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

The Spy Who Loved Us 213
Across the square in front of the theater is the old Caravelle
Hotel, which is dwarfed by the new addition that towers
over it. Correspondents once gathered in the Caravelle’s rooftop
bar to watch the tracer bullets and rockets that lit the night sky
on the outskirts of Saigon.
To my right I look across Catinat, now named Dong Khoi,
onto the Eden Building, an enormous, dun-colored edifice that
fills the entire block between the Continental and Rex hotels.
Once home to the Associated Press and other news agencies,
the Eden is now a mildewed wreck inhabited by families that
live in unplumbed rooms. The balconies are littered with outdoor
showers and chicken coops. Flowers and vines grow wild
up the crumbling facade, and as soon as its residents can be
evicted, the Eden is destined to become another molar extracted
from Saigon’s gap-toothed mouth.
Two blocks up the street, toward Saigon’s red-brick cathedral,
I spot the apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street that
once served as a CIA safe house. On top of the building sits the
flat-roofed elevator hoist house that was used on April 30, 1975,
as an emergency helicopter landing pad. This is where a queue
of refugees climbed a rickety wooden ladder up to the helicopter
that had come to rescue them—an image captured by
Hubert Van Es in his iconic photo of the last flight out of
Saigon, taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy. It was neither
the last flight nor the embassy rooftop, but the photo was
so poignant in capturing the ignominy of America’s pell-mell retreat
from Vietnam that this is what it was called.
Directly below the Continental, at the base of the Eden
Building, sits café Givral. Built with curved windows looking
onto the two busiest streets in town, this fishbowl of a restaurant
was the perfect lookout for surveying wartime Saigon. Across the
street lay the open-air terrace and bar of the Continental Hotel.
On either side of the café stretched the fancy shops that filled
the ground floor of the Eden Building. Americans sat in the