65. Memorandum From the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (Helms) to Secretary of Defense McNamara1
SUBJECT
- The Managing Hierarchy of the NLF and the Current Political Goals of the Viet Cong
At lunch on Wednesday, 2 February, I mentioned that, by and large, the upper echelons of the National Liberation Frontʼs managing hierarchy are staffed by second-raters with very little public prestige or personal [Page 206] following. This is a point to which insufficient attention has been paid in current public debates about Vietnam and allied current discussion about the NLFʼs stature as a “southern” political group.
When Hanoi set up the Front in the summer and fall of 1960, it instructed the VC to select people for overt positions who would lend prestige to the NLF and, by their very names, be capable of winning some measure of active public support. The Communists, however, had a great deal of difficulty in meeting this requirement. The first NLF Central Committee, not announced until March 1962, had places for 52 members but the announcement gave only 31 names, most of them virtually unknown even in South Vietnam. The second Central Committee, announced in January 1964, had only 41 members, with no significant improvement in the caliber or personal renown of the announced members. There may have been additional reasons for leaving vacant slots on the Central Committee (e. g., bait for the politically ambitious who had not yet joined the NLF, or concealing the identity of covert members); but even so, the fact of such vacancies—which still exist—demonstrates in some degree that the Communists have been unable to get the use of the names of the kind of people they want.
How far down in the barrel the Communists were forced to reach becomes apparent if we take a look at the backgrounds and stature of some of those who now hold senior positions within the NLF, such as the Chairman of its Presidium, Nguyen Huu Tho; its Secretary General, Huynh Tan Phat; its Public Health Commissioner, who is also a Central Committee member and Chairman of the NLFʼs “Committee for the Protection of World Peace,” Phung Van Cung; its External Relations Committee chairman (also a Central Committee member), Tran Buu Khiem; its principal Traveling Representative (and original Secretary General), Nguyen Van Hieu; and its Representative in Algiers, Huynh Van Tam.
Nguyen Huu Tho (born in Cholon in 1910) studied law at a provincial university in France during the 1930ʼs, began practicing in Saigon in 1934, was admitted to the Saigon bar in 1939, and practiced law in Vinh Long in 1947. Some sources claim he was “President of the Tribunal” in Can Tho in 1949, though this is not certain. His legal career, even at the provincial bar, was far from distinguished, and he is frequently categorized by his former professional colleagues as a “lawyer without briefs.” His career as a left-wing agitator seems to have begun about 1947, though his Communist associations may have commenced considerably earlier since he appears to have been a school companion of a number of well-known Communist figures, including Tran Van Giau (the leader of the Cochin-Chinese Communists in the 1945–46 period). Tho was Hanoiʼs dictated choice for Chairman of the NLF Central Committee in 1962. He was not, however, a person of any particular prestige or prominence [Page 207] and, indeed, was regarded by many South Vietnamese intellectuals and professionals as something of a joke.
Huynh Tan Phat is usually described as an “architect” though we doubt if anyone could point with certainty to any building he has designed or built. He is supposed to have been born in My Tho in 1913 and educated at the College of Fine Arts in Hanoi, graduating around 1936. He has been a left-wing political agitator and activist ever since his student days and held posts in a variety of Communist and Viet Minh front organizations and political splinter groups. Though apparently articulate and possessing a considerable clandestine organizational skill, Phat was virtually unknown even in South Vietnam when he became Secretary General of the NLF.
Phung Van Cung was born in Vinh Long Province in 1909 and is said to hold a medical degree from the University of Hanoi. He has practiced medicine in Rach Gia and in Cholon and appears to have been mobilized as a major in the medical corps of the French-controlled Vietnamese Army in 1951, though there is some doubt as to whether he actually served in this capacity. NLF sources claim that Cung was a high-ranking government official under Diem before he moved his family into a Viet Cong-controlled area in 1960, but this is simply not true. Cung was never a leading light even in the limited circle of South Vietnamʼs doctors and has almost certainly become considerably better known since he was named Chairman of the NLF Peace Committee and the NLF “Red Cross” than he ever was before.
Tran Buu Khiem was born in Can Tho in 1921 and is said to have studied law at the University of Hanoi, though there is no record of his ever having practiced or having become a member of the Saigon or Hanoi bars. He is a long-time Communist activist and appears to have been a senior member of the “Nambo Resistance and Administrative Committee” in the 1945–1949 period. The record on him is sketchy. Though it suggests considerable competence as a clandestine organizer and political agitator, it certainly has not given him any general stature or personal standing in Vietnamese political or intellectual circles.
Nguyen Van Hieu was born in Camau in 1922. Available details about his educational and professional career are confused and contradictory. He seems to have studied agriculture or law, or both, at Hanoi and Saigon universities and is generally described as a “former teacher” (sometimes of biology, sometimes of mathematics) and a journalist, though it is hard to locate much that he has written. He has almost certainly been a Communist-Viet Minh activist and propagandist since about 1945. He was the NLFʼs first Secretary General but since 1963 has served, in effect, as its principal traveling salesman abroad. Like his colleagues in the upper echelons of the NLF, Hieu could hardly be described as a non-Communist Vietnamese of independent professional or political stature.
[Page 208]Huynh Van Tam was born in 1919 somewhere in the southern part of Vietnam and was probably educated at a Catholic school in Saigon. He seems to have been a secondary school teacher in Saigon until about 1942 when he began devoting most of his time to Communist political activity. He was named to the NLF Central Committee when it was first formed in the summer of 1960, but is now the NLF Representative in Algiers, and, apparently, no longer a Central Committee member. Tam is fluent in French, knows a good deal of Latin, and is quite polished and articulate. He has made a very strong, favorable impression on a number of Western journalists who have interviewed him, most notably Joseph Kraft. In South Vietnam he is little known except as a long-time left-wing agitator.
The above list represents the best that the Communists have been able to come up with, and their best—in terms of political appeal—is not very good. Some, if not all, of these persons are undoubtedly competent as clandestine organizers or agitators but none can be described with any measure of accuracy as a leading South Vietnamese professional or political figure, let alone as a non-Communist leftist or liberal.
Given the facts of Vietnamese political history over the past two decades, there are very few people in South Vietnam who command the kind of general stature and reputation of, say, such well-known Americans as Governor Rockefeller, Thomas Dewey, Walter Lippmann, or even Professor Morgenthau. Even names fairly well-known in the hothouse salons of Saigon do not make magic in the countryside. The Communists in the NLF, however, have never been able to crack the circle of such “notables” as do exist, at least not in the sense of being able to persuade any such person to lend their names or prestige to the Communistsʼ front organization. Nguyen Huu Tho, for example, was far less well known and regarded as a lawyer than, say, Maitre Trinh Dinh Thao, a political leftist and almost certainly a VC sympathizer but one who has never been willing to take the public step of joining the Front. All of Diemʼs more celebrated political opponents—Phan Quang Dan, Phan Khac Suu, Nguyen Van Can, Pham Huy Quat, etc.—were united in opposing the VC and the pretensions of the NLF (even if they could agree on nothing else) and usually justified their opposition to Diem by claiming that they could combat the Communists more effectively than he. South Vietnamese intellectuals and professionals have a considerable measure of political sophistication and South Vietnamese interested in political life have had twenty years of firsthand experience with Communist manipulation of front organizations. Few are fooled by the NLFʼs claim to be either “spontaneous” or “indigenous”. Within South Vietnam it is hard to find anyone interested in politics who is not perfectly well aware that the NLF is something set up by and manipulated from Hanoi. This has made [it] extremely difficult for the Front to attract innocent or non-Communist political “names” to serve as window-dressing and, so [Page 209] far, that particular political objective has simply not been achieved. In fact, the Front has not yet been able to include in its overt roster a single South Vietnamese figure who can accurately be described as a non-Communist of significant personal, political, or professional standing.
We do not know precisely how much discretionary authority Hanoi has delegated to or allows the NLF leadership, but the broad lines of NLF policy are patently dictated and rigidly controlled by its DRV masters. NLF statements on settlement or negotiation conditions have displayed some variations in emphasis from those emanating from Hanoi but none of substance. Over the past year or so, public NLF pronouncements have paid rather more attention to the transition phase of “coalition government” in the South than DRV statements, which generally focus on the ultimate goal of “reunification” (i.e., total political domination by the Hanoi regime). The NLF, however, has always dutifully echoed Hanoiʼs theme that “Vietnam is one” and has consistently depicted “peaceful reunification” as the ultimate objective of its political endeavors. Some of these differences in emphasis have probably been dictated by tactical considerations and some have almost certainly been deliberately devised to support the myth that the NLF is an “independent” political entity indigenous to the South, not a puppet mechanism controlled from Hanoi.
The Frontʼs most recent pronouncements are just as unyielding as those of Hanoi and play the same themes. The NLFʼs 30 January commentary on Ho Chi Minhʼs 24 January “letter” to various heads of state2 stresses that
“If U.S. Imperialism stubbornly keeps on intensifying and expanding the war, the South Vietnamese people will resolutely struggle until the end to liberate South Vietnam, protect North Vietnam, and reunify the fatherland.”
Basically an “us-too” attack on President Johnsonʼs recent diplomatic peace campaign, this Front statement harps on the current Communist claim that the NLF is “the sole genuine representative of 14 million people in South Vietnam”, plays the line that U.S. disregard of the 1954 Geneva Agreements is the source of all of South Vietnamʼs present woes, and insists that peace can never come unless the “U.S. Imperialists recognize the Frontʼs correct platform”—i.e., its Five Point Program of March 1965. (The Frontʼs “Five Points, the DRVʼs “Four Points” and the actual relationship of both to the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Accords were analyzed in detail in CIA Research Memorandum No. 0483/66, 5 January 1966.)3 The NLFʼs 31 January comment on the U. S. approach to the U.N. (broadcast by Hanoi radio on 2 February) is equally [Page 210] intransigent. It condemns the resumption of aerial strikes on the North and “solemnly declares” that the U.N. “has no right at all to decide problems of the South Vietnamese people”, adding that the NLF will consider “all decisions of the U.N. Security Council on Vietnam as null and void”. The statement concludes by emphasizing that:
“The only correct solution to restore peace in South Vietnam is that the U.S. Imperialists must withdraw all troops and weapons of the United States and its satellites from South Vietnam, dismantle all U.S. military bases there, and let the South Vietnamese people settle their own internal affairs by themselves. Should the U.S. Imperialists refuse to abandon their aggressive ambition, they will in no way be able to avoid complete and most ignominious failure, whatever barbarous and perfidious maneuvers they may resort to.”
There are undoubtedly some regional stresses at least latent in the relationship between the VC/NLF apparatus and its directing supervisors in Hanoi. Within this complex there are almost certainly differences of opinion between persons with some measure of authority, and varying assessments (at least private ones) of the risks and probable outcome of continued struggle against the U.S.-supported GVN. We see no present signs, however, of what could accurately be termed a developing “VC” or “NLF” position on negotiation, peace or ultimate political objectives that differs in any material way from the line laid down by Hanoi.