Caodaists
Sir: I can't help. wishing that Marina Warner would reread The Quiet American (Notebook, 6 August). After her moving description of the idyllic, perhaps simple, but altogether peaceful Caodaists in Vietnam in 1972 she writes: `In The Quiet American Graham Greene casts them as supporters of a Third Force, a supposed independent Vietnamese party.' If I could persuade her to take another rapid glance at my book she will find that it was not I who 'cast them', but the CIA in one of its manic moments. The 'peaceful' Caodaists in the days of the French war had their own private army which nominally supported the French, and their own munition factory where I watched the exhaust pipes of old cars being turned into mortars, perhaps good enough for one shot. The Pope's chief of staff Colonel The, rebelled and took to the Holy Mountain from which he arranged with CIA support the terrible bomb explosion in the square before the Continental , Hotel in Saigon. Life magazine was able to publish a full page photograph of the explosion, showing a man with his legs blown off before he had time to fall to the ground — a photographer could hardly have been more on the spot. The made his peace with President Diem and was conveniently shot in the back after he brought his troops into Saigon. When I asked Diem how he had come to make his peace with a man who had killed so many innocent Vietnamese — wasn't he responsible for the bomb? Diem said 'Peut-etre' and broke into uncontrollable laughter. The Life photograph was reproduced in a CIA propaganda magazine in Manila as an atrocity committed by Ho
• Chi Minh, although by that time The had proudly claimed it as his own.
' Marina Warner writes: 'Amnesty now wishes to investigate Vietnam, fbr it fears religious persecution is taking place. The fate of some Catholic priests and Buddhist monks is known or at least suspected (sic). ' But of the Cao-dai there is no word.'
• Amnesty would be well advised to look more than twice at her portrait of the friendly gentle comic Caodaists devoted to equality and charity.
Graham Greene Paris 17, France
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