Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek broke with the communists, and Borodin was forced to return to Moscow. Ho Chi Minh returned to Moscow with him, but before departing turned over leadership of the Youth League to a trusted assistant who was arrested within the year. The League leadership then fell to Thu, who was still living sumptiously in Hong Kong on French blood money. Thu called a congress in Hong Kong in 1929 which resulted in the Vietnam delegates walking out in disgust, and forming an Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in Tonkin. The émigré leadership of the League conceded the necessity of organizing a communist party, but in reality, was unwilling to deviate from the political line set by Ho Chi Minh — which was to build a revolutionary nationalist party with socialist tendencies.10 As the ICP grew in strength, the Youth League adopted the name "Annamese Communist Party."
After leaving China in 1927, Ho Chi Minh travelled to Moscow, Berlin, and in 1929 was in Thailand working secretly with 30,000 Viet émigrés. Ho returned to Hong Kong in January, 1930, and resolved the disunity among the several Indochinese Communist factions. A new party was set up, with a central committee at Haiphong, named the Vietnam Communist Party. In October, 1930, at Comintern insistence, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party, to include Cambodian and Laotians; the Central Committee was transferred to Saigon.11 French police repression of communists shortly after nearly destroyed the organization; a number of Ho's lieutenants, Pham van Dong, Giap and others, were sent to Poulo Candou for long prison terms.
- 3. Prison and Obscurity
Ho, who had been sentenced to death in absentia by the French, was arrested in Hong Kong in 1931 by the British. Bernard Fall wrote this account:
- "Legality, however, prevailed in the genteel world of Hong Kong's Anglo-Saxon law. Defended by Sir Stafford Cripps before Britain's Privy Court, Ho was found not subject to extradition since he was a political refugee. Still, the British did not want him and he was a marked man. He slipped out of Hong Kong, into the nearby but isolated Chinese province of Fukien.
- "Somehow, only a year later, Ho was in Shanghai, the only foreign place in Asia then where a substantial Vietnamese community could be found. He was desperately seeking contact with the Comintern apparatus, which was now prudently concealing its operations in China. It was understandable that what was left of the Chinese Communist Party outside of Mao's forces was not about to advertise its presence all over Shanghai. But there may have been another reason as well for Ho's difficulties in making contact with the Communists: Ho had been released from British prison for reasons which a suspicious Communist might find difficult to swallow. To a Communist apparatus emerging from the blows it had been subjected to in the early Thirties, it was normal procedure to isolate Ho Chi Minh as a potential
