The General’s most trusted friend and a friend and mentor to the narrator, though Claude is unaware of the narrator’s Communist sympathies. Claude reveals to the narrator that he is one-sixteenth black. They meet when Claude finds the nineteen-year-old narrator on a refugee barge in 1954. Claude presented himself as someone working for refugee relief. He is actually in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which, in the 1950s, was called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Currently, his cover is working in the American embassy to promote the development of tourism in Vietnam. He trained the narrator in interrogation tactics and worked with him at the National Interrogation Center in Saigon. Claude speaks poor Vietnamese and worse French, though he speaks excellent English. He is six-two and has perfect vision. He keeps in shape by doing two hundred push-ups each morning with his houseboy squatting on his back. He’s an avid reader, particularly of the work of the English scholar, Dr. Richard Hedd. In Vietnam, he had a girlfriend named Kim, who he had to leave behind after the fall of Saigon. When the narrator sees Claude again in Los Angeles at Professor Hammer’s home, he looks the same, aside from gaining a few pounds.