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Part I

VIET -NAM DOCUMENTS AND RESEARCH

.NOTES

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Document No. 114

VWP-DRV LEADERSHIP 1960 to 1973

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

Introduction

Part I • The Central Committee of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party, Its Political Bureau and Its Staff

Biographical Sketches Members of the Politburo Members of the Central Committee Alternate Members of the

Central Committee

PART II [under seperate cover]

The Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, 1960.1973

Lists of Members of the Government of the DRV, 1960-1973

Lists of Military Leaders of the DRV - 1960-1973

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July, 1973

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Document 114 July, 1973

VWP-DRV LEADERSHIP, 1960 TO 1973

Introduction

This research notes attempts to round-up all the data on Party and State leadership in North Viet-Nam which has become available to its editor in the past three and a quarter years, when he was responsible for Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes and Principal Reports from Communist Sources. The essential assistance that these publications and this research note have received from other United States government researchers and the collaboration of a colleague in Saigon, James M. Haley, is grate­fully acknowledged.

Some of the research embodied in this paper was under­taken for Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 103 and 107, "The Structure of Power In The DRV: Constitution and Party Statute" and "The Bases Of Power In The DRV". This document does not replace either of those. The first reprints the two basic "constitutional" cannons of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, and demonstrates that the Viet Nam Workers' Party's monopoly of political power in North Viet-Nam is sanctioned by the national constitution. It also showed that the "reunification" of Viet-Nam under communist rule, to follow from an involved political process, is a stated Party and national objective of the DRV. "The Bases Of Power In The DRV" attempted to describe the way in which the Politburo of the VWP rests upon four pillars, the Party, the Viet-Nam People'S Army. the civil government of the DRV, and the congeries of ceremonial institutions and "mass organizations" which the Party controls. Decisions result from the interaction of these power bases. In each of them the key positions are occupied by members of the Politburo, assisted by functionaries of the Party Secretariat and other members of the Central Committee. It showed too that persons based in one or another of these apparatuses also held important positions in another. It follows that the structure of power in the DRV is tightly integrated, at least at the top.

Unfortunately there is not sufficient data available to permit a similar probing of the institutions of the DRV down to

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the provincial, municipal, district and village levels, or to local Party committees or V. P. A. units to assess the degree to which they reflect the seemingly perfectly integrated power structure at the top. Document 107 did present some evidence that performance of cadres at the local level was disappointing to the handful of ageing revolutionaries who have managed to hold tightly to their monopoly of power at the top. What percentage of the Party's approximately 200,000 cadres, its allegedly 1,200,000 members, let alone the 20,000,000 people of North Viet-Nam, are truly responsive to the regime's appeals is even more difficult to ascertain. As Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 112 "DRV Cadre Policy In The 'New Phase' " indicated the Party is concerned about the quality of its junior officers and n. c. os. who have failed to become or create "socialist men."

Nonetheless, it is this Party and this govermnent with which the governments and peoples of the world are going to be confronted during the coming years. So, no apologies are advanced for an attempt to familiarize ourselves with its top strata in more detail than was provided in the two research notes which it supple­ments.

This research note breaks into several parts. The first is a study of the Central Committee of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party from 1960 to 1973. So far as one knows there have been no changes of significance in its membership since 1969, but there have been alterations in the governmental structure of the DRV since 1960 which have resulted in some changes in the status of personalities within the Party, personalities about whom little is known outside of North Viet-Nam. These changes are indicated in the biographical sketches of members of the Central Committee provided here as well as in the lists of ministers.

Least satisfactory is the section on military leadership. While in a few cases biographical details are more fullsome for military than non-military leaders in the VWP-DRV, the relation­ships within the military are less known. For example, the compo­sition of the Central Military Party Committee has never been revealed in a comprehensive listing, nor does one know at what point in the chain of command the authority of political o~ficers and Party committees is reduced, and line commanders or chiefs of staff departments become in fact the heads of their units.

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The year 1960 was chosen as the starting point of this study for a number of reasons. Data is more fullsome for the period since 1960 than it was prior to that year. The Constitution of the DRV drafted in 1959 became effective then, and the govern­ment was reconstituted following the National Assembly elections of the spring of 1960. More important, the most recent National Congress of the VWP was held in 1960, electing a new and enlarged Central Committee and publicly committing the Party to the direction of the revolution in the South, and establishing the National Front for the Liberation of South Viet-Nam upon which the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Viet-Nam is based. (For the relationship between the VWP-DRV and the NFL-PRG readers may wish to see Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 101 and 11l __ "The PRGRSV and liThe Leadership of the PRG, the NFLSV and their Affiliated Organiza­tions, 1973. ")

The cut-off date of this study is 30 June 1973. DRV leaders had returned from a successful aid-seeking mission to the People's Republic of China, and agreed to the communique of the May-June discussions with a United States official in Paris for the implementation of the January 1973 Agreement to end the war and restore peace to Viet-Nam.

On June 14, the D~V National Assembly Standing Committee published a number of cabinet changes and modifications in the structure of economic and logistical ministries in the civil govern­ment of the DRV. These changes have been incorporated into the discussion and the tables in the section of this research note on the government, and into the biographies of those Central Committee members who were involved •

William C. Gausmann

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Part I

The Central Committee of The Viet-Nam Workers' Party

its Political Bureau and Its Staff

The Central Committee of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party, elected by the Party's Third National Congress, in Hanoi, September 5-10, 1960, consisted of 43 full members and 28 alternate members. The Committee in turn selected a Political Bureau of 11 full members and two alternate members, and a Secretariat of seven, of whom the first four named were Politburo members. The other three were full members of the Committee. President Ho Chi Minh was confirmed as Party Chairman, and Le Duan as First Secretary.

As the list was read Congress delegates "stood up in stormy ovation", said the Hanoi Viet-Nam News Agency report in English of September 10, upon which the following lists are based. The Politburo members were listed in the rank order which still prevails, save for the deletion of the names of the two members who have died, as were the members of the secretariat. However, except for placing Ho Chi Minh's name first, the lists of Committee­men were presented alphabetically. Consequently there was no indication of their seniority. Scattered references in North Viet­namese media during the years preceding the Congress permit the construction of Politburo and full Central Committee seniority estimates.

In the first list which follows the names of Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Chi Thanh appear. They were both elected to the Politburo at the Third Congress, and indeed were Politburo members as early as 1951 when the Viet-Nam Workers' Party was proclaimed . It, rather deceptively, is referred to as the Second Congress, since the Party is the direct descendant of the Indochinese Communist Party organized in 1930. In 43 years the VWP and its predecessor organization have held only three congresses. The Party Statute, read by Le Duc Tho at the Third Congress, provided that congresses should ''usually'' be held every four years. None has been held since the Statute was adopted in 1960.

The first list gives the dates of election to the Politburo of its members in so far as they can be deduced. Current pecking order follows it remarkably closely, allowing for the demise of

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List 1

VIET-NAM WORKERS' PARTY

Political Bureau

As Elected At 1960 Party Congress

Believed To Have Been Elected At 1951 Party Congress

Ho Chi Minh, died 1969 Truong Chinh Pham Van Dong Vo Nguyen Giap (Gen.) Le Duan Le Duc Tho Nguyen Chi Thanh, died 1967

Believed To Have Been Elected Between 1951 and 1960 Congress

Pham Hung Nguyen Duy Trinh Le Thanh Nghi Hoang Van Hoan

Elected Alternate Members At 1960 Congress, Promoted To Full Membership 1972

Tran Quoc Hoan Van Tien Dung

[Central Committee members Hoang Quoc Viet and Le Van Luong are believed to have been elected to the Politburo in 1951. They stepped down during the land reform "rectification" program in 1956 and were not returned to the Politburo at the 1960 Congress. Le Van Luong, however, was swim a secretariat position at the 1960 Congress.]

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List 2

RECAPITULATION

Politburo Membership By Listing Order 1969-1973

Le Duan

Truong Chinh

Pham Van Dong

Pham Hung*

Vo Nguyen Giap (Gen.)

Le Duc Tho

Nguyen Duy Trinh

Le Thanh Nghi

Hoang Van Hoan

Tran Quoc Hoan

Van Tien Dung (Col. Gen.)

*[Pham Hung has not in fact appeared on any VWP list since Ho Chi Minh's funeral in September 1969. There is rallier evidence however of his being secretary of the Central Office of South Viet-Nam (COSVN) as late as August 1972. Presumably he remains fourth ranking member of the Politburo. The above list is the order in which the names appeared in Hanoi media following the 1960 Congress minus the two members who are deceased. ]

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Ho and Thanh. There were, nonetheless, a few interesting changes in the 1960 name order, but none since then. In the 1960 announ­cement Le Duan advanced to second place, immediately after Ho Chi Minh by virtue of being then First Sec'retary of the Party. Truong Chinh was accorded third place as former secretary general of the Party· and perhaps also by virtue of his having, prior to the convening of the Congress, been chosen as Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee. The Constitution of the DRV in one of its many anamolies ranks the NASC Chairman ahead of the Premier, who is the effective head of the government. Pharn Hung though junior in Politburo membership to Giap was listed ahead of him, possibly because he was First Vice Premier.

It appears, therefore, that state rank had some influence in Politburo listing, but it was not followed rigorously. Date of election to the Politburo mattered, as demonstrated by Thanh's being given seniority over Thinh and Nghi who were Vice Premiers of the government. The second list shows the current order of Politburo listing as followed in every 1972 - 1973 announcement of gatherings at which most or all of the Politburo members, except Pharn Hung, have appeared. Save for the absence of Ho and Thanh it is precisely as read to the Congress delegates in 1960.

The third list shows, so far as available information pernlits, which of the 1960 Central Committee members were first elected at the 1951 Congress -- 18 of the 43, plus another seven who were probably designated alternate members in 1951 and elevated to full membership in the intervening nine years, and another four who are known to have been Central Committee members before the 1960 Congress convened. In short, 29 of the 43 were Central Committee members prior to 1960. Only 14 were newly selected.

All of the 29 carry-overs, with perhaps two exceptions about whom insufficient biographical data is available, were members of the Indochinese Communist Party prior to 1940, as were, apparently, a majority of the 14 new full members of the Comnrlttee, and of the alternates all of whom were newly chosen in 1960. Consequently pre. World War II communists held a decisive majority of the full and alternate seats on the VWP Central Committee in 1960--and in 1973. The fourth and fifth lists recapitulate Central Committee membership as it presumably was in June 1973.

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List 3

VIET-NAM WORKERS' PARTY CENTRAL COMMITTEE

As Elected At 1960 Party Congress

Believed To Have Been Elected At 1951 Party Congress

Ho Chi Minh, died 1969

Nguyen Luong Bang

Truong Chinh

Le Duan

Pharn Van Dong

Vo Nguyen Giap (Gen.)

Hoang Van Hoan

Tran Quoe Hoan

Pharn Hung

Ung Van Khiem

Le Van Luong

Le Thanh N ghi

Chu Van Tan (Col. Gen.)

Ton Due Thang

Nguyen Chi Thanh, died 1967

Le Due Tho

Nguyen Duy Trinh

Hoang Quoe Viet

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Believed to Have Been Alternate Member In 1951, Elevated To Full Membership Prior To 1960 Congress.

Hoang Anh

Van Tien Dun.g (Col. Gen.)

Ha Huy Giap

To Huu

Nguyen Van Kinh

Nguyen Khang

Nguyen Van Tran

Others Known To Have Been Meulbers Prior To 1960, May Have Been Elected Alternates in 1951.

Tran Huu Duc

Do Muoi

Nguyen Thi Thap

(Nguyen) Xuan Thuy

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Apparently Elected Initially In 1960

Le Quang Ba

Nguyen Can

Duong Quae Chinh

.' Va Thuc Dong

Song Hao (Lt. Gen.)

Nguyen Lam

Tran Luong (Maj. Gen.)

Le Hien Mai (Maj. Gen.)

Chu Vim Man (Maj. Gen.)

C) Ha Thi Que (Mrs.)

Bui Quang Tao

Phan Trang Tue (Maj. Gen.)

Hoang Van Thai (Lt. Gen.)

Le Quae Than

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List 4

RECAPITULATION

VWP CENTRAL COMMITTEE

As Constituted 1969-1973

Full Members

Hoang Anh Le Quang Ba Nguyen Luong Bang Duong Quae Chinh Truong Chinh Nguyen Can Le Duan Van Tien Dung (Col. Gen) Tran Huu Due Pham Van Dong Va Thue Dong Va Nguyen Giap (Gen) Ha HUy Giap Song Hao (Lt. Gen) Hoang Van Hoan Tran Quae Hoan Pham Hung To Huu Nguyen Van Kinh Nguyen Khang Ung Van Khiem

Nguyen Lam Le Van Luong Tran Luong (Maj. Gen) Le Hien Mai (Maj. Gen) Ghu Huy Man (Maj. Gen) Do Muoi Le Thanh N ghi Ha Thi Que (Mrs.) Bui Quang Tao Chu Van Tan (Col. Gen) Phan Trang Tue (Maj. Gen) Hoang Van Thai (Lt. Gen) Ton Due Thang

-- Nguyen Thi Thap (Mrs.) Le Quae Than Le Due Tho (Nguyen) Xuan Thuy Nguyen Van Tran Nguyen Duy Trinh Hoang Quae Viet

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List 5

Alternate Melllbers

Ly Ban Nguyen Thanh Binh

- Dinh Thi Can (Mrs.) Nguyen Tho Chan Le Quang Dao (Maj. Gen) Tran Do (Maj. Gen) Ngctyen Don (Maj. Gen) Tran Quy Hai (Maj. Gen) Tran Quang Huy Le Hoang Nguyen Khai Nguyen Huu Khieu

*Hoang Van Kieu Le Lielll

Ngo Minh Loan Nguyen Van Loc Nguyen Huu Mai Ha Ke Tan (Maj. Gen.) Nguyen Khanh Toan Hoang Tung Tran Danh Tuyen Le Thanh Dinh Duc Thien (Sr. Col.) Ngo Thuyen Tran Van Tra (Lt. Gen) Bui Cong Trung Nguyen Van Vinh (Ma.j. Gen) Nguyen Trong Vinh

* Several references to Kieu in DRV output since 1969 suggest that he has been elevated to full lllelllbership in the Central Co=ittee, in keeping with his position as Party Secretary for the Tay Bac Autonolllous Zone.

Obviously, the question arises, are all of these Central Committee members, other than Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Chi Thanh, still alive and participating in the work of the Committee and in the governance of the DRV? List 6 demonstrates that the Politburo members' average age is 63. All of them were, beyond doubt, alive in June 1973, (with the possible exception of Pharn Hung) since all but Pharn Hung were mentioned during that month by Hanoi media as having participated in some activity. But what of the Central Committee members whose average age was about 62, and the alternates, who, in so far as their ages are known, averaged 55 or 56? It is actuarily unthinkable that all of these men were still in place in June 1973. As the biographical sketches presented here indicate about a half dozen of them have dropped out of sight, some for nearly a decade. One or two of these may be in retirement, possibly as "devia­tionists"; the others may have either died or become incapacitated. But no announcements to this effect have appeared in DRV media.

Turning back to lists three and. five--newly elected full members of the Central Committee and the alternate members chosen at the 1960 Congress -it is apparent that the principal source of new committeemen was ,"th:eViet-Nam People's Army. Of the 14 new members six arc:v1l.sted. with their military titles. A seventh, Le Quang Ba, haj:l/just that year left the army to accept a civil post. Two of the recruits, however, Nguyen Con and Nguyen Lam, have proved to be economic managerially oriented, and so 'have increased that skill category in a committee still dominated by men who first gained prominence as professional revolutionaries--the ICP majority. Among the alternate members chosen in 1960 those bearing military titles also loom large on the list, with an assortment of technicians, propagandists and educators rounding it out. Among them, so far as one can make out, ICP members, as has been said, still received preference, but men whose political initiation was primarily in the Resistance War against the French--Viet Minh products--began to appear at least on the road to political power. But, so far as the scanty biographical data on most alternate Central Committee members reveals, few if any of them began their political careers in circumstances other than revolutionary "armed political" struggle.

Another fact that leaps out of the data about VWP Central Committee members is the large number of themJincluding Ho Chi Minh himself, who were born or were first active politically in Central Viet-Nam, the least heavily populated but traditionally most

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List 6

Years and places of Birth of Politburo members

Name YOB POB

I.e Duan 1908 Quang Tri

Truong Chinh 1908 Nam Dinh

Pham Van Dong 1906 Quang Ngai

Pham Hung 1912 Vinh Long

Vo Nguyen Giap 1912 Quang Binh

I,e Duc Tho 1910 Nam Ha

Nguyen Duy Trinh 1910 Nghe An

I.e Thanh Nghi 1911 NVN

Hoang Van Hoan 1905 Nghe An

Van Tien Dung 1917 Ha Dong

Age in 1973

65

65

67

61

61

63

63

62

68

56

The average age for the 10 Politburo members for whom inform­ation is available is 63. I years. The only member whose age is not known, Tran Quoc Hoan, is thought to have been born in 1910, which would make the average age in 1973 an even 63 years.

Of the 11 members of the Politburo, five are known to have been born in Central Viet-Nam. A sixth, Tran Quoc Hoan, appears also to have been raised in Central Viet-Nam, in Ha Tinh Province. Le Duan, Pham Van Dong, and Pham Hung were born in provinces now in the Republic of Viet-Nam.

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Years of birth and birthplaces are known for the following members of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party Central Executive Committee:

Name

Le Quang Ba Nguyen Luong Bang Truong Chinh Le Duan Van Tien Dung Tran Huu Due Pham Van Dong Vo Nguyen Giap Hoang Van Hoan Pham Hung To Huu Nguyen Van Kinh Ung Van Khiem Nguyen Lam Tran Luong Le Hien Mai Chu Huy Man Le Thanh Nghi Ha Thi Que Chu Van Tan Phan Trong Tue Hoang Van Thai Ton Due Thang Nguyen Thi Thap Le Due Tho Xuan Thuy Nguyen Van Tran Nguyen Duy Trinh Hoang Quoc Viet

YOB

1907 1904 1908 1908 1917 1904 1906 1912 1905 1912 1920 1916 1911 1922 1913 1915 1920 1911 1921 1908 1917 1906 1888 1908 1910 1912 1916 1910 1905

POB

Cao Bang NVN Nam Dinh Quang Tri Ha Dong Quang Tri Quang Ngai Quang Binh Nghe An Vinh Long Thua Thien Cho Lon Long Xuyen

Ha Tinh Son Tay Nghe An NVN

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Ninh Binh Thai Nguyen Son Tay Thai Binh Long Xuyen My Tho Nam Ha Ha Dong SVN Nghe An Bac Ninh

Age in 1973

66 69 65 65 56 69 67 61 68 61 53 57 62 51 60 58 53 62 52 65 56 67 85 65 63 61 57 63 68

Of the 29 members of the 41-member VWP Central Committee for whom information is available, the average age is 62.2 years. The range is from 51 to 85 (Ton Due Thang). If Thang is excluded, the average age of the remaining 28 members is 61. 4 years.

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Years and places of birth are known for the following alternate members of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party Central Executive Committee:

Age in Name YOB POB 1973

Dinh Thi Can 1920 Nghe An 53

Nguyen Tho Chan 1922 NVN 51

Tran Do 1922 NVN 51

Nguyen Don 1914 Quang Ngai 59

Tran Quy Hai 1917 Quang NgaL 56

Nguyen Khanh Toan 1903 CVN 70

Tran Dang Tuyen 1912 Bac Giang 61

Tran Van Tra 1918 Quang Ngai 55

Bui Cong Trung 1910 Hue CVN 63

Nguyen Van Vinh 1917 Narn Dinh 56

Of the 10 of the 28 alternate members of the Central Executive Committee for whom information is available, the average age is 56.9 years. The age range is from 51 to 70 (Nguyen Khanh Toanl. If Toan is excluded, the average age of the remaining members is 55.

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politicized of the three areas of Viet-Nam! Central Viet-Nam, Annam, or Trung Bo, as it has been called, consisted of the provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, Ha Tinh, and Quang Binh in what 'is now the northern Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, and the provinces of Quang Tri, Thua Thien, Quang Nam, Quang Tin Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh and a few provinces just to the South, in the southern Republic of Viet-Nam. (West of these coastal Provinces lie the Central or Western Highlands, including the provinces of Kontum and Pleiku. Like the western portions of the coastal provinces they are mountainous, under-populated, and peopled for the most part by nomadic ethnic minority groups rather than by ethnic Vietnamese people.) It was from the Viet­namese population of the valleys and coastal strip of these central provinces in both North and South Viet-Nam that a disproportionate number of the leaders of Vietnamese communism have been drawn, leaders of the Party and government in the DRV, and of the People's Liberation Armed Forces and the People's Revolutionary Party in South Viet-Nam. (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. III "The Leadership of the PRG, the NFLSV and Their Affiliated Organizations, 1973" on the southern aspects of this phenomenon. )

List 7 shows those DRV leaders, Party Central Committee­men, plus a few important other office holders, who were born in Trung Bo with brief statements as to the positions they hold in the DRV, and their Trung Bo origins. It is possible that in one or two instances it is a mistake to assume that a man's having first held an important political assignment in Central Viet-Nam established any meaningful identification with the area. The reasoning which prompted the listing is suggested, .and the reader is enabled to reduce the list if he so wishes. (On the other hand Politburo Le Thanh Nghi whose first political notoriety was gained in Quang Ninh province, in Tonkin, is not included although he too may have been born in and joined the Party in Quang Binh for which he currently sits in the National Assembly. There is a tendency for national leaders of the DRV born in provinces within its borders to take Assembly seats from their native provinces. ) The fact remains that even if several names were

1. Central Viet-Nam, scene of the Tay Son rebellion in the late 18th century, the restoration of the Nguyen throne at Hue in the early 19th century and the principal area of scholars I and

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List 7

CENTRAL VIETNAMESE HOLDING IMPORTANT POSITIONS IN THE VWP AND DRV

VWP Politburo Secretariat, and Central Committee Members

Le Duan~'

Pham Van Dong*

Vo Nguyen Giap

Member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau; First Secretary of the VWP Central Committee; Member of the National Defense Council. Duan was born in the province of Quang Tri in Central Viet-Nam.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau; Premier of the Government; Vice­Chairman of the National Defense Council. Dong was born in Quang Ngai province.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau; Senior General; Chairman of the Central Military Party Committee; Commander-in-Chief of the Viet-Nam People's Army; Minister of National Defense; Member of the National Defense Council. Giap was born in Quang Binh province and represents a Quang Binh constituency in the DRV National Assembly.

Nguyen Duy Trinh Member of the VWP Central Committee .Political Bureau; Vice-Premier of the Government; Minister of Foreign Affairs. Trinh was born in Nghe An province .

Hoang Anh Member of the VWP Central Committee Secretariat; Chairman of the VWP Central Committee's Resettle­ment Department; Vice-Premier of the Government; Chairman of the Central Agricultural Commission. Although there is no information available regarding Anh's place of birth, in the early 1950's he served as Chairman of the Resistance and Administ rative

* Born in provinces now within the Republic of South Viet-Nam.

Nguyen Con

Hoang Van Hoan

T ran Quoc Hoan

To Huu*

Tran Luong

Tran Huu Duc*

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Committees of Viet-Minh Interzones 4 and 5 (both in Central Viet-Nam). And currently represents a Thanh Hoa province constituency in the DRV National Assembly.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Secretariat; Vice-Premier of the Government; Member of the National Defense Council; Chairman of the State Planning Commission. Con's birthplace remains unknown, as does his early career. However, he represents a Nghe An constituency in the DRV National Assembly.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau; Vice-Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee; Hoan was born in Nghe An province.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau; Minister of Public Security; Member of the National Defense Council. Although Hoan's place of birth is not known he is thought to have been born in Central Viet-Nam. For at least the past 8 years, he has represented a Ha Tinh province constituency in the DRV National As sembly.

Member of the VWP Central Committee Secret ariat; Chairman of the VWP Central Committee's Propaganda and Education Department. Huu was born in Thua Thien province.

Member of the VWP Central Committee; Major General in the Viet-Nam People's Army; Member of the Current Affairs Committee of the Central Office for South Viet-Nam (COSVN). Luong was active in the Nghe-Tinh Soviet movement in 1930 and during the 1940's was a guerrilla leader in Ba To district, Quang Ngai province.

Member of the VWP Central Committee; Minister at the Premier's Office; Member of the National Defense Council. Duc was born in Quang Tri province.

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Vo Thuc Dong

Chu Huy Man

Dinh Thi Can

Nguyen Don*

Nguyen Huu Kieu

Tran Qui Hai*

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Member of the VWP Central Committee; Ambassador of the DRV to the USSR. From at least early 1962 until his ambassadorial appointment in 1972, Dong was Secretary of the Provincial VWP Committee of Nghe An province.

Member of the VWP Central Committee; Major General in the Viet-Nam People's Army; Commander and Political Officer of the Western Highlands Front in South Viet-Nam. Man was born in Nghe An province.

Alternate Members of the Central Committee Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Vice -Minister of Public Health. Mrs. Can was born in Vinh, the provincial capital of Nghe An

Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Major General in the Viet-Nam People's Army; Deputy Chief of the VPA General Staff; Vice­Minister of National Defense. Don was born in Quang Ngai province.

Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Chairman of the VWP Central Committee's Rural Work Department; Minister of Labor. Khieu's place of birth is unknown. However, in the past he has represented constituencies in Thanh Hca province and the Vinh Linh special zone in the DRV National Assembly.

Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Major General in the Viet-Nam Peoples Army and formerly Chief of its Rear Services Department. Hai, like the more currently prominent Generals Tra and Don was born in Quang Ngai province.

Nguyen Khanh Toan* Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Vice -Minister of Education; Chairman of the State Social Sciences Commission. Toan was born in the Thua Luu region of Central Viet-Nam, between Hue and Danang.

Ngo Thuyen

Tran Van Tra*

Bui Cong Trung~'

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Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Ambassador of the DRV to the People's Republic of China. Until his appointment as ambassador

to Peking in 1970, Thuyen was Chairman of the Thanh Hoa Provincial Administrative Committee, a position he had held since at least 1956.

Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Lieutenant General in the Viet-Nam People's Army; Deputy Chief of the VPA General Staff; Deputy Commander of COSVN: PRG Delegation Chief Four Party Joint Military Commission, 1973. Tra was born in Quang Ngai province.

Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee. Trung was born near Hue. [Trung has not been mentioned publicly for some time. He is reported to have been involved in the 1967 ''Hoang Minh Chinh Affair" in which several middle-ranking Party cadres attempted to force a negotiated settlement to the War.]

Nguyen Trong Vinh Alternate member of the VWP Central Committee; Major General in the Viet-Nam People's Army.

Phan Anh

Pham Kiet*

Tran Dang Khoa*

Nguyen Xien

Vinh served as Secretary of the Thanh Hoa Provincial VWP Committee in the early 1960's.

Other DRV Officials

Minister of Foreign Trade; Member Vietnamese Democratic Party. Anh was born in Nghe An province.

Vice-Minister of Public Security; Commander of the People's Armed Security Forces; Major General in the Viet-Nam People's Army. Kiet was born in Quang Ngai.

Vice-Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee. Khoa was born in Hue.

Vice -Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee. Xien was born in the provincial capital of Nghe An, Vinh.

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Secretary-General of Standing Committee. Thien province.

the National As sembly Phiet was born in Thua-

Hoang Minh Giam Minister of Culture; Deputy Secretary General Viet-Nam Socialist Party. Giam was born in Nghe An province, as was his friend Ho Chi Minh.

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dropped from the list Trung Bo's contribution to DRV leading personnel and to the communist movement in Viet-Nam has been out of proportion to its population. It is a poor and contentious area, whose residents for decades have been attracted to politics, and to migration, to both Hanoi and the South. (1)

While it would be absurd to suggest that a common area of origin has been the determining factor in the rise of the Trung Bo group in the VWP (intimacy of association in the Party is clearly a more important factor), it would be wrong too to over­look the importance in Viet-Nam of the feeling of kinship which exists upon the basis of region of origin. It is worthy of note that such regional associations have also been an active factor in the internal politics of the Republic of Viet-Nam.

The list of DRV leaders of Central Vietnamese origin points to but does not adequately explore the long interchange within the Party between professional revolutionaries from one part of Viet-Nam and another. Some Party leaders, including Le Duan, have apparently worked in all three regions. Others like Truong Chinh, have been identified exclusively with one part of Viet-Nam, Tonkin, the heartland of the DRV. Prior to 1940 the three regional committees of the ICP may have had some autonomy vis-a-vis a Central Committee whose headquarters shifted back and forth between Hanoi and Saigon. Even so, that Central Committee had the authority to detail Party members from one region to another, and the labor market pulled men from Central Viet-Nam to both North and South.

This pattern of hit or miss assignments and migration ended with the establishment of the DRV, and of Central Committee headquarters, in Hanoi in August-September 1945. Hence forth Hanoi assigned communists regardless of their origins to inspection trips or long-term responsibilities in Central and South Viet-Nam, and, at the same time provided sanctuary for those South Viet­namese communists who had become so well identified by the French police that they could no longer survive in t he South.

(I) The first "modern" academy, Quoc Hoc, was founded in Hue by Ngo Dinh Diem's father. At various times Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong, and Ngo Dinh Diem, first President of South Viet-Nam,were students there.

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Le Duan

Pharn Van Dong

Pharn Hung

Le Duc Tho

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List 8

VWP CENTRAL COMMITTEE

The Southern Experience: Members

Politburo Members

Born in Quang Tri Province. Second arrest by French was in 1939 when as Central Committee member he was active in the South. On release from prison, in 1945 probably after a trip North,he was assigned as Secretary of the Narn Bo Regional Committee and subsequently of the first COSVN, a post which he held until 1952 or 1953.

Born in Mo Duc Village, Quang Ngai Province. Political career almost exclusively in North Viet-Narn but he is believed to have made at least one trip to Central Viet-Nam in 1945-1946 to assist in reorga­nizing the Party there. In Poulo Condore prison 1929-1936, he had learned sometime of the Commu­nist movement in SVN.

Born in Vinh Long Province, in the Mekong Delta. Arrested by French in My Tho in 1931 he was not released until 1945. One of the senior leaders of the Nam Bo Party and resistance until 1954 when he was a member of the Viet Minh delegation to the cease fire commission. After attaining Politburo member­ship and First Vice Premiership in DRV returned to South in 1967 as head of COSVN •

Although born in North Viet-Nam, Tho was assigned as deputy head of COSVN in South Viet-Nam in about 1951, and subsequently was its chief until 1954.

Nguyen Duy Trinh Born in Nghe An Province, Trinh seems to have begun his revolutionary activity in Saigon, for which he was several times jailed. In 1945 he was a leading member of the Viet Minh in the area from Vinh south to Hue, subsequently being elected vice-chairman of the Trung Bo Administrative Committee, remaining a key figure

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Van Tien Dung

Hoang Anh

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The VPA's chief of staff has done virtually all of his political and military work in the North, but after the battle of Dien Bien Phu he came South as chief DRV military delegate on the International Control Commission in Saigon. He is said to have planned the establishment of the arms caches later used by the Viet Congo

Central Committee Members

Although his place of birth is not known, Anh was probably born in Trung Bo. Prior to 1951 he was Chairman of the Administrative Committee of the resistance in Viet Minh Interzone V, most of that part of Trung Bo now a part of the RVN; in 1952 he assumed like rank in Interzone IV which includes the Hue-Quang Tri area as well as that part of Trung Bo now in the DRV.

Nguyen Luong Bang The DRV's Vice President, although born in the North was active in 1:he revolutionary movement

Tran Huu Duc

Ha HUy Giap

To Huu

in Saigon in 1926-27, where he had fled from police in Haiphong. He became a seaman, and after joining the ICP in Hong Kong was again arrested in SVN. Escaping he went to China and came into NVN with Ho Chi Minh becoming secretary general of the Viet Minh. His subsequent career seems to have been entirely in the DR V •

Born in Quang Tri Province, Duc was Chairman of the Trung Bo Resistance Committee in 1946, but his later career seems to have been in NVN, where he was listed as National Assembly deputy from Hue.

Although apparently North Vietnamese born, Giap is the one Party leader mentioned as a principal orga­nizer of the 1945 August Revolution in Saigon in a pamphlet on that subject.

Of a middle class Hue family, Huu was a leader in the 1945 August Revolution there, and from 1951-53 was Director of Information for the Viet Minh in Central Viet-Nam. He moved North when made Information Director for the whole 6f the Viet Minh in 1953.

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Ung Van Khiem

Nguyen Van Kinh ..

Maj. Gen. Tran Luong

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Maj. Gen. Le Hien Mai

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Chu Huy Man •

Lt. Gen. Hoang Van Thai

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Born in Long Xuyen, Khiem, after some years as a communist courier between China and Viet-Narn, was a principal organizer of the 1945 August Revolution in the southern most part of Viet-Nam. He was both a military and political leader of the Nam Bo resistance and a member of COSVN until 1954 before becoming for a time Foreign Minister of the DRV.

In the 1950s President of the Nam Bo Federation of Students, Cholon-born, Kinh was prominent in the Nam Bo Party Committee before moving to the DRV, which he served for ten years as Ambassador to the USSR.

Apparently born in North Viet-Nam, Luong's career has been primarily in Trung Bo, where he organized a guerrilla movement in Quang Ngai Province in 1945. If, as is widely believed, he is Tran Nam Trung, Minister of the Defense of the PRGRSV he led a similar movement there in 1958-59 and helped reestablish COSVN in 1961, remaining in SVN as a senior political officer in the PLAF, and an NF L­PRG figure.

Northern-born, Mai now senior deputy chief of the VPA's General Political Directorate was a military leader of the Nam Bo resistance in the 1950s, and the Secretary of a Viet-Minh affiliated Cultural Association •

Originally from Nghe An Province, Man in the mid-1960s was deputy commander and political secretary in VC Military Region V, and then commander and political officer in the Central High­lands, a post he may still (1973) hold.

Born in NVN in 1906, Thai after occupying senior posts inthe VPA came South in 1964 or 1965 as commander in MR V, Trung Bo, moving in 1967 to COSVN as senior NVA military figure and "commander"of the PLAF, a post he is known to have occupied through Tet 1968 and the 1972 offensive.

Ton Duc Thang

Nguyen Thi Tap

Nguyen Van Tran

Phan Trong Tue

Hoang Quoc Viet

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The President of the DRV was born in Long Xuyen in 1888, and began his revolutionary activity there. Mter a long stay in prison he emerged in 1945 as Chairman of the Viet Minh Committee for My Tho, but went North in 1946 to occupy a series of "Front" and governmental positions.

Prior to 1954, Mrs. Tap, born in My Tho, was President of the South Viet-Nam Women's Union and the "deputy"from My Tho in the DRV National Assembly. Since 1956 she has been President of the DRV Women's Union.

Southern born, French educated, Tran was active in the security services of the Viet Minh during its short-lived rule in Saigon through a Provisional Executive Committee for the South in 1945. There­after his career has been in the North where he is a member of the VWP secretariat and Party Secretary for Hanoi.

Although born in the North, Tue appears to have begun his political while a shipyard worker in the South. Released from prison in 1945 he was active first in the Viet Minh affiliated workers' movement in the south, and then as Deputy Commander in ihe Saigon-Cho1on Special Zone. He was given Maj. Gen's rank in the VPA and then becam.e Minister of Communications and Transport of the DRV.

Best known for labor agitation in North Viet-Nam, Viet in fact knew something of the communist movement in Saigon, which he visited in the 1920s as a mechanic on a French vessel sailing from Saigon. Mter the collapse of the August Revolution in Saigon he was sent by the Party in the North in autumn 1945 to direct the reorganization of the Party in the Saigon-Cho1on-Gia Dinh area.

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Alternate Members of the Central Committee

Tran Do, Maj. Gen.

Nguyen Don, Maj. Gen.

A veteran of the Viet Minh war in the North and one time commander of the 3l2th Div. of the VPA, Tran Do was sent South about 1963 as a senior political-military leader in COSVN, becoming a member of its Military Affairs Committee and a Deputy Commander of the PLAF.

Born in Quang N gai, Don participated in the 1940 Ba To revolt, an area to which he returned in 1945 and again in early 1960s, then as a Maj. Gen. in the VPA. He served as commander and political officer in Military Region V for a time until 1967. Back in the DRV he has become one of the more prominent of the Vice Ministers of National Defense and Deputy Chiefs of Staff.

Tran Quy Hai, Maj. Gen. Also Quang Ngai born, Hai has had less military experience in the area than Don, although he

Nguyen Khanh Toan

is believed to have commanded troops there during the 1960s. He has been Chief of the Rear Services of the VPA, and a member of delegations to Russia and China.

Born in Central Viet-Nam, Toan taught school in Saigon prior to his arrest in the late 1920s. For some years he taught languages in the Soviet Union where he became of friend of Ho Chi Minh's

Tran Van Tra, Lt. Gen. Born in Quang Ngai, Tra like Don was arrested after the 1940 Ba To revolt. However, upon release he was assigned to military-political activity in Nam Bo where he became a zonal commander. After training in Russia and China he held several important posts in the VPA until about 1964 when he was sent south as a COSVN member and PLAF first deputy commander Tra headed the PRG delegation on the short lived Four Party Joint Military Commission under the 1973 Paris Agreement.

Bui Cong Trung

Nguyen Van Vinh, Lt. Gen.

Although born near Hue, Trung is post-prison and exile career appears to have been entirely in North Viet-Nam in a variety of economic posts. Once prominent, little has been heard of him since the early 1960s.

Vinh is said to have fought with the Viet Minh in the South in the 1945-54 resistance, but his role is not known. As Chairman of the VWP Reunification Dept. the government's national reunification commis sion and a VP A deputy chief-of-staff, he is thought to be Hanoi's liaison man with COSVN. There is evidence of Vinh's coming to South Viet-Nam for a COSVN confe­rence on at least one occasion. While his visits may have been more frequent there is no indication that he commanded troops there in the 1964 to 1972 war.

[Editor's note: Less biographical data is available for alternate members of the Central Committee than for full members. It is possible that more of the alternates have had southern experience.]

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North Vietnamese goverrunental leaders who are not members or alternate members of the VWP Central Committee, who have had significant Southern experience.

Pham Van Bach

Kha Vang Can

Nguyen Van Huong

Chief Justice of the People's Supreme Court. Bach was born in South Viet-Nam and was active in the resistance in the South. In September, 1945 he replaced the official Communist leader in Saigon, Tran Van Giau as head of the Viet Minh Provisional Executive Committee for South Viet-Nam and subsequently was become Chairman of the Viet Minh's Nam Bo Resistance and Adminis­trative Committee. He regrouped to North Viet -Nam following the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Minister of Light Industry. Can was born in Cholon. From the mid-1930's until the end of the Second World War, Can worked first for the Renault Company and later for his own foundry and metal-working establish­ment in the South. During the period of anti­French resistance, Can held a variety of positions in the Viet Minh's Nam Bo Regional organization. He was in the South as late as January 1956, but since at least 1960 has been in the North.

Minister of Public Health. Huong was born in the Mekong Delta province of Long Xuyen. During the anti-French resistance of 1946-1954, Huong served on the Nam Bo Resistance and Administrative Committee in a medical capacity. He regrouped to the North following the 1954 Geneva Agreement. He "represented" a Long Xuyen constituency in the DRV National Assembly from 1946 until 191'1.

Tran Dang Khoa

Maj. Gen. Pharn Kiet

Tran Dai Nghia

Ton Quang Phiet

Maj. Gen. Le Trong Tan

A Vice-Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee and Deputy Secretary General of the Democrati.c Party. Khoa was born in Hue. Under the Ho Chi Minh Government of the mid -1940' s, he served as the Chief of the Public Works Department for Central Viet-Nam. From 1946 until 1971, he represented a Hue consti­tuency in the DRV National Assembly.

Vice-Minister of Public Security and Commander of the People's Armed Security Forces. Kiet was born in Son Tinh district of Quang Ngai province. He early engaged in revolutionary activities in his horne province and was at one time before 1945 and 1954, he was an active guerrilla leader in the southern part of Central Viet-Nam. From 1955 until approximately 1959, Kiet was Chief of Military Intelligence at Region V (southern Central Viet-Nam) Headquarters.

Chairman of the State Scientific and Technical Commission. Nghia was born at an unknown location in South Viet-Nam.

Secretary General of the National Assembly Standing Committee. Phiet is reported to have been born in Thua Thien province and "repre­sented" that province in the DRV National Assembly until Southern representation was discontinued in 1971.

Deputy Chief of the Viet-Nam People's Army General Staff. Although Tan is a Northerner by birth, he has been active in the South for the past decade as a Deputy Commander (and, according to one report, Chief of Staff) of the COSVN military apparatus.

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To some degree too it was a matter of a new state requlrlng skills that were in short supply in the North, at least among communists and their sympathizers, a shortage that could be at least partially met by incorporating Southern comrades into the northern state. From 1945 to 1947 the traffic was largely from North to South--cadre from the DRV going South to revitalize a revolution which had ebbed there. Then the flow became two way as all the factors suggested above were operative. But after 1954 there was a South to North flood--the "regroupment" movement, until 1959 when it was reversed. First the "regroupees", then Northern cadres, went South to man revolutionary formations which lacked both the quantity and quality of personnel the revolution required. (These developments were commented upon from a Southern point of view in Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. Ill).

The "southern experience" of Northern and Central Vietna­mese leaders of the DRV who worked in the South for greater or lesser periods of time is summarized in List 8. It also notes those communists whose early careers were in the South, but who have become important, or, in any event, prominent, personalities in the North.

As "the Leadership of the PRG, the NFLSV and their Affiliated Organizations" suggested, there are interesting socio­political differentiations within these groups of migrants. Those Northern and Central Vietnamese who have been sent South, either as political organizers or as military commanders were, for the most part professional revolutionaries of lower middle class, worker, or peasant backgrounds, like most I. C. P. members and Viet Minh fighters o The Southerners who went North, and stayed there as luminaries of the DRV, seem to be much more bourgeois in origin, although, for the most part, recruits by 1945 to the I. C. P. As personalities they seem to have more in common with the almost excl:usively middle class leadership of the southern PRG and NFL than they do with the Party veterans who dominate politics in the DRV.

It is, however, North Vietnamese, plus a sprinkling of men from the northern part of Central Viet-Nam, who predominate in the Party Secretariat and in the Party Boards directly subordi­nate to it. As announced at the Third Congress, the Secretariat

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was to consist of Politburo members Le Duan, as First Secretary, Pham Hung, Le Duc Tho, Nguyen Chi Thanh, plus Committeemen Hoang Anh, To Huu and Le Van Luong. Thanh has died, and Nguyen Van Tran, Xuan Thuy and Nguyen Con have been added. Tran is the only South Vietnamese member other than Pham Hung. He, oddly enough, also heads the Hanoi City Party.

Obviously the First Secretary of the Party is a member of the Secretariat as are Le Duc Tho, the head of the Organization Department, and To Huu the chief of Propaganda and Training. Pham Hung, as the Secretary of COSVN--the Central Committee's Central Office for South Viet-Nam--can be said to still be per­forming Secretariat duties. At the time of his 1960 appointment to the Secretariat he was probably meant to be its liaison man with the civil government of which he was then First Vice-Premier. Xuan Thuy was added to be the Secretariat's expert on inter­national affairs. Nguyen Con, particularly after Hung's departure for the South, was to be its economist along with agriculturalist Anh.

Le Van Luong was a member of the Secretariat from 1954 to 1956 when he resigned as a result in his involvement in the disasterous land reform campaign. His being restored to the Secretariat in 1960, the year that Truong Chinh was made Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee, and his old friend Hoan Quoc Viet was given an important state office was, perhaps, a gesture by Ho, Le Duan, Pham Van Dong, and Giap to demonstrate that the breach between the Truong Chinh group and the rest of the leadership was healed. Such a move could have been prompted by the need for complete unity in the Party at the moment when it was increasing its involvement, and consequently its risks, in the South. Luong may be the overseer of the Ho Chi Minh Working Youth Union, but this is not firmly known.

The Party Boards are "subordinate to the Central Committee" but must in fact function in coordination with the secretariat. Other than those like Organization and Propaganda and Training, whose strictly Party functions are obvious, the Boards, about which little is known, may have been initially established as shadow ministries, then became Party agencies to prod ministries and direct the work of Party Committees in government departments. In fact, most of them are headed by the men who have the counter-

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VWP SECRETARIAT AND ITS SUBORDINATE AGENCIES

First Secretary LE DUAN

PHAM HUNG LE DUC THO Hoang ANH To HUU

Secretariat

Le Van LUONG Nguyen Van TRAN Xuan THUY Nguyen CON

Chairman of Viet-Nam Workers I Party Boards

Agricultural Board (Vice Chairman)

Control Board

Communications and Transportation Board

Emulation Board

Foreign Relations Board (Vice Chairman)

Finance and Trade Board

Flood and Typhoon Control Board

Historical Research Board

Industrial Board

Military Affairs Board

Minority Affair s Board

Le THANH Tran Quoc Manh

Nguyen Luong BANG

Phan Trong TUE (1,4)

LE THANH NGHI (1) Doan Hoang Ky

Xuan THUY (1) Cao Hong Lanh Nguyen Song Tung (2) Tran Chi Hien

To Duy

Ha Ke TAN (1)

TRUONG CHINH

Nguyen Huu MAl (1)

(See separate list)

Le Quang BA (1)

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Organization Board

Propaganda and Education Board Vice-Chairmen

Reunification Board

Resettlement Board

Rural Work Board

Scientific and Educational Board (5)

LE DUC THO

To HUU Hoang TUNG (3) Dao Duy Tung Nguyen Vinh

Nguyen Van VINH (1,4)

Hoang ANH (1)

Nguyen Huu KHIEU (1)

Tran Quang HUY (1)

(1) Holds ministerial or equivalent rank in government in same or related field of work.

(2) Also Ambassador to German Democratic Republic

(3) Editor of Nhan Dan, and President of Viet-Nam Journalists As sociation.

(4) Also Major Generals in VPA

(5) First mention of a "Scientific and Educational Commission [Board] subordinate to the Party Ce ntral Committee" was made in an April 3, 1973 Hanoi Domestic Service broadcast. The establishment of this new Party Board seemed to be a part of the retooling of the VWP's cadre training procedures. See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 102 "DRV Cadre Policy In The 'New Phase "'

[An Hanoi Domestic Service broadcast in May, 1973 referred to Nguyen Thi Ngoc Khanh as a "secretary of the VWP Central Committee, and secretary of the Executive Committee of the Ho Chi Minh Youth Union." This is the first reference to the lady that has been noted. It cannot be firmly stated that she is

a member of the Party Secretariat, and no other positions have been attributed to her. If in fact a young woman has been added

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to the Secretariat, it would constitute an intere sting develop­ment in VWP personnel policy.

[On May 7, 1973 Hanoi Domestic Service reported a conference of 'youths working in central government and Party offices." Le Tat Dac, a Vice-Minister of Interior, was mentioned as "Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee of the Central Civilian Government and Party Organs." This Committee, to which the last known reference was made in July 1970 may be a crucial personnel assignment and control organ of the Party. The name of its secretary is not known. 1

In the above list, and in all lists in Part II, Politburo tnetnbers' natnes appear in all capital letters, full tnetnbers of the Central Cotntnittee are underlined and their last nallles given in capitals, while alternate tnetnbers' last natnes are printed in capitals, but are not underlined.

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part governmental 'responsibilities. In these cases about the only function they seetn to serve is to add the chairtnan's Party "clout" to his governmental prerogatives in attetnpting to tnotivate his subordinates.

That the tnechanistn has not been abandoned, however, is detnonstrated by a new Board's having been created in April, 1973, to assist in itnpletnenting the Politburo's February resolution on cadre training. The Secretariat and Party Boards as they appeared to exist in June 1973 are shown in List 9.

This discussion of the Central Cotntnittee of the VWP concludes with a series of biographical sketches of the tnetnbers of the Politburo, the Central Cotntnittee of the Party and its alternate tnetnbers. By definition this includes all tnetnbers of the Sec'retariat, all but a handful of Party Board chairtnen, and tnost itnportant office holders in the governtnent of,the DRV. Sotne of the conclusions which derive frotn the sitnple factual data of the natne lists have been included in the preceding edito'rial cotntnents.

Mo're insights etnerge frotn a study of the careers of the leading tnetnbers, and sotne of the lesser tnetnbers, of the Cotntnittee. One's knowledge retnains incotnplete in all instances, and woefully inadequate in tnany. North Viet-Natn, like all othe'r political societies, will one day crystalize, and understanding institutional dynatnics and inertias and the itnpact of pres sure groups will becotne tnore itnportant to assessing probable national policy changes than will be the details of the careers and associations of its leaders. But the DRV has not yet reached that stage of political developtnent. The pe rsonalities, ideas and inter-relationships atnong its ageing leaders are still vital factors in detertnining both national policy and institutional developtnents.

The tnost striking fact about North Vietnatnese cotntnunist leadership is its stability. Save for the few changes that stetntned frotn the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969 which were largely detertnined by his choices, there have been no itnportant changes in Party personnel since 1960. Leadership retnained in the hands of tnen who had held it in 1951. This stnall group realized that its inte'rnational position was so tenuous, and even perhaps that its effective hold on North Viet-Natn was so litnp that it could not

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afford the Party feuds and purges that have occurred in every other nlajor co=unist party in the post-Stalin period.

There were in fact at least two nlajor policy-factional crises in the Party between 1955 and 1961. The first, already nlentioned, was over the inlplenlentation, even the guide lines, of the 1953 to 1956 land refornl canlpaign. But, as nlentioned in the discussion of the Secretariat, the leading personalities of the disgraced faction were rehabilitated by 1960. The other was a confrontation within the arnlY, which inevitably involved the Party hierarchy, over nlilitary organization, the relative status of line and political officers, training progranls and weapons procurenlent and utilization. This, in turn, was entangled with DRV inter­national policy. Again, while one school of thought, Giap's, clearly prevailed, the leader of the defeated group, the late Nguyen Chi Thanh, was called back to nlilitary service in 1964 and nlade the head of COSVN.

Possibly there was a connection between these two near­divisions within the Party leadership. If so it can, perhaps, be traced back to the fact that two groups of Party figures were responsible for the success of the 1945 August Revolution in North Viet-Nanl. One was located in the nlountainous backlands, directed by Ho Chi Minh and Phani Van Dong. It organized the Viet Minh resistance whose arnled bands were led by Vo Nguyen Giap and Chu Van Tan. The other group was led by the then Pa'rty Sec'retary Truong Chinh. It directed the anti-French, anti­Japanese agitation in the Red River Delta. The latter was, initially, the nlore nar'rowly cOnlnlunist and nlore exclusively Tonkinese of the two •

SOnle Party veterans fronl Central Viet-Nanl like Thanh adhered to the Chinh group, while nlore like Le Duan, and nlost of those who had fought in the resistance in Central and Southern Viet-Nanl, prefer'red the leadership of Ho and his Viet Minh cOnlrades who held the cOnlnlunist positions in the new DRV govern­nlent. Both groups had sufficient support within the Party that neither could afford to contenlplate elinlinating the other. This associational franlework, rather than a division between pro­Russian and pro-Chinese elenlents, nlay well be the explanation of the factionalisnl and the balancing which have existed within the VWP.

In late 1963 when Le Duan introduced to a full Central Committee"Plenum" the resolution which led to the DRV's main force commitment to the revolution in the South he called upon Truong Chinh to explain it. (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes Nos. 96 and 98.) It must not be assumed that perpetual warfare rages between Politburo members in the VWP, nor that all individual leaders, once associated with one group of colleagues or another, or a set of policies, remain rigorously "in place", factionally, year after year. There is circumstantial evidence at least that line-ups changed rather sharply in the discussions over the extent to which the DRV should commit itself to the 1972 aggression against the South. (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 107).

There may have been debates too in August 1972 and again in early 1973, and in the intervening months, as to whether or not the DRV should accept the cease-fire terms which the govern­ments of the United States and the Republic of Viet-Nam were prepared to conceded. Some of the evidence to support this contention emerges in these biographical sketches. Future discussions within the Politburo and the Central Committee as to how to implement the unaltered policy goal of "reunifying" Viet-Nam under communist leadership may pick up where these debates left off, and the old factional lines traced in these bio­graphies will no longer be relevant.

As the biographical sketches and the section on the formal structure of government in the DRV suggest, men who have been working primarily on the economic problems of North Viet-Nam are beginning to come to the fore in the government. Should a long overdue Party Congress be held in the next year or two the Party will have an opportunity to give them more recognition within its structure too. Whether these new, managerial men, are any less zealously committed to "reunification" than are their elde'rs one does not know. Biographic data and politically­freighted published writing by the new men is skimpier even than that which we have from the older leaders. This is to be expected in a system in which the old dominate.

Wherever possible the most current information about all of these men has been incorporated into their profiles. Important though it is to understand the history of the Party, the essential concern is to learn as much as possible about the present and possible future of the Party and its leaders, without stretching or warping the evidence.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Members Of The VWP Central Committee Politburo

LE DUAN, First Secretary of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party, was born in Quang Tri Province, now a part of South Viet-Nam, on April 7, 1908. Little is known of his family back­ground or his early years, but the village said to be his birth place is a poor OJle. He must, however, have received some education, since when he migrated to Hanoi in the 1920s he found employment as a railway clerk. He was p'robab1y an 1. C. p • member as early as 1930, and beyond doubt was jailed, on Con Son Island, for subversive activities by the French in 1931. Duan, however, benefitted from the Popular Front's amnesty in 1936 and again embarked on the career of a professional revolutionary.

By 1939 he was a member of the I.C.P. Central Committe.e. Whether this recognition resulted from work in his native Central Viet-Nam or in South Viet-Nam where he subsequently made his reputation is not clear. In any event, he was again arrested, this time in the South, in 1940 and remained in prison until released by the Viet Minh in August 1945. Duan presumably then went to Hanoi which had become the seat of the Party, but by 1946 he was assigned to Nam Bo--South Viet-Nam, as secretary of both the Party and the Viet Minh. Some who knew him then have described him as a ruthless commissar. He has been accused of complicity in the murder of Nguyen Binh, the most notable of the Viet Minh military commanders in Nam Bo. On the other hand, some Viet Minh veterans who have since rallied to the Government of South Viet-Nam speak of him warmly as a man who really understands the South and its folkways. In 1951 his authority was broadened to give him political if not military surveillance over Southern Trung Bo as well as Nam Bo. The new organizational structure was called the Central Office of South Viet-Nam -- COSVN.

Le Duan's deputy and then his successor at COSVN in the "Resistance War" was Le Duc Tho. They are said ta have clashed over unspecified policy issues. Duan was recalled to the North in about 1953, but although the implication is that Le Duc Tho's position was favored by the Party, Le Duan was not in disgrace. He is said to have been responsible for the resettlement of Party and Viet Minh "regroupees", mostly from Central Viet-Nam, who

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moved to the North in 1954, and in 1956 was formally designated the member of the VWP Central Committee's Secretariat for the South. During this period he probably visited the South clandes­tinely carrying with him the Party's order to its southern adherents to concentrate on "the political struggle."

The policy proved disastrous as the regime of President Diem consolidated its power and took stern measures against the southern communists. However, in 1957 Le Duan was raised to Politburo membership and was becoming one of Ho Chi Minh's most trusted lieutenants. When Ho had to assume the Party Secretary's job, as well as its chairmanship and the Presidency of the DRV, after the 1956 land reform and Truong Chinh's resignation, it was Le Duan to whom he turned for assistance in running the Party. As early as 1957 he took Duan with him to an international conference of communist parties in Moscow, and did so again in 1960 when the Sino-Soviet schism had become public. It must have been during these visits that Le Duan won Mos cow's confidence, which he appears to have retained ever since.

As the Party in the North recovered from the land reform debacle, it was Le Duan who steered it through the last period of the "rectification" campaign and reconciled at least a considerable segment of the "middle peasants" to continued Party 'rule and to, at first, voluntary cooperativization. His speeches during that period are replete with statements about the importance and virtue of the "middle peasants." In April 1959 at Ho's behest the Central Committee named him First Secretary, an action accepted by the Third National Congress of the Party the following year.

Prior to that time, however, Le Duan and the Central Committee were forced to recognize that the Party faced extinction in the South, and that, in fact, it had lost touch with the situation there. Le Duan is said to have made another trip South in late 1958. In early 1959 the 15th Plenum of the Central Committee adopted a resolution, still not published, authorizing, and pledging support to, an "armed political struggle" in the South. At the Congress in September 1960 Le Duan delivered the "political report" which called for the creation of the National Liberation Front in the South, but at the same time avoided promising it massive assistance. Meanwhile the Party and the army were sending southern-born cadres and rank-and-file "regroupees" back to the South to help man the Viet Congo

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Not until 1963-64 (see Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes Nos. 96 and 98) did the Party decide to alter its economic priorities and run the military risks essential to "main force" assistance to the revolution in the South. Le Duan, with Ho's support, seems to have taken the lead in preparing the Party for this commitment. He is also known to have been one of the planners of the 1968 Tet offensive.

When Ho died in September 1969 it was Le Duan who presided over his funeral. By that time the Provisional Revolu­tionary Government of the Republic of South Viet-Natn had been formed, with the DRV's blessings, (see Viet-Nam Documents and Res.earch Notes No. 101) and the protracted diplomacy of the Paris Talks had become a part of its tactics along with protracted war. Le Duan in a 1966 speech had coined the slogan "negotiate while fighting." When the Party observed its fortieth anniversary in February, 1970 Le Duan wrote a lengthy dissertation entitled "Under the Glorious Party Banner, for Independence, Freedom and Socialism, Let Us Advance and Achieve New Victories" (Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 77). While vociferously reasserting the Party's support for the war in the South, Le Duan seemed equally preoccupied with the successful building of socialism in the North which depended upon "three revolutions, the most important of which is the technological revolution." His essay has rivalled if not surp1anted the simpli'; citudes of Ho Chi Minh as a basic text for VWP members.

There is no evidence to suggest that Le Duan was the architect of the 197Z invasion of the South, as there is of his role in the 1959-1960, 1963-1964 and 1967-1968 offensives. True, it was he who led the DRV's negotiations with Soviet Chairman Brezhnev in October 1971, which made the invasion possible. But by the end of that year it was National Assembly Standing Committee Chairman Truong Chinh who took the lead in preparing the North Vietnamese people for still another military adventure. (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 107) Duan's natne was rarely mentioned in DRV media between April and December 1972. In January 1973, however, on the eve of the Paris Agreement, Le Duan emerged again into the limelight as the Party's senior figure. His visits to the offices of Nhan Dan, the Party's daily newspaper and to Hanoi's broadcasting station were almost obviously designed to remind their· staffs of who was boss.

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When in March 1973 the Politburo did the unusual and published the full text of one of its resolutions, "Tasks Related To Cadres In The New Phase", it was Le Duan who wrote a long, and not very enlightening, exposition of it for Nhan Dan. (Viet­Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 112). More dramatically, in June 1973 he headed, along with Premier Pham Van Dong, a Party-Government delegation to the People's Republic of China. It was Le Duan's first formal visit to the PRC, signalizing both his status in the DRV and his freedom from Russian tutelage.

Le Duan who in his prison years taught his fellow prisoners Marxist-Leninist theory, while Pham Van Dong lectured them on subjects of "general knowledge", seems more at ease in small group discussions than at National Assembly meetings or on public platforms. He, naturally, or by long association with Ho Chi Minh, has developed a "folksy" style in his occasional tours of paddy fields, factories and army installations. His working relations with Premier Pham Van Dong are apparently excellent. How good they are with General Giap or his presumed rival and predecessor as Party "boss", Truong Chinh, it is not possible to say. Nor does one know how long he is now willing to wait, or how much of the DRV's slim resources he is prepared to commit, to the "reunification" of Viet-Nam which remains the avowed purpose of his Party.

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TRUONG CHINH, second-ranking member of the VWP Central Committee Political Bureau and Chairman of the DRV National Assembly's Standing Committee, was born in the Red River delta province of Nam Dinh (now a part of Nam Ha Province) in 1908. His real and less heroic name (Truong Chinh means "Long MarcH') is Dang Xuan Khu. He is the son of a schoolteacher. Through his father's influence or at his own initiative, Chinh adhered to the Vietnamese nationalist cause early. He was expelled for subversive activity, from his local school in Nam Dinh city, which the French were developing as a light industrial center and went to Hanoi in the mid-1920's. There he attended the most prestigious high school in Viet-Nam the Lycee Albert Sarraut, and later a commercial college. He also joined the Hanoi branch of the Association of Young Revolutionary Vietnamese Comrades, founded in China some years earlier by Ho Chi Minh.

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In 1930, Chinh became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party. During the French anti-communist repressions of 1931, he was arrested and imprisoned in the western mountain town of Son La. One of his fellow prisoners was Nguyen Luong Bang, the Vice-President of the DRV.

The Popular Front period brought freedom to Chinh, as it did to many other communists. He returned to Hanoi in 1936 and, until 1939, edited ICP newsheets and jou'rnals.

When the ICP went underground in late 1939, Chinh appears to have gone, briefly, to China. He did not attend the Sixth Party Central Committee Conference in November 1939, but re­appeared in November 1940 to dominate the Seventh Conference, where he was named Provisional Secretary-General (Nguyen Van Cu, who had been Secretary-General since 1938, was arrested in Cochinchina in June, 1940; he was not executed until May, 1941.)

Chinh met Ho Chi Minh, almost certainly for the first time, in May, 1941, at the 8th Conference of the Party Central Committee at Pac Bo. Ho, with his Comintern representative's credentials, assumed the Party Chairmanship and Chinh was confirmed as Secretary-General. Shortly thereafter, Chinh withdrew from the mountainous Viet Bac region that became the base of the Viet-Minh resistance and established Party headquarters in the Red River delta, not far from Hanoi. A rivalry for control of the Vietnamese communist movement may have existed between the Viet Bac group (including Ho, Pham Van Dong and General Giap) and the Party Central Committee group, which consisted for the most part of men from the Red River delta who had been active in the movement within Viet-Nam for many years (including Chinh, Hoang Quoc Viet and Le Duc Tho). If such a rivalry existed, Chinh's decision to establish a Party headquarters away from the Viet Bac may have been prompted in part by a desire to consolidate his position, as well as by the fact that the success of the revolution required its mastering the Hanoi area.

Chinh remained in the delta throughout the early 1940' s, directing Party activities and what little actual anti-Japanese resistance was ever carried out by the Viet-Minh. When Ho Chi Minh organized the Provisional Revolutionary Government in late 1945, those cabinet posts which went to communists were given

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to men who had been with him in the Viet-Bac, and had become identified among the people as Viet-Minh nationalists, not to Chinh and his lieutenants in the Delta, who were known to be Party Communists.

By the end of 1946, Ho and the Governm.ent were again in the resistance bases of the Viet Bac, while Chinh once more established Party Central Committee headquarters in the Delta. If tension in fact existed between Truong Chinh and his co-workers and the Viet Bac group, Chinh was able to overcome it, at the Second National Congress in 1951. He was re-elected Secretary­General, reaffirming his second-to-Ho position in the Party hierarchy. But Pham Van Dong was already Ho's second man in the governm.ent, and Giap the first man in the army.

In 1954, following the establishment of the Party as undisputed ruler of North Viet-Nam, Truong Chinh became Vice­Chairman of the DRV's Land Reform Committee and assumed major responsibility for the land redistribution program. The doctrinaire excesses of that program brought parts of North Viet­Nam to the brink of rebellion, and Truong Chinh was accorded a major portion of the blame. In November 1956, as part of a concerted effort to regain the allegiance of the "middle peasants", and the army, many of whose officers were of this class, Truong Chinh resigned as Secretary-General. Giap led the attack upon him at a Central Committee meeting.

Truong Chinh's eclipse, was brief. By 1958, less than two years after his public confession of "leftist deviationism", he was made a Vice-Premier of the Governm.ent. Meanwhile, accord­ing to a North Vietnamese who "rallied" to the RVN, Chinh restored his prestige in the Party by accepting his eclipse with good grace. At the first session of the Second Legislature of the DRV National Assembly in July 1960, Chinh, a National Assembly representative since 1946, replaced Ton Duc Thang as Chairman of the Standing Committee, Thang became Vice-President of the Republic, in one of Ho's moves to insure that his death would not cause a succession struggle within the Party and State. At the Third National Congres s in September 1960, Chinh was re-elected to the Politburo.

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Chinh's rehabilitation probably was due in large measure to the strength of his personal following among members of the Central Committee who had worked with him in the Delta during the resist­ance. To what extent that loyalty still exists, almost twenty years later, cannot be confidently stated, but it is probably sufficient to make ChiBh secure in his present position and to make his voice count.

Altho'ugh he remains a definite power within the North Vietnamese Party-Government apparatus, Truong Chinh has been effectively blocked from ever achieving personal supremacy over the Party, a position towards which he can may have been headed before 1956. With the exception of his Politburo membership he holds no Party or State position which could be used as a power base. He is not a member of the Secretariat, which has day-to-day responsibilities for the activities of the VWP, and although he heads the Party Board on historical research, that position appears to be largely honorary.

It is difficult to believe that Chinh is quite happy about the way things have turned out. In the early years of Party building in the North he showed himself a dynamic and aggressive individual as well as the Party's theoretician. He was Party General-Secretary at the age of 33 and, had the land reform disaster not intervened, would probably have succeeded Ho as Party leader in 1969. To now find himself in what is essentially a dead-end position, subordinate to Le Duan, whom Ho chose to replace him as Party chief, must be frustrating.

It is almost inconceivable that Chinh, now 65 years old, will ever achieve pre-eminence within the Party. He will remain a force, however, and by utilizing what power remains to him to advance the career of proteges may make his influence felt within the Party into the next generation. However if the VWP finds it necessary to advance more men of managerial capacity it most likely will be the nominees of Le Duan, Pham Van Dong and even Le Thanh Nghi who will forge ahead.

Chinh has tried on several occasions to make the National Assembly more of a force in North Vietnamese policy making. However, these efforts have been ignored, and his Chairmanship of the Standing Committee remains largely ceremonial. What authority he exercises derives from his Politburo membership.

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It is possible that Truong Chinh played a significant role in the VWP's decision to launch its March 1972 main-force offen­sive against the Republic of Viet-Nam. Although there is no firm evidence that the members of the Politburo were sharply divided about the offensive, it was Chinh who delivered the hardline policy speech which presaged the offensive--a speech delivered to Father­land Front Congres s in December 1971 but not published in full in North Vietnamese newspapers until February 1, 1972, (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 107 for its full text.) When all U. S. bombing of North Viet- Nam was terminated in January, 1973, just prior to the negotiation of the cease fire, it was Truong Chinh whom Gen. Giap, his one time opponent, selected to join him in visiting and presenting awards to air force and air defense units. With the signing of the peace agreement in January 1973, however, Chinh appears to have slipped back into being number two (and possibly number three) man in the North Vietnamese hierarchy.

Truong Chinh is thought to have suffered from tuberculosis since 1939. In the 1969-1970 winter he spent some time in a sanatorium in East Germany. More recently, however, the pace of his activities, and a spate of smiling photographs hardly credit persisting rumors that his demise is imminent.

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PHAM VAN DONG has been Premier of the DRV since 1955, when Ho Chi Minh turned over the office to him, while retaining the Chairmanship of the VWP and the Presidency of the Republic himself. Dong had already served as Minister of Finance, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. He had headed the abortive delegation to France in 1946, which failed to settle the "Viet-Nam question," and the qualifiedly successful one, from the DRV's point of view, to the Geneva Conference of 1954.

Dong is the son of the mandarin secretary to the Emperor Duy Tan, who participated in the futile anti-colonialist politics of the 19th Century. Born in Quang Ngai in 1908, he took part in a student's strike in Hanoi in 1925 and fled to Canton. There the young aristocrat met Comintern functionary Nguyen Ai Quoc, as Ho was then called, and joined his Revolutionary Youth League (the Association of Young Revolutionary Vietnamese Comrades). This was the beginning of a friendship which deepened with the years until Ho's death.

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Dong returned to North Viet-Nam in the late 1920s and organized some of the country's first communist cells. He was arrested in 1929, being released in time to participate openly in the "Democratic Front," a communist sponsored group in Hanoi from 1936-1939, editing papers in French as well as Viet­namese. When the Party was again threatened with repression Dong escaped to China. He returned to the Chinese-Vietnamese border area with Ho in 1941 and attended the founding conference of the Viet Minh, which was to be the vehicle for the 1945 August Revolution. During Ho's 1942-43 imprisonment in China Dong seems to have been the effective political leader of the Viet Minh in the uplands of North Viet-Nam.

Designated Minister of Finance in the first Viet Minh government of the DRV, he in fact seems to have functioned as Foreign Minister and Vice Premier, in short as Ho's right-hand man, almost from the beginning. His Party prominence c.ame a bit slower, but he was elected to the Central Committee and the Politburo in 1951 when the VWP was reformed under that name.

Since 1955, and particularly since Ho's death in 1969, he has been the operating head of the DRV government and except on ceremonial occasions, when President Ton Duc Thang is given the spot light, Dong is its principal public figure. He is also Vice Chairman and probably the functioning Chairman of the National Defense Council, which gives him an active voice in military policy making. Over the years his "political reports" to National Assembly meetings have revealed him to be a zealous proponent of DRV support of the southern revolution as well as an advocate of "building socialism" in the North.

Non-communists who have visited Hanoi have the impression that Dong is indeed the key man in the state side of the inter­locked Party-State apparatus. He is also one of the few VWP leaders said to enjoy wide-spread public respect and popularity, among his own people. He has a knack for charming foreign journalists and so is one of the few VWP leaders they are allowed to interview.

Dong has kept his hand in international affairs too, heading the DRV delegation to the Bandung Conference in 1955, and visiting India in 1966, as well as heading delegations to Russia and China.

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The most notable of the latter were his November 1971 and June 1973 trips to China. The PRC in November 1971 assured the DRV of its continuing support between the Hanoi visit of USSR Chairman Podgorny in October 1971, and U.S. President Nixon's February 1972 visit to the PRC. Dong's June 1973 journey to China with Party First Secretary Le Duan resulted in a Chinese pledge to continue economic and military aid to the DRV through 1974. Dong, like Ho before him has managed to retain the personal confidence of the leaders of both of the communist great powers.

How competent a head of government Dong has been is another question. It has been reported that he gave vice ministe­rial jobs to the husbands of three sisters of his wife. Control of governmental affairs was at one time lodged with chairmen of boards Premier's Office. Then it was parcelled out to individual ministries, which do not seem to have coordinated their work successfully. In 1971 a Central Agricultural Commission had to be set up to assert control over food production. In June 1973 the Director of the State Planning Commission was designated to "work in" a hitherto unheard of "Bureau of the Council of Ministers. " Perhaps the 65 years old Dong will begin relinquish a portion of the administrative leadership of the government which he seems to have held tightly since the death of Ho Chi Minh.

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PHAM HUNG, is, beyond doubt, the leading Vietnamese communist born south of Saigon, and whose political experience began there--in the Mekong Delta region. From 1967 until at least 1972 Hung was the head of COSVN. Born in 1912 in Long Ho Village, Vinh Long Province, apparently of peasant stock, he joined first Ho Chi Minh's Revolutionary Youth League, and then the Indochinese Communist Party when it was organized in 1930. Arrested by the French in My Tho on May Day 1931 for complicity in the death of a French official killed by a crowd which he is said to have led, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Hung remained in prison throughout the 1936 to 1939 period when most Vietnamese communists enjoyed their one experience of overt political activity. Hung plunged into Viet-Minh activity upon his release in 1945.

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He worked directly under Le Duan and Le Duc Tho when they were, successively, the secretaries of the first CO.SVN. Various reports list his titles between 1945 and 1954 as Political O.fficer of Viet Minh troops in Eastern Naln Bo, head of the Lien Viet Association, an enlarged version of the original Viet Minh, Director of the Security Service in Naln Bo and a :me:mber of the Regional Ad:ministrative Co:m:mittee of the resistance. His reputation in the Party was such that when the Viet-Naln Workers Party was for:mally organized in the North in 1951, he was elected to its first Central Co:m:mittee •

With the ter:mination of the war with the French in 1954 Hung headed the Viet-Minh delegation on the Cease Fire Co:m:mittee in the South, and then the short-lived Saigon Liaison Mission with the International Control Co:m:mission of the Viet-Minh High Co:m:mand. He and his colleagues, including the North Vietna:mese ar:my's Chief of Staff, Politburo :me:mber Gen. Van Tien Dung, were expelled fro:m Saigon for :misusing their "diplo:matic" functions for political activity.

O.nee in North Viet-Na:m, where his for:mer superiors, Le Duan and Le Due Tho, were key :men in the Party apparatus, his rise was :meteoric. Hung's patron, however, was DRV Pre:mier Phaln Van Dong, who appointed hi:m Minister in his office in 1955 and a Vice Pre:mier in 1958. Meanwhile, in 1957, he had beco:me a :me:mber of the Politburo. Fro:m 1960 to 1963 he was also Chair:man of the Agricultural Board in the Pre:mier's O.££ice. It was in that capacity that he addressed the Third National Congress of the Party in 1960 where the VWP's decision to assu:me direction of the southern insurgency was for:malized. Then fro:m 1963 to 1966, after ":main force" North Vietnalnese troops had been thrown into the South, Hung headed the govern:ment's Financial and Co:m:mercial Board. When Phaln Van Dong was out of the country for several :months in 1961 Hung served as Acting Pre:mier of the DRV.

The first Politburo :me:mber to head the reestablished CO.SVN was Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, who directed the war in the South fro:m 1964 to 1967. Thanh, :more a political co:m:missar than a soldier, had been a rival of Defense Minister Giap's and appa­rently was no favorite of Le Duan's or Dong's. His being given the CO.SVN co:m:mand :may have been :motivated at least in part,

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by a desire to insure firm support of the war by the Truong Chinh group. The plan for the 1968 Tet offensive was worked out in 1967, with Giap and the senior politicians of the Politburo as well as Thanh having a hand in it, since it was to involve political uprisings in the South as well as military thrusts. Thanh died of pneumonia before it was put into effect.

In the autumn of 1967 Hung was lifted out of his economist­manager First Vice Premier role in the DRV and sent South to win the "decisive victory." The plan failed, but Hung was not blamed for the failure since so many of his peers had been involved in designing it. To what degree he was consulted in the planning of the 1972 offensive, which depended heavily upon the employment of North Vietnamese divisions not hitherto operating under COSVN, it is impossible to say. His disappointment at the inability of the People's Revolutionary Party in the South, an agency of COSVN, to produce effective political support for the invasion must have been considerable.

In 1971 Hung was dropped from the list of Vice Premiers of the DRV, but there is no reason to presume that he does not still hold his more significant rank as fourth member of the VWP Politburo--outranking in fact the better known Yo Nguyen Giap. His southern origin and experience, and his popularity with the cadres, not to mention his friendship with the top leaders of both Party and government in the North would, in communist terms, qualify him for continued high rank in North Viet-Nam, or in the South, pending their unification for which he has fought.

(The above sketch is adapted from one published in Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 111, "The Leader­ship of the PRG, the NFLSV and Their Affiliated Organizations." Also profiled in that publication is Nguyen Van Cuc, Hung's political deputy in COSVN who may be a secret member of the VWP Central Committee.)

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VO NGUYEN GIAF, VWP Political Bureau member, Commander-in. Chief of the Viet-Nam People's Army and the DRV Minister of National Defense, is probably the best known VWP. DRV leader outside North Viet.Nam. He was born in 1912 in Vo Xa village, Quang Binh, the southernmost of the DRV's provinces and one 0.£ those which has suffered most heavily in the past decade from his war policy. Giap's family were reportedly peasants, but he seems to have received a better than usual elementary education. At the age of 16 Giap is said to have joined the New Viet-Nam Revolutionary Party, one of the rival nationalist groups which appeared throughout Viet-Nam in the late 1920' s. When the New Viet-Nam Revolutionary Party was disbanded in 1930, Giap was arrested. It is not known whether he was actually imprisoned or, if so, for how long. By 1933, he had left his native province for Hanoi and had joined the Indochinese Communist Party, then just beginning to recover from the depravations of French repression in 19.30 and 1931. By 1936, he was a leading figure in the Democratic Front, the facade behind which the ICP operated during its quasi-legal 1936-1939 period.

Along with his Party organizational and propaganda activities, Giap found time to study at the National Studies School in Hanoi and, later, to attend the FaCUlty of Law at Hanoi University. He graduated from the latter in 1937 in law, political economy and history and began to teach. In 1938, he co-authored a book, The Peasant Question, with Truong Chinh, then already a leading figure in the rcp.

When the French ended the relative political freedom of the Popular Front period in late 1939, Giap fled Viet-Nam and, along with other ICP leaders, regrouped in Kwangsi province in southern China. At the Tsin Tsi Conference in 1941, Giap, although apparently without any military experience, was given the task of building up the armed forces of the newly-formed Viet Minh organization. A forIner pupil of his has said that he enjoyed teaching military history and was an adInirer of Napoleon's.

Despite the limited nature of Viet Minh Inilitary activities during the 1941-45 period (and the fact that Inost ·of those activities were in fact planned and directed froIn the Party Central Committee Headquarters of Truong Chinh in the Red River delta), Giap rose within the Viet Minh-Party apparatus. When Ho Chi Minh proclaiIned

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his Provisional Revolutionary Government in September 1945, Giap was named Minister of Interior. Although he held this position only a few months, they we're the crucial months in which a number of non-communist Viet Minh were easedout of the Govern­ment. As Minister of Interior, Giap may have played some role in carrying out this coup. At the same time he supervised the replace of traditional local government leaders by Communists. In November 1946, Giap was appointed Minister of National Defense and given the responsibility for building the new nation's army. At about the same time, he married his second wife, Dang Thai Ha, the daughter of fellow Viet Minh Dang Thai Mai, who briefly served as Minister of Education in 1945. (Giap's first wife, Minh Thai, whom he married in 1934, died in a French prison. )

With the reoccupation of the Red River Delta by Fre=h forces in the first months of 1947, Giap retired to the Viet Bac region with Ho Chi Minh. In July 1947, he was briefly relieved of the National Defense portfolio and named Commander-in-Chief of the VPA. In August of the following year, he was reappointed Minister of National Defense, made a member of the National Defense Council and promoted to Senior General. He may also have been raised to Party Central Committee status at that point.

As Commander of the young Viet-Nam People's Army, Giap, with significant assistance from such figures as Van Tien Dung, Hoang Van Thai and Tho tribal guerrilla leader Chu Van Tan, was responsible fo'r the planning and execution of the campaigns which, despite some notable setbacks and near-disasters, led to the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the feat for which he is most often remembered by Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese alike. Giap appears to have had almost unlimited personal backing from Ho Chi Minh. One of his worst defeats was suffered at Vinh Yen in January 1951, where he badly, andabnost disastrously, overestimated both the ability of his own forces to fight a major, set-piece battle and the weakness of the French. However, only a month later at the Second National Party Congres s he was named to the VWP Central Committee Politburo. In July 1954, following the establishment of the DRV, Giap was appointed a Vice-Premier of the Government.

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Giap was not without challengers to his apparently complete control over the North's military apparatus, however. A believer in "professionalism" in the army, Giap was opposed by fellow Politburo member and Senior General Nguyen Chi Thanh, who, since 1951, had headed the Army's General Political Directorate, a body which supervised the ideological aspects of military training. Because the GPD was not subordinate to Giap's Defense' Ministry but to the Party Central Committee, General Thanh was able to advance the theory of Party primacy over professionalism, (and consequently to advance his own position). The dispute between the two men was not resolved until early in 1961 when, with the aid of a number of general officers and Giap supporters who had been given Party Central Committee membership at the Third National Congress in September 1960, Thanh was eased out of the General Political Directorate. (General Thanh eventually became the head of COSVN in 1964. He died, reportedly of pneumonia, in July 1967.)

In 1956 Giap attacked the implementation of the land reform program, and its leading advocate Truong Chinh, in a Central Committee meeting. Many VPA officers were of "middle peasant" families which were hurt by the land reform, and their support of Giap may stem in part from this episode. Giap may have also argued with Truong Chinh in the early 1960's over military strategy. A North Vietnamese who rallied to the Republic of Viet-Nam in 1969 claimed that while Giap wanted to completely modernize the army for its impending confrontation with the United States, Truong Chinh remained an advocate of "people's war." A compromise appeared to have been made. As the profile of Truong Chinh recounts the two now seem to be friends again, as they were in 1938.

The degree to which Giap continues to make or influence Party decisions and the part he played in the military disaster of Tet 1968 and the recent unsuccessful invasion of the Republic of Viet-Nam in 1972 a're unknown. Le Duan, Nguyen Chi Thanh, before his death, and Pham Hung, at least, must share the blame for the 1968 fiasco. There have been recurrent rumors that Giap no longer has much voice in Politburo decisions and that he has become little more than a convenient symbol of past glories. He was described, by the same North Vietnamese rallier who told of his dispute with Truong Chinh, as a "quick-tempered" man who

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reacted to circumstances "without mature reflection." The 1972 elevation of Chief of Staff Gen. Dung to full Politburo membership broke Giap's monopoly of military representation in that forum.

There were rumors that Giap had been killed during the December 1972 U.S. bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong area. In an interview with a French radio and television reporter in late January 1973, Giap declared that, "contrary to certain rumors", he was in perfect health. Newspaper photographs (the most recent showing he and Truong Chinh attending a soccer match in Hanoi in June 1973) tend to support his claim to good health.

At 61 years of age, Giap can be expected to be a presence in North Viet-Nam for some time to come, As the "hero of Dien Bien Phu", his position is inviolable and he has managed to identify himself with the success of air defense work in North Viet-Nam in 1972 rather than with the failure in the South. He continues to write long and often turgid articles on military strategy. His personal goal of a large, modern, well-equipped army appears to be approaching realization.

Despite the emphasis on the importance of economic re­construction and improved living standards in the Hanoi press since January 27, 1973, there was no hint of partial demobilization of the army. Its being utilized in the reconstruction effort has been mentioned in only a limited way. Almost daily articles have appeared on either the excellence or the needs of particular branches of the armed forces. Since military men hold several logistical ministries in the civil government, North Viet-Nam's "military-industrial complex" will remain one of the strongest pressure groups in the DRV even if Giap's own reputation among his fellow Party leaders has sagged.

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LE DUC THO, for many years one of the least publicized of the VWP's Politburo members, is today one of its three or four best known, both at home and abroad. Actually, he has long been a key figure in the Party. His Politburo membership may well date from 1951, and he has headed the Party's Organization Department, since sometime before the 1960 Congress. There, it was Tho who presented the Party with its new rule book. (See Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 103). Photographic

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evidence demonstrates that Tho is also a member of the Central Military Party Committee, the names of whose non-military members have not been published. (Some North Vietnamese refugees insist that Le Duan and Pham Van Dong are also members. Others say that Tho is the only civilian who attends its meetings.)

Born in Nam Ha Province on October 14, 1910, Tho was a founding member of the I.C.P. in 1930, but little is known of his pre-1945 career. He was reportedly arrested in 1940, escaped to China, returned to Viet-Nam in time to participate in the Viet-Minh resistance, but in the Hanoi area rather than in the backlands with Ho, Dong and Giap. A Party history of the August Revolution has Tho leading the delegation which escorted Ho and his provisional government into Hanoi in 1945.

When the "Resistance War" broke out Tho was assigned, probably in 1949, to South Viet-Nam as Le Duan's deputy, succeed­ing him as the chief of the first COSVN in late 1952 or early 1953. It is believed that there was a bitter dispute between the two over tactics. But what the issues were is not known. Nor is there any evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that the two men, who for more than a decade have shared adjoining offices, as number one and number two in the VWP apparatus, have staid on bad terms. All available evidence suggests that both of them by the autumn of 1972 wanted to extricate the DRV from its war with the U. S.

Both men avoided formal state office until 1968 when Le Duc Tho was named "Special Advisor to the DRV Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks." Tho's international experience up to that time had been confined to a few trips to the USSR, East Europe and France to study communist organizational questions. He was known to be a hard-core communist in his thinking, critical of the laxity with which his Party rules were applied in the DRV, and concerned to build the Party more firmly among urban workers.

But in the Paris negotiations-Min which he participated himself when the DRV belatedly decided it wanted the war ended-­Tho proved himself to be a man of some charm as well as considerable competence. His public relations sense has also

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proved an asset to the DRY in its "diplomatic offensive." Since January 1973 the man who had hitherto kept to the backrooms has also become a leading public figure in North Yiet-Nam.

Should Le Duan abandon the Party First Secretary's job Le Duc Tho, a few years his junior, would almost certainly be his successor.

********** NGUYEN DUY TRINH, the DRY's Minister of Foreign Affairs

since 1965, was born in Nghe An (the birth place of several YWP leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, Hoang Van Hoan and Chu Huy Man) in 1910. Although his family were reportedly peasants, Trinh attended school and into his mid-teens and then became politically active. In 1928, at the age of 18, he joined one of the many nationalist groups which had begun to appear in Yiet-Nam in the late 1920's. He was promptly arrested and sentenced to a rather mild 18-months imprisonment. Released in 1930, he promptly joined the Indochinese Communist Party. (Several writers of memoirs have said that there was a tendency for the younger nationalists who were jailed in this period to come out communists. )

Appointed District Party Secretary for Nghi Loc district, Trinh was almost certainly deeply involved in the Nghe-Tinh Soviet movement of mid-1930, in which large areas of Nghe An and contiguous Ha Tinh Province were virtually free of French rule for as much as a year. Trinh appears to be the only surviving member of the top YWP leadership to have had this experience, and one of the few who chose activity at the local level rather than moving to Hanoi.

The Nghe-Tinh Soviet movement prompted the brutal repression of all nationalist groups. In 1932, Trinh was arrested, sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor and sent to the prison at Kontum, in the Central Highlands of South Yiet-Nam. Sometime later, perhaps in 1936 when the Popular Front period resulted in a decreased burden on the French penal system in Indochina, Trinh was removed to the political prison at Poulo Condore. He remained there until his release by the Japanese in March 1945. He shared his island prison with Le Duan and Pham Hung, now fellow Politburo members, and with the current President of the DRY Ton Duc Thang.

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Following his release, Trinh returned to Central Viet-Nam. In 1948, he was named Chairman of the Resistance and Admin­istrative Committee of Viet Minh Interzone IV (the portion of the Central Vietnamese coast which is now part of the Republic of Viet-Nam), a position he held throughout the remainder of the resistance. In 1951, at the Second National Congress, he was elected a member of the Party Central Committee •

With the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam as an independent state in 1954, Trinh seemed to be heading toward an economic career. He held a vice-ministerial position in the President's Office from 1954 until 1957, and in that capacity traveled to the Soviet Union and China with Ho Chi Minh in 1955 to negotiate aid agreements. Trinh is reported to have played a significant role in carrying out the Rectification of Errors Campaign, an effort in late 1956 to undo some of the damage done by overzealous administration of the land reform program. In 1957, he was transferred to the Premier's Office as head of the Domestic Affairs Board and, in April of the following year, made a Minister at the Premier's Office. In 1958, Trinh waS also accorded Politburo membership and was appointed Chairman of the State Planning Commis sion.

In July 1960, at the First Session of the DRV National Assembly's Second Legislature (to which Trinh had been elected, strangely enough, from a constituency in Thanh Hoa province), Trinh was re-appointed to the Chairmanship of the State Planning Commission. He was also named a Vice-Premier of the Govern­ment and a member of the National Defense Council.

Trinh's career followed an economic pattern throughout the early 1960' s. He led at least two major trade delegations to communist countries. In 1963, he added the Chairmanship of the State Scientific and Technical Commission to his roster of positions. Then, in April 1965, he was relieved of his economic tasks and positions and replaced Xuan Thuy as Minister of Foreign Affairs, the position he continues to hold today. One possible explanation for Trinh's abrupt change in careers may lie in a combination of the illness of Xuan Thuy, whom he replaced, and the desire to have the Foreign Affairs portfolio firmly in the hands of a Politburo member. It is also possible that Trinh had not done as well in his economic positions as had been expected

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and that Thuy's temporary retirement for illnes s may have provided a convenient opportunity to provide Trinh with a prestigious, but non-economic position.

Since North Viet-Nam's foreign policy decisions are made behind the doors of whatever chamber in which the VWP Central Committee Politburo meets, Nguyen Duy Trinh's portfolio allows him little independence. He is simply the Politburo member for foreign affairs. Because of his Politburo membership, however, Trinh remains an important man in North Viet-Nam. Particularly since the leaders of the Chinese People's Republic began moving towards the normalization of relations with the United States, Trinh's occasional articles and his Foreign Affairs Reports to meetings of the National Assembly have stressed the DRV's "sovereignty" and its autonomy in the conduct of foreign relations. (1)

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LE THANH NGHI is the nearest thing there is to an economist or managerial expert among VWP Politburo members. But he too began his career as a professional revolutionary. Born in 1911 in North Viet-Nam, his formal education probably did not exceed junior high sehool level, but that was better than average for those years. By 1930 he was a qualified electrician, an 1. C. P. member, and one of its agitators among the Quang Ninh coal miners. Like most 1. C.P. activists he was jailed in 1930 and released in 1936. Until 1939 he worked for the Party in Hanoi, Haiphong and their sur-rounding provinces.

Imprisoned again in 1940, Nghi escaped in 1945 and immediately was named to the Standing Committee of the Northern Regional Party Committee. In the "Resistance War" he made his mark as a zonal Party secretary and VPA political commissar, being elected to the Central Committee in 1951.

When the VWP returned to Hanoi as the government in 1954 Nghi worked briefly on northern questions in the Party Secreta­riat, but in 1955 became Minister of Industry, an assignment which set the pattern for much of his subsequent career. He seemed to have done well enough at it to have been coopted onto the Politburo in 1957, although the official records date his membership from 1960. From 1960 to 1968 he headed the

(1) When Dong and Nghi were away from the DRV at the end of June 1973 Trinh was referred to as "Acting Premier.

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Industrial Board in the Premier's Office, serving as Minister of Heavy Industry as well during a part of that period. His designa­tion as a Vice Premier dates from 1960.

Nghi's parallel career as the DRV's principal aid negotiator began in 1959 where he headed a trade delegation to Peking and another to Czechoslovakia. In 1961 he accompanied Pham Van Dong on a tour of six countries, most of which extended aid to the DRV. After that year all of the important foreign economic missions have been led by Nghi himself. A frequent travelling companion has been Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Tran Sam who has become the VPA's expert on arms procurement.

Nghi's most dramatic journey recently has been his trip to Peking with Le Duan and Pham Van Dong in June 1973, which was a Party as well as state visit, involving a private audience with Mao Tse-tung in which Nghi participated as a Politburo member. Continued Chinese economic and military assistance to the DRV was pledged. (l)

During th,~ 1972 phase of the war in Viet-Nam Nghi was the de facto chief of economic mobilization. While never so designated formally, he is probably considered the first vice premier for economic affairs. Younger men holding vice premier­ships, like Nguyen Con and Do Muoi, probably owe as much to Nghi's tutelage and friendship and to Nguyen Duy Trinh's as they do to Pham Van Dong's.

Although, assuming he was born in 1911, he is only three years younger than Dong, the allegedly colorless Nghi's succeeding Dong as Premier of the DRV, should the latter become incapaci­tated, is not impossible. Nghi was not mentioned in the June 14, 1973 National Assembly Standing Committee release which announced a number of changes in economic ministerial assign­ments. However, on June 16 and the following days Nhan Dan published a long article by Nghi on the need to improve the quality of goods produced in North Viet-Nam and related problems--a clear indication that Nghi was not being pushed aside.

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(I) Later that month Nghi also accompanied Dong on Party-govern­ment visits to Mongolia and North Korea. More political that economic missions, these trips, well reported by DRV media, no doubt served to enhance Nghi's reputation.

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HOANG VAN HOAN, who was born in 1905 into a "middle peasant family" in Ho Chi Minh's native Nghe An Province, has been a member of the VWP's Central Committee since 1951, and of the Politburo for most of the intervening years. For a time he looked like becoming the Party's leading authority on international relations, but something, perhaps uncertain unhealth, has diverted him to being Vice-Chairman, to Truong Chinh, of the National Assembly Standing Committee.

Hoan may have been a member of a pro -communist nationalist movement in Central Viet-Nam, where such movements flourished, before escaping to Canton, where he joined Ho's Revolutionary Youth League. He was a founding member of the 1. C. P. For nearly a decade he was a liaison man between Vietnamese communists in Viet-Nam, China and Thailand, as well as a Party organizer in Viet-Nam. (One account said that he at one time studied medicine in France, but this seems unlikely.)

When the Viet-Minh was organized Hoan was elected to its executive committee and displayed a facility for working with the small middle class nationalist groups which adhered to it. He also assisted in the organization of guerrilla units. In 1945 when the DRV was proclaimed Hoan was Deputy Minister of Defense during the brief period when the Minister was a non-communist. During the "Resistance War" Hoan was at first Viet-Minh chief in northern Central Viet-Nam, but in 1950 was named Minister then Ambassador to China.

In Peking Hoan no doubt helped secure the vital military and food supplies for the often isolated Viet-Minh, and in establish­ing Chinese-North Vietnamese state and pal'ty relations. He was also accredited as Ambassador to Mongolia and North Korea until 1957, when he returned to Hanoi to become active in legislative and Party affairs.

In 1957 he worked in the Party's organization apparently assisting Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, 'and Ho himself in reshaping a Party badly damaged by the excesses of the land reform drive. He served too on an In,>pection Committee which endeavored to streamline the civil bureaucracy. But in April 1958 he became Vice Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee. The Chairman was then Ton Duc Thang, already old enough to require a younger but experienced assistant.

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Hoan had in 1954 been one of Pham Van Dong's assistants at the Geneva Conference, and his National Assembly duties, once he resigned its secretaryship which he also held for a time, permitted him to lead numerous delegations to Russia and Eastern Europe as well as to China in the 1960s. He quite possible played a major role in persuading the communist states generally to make support of the DRV a cardinal policy doctrine within their parties as well as in the diplomatic arena. He also participated in the 1961 conference on Laos.

Hoan was out of the limelight in North Viet-Nam in the early 19 70s. However it was he who went to China in May 1973 to pave the way for the June visit of the Le DuanNPham Van Dong delegation. Nearing 70 years of age, Hoan is not likely to become a power in the land, but he has worked closely at one time or another with all of the men of power in the DRV. They seem to value his fidelity and competence. He is, it would seem, a good colleague and committeeman.

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TRAN QUOC HOAN has been Minister of Public Security of the DRV since 1953, and a member of the Central Committee of the VWP since 1951. In 1960 he was chosen an alternate member of the Politburo. Along with Gen. Dung, the only other alternate member, he was raised to full Politburo membership in midN 19 72 at the height of the North's invasion of South Viet­Nam.

Little is known of his preN195l career. Hoan is thought to have been born about 1910, probably in Quang Ngai province . From 1949 to 1951 he was political officer of the Viet Minh troops in the Hanoi-Hadong area and apparently impressed the Party with his police and security chief's potential. So in 1953 he was given the government post he still holds. In addition to the regular police and secret police, the Public Security Ministry directs the People's Armed Security Forces which has its own motorized, naval and communications units. Consequently it is under the supervision of the Central Party Military Committee. Hoan's job also accounts for his being a member of the National Defense Council, since 1960, prior to his elevation to full Politburo member­ship.

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There are indications that Hoan has from time to time over-reached himself. In 1960 he was designated Chief of the Domestic Affairs Board in the Premier's Office but was removed from that post in 1965. The job was given to an obscure Party functionary for a time, and then the Board was abolished. Hoan, in March 1972, on the eve of the North's invasion of South Viet­Nam, published an article in the "theoretical" journal Hoc Tap which conjured up fears of wide-spread subversion in the DaV, centered among ethnic and religious minorities and "remnants" of the old middle class. He called for public vigilance to assist his security forces in ferreting out the potential traitors and lauded the tradition of "revolutionary violence." By May, however, possibly as a result of reprimands by senior Politburo members, Hoan back-tracked and in another Hoc Tap article all but admitted that the March offering was grossly exaggerated, and that the people could confidently leave security to his men and duly constituted Party committees.

Hoan's importance, however, should not be under-estimated. In a 1970 Hoc Tap article, celebrating the security forces' 25th anniversary, Hoan boasted of their contribution to the "revolution", including their killing political opponents, their assistance to the Party in consolidating power in the North, and to the National Front for the Liberation of South Viet-Nam in establishing its "security" squads. (See Viet-Nam Documents and aesearch Notes No. 90.) Hoan and his Ministry have remained, at very least, technical advisors to the NFL security, murder, and terrorist apparatus throughout'the war in South Viet-Nam. (See Viet-Nam Documents and aesearch Notes No. 97, Part I.)

Even so, there is no evidence that Hoan and his security forces are permitted to terrorize the people, or the Party, in North Viet-Nam. Hoan's long wait for full membership in the Politburo, and his armed forces' subordination to the army­dominated Central Military Affairs Committee attest to that. The Party seems determined to prevent the Public Security Ministry from acquiring the alarming power and autonomy which its eqUiva­lents have enjoyed in other communist states. On the other hand, there is no evidence to suggest that the Party in the North has wished to curb the terrorism of the NFL-paa "security" agents in the South whom Hoan and his men have helped to organize and train.

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VAN TIEN DUNG, Chief of Staff of the Viet-Nam People's Army for the past two decades, was born in 1917 in Ha Dong province (now a part of the DRV's Ha Tay province), just south of Hanoi. His family were peasants and there is no indication that Dung received more than an elementary formal education.

Dung is one of a very small number of VWP-DRV leaders who was actually a worker. During the mid-1930's, he worked at the Cu Chung textile mill in Hanoi. In October 1937, at the height of the Popular Front period, nung joined the Indochinese Communist Party, briefly a quasi-legal organization. In 1938, he was Secretary of an ICP-sponsored Worker,s League. Hi.s Party activities led to his arrest and imprisonment during the anti­Communist repression of late 1939.

When he escaped from prison in late 1943 or 1944~ Dung worked for a time with the Party Central Committee, then located in the Delta region near Hanoi, before joining the Viet Minh resistance base in the mountainous Viet Bac region on the Viet­Nam .China border.

Although he had no military background, Dung was named in late 1946 to head the Military Political Department (the precursor of the General Political Directorate) of the Viet-Nam People's Army. At the, same time, he became Deputy Secretary of the Military Current Affairs Committee of the Party (now the Central Military Party Committee). In 1947, he was promoted to the rank of Major General.

When, in 1950, the VPA organized its first formal divisional­sized units, Dung took charge of the 3Z0th Division, then one of five divisions and the only one formed and equipped outside of the Viet Bac base area. How long Dung commanded it is not known. By 1951, he had been elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee and became Political Officer of the Viet Bac Region, a position which would have made him responsible for the political indoctrination of the army then being recruited, trained and equipped in the Viet Bac and in bases in the adjacent regions of newly-Communist China.

In 1953, at the age of 36, Dung replaced Giap's friend Hoang Van Thai as Chief of Staff of the VPA. In that position, he played a major role in the planning and execution of the

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campaigns which led to the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Following the signing of the Geneva Accords in July 1954, Dung served first as the head of the DRY delegation to the Trung Gia Armistice Talks, then as head of the Saigon-based DRY liaison group with the International Control Commission. He returned to North Yiet-Nam in 1956, after, it has been said, instructing the Party in the South to establish arms caches and make contin­gency plans for the establishment of base areas.

Dung was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General in 1959 and the following year, at the Party's Third National Congress, was elected to the YWP Central Committee and an alternate member of the Political Bureau. It has been said that Dung was a personal favorite of Ho Chi Minh who valued his worker-peasant style in an army and Party largely led by persons who, like himself, were of middle class or "middlepeasarit" . backgrounds. In 1960, Dung was appointed a member of the National Defense Council. He is also a member of the current National Assembly from Hanoi.

Although Dung may in fact be a competent military officer, he almost certainly owes his position to his political abilities and to his Party experience. He has written a number of articles on military theory and, at least in the late 1960s, seemed to favor guerrilla action over "main force" campaigns in the South. In September 1972, Dung was first identified as a full member of the Political Bureau. Precisely when he assumed that position is unknown but he has probably had a strong voice in Politburo decisions for some time.

At 56, Col. Gen. Dung is the youngest member of the Politburo and can be expected to not only maintain his position for some years to come but to have an even greater voice in the military affairs of the DRY. The precise nature of Dung's relations with Giap is not known. In the 1960 Giap-Thanh confrontation he must have sided with Giap, but he has not been said to be an intimate friend or a protege of the Defense Minister's as many Y. P. A. leaders are.

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MEMBERS OF THE VWP CENTRAL COMMITTEE

Hoang ANH is one of the most senior members of the VWP hierarchy short of Politburo membership. Probably Trung Bo born, he headed the Viet-Minh Resistance and Administrative Committee there, Military Region V, in 1951. He was elected to VWP Central Committee and became a member of its secretariat that same year. In 1952 he moved to North Viet-Nam's "panhandle" as Resistance Committee Chairman for Military Region IV. When the Party reestablished itself in Hanoi in 1955 Anh was elected to the National Assembly and named a Vice Minister of National Defense-­the only person lacking formal military rank to have held this title. Apparently he seems to have planned the 1956-57 partial demobiliza­tion of the VPA and served as director of its Rear Services Department, and was a member of the precursor of the' National Defense Council..

In 1958 Anh became Minister of Finance, a post he held for seven years, during which time he directed a currency reform. However in 1965 he was moved to agricultural administration, becoming both Minister of Agriculture and head of the Agricultural Board in the Premier's Office. He lost the former position in 1967 but retained the latter more important one, until 1969. When, in the late 1960s, the importance of the Board declined, a multiplicity of ministries were responsible for various aspects of the food production and distribution task, In another attempt to solve the problem, the Party and government in 1971 tapped Anh, who had been out of the limelight for several years, to be Chairman of a new Central Agricultural Commission and gave him the rank of Vice­Premier, positions he continues to hold. Anh ,has remained a member of the Party Secretariat, and a National Assemblyman from Thanh Hoa Province. If the DRV masters its agricultural problems this Pa.rty veteran with broad-ranging political, military and managerial experience could be in line for a place on the Politburo.

Le Quang BA is a keyman in the DRV's continuing but not spectacularly successful campaign to integrate its Ethnic Minorities into the national economy. Born in 1907, a member of the Tay tribe, in Cao Bang Province, little is known of Ba's early life. Prior to the August Revolution he was an 1. C. P. member and chief of a resistance band which cooperated with Giap's "Armed Propaganda"

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platoons. In 1949 Ba was a sector commander in the northeast maritime area during the "Resistance War" and from 1953-58 com­manded the 316th VPA Division. Ba became a National Assemblyman for Cao Bang Province in 1960 and commander of the Viet Bac Military Region. That same year he was appointed Chairman of the DRV's Central Nationalities Commission, whose office is in Hanoi, given major generalIs rank in the army and elected to the Party Central Committee. Ba has written extensively on the advantages the ethnic minorities would reap from abandoning their nomadic life, but does not seem to have won many converts. He appears, however, to enjoy the confidence of Party First Secretary Le Duan who has several times toured the "autonomous zones" with Ba.

Nguyen Luong BANG, North Viet_Namls Vice-President since September 1969, was born in the Red River Delta in 1905. His formal education does not seem to have gone beyond the high school level. By 1925, Bang had become a seaman, and in Canton met Ho Chi Minh (then called Vuong) and joined his Association of Young Revolutionary Vietnamese Comrades. For several years he worked as a propagandist and as a courier between Association cells in Haiphong, Saigon,Canton and Shanghai.

In October 1929, Bang joined the Annam Communist Party, one of three rival Communist organizations then existing in Viet­Nam. He is the only member of the VWP Central Committee known to have done so. The next year he joined the Indochinese Communist Party. Bang continued his propaganda and proselyting activities among overseas Vietnamese until his arrest by French Security Services in Shanghai in mid-193l. Returned to Viet-Nam, he was sentenced to 20 years at hard labor. While in prison, he met Le Duan, the future VWP First Secretary who, like a number of other future Party leaders, was jailed following the anti-French out­breaks of 1930.

Bang escaped from prison in December 1931, but was recaptured in 1933, and sentenced to life imprisonment. This increase in his sentence may have resulted from something more than simply his having escaped from jail. He was sent to the French prison at Son La, in the mountainous western portion of North Viet-Nam. One of his fellow prisoners there was Truong Chinh who became Secretary­General of the Party in 1940.

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With the opening of the Popular Front period in 1936, Truong Chinh and a number of other Party members confined at Son La were released. Bang, however, remained in jail, lending weight to speculation that his crimes went beyond the political. In an autobiographical contribution to a book published in the DRV in 1965, Bang said that although he had asked his fellow prisoners, including presumably, Truong Chinh, to arrange his escape, "this could not be done because they were too busy with the work of the Democratic Front .•. "

Perhaps something more than preoccupation with the Democratic Front prevented the Party from arranging Bangls escape. The decision to let him languish at Son La may have been based on a factionalism that became more clearly defined in the anti-World War II revolutionary period when the revolution in North Viet-Nam had two "centers": the Viet Minh group of Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong and Giap in the Viet Bac mountains and the Party group of Truong Chinh on the outskirts of Hanoi. As a veteran member of the Association of Young Revolutionary Vietnamese Comrades and an ardent admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Bang may have been viewed by Truong Chinh and other Central Committee members, who had had little personal contact with Ho, as a nuisance.

By mid-1943, Ho had returned to Viet-Nam and assumed some control over the Party, Bang's escape was arranged. Even then, his reception, as he described it in 1965, by the Truong Chinh Central Committee group was not overwhelming. Twice Bang was left waiting for contacts who never came, yet Party activities went on around him. In the autumn of 1943, Bang re-established contact with the Central Committee himself, and was made an alternate me mber of it .

Bang and members of the Central Committee traveled to the Viet Bac mountains in August, 1945 to attend the Second National Congress at Tan Trao village. It was probably the reunion between Bang and Ho Chi Minh since 1920's. The Tan Trao Congress resulted in the formation of a Liberation Committee, of which Bang became a member. At the same time, he was elected to full Party Central Committee membership.

Following the liberation of Hanoi in August 1945, the Liberation Committee was transformed into the first Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. Bang traveled

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to Hue on a Government delegation to accept the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai. Upon his return to Hanoi in September, Bang was "charged ... with looking after the President", apparently in some private secretariat capacity. He asked to withdraw from the Government "to work in the Viet Minh Front and to take charge of the Party's finance. "

With the reoccupation of Hanoi by French forces at the end of 1946, Bang apparently accompanied Ho and other Viet Minh leaders to the Viet Bac resistance bases. With the creation of the Viet-Nam Workers Party in March 1951 Bang was elected to the Central Committee. In May of that year he was appointed Chairman of the National Bank, a position which at that time would have involved little more than fund-raising. In April 1952, he was named Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Recalled in December 1956, Bang was made Chairman of the State Inspection Commission,. a post which he held until December 1959.

In September 1960, at the Party's Third National Congress, Bang was re-elected to the Central Committee and named to head the Partyls Control Board, a task which involved investigating violations of Party statutes and discipline, dealing with corruption and irregularities within the Party, and controling Party finance.

Bang was seldom in the limelight until September 1969 when at the age of 64, he was chosen to succeed the then 81 years-old Ton Duc Thang in the Vice-Presidency. Thang had assumed the Pre sidency on Ho IS death.

The picture of the Vice-President, is that of a loyal but not brilliant Party regular who voluntarily accepted subordinate positions within the hierarchy. His elevation to the second-ranking position in the DRV Government structure was not expected. His only apparent qualificatio'ns were his long-time experience as a second­ranking Party figure and his loyalty to Ho Chi Mbh. In view of the advanced age of Ton Duc Thang, Party leaders may have chosen Bang as the candidate least likely to attempt to actually exercise power should the President die.

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Duong Quoc CHINH is one of the shadowy Party bureaucrats about whom almost nothing is known. He appears to have been born in the Red River Delta region of North Viet-Nam. Since at least 1964, he has "represented" a constituency in what is now the DRV's Hai Hung province, also the home province of Vice­President Nguyen Luong Bang.

Nothing is known of Chinh's early career. He was first noted in July 1960 when he was named Minister of Water Conservation and Electric Power. In September of that year, the Third National Party Congress elected him to the Central Committee, presumably on the basis of accomplishments about which there is no available information.

Throughout much of the 1960's, Chinh held a series of agricultural positions, including periods as Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the Agricultural Board of the Premier's Office. He virtually disappeared from public view in the mid-1960's and was not noted again until his appointment as Minister of Interior in June 1971, replacing Ung Van Khiem.

The Ministry of the Interior has not traditionally been important in the DRV. More recently, however it has been tasked with overseing the welfare programs for families of "fallen heroes" and providing job training for "wounded combatants." After the 1971 Laos campaign these two categories of war victims seemed ready to form, outside of Party channels, a potentially disturbing pressure group. It was then that Chinh replaced the ageing Khiem at the Ministry.

During the 1972 campaign much publicity was given to these problems and negative evidence suggests that Chinh has done a reasonably good job of either assisting or placating the casualties of the 1972 offensive.

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Nguyen CON, one of North Viet-Nam's seven vice-premiers and Chairman of the DRV State Planning Commission, is one of the few individuals who has measurably risen within the VWP-DRV hierar­chy in recent years. Although Con's date of birth is not known, recent photographs indicate that he is probably in his early 50 's. Con's birthplace is also unknown, although he may be from one of the Central Vietnamese provinces (since at least 1964 and possibly since 1946, he has held a National Assembly seat from Nghe An province).

Virtually nothing is known of Con's early activities, educational background or his activities during the 1941-54 resistance period. He first attracted notice in January 1957, when he was identified as a member of the National Assembly's Subcommittee on Land Reform, one of the principal instruments of the Rectification of Errors Campaign. In March of 1957, he became an assistant to the Chairman of the State Inspection Commission (at that time Nguyen Luong Bang, now the DRV's Vice-President). In May 1959, Con was appointed a Vice-Minister of Construction and in August 1960 was made a Vice­Chairman of the State Planning Commission then headed by Politburo member Nguyen Duy Trinh.

At the Party's Third National Congress in September 1960, Con was elected to the Central Committee as a full ~member. If he had previously held alternate member ship, it does not appear in any of the available information about him.

Con served as Vice-Chairman of the State Planning Commission until he replaced Nguyen Duy Trinh in April 1965, when Trinh became Foreign Minister. As one of the North's principal economic plannings during the heavy war years, Con was among those re sponsible for preventing the total economic collapse of the DRV, and for formulating realistic plans to take advantage of domestic and foreign aid resources. His contribution sufficiently impressed his superiors in the Party that in November 1967, he was made a Vice-Premier of the Government. The next year, he was appointed to the VWP Central Committee Secretariat.

In June 1971,. Con's increasing importance within the Party­State hierarchy was re-emphasized with his appointment as a member of the National Defense Council. It was in this position that he probably played a major role in North Viet-Nam's planning for the main-force offensive that was launched against the Republic of Viet-Nam in March 1972, providing the top leadership with the domestic economic information which would have been a fundamental part of any war planning proces s.

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In June 1973, Con was relieved of the Chairmanship of the State Planning Commission and assigned to the Bureau of the Premier's Office, an organ which has not yet been adequately identified or defined. It is likely, however, that it was a promotion for Con and that his responsibilities will increase.

Con does not appear to be simply a technocrat. His rise within the Party structure has paralleled his rise in the State apparatus, and may have been based as much on his Party zeal as his success in the State economic sector. It is not unlikely that, should there be a new Party Congress in the near future, Con will find himself an alternate member or, pos sibly, a full member of the Politburo. He has already been given strictly Party tasks, most recently leading a delegation to attend the fourth anniversay celeb1:ations of the PRGRSY in the "liberated area" of Quang Tri. He will probably perform more similarly noneconomi.c functions in the future.

Yo Thuc DONG was elected to the Central Committee in 1960 He was probably secretary of the Nghe An Province Party Committee at that time. In 1957, and possibly during the "Resistance War" Dong is known to have been Deputy Party Secretary for Yiet Minh interzone III the "panhandle". It was in 1968 that he was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Dong's date and place of birth are unknown. He seems to be one of the few Central Committee members to have won the confidence of the senior officials and Central Committee membership primarily on the basis of provincial Party work. Dong's appointment to the DRY's most important ambassadorial post, however, suggests that before 1968 he must have had some experience in international work.

Tran Huu DUC is a veteran 1. C. P. revolutionary, born in Quang­Tri Province in 1904. After spending an estimated 10 years in French prisons he emerged in 1945 as Chairman of the Trung Bo Resistance Committee in Central Yiet-Nam and one of Hue City's two members of the DRY's 1946 National Assembly. Duc's part in the "Resistance War" is not known, but from 1945-1958 he was a Yice Chairman of the State Planning Commission, and in 1958 seems to have been coopted onto the YWP Central Committee, when serving as head of the Rural Work Board of the Party. He then became Yice Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, next Minister of State Farms (1960-1963) and finally Chairman

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of the Agricultural Board in the Premier's Office (1963-1965). Since then he has been Minister in the Premier's Office. Nearly 70 years old, Duc obviously enjoys the friendship of Premier Pham Van Dong, like himself a Central Vietnamese.

Ha Huy GIAP became a member of the Central Committee of the VWP in 1960, He had already served for four years as Vice Minister of Education under a non-Party minister. In 1963 he was shifted to the Ministry of Culture again under a non-communist minister. But this time his minister was Hoang Minh Giam about whom much more information is available than there is about Ha Huy Giap.

Giam, born in 1903, in Nghe An Province, was a journalist and school teacher in Hanoi when in the 1930's he joined the Hanoi branch of the French Socialist Party. When that small Vietnamese section split between those who thought accomodation with the French was possible, and those who did not, Giam was a leader of the latter group which affiliated to the Viet Minh. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DRV from 1947 to 1954, while Pham Van Dong and Hoang Van Hoan were in fact the DRV IS key men in the administration of foreign policy. Giam is said to have enjoyed a close personal friendship with Ho Chi Minh, with whom he frequently travelled abroad.

Therefore it is probable that unlike some instances where communists have been assigned as vice ministers to non- communist ministers because the non- communists were not trusted in this case, Giapls assignment may have been prompted by a desire to prop up an ageing friend who needed assistance more than surveillance. How old Giap himself is not known. The fact, however, that he is deputy chief of the Party historical commission suggests that he is no newcomer, and that he must have been an I.C.P. member. Besides that, in fact all one knows of him is that he is a frequent writer of "theoretical" article s and the Pre sident of the Vietname se -Korean

Friendship Society.

And one other thing. A People IS Revolutionary Party pamphlet published in South Viet-Nam in 1965 analysing the dynamics of the August Revolution in Saigon in 1945 mentions one man only by name-­Ha Huy Giap--as a leader of the Party in Saigon in those few halcyon days. The implication is that Giap like Giam is a veteran of the revolution who deserves an honorary position. It follows, then that another Vice Minister of Culture, not Giap, is the Party's

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wheel horse at the Ministry of Culture, but as no other Central Committee member or alternate is so assigned Giap remains the link between the Party and the Ministry.

Not much has been heard of Giap recently, but on June 6, 1973 when the DRV government sent a delegation to Quang Tri to participate in the PRGRSVls reception of ambassadors Giam was one of its members. It seems that the two old men are revolutionary monuments, with neither the veteran communist nor the aged one time socialist persons of much power in the DRV.

Song HAO is the third most important military officer in North Viet-Nam, He has been a member of the Central Committee since 1960, and the chief of the General Political Directorate of the VPA and a Lieut. General as well as a Vice Minister of Defense since early 1961. Prior to that time he was Vice Chairman of the GPD.

It appears that Song Hao although Nguyen Chi Thanh IS second man in the GPD during the Vo Nguyen Giap-Thanh controversy became Giapls man and has profitted from his choice. Sometime during the 1960s he also became a member of the National Defense Council, and along with Van Tien Dung, deputy secretary of the Central Party Military Committee.

Once a prolific speak.er and writer, not much has been heard from Hao of late. His articles proclaimed a concept of military organization and training, and subordination to the Party, that sounded more like Thanh IS theory than Giapls practice, but there is no record of his having retarded Giap!s real although unacknowledged drive to make the army less dependent upon the Party in its internal life, while not contesting the Party!s ultimate primacy in all institutions in the DRV.

Prior to 1960 Hao may have had a distinguished military or military-political career. But nothing is known of it or of his date and place of birth. So far .as the record known outside of North Viet-Nam goes he is a successful careerist, and despite his imposing collection of titles, little more than that. Several of his deputies like Maj. Gens. Le Hien Mai and Le Quang Dao are also key Party men in the army, and better known publicly than Hao has been in recent years.

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To HUU, the VWP Central Committee's propagandist, was born Nguyen Kim Thanh in 1920 near Hue in the Central Vietnamese province of Thua Thien (now a part of the Republic of Viet-Nam). Huu, from a "bourgeois" background, was educated in Hue, then one of the centers of Vietnamese intellectual life and nationalist opposition to the French. Although there are no reports available on Huu's early activities, he was apparently involved in nationalis1; and probably communist, movements at an early age. In late August 1945, Huu was part of a Provisional Government delegation which received Emperor Bao Dai IS abdication and his endorsement of Ho Chi Minh IS newly-declared independent Viet-Nam.

In 1949 Huu was chief of the Viet Minh's Information Bureau for Central Viet-Nam. He first came to real prominence in 1951, when he was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee and appointed Director-General of the Viet-Minh information apparatus, replacing Tran Van Giau, once the leader of the 1. C. P. in Saigon.

In 1954, with the creation of a functioning government in the North, Huu was named a Vice-Minister of Information, and then became a Vice-Minister of Culture in which capacity, he played a large part in suppressing in 1956 the literary magazine Nhan Van­Giai Pham editted by a group of radical, but not orthodox communist, North Vietname se intellectuals.

That same year Huu was awarded the'Viet-Nam Literary Prize for his collection of resistance poems, Viet-Bac, and was named a full member of the Central Committee. Huu has been said to be a close associate of Politburo member Truong Chinh, and may have been, but Huu's rise within the VWP-DRV hierarchy, in fact, came when Truong Chinh's personal fortunes were temporarily in ebb.

At some point prior to 1958, perhaps as early as February 1956 when he ceased to be a Vice-Minister of Culture, Huu became Chairman of the Cultural and Educational Affairs Board at the Premier IS Office. His control over the DRV -VWP propaganda apparatus was further strengthened in September 1960 when, at the Party's Third National Congress, he was made a member of the Secretariat and head of its Propaganda and Education Department. Huu was however replaced in his position at the Premier's Office in January 1963 by Central Committee alternate Le Liem. He has

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retained his Party propaganda position.* but has held no government position since that time.

Huu has written a number of article s on ideological training for Party journals. He continues to produce poetry and is acknow­ledged by many as the North's unofficial poet laureate. Some non­communist Vietnamese writers have acknowledged his talent but point out that its development has been severely limited by his themes. Huu's latest effort, written on the occasion of the January 1973 signing of the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet-Nam was an unfortunate work entitled ''Viet-Nam: Blood and Flowers."

To Huu, nonetheless, must be given credit for having written several trenchant critiques of poor performances by district and province Party authorities. He has commented revealing on the rivalries which exist in both Party and government echelons between undereducated revolutionary veterans, and better qualified young cadres .

* A North Vietnamese film director who was captured during the 1972 offensive and who knew both To Huu and Le Liem the one time Vice-Minister of Culture, stated that Huu was more narrowly Party oriented than Liem, and showed less understanding of the problems of intellectuals in trying to balance between art and the orthodoxies of the Party. To Huu, the film director added, is the chief censor in North Viet-Nam and is thoroughly disliked by the country's intellectuals.

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N!f!1Yen KHANG, is one of several VWP Central Committee members who have all but disappeared in recent years. Although Khang's age is not known, he is probably contemporary with the majority of the Central Committee members. A native of the Red River Delta IS Thai Binh Province, he is a Catholic, the only known follower of that faith on the Central Committee.

From the late 1940'S and possibly into the early 1950 ' s Khang was Chairman of the Resistance and Administrative Committee of Viet-Minh Interzone I (the Viet-Bac Region). Although the position was prestigious, Khang was probably the least independent of Interzonal Committee Chairmen because of the presence of the major Viet-Minh bases and leaders within the Viet-Bac.

In 1951, at the Partyls Second National Congress, Khang was named to the Central Committee as a full member. His activities over the follOWing several years are unknown, but in April 1957, he was appointed Ambassador to the PRC, replacing Politburo member Hoang Van Hoan. He was recalled in April 1959 and named to head the Organization Board at the Premier's Office (about which no more has been heard). In September 1960, Khang wa.s re-elected to the Party Central Committee and at the same time named Minister at the Premier's Office.

Khang held a variety of minor positions in the early 1960 's, including membership on the Standing Committee of the Fine Arts Association (he is reported to be a painter) and the Chairmanship of the National Census Advisory Committee. In April 1962, he was identified as the Principal of the School of Industrial Art.

Since April 1965, when he was replaced as Minister at the Premier IS Office by Tran Huu Duc, Khang IS activities have not been publicized. It is possible that he has voluntarily retired from public life for reasons of age or health. It is unlikely that he continues to function as an active member of the VWP Central Committee.

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Ung Van KHIEM born the son of a school teacher in Long Xuyen in 1911, is one of the few natives of the far south of Viet­Nam to have been accorded high Party and government status in the North. For a time in the 1930's he was a communist courier between Hong Kong and V iet-Nam, then the manager of a small illegal communist printing press in South Viet-Nam, which won him five years in a French prison. Khiem's activity during the 1936-39, and the 1940-44 periods is not known, but in 1945 he seems to have been the principal organizer of the revolution south of Can Tho, After a brief trip north to meet the leaders of the DRV, and the 1. C. P. a s it was still called, he came south again to be a leading member of the Administrative and Resistance Committee for South Viet-Nam, of which Le Duan was secretary. Khiem also commanded Viet-Minh troops against the French. His Party Central Committee membership dates from 1951.

When Khiem "regrouped" in 1954 he was appointed a Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, then in 1961 Foreign Minister, succeeding Pham Van Dong. He was also Chairman of the Party's Foreign Relations Board. Khiem was shifted to the Ministry of the Interior in 1963, remaining Minister until 1971. Since then little has been heard of him. Probably his apparent retirement resulted from ill-health rather than disfavor. He seemed to be one of the southern revolutionaries most highly regarded by the northern and central Vietnamese hierarchy of the Party and the DRV.

Nguyen Van KINH has been a member of the . Central Committee since 1951, and from 1957 to 1967 was DRV Ambassador to the USSR. Yet little is known of his career. Some accounts say that in 1951 he was elected to the Central Committee under the name Nguyen Thuong Vu. In all probability Kinh is of a middle class background. He was born in Cholon in 1916, and participated probably as an 1. C. P. member in the short-lived August Revolution in Saigon-Cholon in 1945 as a leader of the students' contingent. In any event, he was President of the Viet Minh-affiliated Nam Bo Federation of Students in the early 1950s. During his assignment to Moscow, Kinh was also DRV Ambassador to Romania 1957~1961, and to Albania 1957-1964. Since his return from Moscow in 1967, Kinh has been President of the Viet Nam-Soviet Friendship Society and a member of delegations to Czechoslovakia, East Berlin, Bulgaria and the USSR.

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Nguyen LAM, born in 1922, is one of the DRV Party leaders who appears to have won his way to the Central Committee more via managerial than political talent. In 1957 he was a Deputy Director of the Central Tax Office, from 1964-1966 Secretary of the Hanoi City Party Committee and for a time of the Working Youth Union. Since then his work seems to have been confined to economic and managerial posts. Now a Vice Chairman of the State Planning Commission with ministerial rank, Lam was Minister of Light Industry, 1967-69. He has also chaired the State Price Commission and continues to do so along with his other duties at the State Planning Commission's office. Lam is a member of the National Assembly from Nam Ha Province.

In the June 1973 changes in the goverment Lam was given a significant promotion. Said the National Assembly Standing Committee Communique: "Comrade Nguyen Lam, Minister and Vice Chairman of the State Planning Commission will now hold the post of Chairman of the State Planning Commission in place of Comrade Nguyen Con. Con too had been upgraded to work with a new "inner cabinet." Lam, in mid-1973 had clearly won recognition as a full member of the DRV top managerial team with great responsibility for the future development of North Viet-Namls economy.

Le Van LUONG was a member of both the Secretariat and the Politburo of the VWP between 1951 and 1956. He resigned from both of those posts in 1956 when Truong Chinh stepped down as Party secretary general and his old friend Hoang Quoe Viet also resigned from the Politburo. Little is known of Luong IS early life, but it can be deduced from reference s to him in a memoir written by Viet that Luong was born in North Viet­Nam in about 1910, and was an I.C.P. member by 1929. He came to the Saigon port area with Viet to work and to organize about that time, and Viet reports that his younger colleague was almost irresistibly attractive to the girls. Luong was arrested and jailed, but how long he served and when he was released is not known. Obviously his fortunes have been tied to those of Viet and Truong Chinh. When they were "rehabilitated" in 1960 he was readmitted to the Secretariat, but has remained its least important member--the only one who does not also have an additional significant job assignment. There are occasional indications that

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he oversees the work of the Ho Chi Minh Working Youth Union, but no formal notice of his having this responsibility seems to have been made.

Tran LUONG, born in 1913 in Ha Tinh Province in North Viet-Nam's narrow "panhandle", once considered a part a Central Viet-Nam, was a member of the Nghe Tinh-Soviet in 1929 and 1930. (See the profile of Politburo member NGUYEN DUY TRINH). He undoubtedly served time in prison, and it is not known whether or not he was free during the 1936-1939 period. He organized and led the Ba To uprising in Quang Ngai Province in 1945, and thereby established himself as a potential leader of the Viet-Nam People IS Army. Luong "regrouped" to North Viet-Nam, presumably in 1954, and by 1958 held major general's rank in the VPA. When the Central Committee authorized the recreation of its Central Office for South Viet-Nam (COSVN), in 1961 Luong was sent south as one of its first military leaders, and a member of its Standing Committee. It is widely believed that Tran Luong is in fact Tran Nam Trung the Minister of Defense of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Viet-Nam. (See the profile of "Tran Nam Trung" in Viet-Nam Documents and Research Note s No. Ill.)

Le Hien MAl, born in Son Tay Province in 1915 is one of the few VWP leaders stemming from an ethnic minority tribe -­the Nungs--who has become a significant figure in the DRV on the basis of his own abilities rather than as an alleged represen­tati ve of the minority people s. He was a pre -1945 1. C. P. me mber and a Viet Minh military commander in Hanoi proper in 1946 . During much of the "Resistance War", however, he commanded troops in Nam Bo south of Saigon and has been said to have also been the secretary of a Nam Bo Cultural Association.

Returning north in 1954 Mai was assigned to the V.P.A. IS General Political Directorate, given major general's rank, and seems to be the senior GPD deputy chief, as well as a member of the Central Military Party Committee. He is a prolific writer on political work in the armed forces and has written several articles on women's role in the "armed struggle. II Mai's wife, who is believed to have also been a pre-194& I.C.P. member may

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have had an important part in his career. Mai is frequently seen accompanying political leaders on tours of military installa­tions. He is a likely candidate to succeed his chief Lieut. Gen. Song Hao, whose age is not known, but who appears to be older than Mai, in the key role of chief commissar of the V. P.A.

Chu Huy MAN, Commander of the B-3 Front in South Viet­Nam since 1966, was born in Nghe An Province in 1920. Nothing is known of his early background or education. He was identified in 1953 as the Political Officer of the Viet-Nam People's Army's 316th Division, the Highlander Division, then commanded by Le Quang Ba (also a member of the VWP Central Committee). How long Man, who from his name appears to be a member of one of North Viet-Nam's tribal minorities himself, held this position is not known, but he was probably with the 316th Division during its 1953 thrust into Northern Laos and, later, at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Man was not identified again until 1960, when he was promoted to Major General. That year, he was elected to the DRV National Assembly from the Tay Bac (Northwest) Autonomous Region and was further identified as Commander and Political Officer of the Tay Bac Military Region (geographically identical to the Autonomous Region). He was probably responsible for keeping the peace and implementing Party and State policies among the independent and sometimes rebellious Thai and Meo tribes.

In September 1960, Man was one of several VPA generals who were given Party Central Committee membership. In June 1962, apparently no longer in the Tay Bac region, Man was named a Deputy Chief of the General Political Directorate, newly under the direction of Lieutenant General Song Hao.

Sometime prior to 1965 (possibly in conjunction with the DRV's 1963 decision to intervene in the South), Man became Deputy Commander and VWP Secretary of Military Region V (the four northern provinces of the Republic of Viet-Nam plus the four

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central costal provinces to the south). Military Region V was at that time commanded by Lieutenant General Hoang Van Thai. It was almost certainly on the basis of Thai IS recommendation that Man, in 1966, was made Commander and Political Officer of the B-3 (or Western Highlands) Front, the strategic mountain provinces lying between Military Region V and the Lao and Cambodian borders with Viet-Nam. In this position Man would have been responsible for the direction of military operations which brought American units some of the bitterest fighting of the war. It is as sumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that Man continues to direct the B-3 Front.

At 53 years of age, Man is one of the younger members of the VWP Central Committee and one of the VPA's younger generals. Barring errors of disastrous proportions, Man will probably continue to rise in importance, at least within the VPA structure as older generals such as his mentor Hoang Van Thai, now 67 and Col. Gen. Chu Van Tan, the senior ethnic minority figure in the VPA, now 65, retire from active duty.

Do MUOI, a Vice-Premier of the Government and the newly-appointed (June 1973) Minister of Building, is probably close to the average age of his VWP Central Committee colleagues (about 62). Although nothing is known of his background, he appears to have been born in or near the port city of Haiphong. He may be the only representative of North Viet-Nam's second largest city on the Central Committee.

No information is available on Muoi's experience during the resistance. In May 1955, shortly after the evacuation of the last French forces from the North, he became Chairman of the Haiphong People's Military and Administrative Committee. He held that position until December 1956, when his economic career began with an appointment as Vice-Minister of Commerce under non-Party Minister Phan Anh.

In April 1958, he was promoted to Minister of Home Trade when that Ministry split. off from the Ministry of Commerce. In April 1960, he was re-elected to the DRV National Assembly from a Haiphong constituency and at the neW legislature's first session in July 1960 was confirmed as Home Trade Minister. In September 1960, he was elected a member of the VWP Central Committee.

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In February 1961, however, what appeared to be a career was interrupted when Muoi retired from active life reasons of health. The nature of his ailment is unknown.

promising for

It was more than six years later, in November 1967, that Muoi reappeared and was appointed Chairman of the Economic Affairs Board in the Premier's Office. Although the precise nature of the responsibilities and authority of Premier's Office Board Chairmen have never been adequately defined, Muoi probably supervised, for Pham Yan Dong, the important reorganizations of the State economic sector which took place in November 1967 and again in December 1969.

In December 1969, at the time of the economic reorganiza-tion, Muoi was named a Yice-Premier of the Government, perhaps to given him greater authority. In April 1971, he was again named a deputy to the DRY National Assembly from Haiphong. In the same month, he was relieved of his Premier's Office position and named to head the State Capital Construction Commission. Capital construction was just then beginning to receive greater emphasis from economic planners who had in years past been preoccupied with agricultural development and U. S. bombing. Another reorgani­zation, not as sweeping as those in the past, occurred in mid-June 1973. Muoi became Minister of Building, taking charge of a new organization created by the merger of the old Ministry of Construction and the State Capital Construction Commission, which he had headed for two years.

How well Muoi has done in his various economic positions cannot be accurately determined from the evidence available. However, although the many reorganizations, mergers and personnel changes within the State economic sector indicate that the North's senior economic planners are not yet satisfied, Muoi himself appear s secure. People who have known Muoi state that he has a popular repu­tation for fairness and has in the past come to the aid of people who were suffering at the hands of the DRY's middle-level economic bureaucracy.

Muoi will almost certainly continue to be important at the ministerial level as North Yiet-Nam embarks on its ambitious post­war economic development program, but he is probably not slated

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for a position of much greater responsibility than what he already has. Had Muoi not been ill for so long and during so vital a period, he might have hoped to have someday become one of the North's senior economists (he is reported to be a protege of Politburo member Le Thanh Nghi). However, Nguyen Con appears to have outstripped him as the VWP-DRV's rising economic expert.

Ha Thi QUE, one of two women on the VWP Central Committee, was born in 1921 in the Red River Delta province of Ninh Binh. In 1939, at the age of 18, she joined the 1. C. P. When it went underground in late 1939, Que remained active in her native province. During the "Resistance War" against the French, she organized and directed guerrilla units in Ninh Binh, one of the delta provinces over which the French exercised nominal control.

Que apparently became a deputy to the first DRV National Assembly and has remained a Nati.onal Assembly deputy ever since, having been elected from her native Ninh Binh in 1964 and 1971. In 1954, she was appointed to the Central Committee of the Viet­Nam Women's Union (VWU), and in May 1956 Vice-Chairman of that organization, a position shoo continues to hold.

Que was elected a member of the VWP Central Committee at the 1960 Congress. During the 1960's, she travelled on VWU delegations to a number of socialist countries, attending international women's conferences and similar conclaves. In 1968, she was named Deputy Chairman of the VWP Central Committee's Control Board.

It has been suggested that Que, not VWU Chairman Nguyen Thi Thap, is the ranking woman in the VWP-DRV hierarchy. The contention is supported by Que's Party activism and the fact that Thap, who is a South Vietnamese, occupies positions which, while prestigious, are largely ceremonial. Que's own North Vietnamese origins may make her more acceptable to some elements of the VWP.

It is expected that Que, now 52, will continue to occupy a position of importance in the VWP-DRV structure, probably suc­

ceeding Mrs Thap, 13 years her senior, as head of the VWU.

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Ton Duc THANG, President of the DRV since the death of Ho Chi Minh, was born in 1888 in the Mekong Delta province of Long Xuyen in South Viet-Nam. Although his family background remains a mystery, it appears that they were both wealthy and influential enough to send their son to French schools. In 1910, Thang graduated from the Ecole d 'Extreme Orient in Saigon and began to teach school. He also became active in anti-colonialist movements and, in 1912, was forced to leave Viet Nam for France. He joined the French navy, during the First World War, and, participated in the communist-inspired mutiny of the French naval squadron at Sebastopol. Dismissed from the service, Thang returned to France and worked as a mechanic in an automobile factory in Paris. Perhaps encouraged by the rise of nationalist, and communist, movements in Indochina, Thang returned to Viet­Nam in 1927. At the age of 39, he became a member of the Association of Young Revolutionary Vietnamese Comrades, the organization founded by Ho Chi Minh in Canton in 1925. Within months, Thang had been convicted of sedition and complicity in murder. He was shipped to the island prison of Poulo Comdore, where he was to remain for the next 16 years.

Released from prison (where he had at various times had the company of such other future VWP leaders as Le Duan, Pham Van Dong, Pham Hung and Nguyen Duy Trinh) by the Viet Minh uprising of August 1945, Thang became Chairman of the Viet Minh committee of My Tho, In 1946, he became Pre sident of the newly-formed Lien Viet, the Popular National Front, behind which Ho Chi Minh hoped to conceal some of the less appealing aspects of the Viet Minh. Thang was in many ways a logical choice for the position (as he was later to become a logical choice for the Vice-Presidency and the Presidency of the DRV), with his long revolutionary back­ground unsullied by the mistakes he might have made had he not been in prison, and in view of his Southern origins.

Thang was appointed Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee in 1949, and, in 1951, was elected to the VWP Central Committee. In 1955, Thang was named to head the newly formed Viet-Nam Fatherland Front, a nominal "association" of political and mass organizations in the DRV whose main purpose was the promotion of reunification, as well as the selection of candidates for National Assembly and local government offices in the DRV. He continues to occupy that position.

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In July 1960, the First Session of the DRV National Assembly's Second Legislature selected Thang, then already 72 years old, as Vice-President of the, DRV, He occupied this position until September 1969 when Ho Chi Minh died and Thang succeeded him in the Presidency,

His being President does not make Thang one of the top echelon of North Vietnamese leaders. The position itself carries no particular powers that would not from the beginning have been usurped by the Party apparatus had anyone other than Ho been President. Thang is an old man i1'! a country that still respects age; a Southerner at a time when visible expressions of North­South solidarity and eventual reunification are still necessary. His career in revolutionary activity has provided him with both domestic and international prestige (in October 1967, he was awarded, belatedly, the Order of Lenin for his part in the Sebastopol mutiny). This coupled with his avuncular neutrality in internal Party matters makes him an asset to the top VWP-DRV leaders.

In mid-1973, Vice President Nguyen Luong Bang has taken over more and more of the routine duties of the Presidency. While rumors of Thang's being seriously ill were perhaps premature. Thang I s advanced age makes the prospect of his continuing to function either as President or as a member of the Central Committee for many more years unlikely .

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Chu Van TAN has understandably, been accorded virtually all the honors at the DRV's disposal. After all it was he, not Ho or Giap, or Truong Chinh, who first initiated active resistance to the French and the Japanese in 1940. Tan is a member of the Tho tribe. He was born in 1908 in Phu Thong,Thai Nguyen Province. Some say that he was once leader of a band of smugglers. In any event his anti-French feelings were strong enough to prompt him to join the 1. C. P. in 1935, one of the very few tribesmen to adhere to the Party at that time.

Tan organized a Tho guerrilla band to fight the French in 1940. Although he was a Party member it is not clear that he acted under Party instructions. The Tho highlanders were in the midst of a rebellion of their own, and it is entirely possible that Tan assumed the leadership of it without consultation with the Party, which was then in disarray. The next year, however, Ho returned to Viet-Nam and Giap began organizing the Viet-Minh forces. Tho's men, then called the National Salvation Forces had already established contact with the 1. C. P. which has ever since claimed credit for their activities.

In any event once Giap and Tan established contact they became close collaborator s and when the two force s were consolidated Tan gracefully accepted the fact that the ethnic Vietnamese military politician was to be top soldier" The Viet-Nam People's Army was formally constituted by merging the two small bands at a meeting in Thai Nguyen city in April 1945. Truong Chinh was present and it has been said in a Party historical commis sion publication that the Central Military Party Committee, of which Tan has long been a member, dates from this meeting. Giap's memoir of the period does not refer to it. In the internal politics of the army of the late 1950s and early 1960s there is good reason to think that Tan sided with Giap and that other highlander soldiers like Le Hien Mai and Chu Huy Man were assigned to the VPA General Political Directorate in 1961 to firm up its cooperation with, perhaps even subordination to, the Defense Minister.

Tan's service s were fulsomely recognized by Ho Chi Minh, who made him a leading member of the Viet-Minh-sponsored Provisional Revolutionary Council, and first Minister of Defense of the DRV in September 1945. Tan held the post for only a short time, as this was the period of rapidly changing pseudo-coalition governments in the DRV. When the Viet-Minh regime was driven back into the hill

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country by the Frencl1 in 1946-1947, Tanis mastery of the tactics of mountain warfare and his hold on the tribes people again proved invaluable. He became commander of troops in Upper North Viet-Nam and Chairman of the Administrative and Resistance Committee for the Viet Bac area, of which he is still Party secretary. There are those who believe that Dien Bien Phu was as much his campaign, and Van Tien Dung 's, as it was Giap's.

Since the end 'of the Resistance War, however, Tanis assignments, numerous though they have been, seem largely ceremonial, except his zonal Par~y secretaryship and his membership on the National Defense Council. He is said ,to enjoy his many honors, like the Chairmanship of the Viet Bac Zonal Administn.tive Committee (one of the very rare cases where the Party secretary himself holds the local government post as well) and his Vice Chairmanship of the National Assembly Standing Committee, and the Chairmanship of the Assemb1y l s M~norities Commission. In 1959 he was given the title of Colonel General in the VPA, which is held only by Dung and himself. (~:aap alone, since the death of Nguyen Chi Thanh, is styled IFuU" or Senior General).

Tan for the rElst of his active life will be one of the figure-heads of theORV, although other tribesmen, like Le Quang Ba, have taken over ;the function he once exercised of trying to represent ethnic minoritie s I intere sts within the Party, while striving to bring them into an economy painfully moving towards modernization.

Bui Quang TAO was relieved of his post as Minister of Construction, which he had held since 1958, on June 14, 1973. The National Assembly St~nding Committee communique which contained the announcement politely said that he "will relinquish his post--to accept new tasks. ',' A week later there had been no indications of what those tasks would be. The political career of this obscure Central Committee m.ember was probably terminated. Little is known about Tao. He was Vice Chairman of the Resistance Standi ng Committee in late 1949, which probably means that he was an I. C. P. member before WorM War II. In 1955 he headed a "North Viet-Nam Administrative Comm~ttee ", which was part of an administrative structure of the DRV soon abandoned, and that same year was made

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Vice Minister of Water Conservancy and Construction. When the two functions were separated in 1958 he was made Minister of Construction, which. was responsible for many public works programs, but not those in the water conservancy area, in the DRV The North Vietnamese press has been critical of the Ministry's performance for a number of years. Now it is to be merged into a Ministry of Building along with the Committee for Capital Construction. The new ministry will be headed by Do Muoi former Chairman of the Capital Construction Committee, a DRV Vice Premier, one of the Party's rising economists and planners who may already have taken over some of Tao's tasks. It is doubtful that Bui Quang Tao will be heard of significantly again.

Hoang Van THAI has been the commander of the allegedly South Vietnamese People's Liberation Armed Forces since 1967 or 1968. He was born in North Viet-Nam--Thai Binh Province--in 1906, and trained as a school teacher. However in 1930 Thai joined the 1. C. P., was involved in an insurrection and fled to China to avoid arrest. He is believed to have been in one of the first Viet Minh formations in the 1940's and to have become a close friend of Vo Nguyen Giap's. As early as 1946 he was a deputy chief of staff of the VPA, and chief of staff for a time during the "Resistance War" until succeeded by Gen. Van Tien Dung. The late 1950s found Thai the Director General of Training of the VPA, Chairman of the DRV's Physical Culture and Sports Commission, and a member of the State Science Commission.

In 1960, the year he was elected to the VWP Central Committee, Thai wrote a number of articles in the daily papers and in Hoc Tap, the Party's theoretical journal, whiich stressed the importance of professional military training and implied that there was a misunder­standing within the VPA between some senior officers and the General Political Directorate then headed by Giapls rival, Politburo member Nguyen Chi Thanh. It was after the 1960 election of Thai and a number of other military figures to the Central Committee that Thanh was relieved of his post as head of the GPD. In 1963, then a Lieut. General, Thai, on the eve of the DRV IS commitment to "main force" involvement in the southern insurgency, wrote an article "Men and Weapons" in Hoc Tap which insited that modern weaponry as well as revolutionary elan was essential to the VPA if a confrontation between

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the DRV and the U. S. was pending. The article in fact asserted the need for a DRV understanding with the Soviet Union at a time when China was morE( atune of VWP aggressive policy than was Russia.

Thanh was recalled to the military in 1964 to be both political and military chief of COSVN--the VWP's Central Office for South Viet-Nam. Thai was assigned to command in V. C. Military Region V which was not under COSVN control. Sometime after Thanh's death in 1967 Thai was made commander of the COSVN -directed PLAF. He is believed to have himself directed military operations in the Mekong Delta in the Tet 1968 campaign and in the 1972 offensive.

In 1973, however, it seemed that Thai was being overshadowed by his one-time assistant in the VPA Training Department and in the PLAF High Command, Lieut. Gen. Tran Van Tra, as the North's leading soldier in the South. Thai was then 67, Tra 55 years old.

Phan Trong TUE was a major general in the VPA in 1958, and may well still retain his military rank while holding the post of Minister of Communications and Transport. & is one of the handful of leaders of the Viet-Nam Workers' Party who has been a urban manual worker. Born in 1917 in Son Tay Province, North Viet-Nam, Tue worked in a shipyard near Saigon from 1929 to 1935, where he joined the I.C.P. After a brief stay in Vientiane, Laos, he returned to North Viet-Nam where he was jailed in 1935 for plotting to overthrow the government.

Like Nguyen Luong Bang and Pham Hung, Tue was not released during the Popular Front period, but remained in prison till released from Poulo Condore Iby the Viet Minh. In 1949 he is said to have been a leader in a Saigon-centered workers' movement and deputy commander of Viet Minh troops in the greater Saigon area. After "regrouping" in 1954 he was a VPA delegate to the Joint Armistice Commission dealing with the French.

Tue worked for a few years in a VPA military-political cadres' training program, but by 1960 was assigned to the logistical post he still holds. Directing transport at least in the DRV during the 1972 offensive, Tue seems to have done an adequate job of

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supplying North Vietnamese units fighting in the South, but at the expense of adequately maintaining "feeder" routes in rural North Viet-Nam whose deterioration may adversely affect food supplies in late 1973 and in 1974. He holds a Son Tay seat in the National Assembly.

Nhan Dan on June 17, 1973 carried an editorial extremely critical of the Communications and Transportation Ministry. While praising the speed with which bridges have been repaired and major communications lines restored since January, the aditorial said that management was weak and labor productivity ''low.'' Equipment was not being maintained or repaired properly and turn around time was excessive. "Guidance and command" was pointedly condemned. It seemed by no means out of the question that if there was another governmental shake up in the offing comparable to that of June 14, Tue would be up for reassignment.

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Nguyen Thi WAP is President of the Viet-Nam Women's Union as well as a rtlember of the VWP Central Committee, a Vice Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee and a member of the pre,sidium of the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front. She has served on a number of National Assembly Committees, friendship societies and DRV delegations to international women's conferences. In short, Mrs. Thap is the VWP's leading woman politician. She is a native of South Viet-Nam, possible of My Tho in the Mekong Delta which she "represented" in the DRV National As s embly from 1946 until the 1971 elections when the Southern seats, long perpetuated, were abolished. A Hanoi constituency was then found for her.

Mrs. Thap w~s born in 1908 and was probably an I. C. P. member before 1940. She may have taken part in the 1940 "Nam Ky Uprising" against the conscription of South Vietnamese peasants for a war with Thailand which did not actually take place. Many 1. C. P. southern cadres were executed by the French in its aftermath. The nortl\tern and central Vietnamese Party leadership has often condemned the "Nam Ky Uprising" as poorly planned, but several years ago Mrs. Thap wrote an article lauding its heroism and implying' that it deserved great recognition in Party mythology than it had received.

It is said that Mrs. Thap headed the South Vietnamese Women's Union, a Viet Minh affiliate, prior to her migration to the North sometime between 1954 and 1956. She may be the wife of VWP Politbur<il member Hoang Van Hoan, which could partially explain her 1956 selection as head of the North Vietnam«se Women's Union and her prominence, along with Hoan, in the National Assembly •

********** Le Quoc THAN! is a Vice Minister of Public Security of

the DRV, a post he h'its occupied since May, 1958. Prior to that time he was chie~ of police of Hanoi for three years, and a member of the Hanoi Administrative Committee. Virtually nothing else is known a;bout him but it is hard to imagine anyone's being made chief of police in Hanoi at that time who was not a tough 1. C. P. veteran. Another Vice Minister of Public Security

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Maj. Gen. Pham Kiet, chief of the Armed Security Forces, is more in the public eye, but Than's appointment as Vice Minister pre-dates Kiet's by nearly a decade,and Than alone of the Vice Ministers is a Party Central Committeeman. Therefore one can assume that he is likely to be Politburo member Tran Quoc Hoan's successor as Minister of Public Security one day. Whether or not this will get him a seat on the Politburo is another question.

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Xuan THUY, whose full name is Nguyen Xuan Thuy, has gained international prominence since 1968 when he was appointed chief of the DRV's delegation to the Paris Peace Talks. Of course it was understood that whenever the DRV was prepared to get down to business Thuy would be superceded by the delegation's "Special Advisor", Politburo member Le DucTho. Thuy, nonetheless, is a person of some importance in the VWP-DRV hierarchy.

Older than he looks, Thuy was born in Ha Dong Province, North Viet-Nam, in 1912. Educated in Hanoi, he was attracted to nationalist and radical politics, joining Ho Chi Minh's Revolu:' tionary Youth League, it is said, as early as 1926. Thuy was arrested in the late 1920s and again in 1939. His 1939 sentence was to Son La prison where he edited a prisoner's paper in support of communist policies.

When the August Revolution freed him in 1945 he became chief editor of Cuu Quoc (National Salvation) the official organ of the Viet Minh, now the journal of the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front (VFF) under whose auspices he continued to edit it for some time. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Viet Minh, its enlarged version the "Lien Viet" Front and now of the VFF.

In 1950 he was named President of the Party-created Vietnamese Journalists' Association, a post since given to Nhan Dan's editor Hoang Tung, an alternate member of the Central Committee. But Thuy still held that job in 1956 when the Association expelled the writers who contributed to the unorthodox radical literary Journal Nhan Van Giai Pham, the last independent newspaper or magazine to be published in the DRV.

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Thuy was addE)d to the Party Central Committee between Congresses, in about 1958, and subsequently to the Party Secretariat, presumably as its international affairs staff expert. He had already attended a nu:mber of communist-sponsored international congresses. He also attended the 1961 Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with Ho and Le Duan, and has visited China. For a time he was President of the Viet-NamMChina Friendship Association which he helped found in 1950. Meanwhile Thuy had become a Vice Chairman and briefly, in 1963, secreta'ry general of the Nation!).l Assembly Standing Committee. Then in 1963 he was named Foreign Minister of the DRV. a post he held for two years, resigniing in 1965 for "health reasons".

When Thuy, aItparent1y recovered, was named to head the Paris Peace Talks de~egation in 1968 he was given ministerial rank, without portfoli<!>. While filling this post he again travelled widely as a DRV top-level propagandist. Shortly after the signing of the Paris Agreeme~t at the end of January, 1973, Thuy worked his way home visiting: many capitals en route. His new assign­ment had not been announced in mid-June 1973. So far as can be ascertained Thuy has managed to maintain good relations with all of the Politburo members under whom. he has worked. It is unlikely that he will be without assignrn.ent for long.

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Nguyen Van TRAN was born som.ewhere in South Viet-Nam, possibly in the Saigon area, in 1916. It is therefore surprising to note that his principal job since 1968 has been as Secretary ("boss") of the Hanoi Municipal VWP Comm.ittee. Tran must be of "bourgeois" antecedents as he is one of the very few im.portant leaders in the DRV (in contrast to the PRGRSV) who had some education in France. During the 1945 August Revolution Tran was active in Saigon ap,d m.ay have been head of the security servioee of the short-lived Provisional Executive Committee for the South. Then he made his way north and became head of the Viet Minh Administrative and Resistance Committee for Interzone III--the Red River Delta. This as well as his current job suggests that prior to his Saigon activity in 1945 Tran actually had worked in the I.C.P. in the North during his earlier career.

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Elected a member of the VWP Central Conunittee in 1951, Tran seemed to be slated to be one of the DRV's industrial managers. He was Minister for Heavy Industry during much of the 1960s for a time Vice Chairman of the State Planning Commission. These posts resulted in his being named to the National Defense Council, but he was dropped from that prestigious body in 1971.

In 1967 Tran lost his Heavy Industry post and was named head of the Education Bureau of the Propaganda and Training Department of the Central Committee and a member of the Secretariat. Apparently his real talent was in political rather than economic organization. His leadership of the Hanoi City Party dates from 1968.

As leader of the Party in the DRV's capital Tran has considerable prominence in the DRV. With the national Party having held no Congress since 1960 the almost annual congresses of the Hanoi City Party have been the most important broadly based VWP meetings over the past several years. Tran invariably opens theIIl with a zealous, but in conununist terIIls, rather candid, review of the municipality's succes s es and failures since the previous congress.

During the April, 1973 local government elections in the DRV, Tran got out 98 per cent of the eligible voters in the Hanoi area, and elected a new People's Council in which "IIlore than half of the elected representatives production, and technical and adIIlinistrative cadres." This achieveIIlent was in keeping with a national Party directive to endeavor to iIIlprove the calibre of people's representatives so that local government units could contribute IIlore to planning the rehabilitation of the country.

Surely Tran's is an iIIlportant voice in the Party, but it does not appear that he will again be slated for a significant national post.

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Hoang Quoc V~ET born in Bac Ninh Province, North Viet­Nam, not far from Hanoi in 1905, is the best known "worker" in the VWP, and one of, the Party's most authoritarian bureaucrats. He was one of the earliest recruits to the 1. C. P. His father before him had been ,an urban manual worker, and Viet was able to attend Haiphong T¢chnica1 College, really a v~ationa1 school, from which he emerged a skilled turner one of pre-1940 Viet­Nam's tiny "aristocracy labor." He elected to go to sea as a mechanic and worked; on vessels plying between Saigon and Marseilles. As a member of Ho Chi Minh's Revolutionary Youth League and then of the I. C. P. he propagandized Saigon seamen and port workers untU he was arrested in 1930.

Released in 1936 he went to Hanoi where he worked with Truong Chinh on com;munist and "Democratic Front" pub:ications as well as carrying on his own "working class" communist organizing work in the Hanoi area. Viet was a leader of a wide spread strike movement that swept North Viet-Nam in 1937. So well known did he become that when Nguyen Ai Quoc changed his name to Ho Chi Minh some Party members and supporters at first thought Viet was Ho. In fact Viet had escaped to China in 1939 and for a time at least assisted Ho in organizing the Viet Minh in the bordler areas. He seems to have been the principal links between that grouping and the one around Truong Chinh, then Party secretary, which was preparing for the August Revolution clos er to liIanoi.

When the August Revolution was defeated in Saigon Viet was sent there briefly to reorganize the Party in the South, a job which then fell to I.e Duan. Viet was for a time in 1946 styled Governor of Central Viet-Nam. At the end of the year he was aligned with Truqng Chinh in urging all-out war against the French, a position whieh differed somewhat from that of Ho who wished to negotiate as, long as possible •

When the "Resistance War" did break out Viet went with most of the VWP senior leaders into the back country of North Viet-Nam. While there he was elected to the first Politburo of the VWP, Chairman of the Viet-Nam Federation of Trade Unions, and a member of the presidium of the precursor to the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front. He was listed in the international communist movement as a member of the presidium of World Federation of Trade Unions. [WFTUj

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As the VWP was restored to power in Hanoi in 1954 Viet was prominent, along with Truong Chinh and Politburo and Party Secretariat member Le Van Luong, who had worked with Viet in Saigon in 1930, in pushing for rigorous implementation of the land reform program. So much opposition did it encounter that Viet and Luong were compelled to resign from Politburo in 1956, when Chinh stepped down as Party secretary.

However, when Truong Chinh's rehabilitation, which had begun in 1958, <l:ulminated in 1960 with his becoming Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee, Viet emerged from the relative obscurity of his trade union duties. He became Chief Procurator of the People's Supreme Organ of Control a body, poorly defined in the 1959 DRV Constitution, which is responsible for policing the conduct of government agencies and their staffs. Viet has written numerous articles on the importance of the strict enforcement of economic decrees as well as of civil laws in a vain effort to correct laxity and corruption within the DRV bureaucracy.

Although he retains his trade union position and has travelled the communist world on trade union delegations, labor questions do not seem to preoccupy him. For example, despite Viet's Party eminence the little known Minister of Labor, an alternate member of the Central Committee, did not feel it necessary to involve him in the conference preceding the release in mid-1972 of a war-time compulsory work order. In early 1973, however, Viet put his union button on again to host, in Hanoi, a special meeting of the executive council of the WFTU where the North Vietnamese persuaded this international front group to commit itself to the VWP's propaganda themes.

Viet was reelected to the Central Committee of the Party in 1960, but not to the Politburo. He has frequently been the Party spokesman at Viet-Nam Fatherland Front public meetings when Truong Chinh himself was not present.

In mass meeting platform and airport "pecking order" lists Viet's name has appeared immediately after, and in one case ahead of, those members of the Party secretariat and Vice Premiers who are not Politburo members. If a Party congress is held in the next year or two it is not impossible that the nearly 70 years old "hard line" factionalist may contest with the younger economic management oriented Vice Premiers for a seat on the Politburo.

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Alternate Memb,~rs Of The VWP Central Committee

Ly BAN was an assistant director in the Political Division of the Ministry of Defense in 1949, but first gained prominence as Director of the Import-Export Division of the Ministry of Com­merce in 1956. When the Ministry of Foreign Trade was esta­blished in 1958, with Phan Anh, who is not a VWP member, as

_ its nominal head Ly Ban was named Vice-Minister. He has been Vice.Premier Le Thanh Nghi's second man on numerous interna­tional trade and aid missions to communist countries and has more recently headed a few himself. It has been alleged that he also serves as security officer for DRV -delegations traveling abroad. In May 1973 Ban went as advance man to Peking for the Le Duan­Pham Van Dong Party and government June visit.

Nguyen Thanh BINH was Director of Ordnance of the Viet Minh Army in 1951 and emerged from the "Resistance War" in 1956 as a Major General in the VPA and its Deputy Chief of Rear Services. In 1960 Binh was appointed to the State Science and Technology Committee, and at that time became a civil govern­ment official as did a number of other Party members who had first attained prominence in the military. After serving as Acting Minister of Internal Trade he became, in 1966, Chairman of the State Price Commission for a year, and for three years Chairman of the Financial and Commercial Board in the Premier's Office, until 1969. During that time, and subsequently, he has been Chairman of the State Inspection Commission. The commission was dissolved in 1965, but reactivated by June 1971 when Binh was again listed as its chief. He toured Eastern Europe in 1973 studying counterpart bodies there. Tried out in major economic planning and management positions Binh appears to have not been too successful, but may be well suited to his inspectorate function. He has been a National Assemblyman from Ha Bac Province since 1964. (See Postscript at the end of these sketches.)

Dinh Thi CAN, Mrs. was born in Vinh, Nghe An Province in 1920 and joined the 1. C. P. at the age of 16. Several times arrested by the French, she was a Party province committee

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member in 1945, and from 1946 to 1961 a member of the National Party's Women's Commission. Since 1954 she has been a member of the Executive Committee Viet·-Nam Women's Union and of the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front_ Mrs. Can is also Chairman of the Committee for the Protection of Mothers and Children and a Vice-President of the Red Cross Society. Appointed a Vice-Minister of Public Health in 1960 under Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, who had been one of the leaders of the 1945 revolution in Saigon, Mrs. Can mayor may not have acquired professional competence in health and welfare fields. She has been a member of several health as well as women's organization delegations to other communist countries and international conferences. However in 1973 another Vice-Minister, Vu Van Can, not she, was called "Acting Minister of Health", during an apparent indisposition of the non-Party Minister, Dr. Nguyen Van Huong.

Nguyen Tho CHAN is one of the few Party and government leaders who has spent time as a local Party official. He joined the I. C. P. in 1939, at the age of 17, and like Mrs. Can, was jailed by the French at an early age. From 1955-1959 he was Chairman of the Manpower Department of the Ministry of Labor. Then for three years Chan was Deputy Secretary of the Hanoi Municipal Party Committee and for a time its Secretary, a post he was occupying when elected a Central Committee alternate member. He was Secretary of the important Party Committee of Quang Ninh, the DRV's coal producing province. in March 1967 Chan was appointed Ambassador to the USSR and in 1969 to Sweden as well. Sinc" he vacated those posts in 1971 almost nothing has been heard of Chan who had appeared to be one of the VWP's most promising younger leaders.

Le Quang DAO, a Major General in the VPA, is listed as a Deputy Director of its General Political Directorate, and seems also to have served as the Commanding General on the Laotian Front in 1971. Dao is the editorial director of the Army's daily newspaper Quan Doi Nhan Dan and a member of the Presidium of the Viet-Nam Fatherland Front. In the early 1960's, he seems to have been in charge of mass mobilization and motivation

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campaigns in the Hanoi area, and in 1973 was the Army's speaker at a national youth emulation conference convened by the Party's Youth Union. Despite his reported 1971 command in Laos, Dao seems to be more of a military-political figure than a soldier.

Tran DO, although a northern-born VPA major general, is best known for his post-1960 service as a senior political officer of the nominally South Vietnamese People's Liberation Armed Forces and a member of the Military Party Committee of COSVN. At 18, he joined the Revolutionary Youth League in 1930, spent time in a French prison and then rose rapidly in the Viet Minh Army. Do played an important part in the Dien Bien Phu campaign. He commanded the 312th VPA Division in 1958, and was one of a nmnber of military leaders elected as full or alternate members of the Party Central Committee in 1960. As a COSVN political-military leader he is thought to have written a number of articles under the pseudonym "Cuu Long" (see Viet­Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 94). A senior staff officer, he may also have drafted COSVN directives signed "Chin Vinh" (see Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes No. 108). Ralliers have said that Do is unpopular among Southern cadres, that he favours Northern-born and trained personnel over them, and does not understand southern customs and temperaments despite his long service with the PLAF.

Nguyen DON like a number of other North Vietnamese generals was born in Quang Ngai Province in what is now South Viet-Nam. Born in 1914 into a poor peasant family, he joined the I. C. P. in 1940, was imprisoned, and escaped and organized guerrilla units which participated in the Ba To uprising of 1943 and the 1945 August Revolution. Don held important military and political posts in the Viet Minh, coming out of the "Resistance War" a major general and a divisional commander in the Fourth Military Region, North Viet-Nam's "panhandle." Don is believed to have commanded VPA and PLAF troops in VC Military Region V, his native Trung Bo, from about 1962 to 1967, where he was also Party Regional Secretary. However in 1967 he appears to have been back in the DRV, where he is a Vice Minister of

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Defence, a Deputy Chief of Staff and a member of the Central Military Affairs Party Committee. Don appears in public functions more frequently than do others who hold siInilar rank, and may be one of the more influential military-political personalities in the DRV. In 1971 he was elected to the National Assembly from Nghe An Province.

Tran Qui HAl is another Quang Ngai born VPA major general, Vice-Minister of National Defense, and Central Military Affairs Party Committee member. Like Don he participated in the 1943 Ba To uprising, and may have commanded troops in the South in the 1960s. However less is known of his career than of Don's, despite his having also been designated a Vice-Minister of Defence and Deputy Chief of Staff of the army. He was Chief of the Rear Services Department of the VPA 1961-1963, and in 1965 was a Vice Chairman of the State Planning Commis sion. Hai headed a military delegation to the USSR in 1970, and was a member of a Party-government group which visited the PRC in 1971.

Le HOANG was first noted as the Director of Construction in Thai Nguyen city in 1949. In the 1950s he was Vice Chairman of the committee that supervised the construction of the East European-aided Thai Nguyen Steel Works, North Viet-Nam's largest heavy industrial complex. Hoang was head of the Directo­rate of Materials Resources in 1961, and was named Secretary of the Bac Thai Party Province Committee in 1965. Little has been heard of him since 1968, but he may still head the Thai Nguyen enterprise which was being rebuilt in 1973.

Tran Quang HUY, Minister of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Premier's Office was born in 1922. Little is known of his pre-1960 career. He can be assumed to be one of the Party's intellectuals, having been Chief Editor of its theoretical journal Hoc Tap before becoming Deputy Director of the Propaganda and Education Department of the Central Committee in 1962,

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a post he held until 1968. Then Huy joined the PTemieT's staff in the position he still held in 1973, seTving also as the head of the PTemieT's PTess BUTeau. The Educational and CultuTal BoaTd which he headed seems to have been abolished but Huy was designated MinisteT CooTdinatoT of CultuTe and Education in the PTemieT's Office as Tecently as June 1971. In 1971 he was elected to the National Assembly hom Hai Hung PTovince. Huy was mentioned in ApTil 1973 as "Deputy Chief of a Scientific and Educational Commissio:n suboTdinate to the PaTty CentTal Com­mittee". AppaTently he is to have an impoTtant Tole in the PaTty and state's 1973 effoTt to impTove cadTe tTaining. (See Viet-Nam Documents and ReseaTch Notes No. 112.)

Nguyen KHAI is one of the alteTnate membeTs of the VWP CentTal Committee about whom least is known. In 1954-1958 he was SecTetaTY of the Left Bank Zonal PaTty Committee, a Tegional oTganizational echelon which has appaTently been abandoned. Khai also seTved as Vice ChaiTman, undeT Le Duc Tho, of the OTganizational DepaTtment, and in 1971 headed a delegation to East EUTope and the USSR to study PaTty oTganizational fOTms.

Nguyen Huu KHIEU is MinisteT of LaboT of the DRV and has been a membeT of the National Assembly, and at one time of its Standing Committee. In 1961 he was Vice ChaiTman of the PaTty's RUTal AffaiTs BoaTd and hom 1963-1966 ChaiTman of its AgTicultuTal BoaTd. His appointment as MinisteT of LaboT dates hom 1965. In 1972 it was Khieu who issued the DRV's compulsoTY laboT mobilization oTdeT, but except in this context was seldom heaTd fTom duTing the waT yeaTS.

Hoang Van KIEU, about whom little is known, may in fact be a faiTly impOTtant leadeT of the VWP. In 1954 he was ChaiTman of the AdministTative Committee of Lang Son PTovince. Kieu became Deputy SecTetaTY of the PaTty Zonal Committee of the Tay Bac Autonomous Zone in 1960, and some time theTeafteT became its secTetaTY and also secTetaTY of the Tay Bac MilitaTY

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Committee. Since 1969 occasional references to him have indi­cated that he may have been promoted to full membership on the Central Committee, but no formal announcement of this has been made.

Le LIEM, like many other Party committeemen now serving as ministers or vice ministers in the DRV, began his career in the army during the "Resistance War." From 1948 to 1958 he was in the VPA's General Political Directorate, being one of its deputy chiefs from 1953 to 1958, when he became a Vice-Minister of Culture. During this period (according to a North Vietnamese film director who, after being captured during the 1972 invasion of the South, chose to stay there) Liem showed more understanding of the problems of intellectuals who wished to do professionally creditible work than did the narrowly Party­oriented To Huu, at the time head of the Cultural and Educa­tional Board in the Premier's Office. Le Liem succeeded Huu in that position in January 1963, holding it until October 1965 when he became one of two Party leaders serving as Vice­Ministers of Education under a non-Party Minister. Liem is editor of the DRV's professional educational journal Nghien-C:uu Giao-Duc. He has visited both the USSR and the PRC.

Ngo Minh LOAN, about whose pre-1960 career little is known, has alternated between economic management and diplo­matic posts. From 1959 to 1967 he was a Vice-Minister of Light Industry. In 1967 he became the DRV's Ambassador to the People's Republic of China returning after less than two years to become Minister of the newly formed Grain and Food Products. In that capacity Loan has headed delegations to several East European countries as well as the CPR. He is a deputy in the Fourth National Assembly from Nam Ha Province in the Red River Delta. When the Grain and Food Products Ministry was folded into the Central Agricultural Commission in April 1971, Loan was designated a member of the Commission with ministerial rank.

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Nguyen Van LOC headed the Interzone III Adlninistrative COlnlnittee of the Viet-Minh in 1955 when the VWP was consoli­dating its power in North Viet-Naln. Since then Loc has been one of the DRV's agricultural lnanagers. Froln 1958 to 1960 he was a Vice-Minister of Water Conservation, then, until 1967, Vice-Minister of Agriculture, becolning Minister in 1967. When in 1971 the Central Agricultural COlnlnission was established under Hoang Anh, Loc like Loan, becalne one of its Vice Chair­lnen, retaining his ministerial rank.

Nguyen Huu MA[ is one of the few DRV leaders who has had experience in trade union work. In 1950 he was a melnber of the Executive Committee of the Viet-Nam Federation of Trade Unions, and in 1954 its Deputy General Secretary. Early in 1955 he became Director of Railways in the Ministry of Comlnu­nications and Transport, being given vice ministerial rank later that year. Mai was made Minister of Heavy Industry in 1967 and 1969, when that lninistry was split, he became Minister of Coal and Electric Power, a position he continued to hold in 1973. His importance to the Party as an industrial lnanager is under-s cored by his also being Chairman of the Party's Industry Board since 1964.

HaKe TAN seems to have been a lnember of the 1. C. P. at least from 1942 when he was arrested by the French. Upon his release in 1945 he joined the Viet Minh forces and subse­quently became a major general in the VPA. However he has not pursued a. lnilitary career since 1957. In that year Tan became a lnember of the Hanoi People's Council, and has been a member of the Second, Third and Fourth National Assemblies, each time from different constituency. Currently he holds a Lang Son Province seat:. Tan became a member of the State Scientific and Technical Commission and Vice-Minister of Water Conservation in 1960. Since 1963 he has been Minister of Water Conservation and has headed technical delegations to China and Hungary. Persisting reports of flood and drought problems in the DRV suggest that Tan's job is a long way from successful completion. He also chairs the Party's Water Resources Board. (See Postscript at the end of these sketches.)

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Le THANH is one of the Central Conunittee alternate members about whom least is known. In 1957 he was a member of the National Assembly's Land Reform Committee and may have helped "rectify" the excesses of the 1954-1956 land reforrr, fiasco. For a time he was a member of the central committee of the Party's Working Youth Union. His principal assignment is the chairmanship of the VWP's Rural Works Department. Although not a National Assemblyman he was a member of the Electoral Board in 1971.

Dinh Duc THIEN is either a senior colonel of a major general in the VPA, and a member of the Central Military Affairs Party Committee. In the late 1950s he was, and may still be, a Deputy Director of the Rear Services Department of the Army, and Director of its Logistics Branch. Thien is Minister of Machinery and Metallurgy in the DRV government, a post he has held since 1970, following an apprenticeship as Vice-Minister in the discontinued Ministry of Heavy Industry. Thien about whose early career nothing is known, but who can be assumed to have been a logistician of the Viet-Minh forces in the war against the French, symbolizes those North Vietna­mese soldiers whose military careers and Party activity qualified them for civil government office. His continued membership in the Central Military Affairs Party Committee indicates that his personal links with the interlocked VPA-VWP power group remain strong.

Ngo THUYEN is DRV Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, a post first held by Politburo member Hoang Van Hoan. More recently it has been held by alternate members of the Central Committee, with Thuyen, apparently replacing Ngo Minh Loan at the end of 1969. Thuyen was Secretary of the Thanh Hoa Province Party Committee before being sent to China. Thuyen was nominally at least a member of the Le Duan-Pham Van Dong delegation to the PRC in June 1973 .

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Nguyen Khanh TOAN, born in 1903 in Central Viet-Naxn, is probably the oldest alternate member of the VWP Central Committee. A linguist and school teacher by profession, he was a close friend of Ho Chi Minh's whom he may have first met while he was a language teacher in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. He is said to have returned to Viet-Naxn with Ho in 1941, via China. One of the few VWP figures of substantial middle class origins, he does not appear to have ever been a Party activist in the normal meaning of the term, but a reliable Party "intellectual." Toan was a founding member of the Viet­Nam Soviet Friendship Society in 1950 and since 1960 has been its Vice President. He has also headed the Committee for Protection of Children, a logical outgrowth of his being Vice Minister of Education since 1963. Since 1968 Toan has also chaired the State Social Science Commission and was, earlier, a member of successive scientific research bodies. In 1970 he headed the Council to Review Dictionaries •

. The November 1972 issue of Hoc Tap, the Party's theore­tical journal, probably edited when the DRV thought a cease-fire would be agreed late in October, carried an article by Toan "President Ho and International Solidarity," which read like a cautious Leninist answer to anyone who wished to continue to fight until South Viet-Nam was "liberated." "There is a time to advance, but there is also a time for us to step backward temporarily in order to advance more steadily later, we cannot exterminate imperialism at one time and in a single battle. We drive it back step by step and destroy it part by part." This almost "revisionist" article was in sharp contrast to Hoc Tap's usually uncompromising theoretical stance. But in the autumn of 1972 the Party secretariat was willing to print the ageing Russian-oriented Toan's article in its most important magazine.

In May 1973 Toan presided over a joint conference of the Social Science Commission, the Military Institute, and the Historical Studies Association which have been charged with producing an analytical report on "neo-colonialism." It is to be published no later than September 2, 1974, the 29th anniversary of the proclaxnation of the DRV.

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Tran Van TRA (who is profiled at greater length in Viet­Nam Documents and Research Notes No. Ill) now 55 years old, has become the best known of the Central Viet-Nam communist regroupees to win significant military and political rank in the DRV. After fighting in southernViet-Nam in the "Resistance War," Tra, a native of Quang Ngai, who had been an I. C. P. member since 1940, was sent by the DRV to both China and Russia in 1954 to pursue military studies. He then held such posts as Director of the Institute of Military Administration, Deputy Chief of the Training Department, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Justice of the Central Military Court of the VPA, attaining Lieutenant General's rank before being sent South as one of the senior mili­tary figures in COSVN from about 1964 until 1973. His role as Chief of the PRGRSV delegation to the Four Party Joint Military Commission in Saigon in February-March 1973 brought him international notice. When the Commission's 60 days expired he returned to a hero's welcome in Hanoi, and then was reported to be inspecting "PLAF" troops in Quang Tri Province in late April 1973. It is possible that Tra was responsible for the construction and security of the Quang Tri "capital" of the PRG whose existence but not its precise location was proclaimed on June 6, 1973, when the PRG received an Hanoi delegation there along with the ambassadors from a number of communist and "nationalist" countries. At the PRG "Council of Ministers" meeting there, June 6-7, Tra delivered the "report on the military situation," an assignment usually reserved for Tran Nam Trung, PRG Defense Minister. It appeared in mid-1973 that in future Tra, not Trung not the ageing PLAF Commander, Lt. Gen. Hoang Van Thai, a VWP Central Committee full member, would be Hanoi's leading military representative in South Viet­Nam.

Bui Cong TRUNG who was born near Hue in 1910, joined Ho Chi Minh's Revolutionary Youth League prior to the foundation of the I. C. P. He fled to China in the late 1920s, studied at the Stalin Institute in Moscow in the 1930's and returned to Viet­Nam in time to be arrested by the French prior to the 1936-39 period of qualified political liberty. During that period he was an 1. C. P. "militant". Like Toan he was a founder of the Viet-

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Nam Soviet Friendship Association in 1950. After the "Resistance War" Trung held a nurnber of economic posts in the DRV, including membership on the State Science and State Planning Commissions in I 'J60, and in 1964 was editor of the economic research maga­zine 1\Ighien Cuu Kinh Te. Since that year virtually nothing has been heard of Bui Cong Trung, who may have been dismissed in

. a reported "purge" of revisionists in late 1967.

Hoang TUNG is best known as the editor of Nhan Dan, the official daily newspaper of the VWP. His date of birth is not known, but an American journalist who interviewed him in March 1973 estimated that he was nearing 70, and described him as pleasant, outspoken; but with a sense of humor, and a chain_ smoker with a fondness for American cigarettes. He sald he had edited Nhan Dan for 23 years. Tung edited Viet Minh journals in the "Resistance War" and has claimed to have learned the art of pop.ular journalism from Ho Chi Minh, whose simplistic formu­lation of policy-carrying messages is rarely reflected in the turgid prose of Nhan Dan. Tung cannot escape responsibility for Nhan Dan's style since he is also deputy head of the Propaganda and Training Department of the Party Secretariat and President, since 1962, of the Viet-Nam Journalists Association. In March and April 1973, Tung, who in recent years has rarely written over his own by-line, authored two articles in Hoc Tap. The first, speaking of the continuing "struggle" in South Viet-Nam" said: "Once the historic task of the national democratic revolution has been completed, it is essential to move toward socialism." The April article, however, was more defensive in tone. It applauded the January 1973 Paris Agreement as opening the way for "the eventual establishment of a three party coalition government .•. From that time until the completion of entire democratic, national revolution and the reunification of the country is another process (sic)." He cited the DRV's need to apply two technological revolutions as well as the social revolution in North Viet-Nam as an argument for "strict implementation" of the Paris Agreement. Tung's implication seemed to be that there was some dissatisfaction with the Agreement which halted the war without a clear -cut victory for the DR V.

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Tran Danh TUYEN, Minister of Materials of the DRV, was born in Bac Giang Province in 1912 into a poor peasant's family. He is said to have worked as a railroad laborer, joining the ICP in 1937, and taking the lead in a strike of railwaymen. In 1946 he was the first secretary of an overt conununist city Party in Hanoi, a member of the first DRV National Assembly and general secretary of the Viet-Nam Federation of Trade Unions. What Tuyen did during the "Resistance War" is not known, but after 1954, while retaining a vice presidency of the VFTU, he became one of the DRV's industrial managers. For a time he headed the Industrial Board in the Premier's Office, and since then has been a minister and a member of the National Assembly's Planning and Budget Committee. Tuyen has been a member or chairman of a number of technical and trade union delegations to communist countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Nguyen Trong VINH is a little known figure, and indee(! there are virtually no available reports of his work since 1962 when he was Thanh Hoa Province Party secretary and a member of the National Assembly. In 1961 he was deputy director, under Le Duc Tho, of the Central Committee's Organization Department. Vinh seems to have held major general's rank in the VPA but nothing is known of his pre-1960 military career, nor does he seems to have returned to the army during the 1964-1973 war.

Nguyen Van VINH, on the other hand, is one of the most prominent military-political figures in North Viet-Nam, Born in 1917 in Nam Dinh Province, he was almost certainly an 1. C. P. member prior to 1939. An early organizer of Viet Minh guerrilla forces, he was jailed by the Japanese between 1942 and 1945. When the war against the French began in 1946 he was sent to a southern command and in 1954 was a member of the Viet Minh liaison group with the International Control Com­mission in Saigon. Returning to the North, Vinh became head of the VPA Personnel Department and a Deputy Chief of Staff and Vice-Minister of Defense in 1959. When, in 1960, the VWP for­mally decided to encourage and direct the revolution in the South, Vinh was named Chairman of the National Reunification Com­mission and head of the VWP's Reunification Department. It is

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one of the principal links between COSVN and the Party and army in the North. Since 1960 Vinh has made several trips to the South, attending and reporting on COSVN conferences. Vinh does not appear, however, to have actually held a command in the South during the 1964-1973 fighting. He is said to have close relationship with both Party First Secretary Le Duan and Premier Pharo Van Dong, as WE,u as with Defense Minister Giap.

Postscript: On June 1.4, 1973 it was announced that Nguyen Thanh Bi:ry:t Director of the State Inspection Commission would replace Ha. Ke Tan as Minister of Water Conservation. Tan was appointed to a new post, Ministe:r-in-Charge of the Construction of the Da River~am. The incident is discussed in Part II of this research note.

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