The perilous international situation and Kennedy himself deterred DRVN leaders from meaningfully revising their revolutionary strategy that year. On the one hand, they did not want to disrupt Sino-Soviet rapprochement; on the other, they feared that Kennedy, whom they considered a staunch cold warrior, might respond aggressively to the launching of an actual war of national liberation in the South. They did, however, authorize a moderate escalation of insurgent activity there and undertook a series of other endeavors to improve the coordination and effectiveness of communist-led military and political activity. As Hanoi remained committed to the “North-first” policy, by the end of the year the Vietnamese revolution had developed the dual character sanctioned during the VWP’s Third National Congress of 1960. As northerners transformed the DRVN, southerners resisted Saigon and Washington as best they could.
RECALIBRATING THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY
In January the new Politburo convened for the first time to assess the situation in the South, deemed uneven. In the Central Highlands conditions seemed to be improving. Support from ethnic minorities and peasants was strong and the presence of the Saigon regime diminishing, both of which facilitated the creation of active revolutionary bases. In the rural lowlands and the Mekong Delta, however, the picture was less rosy due to the ease of access by enemy forces and Saigon’s consequent ability to exert its power and influence there. The “political strength of the masses” in those areas was considered high, but the revolutionary presence was “not strong enough.” Specifically, there were too few cadres there, and the revolutionary tactics they employed were ineffectual. The situation in the cities was still more problematic. Though the “struggle movement of the [urban] masses” was developing, it was “not yet like [that] in the rural areas.” As a result of this unevenness across the whole of the South, the Politburo concluded rather understandably that the “united front for reunification” remained “narrow and weak,” having not yet “assemble[d] really widely” the forces and tendencies opposing Diem and the Americans.1
The Politburo determined that southern revolutionaries placed too much emphasis on violent struggle and committed too little of their efforts and resources to political struggle, to winning hearts and minds, especially in cities. The appeals of southern cadres elicited little or no response among students, petty capitalists, certain religious denominations, and even workers. The Politburo attributed this to the failure to get across the “united front” message—that the revolutionary movement was an expression of Vietnamese nationalism and anti-imperialism, an effort to force the Americans to leave Vietnam and to destroy their puppet regime, rather than a conspiracy to foment social revolution. The Politburo recognized that many southerners, especially in the urban classes, were variously indifferent to, apprehensive about, or hostile to anything that smacked of social revolution or communism.2 Such sentiments were, in reality, probably increased by a sense of the lack of candor in the communists’ message. Though cadres preached unity among exploited classes, many of them distrusted urban dwellers and only reluctantly recruited them into the NLF or worked with them after they joined. Cadres from rural and poor backgrounds, for example, often considered students to be privileged and self-indulgent, and thus unpromising recruits to the revolutionary cause. The same tended to be true of their attitude toward intellectuals, whom they almost invariably considered unfit and unwilling to struggle physically, and therefore untrustworthy “comrades.” As for the petty bourgeoisie, what cadres knew of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy taught them that such people were “objectively” unreliable.
After its deliberations on the state of the revolution in the South, the Politburo adopted what it called “a very important new strategic directive” concerning “the development of the theoretical position [of the party] on insurrection” below the seventeenth parallel. “The process of attacking the enemy [and] vanquishing the regime in the South,” the directive stated, was not about to go from “relative calmness” to an “explosion” of revolutionary activity in a short period. However, the Politburo now recognized that resort to war would likely be necessary in the future to achieve the liberation of the South, that political struggle and self-defense would probably prove insufficient. Accordingly, it ordered operatives below the seventeenth parallel to work diligently to improve the strength of southern forces and raise the level of their combat readiness. Once that objective was met, the southern revolution would be better positioned to take on and destroy enemy troops in a protracted conflict and gradually bring about favorable changes to the balance of forces below the seventeenth parallel. As they carried out these orders, the Politburo cautioned, revolutionaries in the South had to continue concentrating on political struggle and avoid military adventurism.3 The directive was not for waging war, but for making further preparations for war.
At long last, DRVN decision-makers unequivocally acknowledged the potential necessity of war to accomplish revolutionary objectives in the South. The acknowledgment portended a recalibration of the struggle in the South but not the overhaul of the party’s revolutionary strategy there. For the time being, the Politburo stressed again, political struggle remained central to revolutionary purposes.4 According to historian William Turley, this latest directive “laid down basic strategy for a long struggle.” In that strategy, military struggle might “conceivably” become dominant, Turley observed, though for the time being “it was more important [to Hanoi] to develop the capacity for coordinated armed and political struggle.”5 Uncertainties about the reaction of the new Kennedy administration, which the Politburo considered more anticommunist and hot-tempered than its predecessor, and of close allies, whose position on war in Vietnam had not changed, made that caveat sensible in the party leadership’s eyes.
These assessments rest less on the banal passage from the Politburo directive quoted above than on the language in which the directive was communicated to southern party leaders. The language was that of a fellow southerner who was now the party’s highest official, the militant Le Duan, who, for the time being, quietly went along with the moderate consensus still dominant in Hanoi. In one of a series of “letters to the South,” this one dated 7 February 1961, Le Duan told his southern compatriots that Vietnam must not repeat the Chinese revolutionary model of protracted military struggle, which called for liberation of the countryside and only then an assault on cities. That model had forced the CCP to endure a revolutionary struggle that lasted more than a quarter century, from the 1920s until 1949. Instead, Vietnam should follow its own model: simultaneous struggle in both urban and rural areas. In doing so, it should work to consolidate and increase its armed forces, expand its revolutionary bases perhaps only in isolated regions at first, but then wherever possible, and eventually coordinate local episodes of violent activity, culminating in a “general uprising.” In that course of events, military struggle would at some point become important, but political struggle would remain dominant until that point arrived. “We must strengthen the building of our political forces while building our armed forces” for a general offensive, Le Duan told southerners, accentuating the aggressive potential while repeating the essence of the current line. “The correlation of forces is deterministic”; appraising it correctly was crucial for revolutionary success.
Presciently, Le Duan acknowledged an important reality that accounted for many of the shortcomings and failures of the communist movement in the South: its overall weakness. “We are weaker than the enemy,” he pointedly admitted. The party below the seventeenth parallel did not yet have the human or material resources necessary to mount a successful comprehensive military campaign against Saigon and its armed forces. Resorting to war under such conditions would only imperil the southern revolution. It might even give the United States the pretext it sought to send its own armed forces to southern Vietnam, which would surely doom the communist effort there. Besides, the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, and Laotians, Le Duan wrote, had all demonstrated that successful revolutions draw th
eir strength from the masses. However, due to the misapplication of party directives and a shortage of competent cadres, communists in the South had not yet won over the people. Addressing these fundamental problems was the most pressing task. “We must know to exploit time,” Le Duan concluded.6
PREPARING FOR WAR IN THE SOUTH
As part of its preparations for war in the South, the Politburo ordered the unification of southern guerilla forces. Insurgent activity had theretofore largely been locally planned and executed. The uprisings in the Central Highlands and elsewhere in 1959–60, for example, had essentially been spontaneous and uncoordinated, sometimes with little purpose larger than the action itself. Some of them had been staged without Hanoi’s knowledge or approval and even in defiance of its directives, as previously noted. To eliminate this problem and help set the stage for a new level of coordinated armed struggle, Hanoi mandated the creation of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, soon renamed the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). Organized into regular as well as guerrilla or militia units within the PAVN, the PLAF was under direct command of party leaders in Hanoi.7 To improve its organization and effectiveness, in 1961–62 Hanoi secretly dispatched to the South an additional 19,150 personnel from the North, mostly regroupees.8 The PLAF became the chief engine of revolutionary violence in the South until the introduction of PAVN units three years later.
Pursuant to its January directive, the Politburo also changed the name of the Nam Bo Executive Committee back to Central Office for Southern Vietnam (COSVN). The change was revealing. COSVN had coordinated political as well as military activity in Nam Bo during the Indochina War. Following the Geneva accords and the September 1954 Politburo resolution formalizing the commitment to peaceful reunification, COSVN lost its license to direct military activity and became the Nam Bo Executive Committee. The decision to change the organization’s name back to COSVN meant that its responsibilities had been enlarged and its license to direct military activity reinstated. More fundamentally, it affirmed the Politburo’s commitment to military preparations in the South.
Nguyen Van Linh, who had replaced Le Duan after the latter was recalled to Hanoi in 1957, remained as COSVN’s leader, assisted by PAVN major general Tran Luong.9 Their chief aides were Vo Chi Cong and Vo Van Kiet, as well as Tran Van Tra, the acting military commander.10 All of them had been involved in the party’s organizational work in the South since the Indochina War and were protégés or loyal disciples of Le Duan. COSVN’s mandate from this point was to oversee “all affairs of the party,” political as well as military, in Nam Bo. Specifically, it was tasked with “executing the guidelines, policies, lines, [and] working plans” adopted by Hanoi and “guiding their implementation.”11 Whenever problems arose, COSVN had to ask for instruction from Hanoi. When that was impossible because of circumstances, COSVN was to take no action inconsistent with party guidelines. Otherwise, COSVN must at all times “execute the platform and the concrete determinations of the rule of the party in South Vietnam.” The “line of party control” thus ran thereafter from the Politburo and Central Committee in Hanoi to COSVN, and then to party committees at provincial, district, and village levels.12
The actualities of COSVN’s duties included selecting, training, supervising, and assigning party cadres in the area of its jurisdiction, administering party finances there, and running the insurgency.13 American intelligence reported that COSVN not only had some “policy-making powers,” but its responsibilities included the duty to “study the situation [in the South] and suggest policy to [VWP] Headquarters.” “The direction given by the [VWP] to COSVN consists for the most part of suggestions rather than orders,” the Americans estimated. Hanoi’s “suggestions” became “directives” only after “long consultations with COSVN.” In this way, COSVN “tailors the policy directives of the [VWP] to the specific situation in the South and incorporates them in COSVN’s own resolutions and policies.” It also handled most military matters by itself, “though following the broad military policy laid down” by Hanoi. COSVN thus enjoyed a measure of autonomy, though less in policymaking than in policy implementation.14 To avoid American and international outrage and perpetuate the notion that the southern insurgency, which COSVN actually directed in parts of the South, was purely indigenous and largely nationalist in character, the organization’s existence was kept secret, and its ties to Hanoi were “top secret.”15
To ensure compliance with its strategic directives, the VWP ordered a purge of all southern cadres of questionable loyalty and reliability and, when possible, replaced them with more dedicated operatives. It also placed “unprecedented emphasis” on training and indoctrinating cadres throughout the South, and dispatched there increasing numbers of agents specializing in “secret and important work” and warfare, as well as more physicians and nurses.16 An average of 150 such agents infiltrated the South each month in 1961, each of them having assumed a new identity to conceal his or her northern origins in the event of capture (even though their accents would almost surely betray where they came from).17
Later that year, the VWP leadership instructed its southern branch, the Party Committee of South Vietnam (PCSVN), to rename itself the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP). This was another initiative designed to prepare the southern communist movement for a protracted struggle while concealing Hanoi’s involvement in revolutionary activities in the South.18 Retaining the old name, a COSVN directive explained, would reveal that the PCSVN was a branch of the VWP and thus “subjected to the leadership of the Party Center in the North.” The enemy could exploit such a revelation to “slander” southern communists, “distort” the truth about their purposes, claim that “the North’s intervention in the South is subversive,” and otherwise “creat[e] difficulties.” More positively, the new name would create “favorable conditions for the North in its effort of diplomatic struggle to serve the liberation of the South,” as well as “favorable conditions for the PCSVN to call upon the people of the South to use every method of struggle to combat the enemy.”19
Interestingly, a French assessment noted of the name change that “Hanoi’s agents [in the South], who had until now opted to use the NLF to act in South Vietnam, may have estimated that it was preferable to present themselves henceforth with unconcealed faces to influence in an authentic Marxist way the all too independent orientation of the Front.” The PRP was created, in other words, to leave no doubt as to the commitment of southern revolutionaries to the “triumph of Marxism,” to the establishment in the South of “not a neutral government but a communist regime.”20 According to American intelligence, the founding of the PRP, which officially took place in 1962, was merely “a restructuring of the [VWP] in South Vietnam,” a “tactical maneuver to disguise northern direction of the insurgency.”21 Indeed, the maneuver enabled Hanoi to continue its control of a southern revolutionary movement that increasingly comprised “persons who are not party members and who do not realize the extent or degree of party control” over “their” movement.22 In the words of the VWP Central Committee, the creation of the PRP, like the earlier formation of the NLF, “allowed the southern revolution to win over more supporters and isolate the enemy to a high degree domestically and internationally.”23
In thus reconstituting and relabeling its organizational apparatus in the South, Hanoi was acting to not only conceal the central role it played in directing the insurgency there, but also to put the southern revolutionary movement in position, to borrow the formulation of historian Nguyen Vu Tung, to overthrow the Saigon regime and establish “a coalition government that would adopt a policy of neutrality, ask the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from Vietnam, and realize national reunification.”24 It still sought, in other words, to bring about a set of circumstances that would achieve victory through political struggle without resort to war. Hanoi hoped through policies of stealth, indirection, and subversion to generate a mass protest movement and a presence so evidently popular and so insistent in its demands
as to collapse the Saigon regime. If successful, the effort would avoid DRVN entanglement in the South, preclude American military intervention, enable the socialist transformation of the North to continue apace, and satisfy foreign allies.
COPING WITH CHALLENGES IN THE DRVN
It was in light of these hopeful dreams about the South that in June 1961 Politburo member Nguyen Chi Thanh reaffirmed in Hoc tap Hanoi’s prioritizing of socialist construction in the North over escalating and increasing its contribution to armed struggle in the South. Thanh, a leading militant, had recently been assigned to direct reform in agriculture. His appointment testified to Hanoi’s determination to “put more drive” behind that important sector, and may also have been arranged by moderates to mollify Thanh by making him a stakeholder in the socialist transformation of the northern economy.25 The VWP, Thanh stated, regarded socialist construction as its “central task.” Although class struggle was ongoing “in a certain sphere” in the North, he wrote in a passage that reveals the emphasis Hanoi was giving to reform, “the struggle between laboring people and nature to eliminate poverty and economic and cultural backwardness has become extremely important.” By highlighting the primacy of socioeconomic problems over other issues, Thanh was signaling just how important those problems remained in party thinking.26
Despite satisfactory progress on some fronts, the DRVN’s economic challenges in 1961 did remain daunting. According to the party’s own statistics, between 1958 and 1960 foreign imports into the North increased by an average of 26.7 percent annually while exports grew by only 15.6 percent.27 Unable to generate sufficient capital internally, Hanoi still depended heavily on foreign aid to finance its ambitious programs of socialist development and industrialization.28 Prime minister Pham Van Dong revealed to the National Assembly in April that per capita production of grain in 1960 had fallen to 304 kilograms from 367 in 1959. This drop was partly due to the fact that the North’s population was increasing by nearly half a million a year, and the implications for the people’s quality of life were obvious. People’s lives were “deficient and hard,” Dong reported, and in a year of poor harvest such as 1960, “the consequences that everybody can see” were “unavoidable.”29
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