The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

120 THOMAS A. BASS
and the famous island prison of Alcatraz. “I will see you before
you go home,” she wrote.
“When my plane landed in San Francisco, I went to the
Golden Gate Bridge to look over the bay toward Alcatraz island.
There it was, floating in the water, exactly as in the postcard Lee
Meyer had sent me. I stood on the bridge thinking of her, and
I almost changed my mind. I thought to myself, This is where
I’m going to end up if I go back to Vietnam, in prison, but a
prison not so beautiful as Alcatraz. For me, it will be Poulo Condore
and a tiger cage. They are both islands, but Poulo Condore
is far worse than Alcatraz.”
It was October 1959, with a fall chill in the air. In An’s
pocket was an airplane ticket to Saigon, bought for him by the
Asia Foundation. Rising below him in the harbor were the solitary
smokestack and sun-raked walls of Alcatraz. He could stay
in America and take a correspondence course to finish his college
degree at Berkeley. He could marry an American and forget
about the long war his country was fighting. Finally An the
patriot, who had in his possession four suits that belonged to
the Communist Party of Vietnam and should rightfully be returned
to the people, boarded his plane and flew home to
Saigon. Thus ended his first and only visit to the United States.
“I have two loves, like Josephine Baker,” An says. “I love my
country, and I love the United States. When the war was over,
I wanted them to get back together.”