Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955) told the story of this triangle against the background of America’s adventure in Vietnam in the early 1950s—when, he shows us, the CIA used pleasant, presentable agents like Pyle to pose as “aid workers” while arranging terrorist acts that would justify our intervention there. The novel inspired a 1958 Hollywood version in which the director Joseph Mankiewicz turned the story on its head, making Fowler the bad guy and Pyle the hero. Did the CIA have a hand in funding this film? Stranger things have happened: The animated version of Animal Farm
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