Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
railways, rivers, and canals open for traffic, of ensuring that rural crops reach the markets and that in turn commodity goods are redistributed throughout the country. The Communists have no such responsibility. They have no roads and bridges to guard, and no goods to distribute."121
Diem failed to perceive that the "first phase" was crucial, or that the VC were, from the very outset, constructing while they destroyed, building a state within South Vietnam with more effective local government than his own.
Like many another issue in Vietnam, the problem was in part semantics. "Communists" during this period formally recanted for the GVN by the thousands; thousands more "communists" were incarcerated by the GVN for "political reeducation." But Ordinance 47 of 1956 notwithstanding, "communist" is a term which has not been used since the 1940's by Vietnamese serving the Marxist-Lenist Party headed by Ho Chi Minh of the DRV. These referred to themselves as members of the Vietnam Workers Party (Dang Lao Dong), as members of one Front or another, or as resistance fighters, or fighters for national liberation. Nor was "Viet Minh" a useful name, since Viet Minh, a nationalist front, included numerous non-communist, or at least non-party members. In 1956, the Saigon press began to distinguish between the Viet Minh and communists by referring to the latter as "Viet Cong," a fairly precise, and not necessarily disparaging, rendition of "Viet Nam Cong-San," which means "Vietnamese Communist."122 The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) much later condemned the term as "contemptuous," and pointed out that the GVN had applied it indiscriminately to all persons or groups "who are lukewarm toward the pro-U.S. policy even on details."123 There can be no doubt that Diem and his government applied the term somewhat loosely within South Vietnam; and meant by it North as well as South Vietnamese communists, whom they presumed acted in concert.124
2. The Viet Minh Residue
At the close of the Franco-Viet Minh War, some 60,000 men were serving in organized Viet Minh units in South Viet Nam. For the regroupments to North Vietnam, these units were augmented with large numbers of untrained young men -- who were later known among the regroupees in North Vietnam as "soldiers of Geneva." A reported 90,000 soldiers were taken to North Vietnam in the evacuated units, while the U.S. and the GVN estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 trained men were left behind as "cadre." If French estimates are correct that in 1954 the Viet Minh controlled over 60 to 90 percent of South Vietnam's villages outside the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao regions, those 5000 to 10,000 cadre must have represented only a small fraction of the remaining Viet Minh apparatus--cadre, local workers, sympathizers--in the countryside. GVN figures themselves attest to this. In 1955 and 1956 alone, the GVN claimed 100,000 communist "cadre" rallied or surrendered, and up to 20,000 "communists and communist sympathizers" were detained for reeducation. However, from all accounts--including testimony of the communist prey--the combination of the evacuation and the GVN Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign was devastating. The Viet Minh wartime apparatus was depleted and fragmented, as the GVN claimed.
