For their part, U.S. officials stationed in China had already become aware of Ho Chi Minh long before his release from captivity. During the fall of 1942, news reports in the Chinese press (probably leaked by sources close to the ICP in China) mentioned the arrest of an Annamite named “Ho Chih-chi” who had an alleged connection with a pro-Allied “provisional government” of Indochina that was being formed in Liuzhou with support from the Chinese government. When U.S. Embassy officials contacted the local representative of the antifascist Free French movement, he discounted the truth of the story and denied that such a government existed. Nevertheless, U.S. Ambassador Clarence Gauss cabled the Deparrment of State on December 31, 1942, to report the arrest and instructed embassy officers to look into the matter. Lacking cooperation from Chinese authorities, however, they had little success; when the following June Washington asked for an update on the situation, the embassy simply reported that so far as it could determine, the resistance movement in Indochina had no particular importance at that time.
But if the U.S. Embassy in Chongqing wanted nothing to do with an obscure “Annamite,” other U.S. officials in China were of a different view. When, in the summer of 1943, the CCP liaison chief Zhou Enlai approached the local U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for assistance in securing Ho’s release on the grounds that he could be of assistance to the Allied war effort, they, along with officials at the OWI (who might have been approached by Ho Chi Minh with an offer to serve as a translator), discussed the matter with U.S. Embassy officials, who apparently agreed to broach the issue with the Chinese government to seek his release and arrange for his collaboration.
Whether the U.S. approach ever took place, and if so, whether it had any impact on Zhang Fakui’s decision to grant limited freedom for Ho Chi Minh is not clear. In any case, it did not lead to any immediate arrangements for Ho to collaborate with U.S. officials in south China. In November 1943, the Vietnamese branch of the International Anti-Aggression League, writing from Jingxi, appealed to the U.S. Embassy in Chongqing for U.S. assistance in obtaining full freedom of action for “Hu Chih-ming” to take part in anti-Japanese activities and, if necessary, to return to his own country.
Embassy officer Philip D. Sprouse recognized the name as “the person whose alleged arrest” had taken place the previous year. But Sprouse apparently had been persuaded by Free French representatives in Chongqing that the so-called provisional government of Indochina established in Liuzhou was simply a ploy by the Chinese government to promote its own interests in the area. Ambassador Gauss transmitted the appeal to Washington, with a cover letter indicating that since the French had denied the existence of such an organization, he would make “no reply” to the letter. Gauss’s report was filed and forgotten in Washington.35
By the spring of 1944, the lute of potential U.S. support had piqued the interest of other Vietminh representatives living in south China. That April, Vietminh representatives in Kunming had met with officials at the Free French Consulate about arranging a meeting to discuss postwar French policies in Indochina, but after initial contacts their efforts had stalled. Rebuffed by the French, they turned to the United States, and met with local officials of the OSS and the OWI, to seek their assistance in writing a letter to U.S. Ambassador Gauss in Chongqing. The letter appealed for U.S. aid in the Vietnamese struggle for independence while offering to fight alongside the Allies against the Japanese occupation forces in Indochina. On August 18, an OSS officer delivered the letter to U.S. Consul General William Langdon in Kunming with the comment that there would be “considerable trouble in Indochina after the war if at least a substantial measure of self-government is not put into effect in that country at an early date.” Langdon agreed to meet with the group on September 8. He promised to pass on the letter to the U.S. ambassador and expressed U.S. support for the aspirations of the Vietnamese people, noting that “the highest spokesmen of the American Government had in numerous declarations given assurances of the interest of their government in the political welfare and advancement of oppressed peoples in the Orient, among whom the Annamite people might believe themselves to be included.” But Langdon was diplomatically cautious in responding to the request for U.S. sympathy, noting that “the Annamite people are citizens of France, who is fighting side by side with the United States … against the Axis. It would not make sense … if America with one hand at great expenditures of life and treasure rescued and delivered France from German slavery and with the other undermined her Empire.”
Pham Viet Tu, the leader of the Vietnamese delegation, promised Langdon that the Vietminh had no intention of fighting the French, but only the Japanese, and asked for assistance for that purpose. But he added his hope that the United States would insist upon autonomy for the Annamite people after the close of the war. Langdon was noncommittal, noting that during Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Washington, D.C., in July, the General had told the press that French policy was to introduce the peoples of the French empire to self-government, and that if the Vietnamese had any complaints against the French, they should deal directly with them.36
The stratagem by local representatives in Kunming to enlist U.S. support had thus once again failed. American officials still had little knowledge about Vietnamese nationalist groups operating in the area, and some were skeptical about their effectiveness because of the chronic factionalism that seemed to accompany their activities. Although the OSS office submitted a favorable report on the meeting, Langdon and the OWI representative were more doubtful. The latter noted that Vietnamese nationalist groups in south China appeared to have little experience in running a modern government (although he conceded that it was not their fault). Langdon was even more negative, reporting in a dispatch to Washington that Vietnamese groups in south China had “no real importance” in Indochina. That December, an OSS report, citing French sources, remarked that the League for the Independence of Indochina (as the Vietminh Front was known in English) “lacked any popular support” and was “largely a facade composed of a relatively small number of Indo-Chinese intellectuals and other dissatisfied elements in the colony.”37
Ho Chi Minh was not directly involved in these events, but was presumably in contact with Pham Viet Tu and his colleagues, and may have suggested the meeting with U.S. officials in Kunming. In the months after his release from prison in September 1943, Ho had carefully cultivated the friendship and confidence of U.S. officers at the OWI branch in Liuzhou, who in August 1944, apparently sought to arrange for Ho Chi Minh to go to San Francisco. The U.S. Consulate General in Kunming requested guidance from the State Department on this request by OWI for a visa for a certain Ho Ting-ching (described as an Indochina-born Chinese) to travel to the United States to broadcast the news in Vietnamese. Philip Sprouse, who had now been transferred to Washington, took up the matter and wrote a memorandum on “Mr. Ho,” describing his activities. Sprouse surmised that “Mr. Ho” was the same person who had been employed by the Kuomintang in Kunming to broadcast propaganda in the Vietnamese language into Indochina. The request was supported by the State Department’s Far Eastern Division, but was opposed by Europeanists, who undoubtedly sensed that it would cause problems with the French. OWI argued on Ho’s behalf that his activities in the United States would be tightly controlled and mainly mechanical, but the request was ultimately rejected.38
Why Ho Chi Minh would have wanted to go to the United States at that particular time is not clear. By the summer of 1944, the overall situation in the Pacific Theater was becoming increasingly favorable to the Allies and, as Ho had previously predicted, the end of the war beckoned sometime during the following year. Should that be the case, Ho would undoubtedly wish to be inside Vietnam directing the struggle against the French. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that the request was made at a time when Zhang Fakui still refused to approve his return to Indochina, and Ho saw the visa as an opportunity to influence the situation in the United States, perhaps through a direct appeal to the White
House, in preparation for a return to his country at an opportune moment.
If U.S. support for the Vietminh Front was the ultimate prize, then Lieutenant Shaw’s appearance on Ho Chi Minh’s doorstep late in 1944 was his ticket to take part in the raffle. When Shaw asked for Ho’s assistance in teaching the Chinese border, Ho agreed, remarking that he also intended to go to China on business. Shaw then invited Ho to join him in going to Kunming, then the headquarters of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force. A few days later, Ho Chi Minh and two young colleagues escorted Shaw into China, Ho still wearing his threadbare Kuomintang military uniform and bearing the identity papers that Zhang Fakui had provided him before his departure from Liuzhou. Shortly after crossing the Chinese border, Shaw alerted the Air Ground Aid Services (AGAS) office in Kunming, a U.S. military agency responsible for assisting in the rescue of downed Allied airmen in the region, of his rescue and forthcoming arrival. Officials at AGAS wired back to Shaw, inviting him to bring Ho Chi Minh with him to Kunming. Local Chinese authorities decided to send Shaw on to Kunming by plane, leaving Ho to fend for himself, but Ho Chi Minh was determined to use the opportunity to meet with U.S. officials in Kunming, so he decided to continue the journey on foor, posing as an inspector along the French-built Hanoi-Kunming railroad.39
En route to Kunming, Ho and his two companions stopped at Yi-liang, a small town on the rail line where Hoang Quang Binh, one of the comrades he had met four years previously during his stay in Kunming, was still working as a barber. In his reminiscences, Binh later recalled that Ho Chi Minh looked sickly and emaciated, and are little. His uniform was patched and worn, and his thin canvas shoes were full of holes; the group had been walking for several days, spending the night with sympathizers, and often sleeping in the open or in pigsties. Ho had recently caught a fever from another traveler, and to his host he seemed uncharacteristically depressed. Yet his mind was still focused on the cause. When Binh remarked that he and his comrades were resisting appeals from the local office of the Dong Minh Hoi (many of whom were members of the VNQDD) to join their organization, Ho remonstrated with his host, advising him to join the Dong Minh Hoi and then steal away its followers to become members of the Party.40
After staying several days in Yiliang in order to allow Ho Chi Minh to recover, the little group continued on the last leg of their journey. Once they got to Kunming, sometime in the first weeks of 1945, however, they discovered that Lieutenant Shaw had already left for the United States by airplane. Ho Chi Minh took up lodgings with Tong Minh Phuong, one of the local Vietminh representatives who had written the letter to Ambassador Gauss the previous August. A former student at the University of Hanoi who had come to Kunming from Indochina in 1943, Phuong had set up a coffee shop near OSS headquarters which he used as a cover for the Party’s clandestine activities; now he undoubtedly informed Ho of their abortive approach to the Americans.41 Ho decided to contact the local AGAS office in the hope that officials there would, as an expression of gratitude for his bringing the downed U.S. airman to China, arrange for him an interview with General Claire Chennault, commander of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force in Kunming. He also got in touch with the local headquarters of the OSS, since officials there had assisted Phuong and the other Vietminh representatives in drafting their letter to Gauss. Perhaps now, Ho Chi Minh hoped, his service to the Americans could be parlayed into official U.S. recognition of his movement and military assistance for Vietminh operations.
To his own good fortune, Ho Chi Minh had arrived in Kunming at a truly providential and opportune moment. For the last several months, the local AGAS office had been authorized to extend its activities beyond rescuing Allied airmen to obtaining intelligence information on Japanese activities inside French Indochina. Among its most valuable sources was a small group of Western civilians (known as GBT from the names of the individuals: a Canadian, L. L. Gordon; an American, Harry Bernard; and a Chinese-American, Frank Tan). All had formerly been employed by an oil company in Saigon and were able to use their local contacts to obtain valuable information about Japanese activities throughout Indochina. On March 9, 1945, however, that source suddenly dried up when the Japanese (doubting the loyalty of French officials in Indochina) abruptly announced the abolition of the Vichy French administration in Indochina and turned over control to a puppet administration under Bao Dai, the Vietnamese emperor. Most foreign citizens inside Indochina were now placed under arrest or removed from their positions, and the GBT group fled to south China.
Faced with the loss of their chief source of intelligence in Indochina, U.S. officials in Chongqing instructed intelligence units in south China to seek new channels of information, even from anti-French Vietnamese resistance groups. Previously, U.S. operatives had been ordered to refuse contacts with such groups as a result of orders from the White House that U.S. officials were not authorized to become involved in local In-dochinese politics. Now, however, new orders arrived from Washington instructing them to work with whatever sources were available.
Sometime in mid-March, Marine Lieutenant Charles Fenn, who had recently been transferred from the local OSS office to AGAS to run the GBT operation, was informed by one of his colleagues that “an old Annamite” (at the time, Ho was actually only fifty-four years old, but looked older) who had arrived in Kunming after saving a downed U.S. flier apparently had connections with a patriotic group and might prove useful in carrying out intelligence operations in Indochina. A native of Ireland and a former correspondent who had been assigned to Kunming because of his knowledge of Asia and the Chinese language, Fenn was eager to find a new source of intelligence information in Indochina to replace the GBT operation; he asked his contact to arrange a meeting for him with Ho Chi Minh, who had been spending his time at the local OWI office reading everything from Time magazine to the Encyclopedia Americana. Although Fenn had been warned about Ho’s Communist connections, a meeting was arranged for March 17. As Fenn recorded in his diary at the time:
Ho came along with a younger man named Fam. Ho wasn’t what I expected. In the first place he isn’t really “old”: his silvery wisp of beard suggests age, but his face is vigorous and his eyes bright and gleaming. We spoke in French. It seems he has already met Hall, Blass, and de Sibour [OSS officers in Kunming], but got nowhere with any of them. I asked him what he had wanted of them. He said—only recognition of his group (called Vietminh League or League for Independence). I had vaguely heard of this as being communist, and asked him about it. Ho said that the French call all Annamites communists who want independence. I told him about our work and asked whether he’d like to help us. He said they might be able to but had no radio operators not of course any equipment. We discussed taking in a radio and generator and an operator. Ho said a generator would make too much noise—the Japs were always around. Couldn’t we use the type of set with battery, such as the Chinese use? I explained they were too weak for distant operation, especially when the batteries run down. I asked him what he’d want in return for helping us. Arms and medicines, he said. I told him the arms would be difficult, because of the French. We discussed the problem of the French. Ho insisted that the Independence League are only anti-Jap. I was impressed by his clear-cut talk; Buddha-like composure, except movements with wrinkled brown fingers. Fam made notes. It was agreed we should have a further meeting. They wrote their names down in Chinese characters which were romanized into Fam Fuc Pao and Ho Tchih Ming.
Fenn consulted with his colleagues at AGAS, and they all agreed to make preparations for sending “old man Ho” (he was formally given the code name of “Lucius,” but the Americans called him “old man Ho” in private) back to Indochina with a Chinese radio operator. Three days later they met again:
Had a second meeting with the Annamites in the Indo-China cafe on Chin Pi Street. It seems that the proprietor is a friend of theirs. We sat upstairs and drank coffee filtered in the French style, strong and quite good. The toom was empty but Ho said customers might come in. We agree to use certain terms: C
hinese to be called “friends,” Americans “brothers,” French “neutrals,” Japs “occupants,” Annamites “natives.” Ho said that in regard to taking down two Chinese, one of them American-Chinese, this might be difficult because the latter, certainly, would be easy to identify. Ho’s group are inclined to be suspicious of the Chinese. Since there are no Annamite radio operators, the Chinese operator is of course inevitable. But instead of taking [Frank] Tan, he’d rather go with this one man and then later we could drop in an American officer. Would I go myself? I said I would. Ho said his group would give me every welcome. We then discussed supplies. Fam mentioned the “high explosives” that Hall had told him about. I tried to soft pedal this, but agreed we might later drop in light weapons, medicines and further radio sets. Our own operator could train some of Ho’s men to use these. Ho also wants to meet Chennault. I agreed to arrange this if he would agree not to ask him for anything: neither supplies not promises about support. Ho agreed. The old man wears Chinese-type cotton trousers and buttoned-to-the-neck jacket, sand-coloured, not blue. His sandals are the strap type they usually wear in Indo-China. His little beard is silvery, but his eyebrows are light-brown going grey at the top edge and his hair is still almost black but receding. The young man, Fam, wears a western-style suit and has enormous cheek-bones and a powerful chin. They both talk quietly but sometimes burst into chuckles. We seem to get on well together.42
After the meeting, Fenn checked with his colleagues about the Viet-minh, and found that although the French labeled them as Communists, the Chinese simply considered them tricky. When Fenn asked general headquarters in Chongqing for advice, he received instructions: “Get a net regardless,” but with a warning that intelligence operations were directed not to become involved in native-French politics.
A few days later, Fenn arranged for Ho Chi Minh to meet General Claire Chennault in his office at Fourteenth Air Force headquarters, but warned him once again not to submit a formal request for assistance. Ho arrived for the meeting dressed in his worn khaki-colored cotton tunic, although Fenn noticed that he had replaced a lost button on the collar. As was his custom, Chennault was immaculately dressed in his resplendent military uniform and sat behind a massive desk. The dapper Chennault, already famous for his role as the U.S. commander of the “Flying Tiger” detachment of volunteer pilots that had assisted Nationalist Chinese forces in fighting against the invading Japanese in the late 1930s, was widely reputed to be vain about his personal appearance. The general thanked Ho Chi Minh for rescuing Lieutenant Shaw; according to Fenn, there were no comments about political issues. Ho kept his promise not to request assistance and (at Fenn’s advice) dutifully praised Chennault’s efforts with the Flying Tigers, but at the end of the short visit he did ask his host for a signed photograph. As Fenn recalled:
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