Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Chairman Ho at the head." 145/ An NVA naval officer captured in 1966, a second generation Party member, asserted that: "Once South Vietnam has been liberated, the NLF will suffer the same fate as the Viet Minh did in North Vietnam after independence was gained from the French. The Front will atrophy and quickly disappear . . ." This officer was emphatic that: "The Lao Dong and the PRP are one and the same organism the PRP and the Lao Dong will emerge into the open (after reunification) as one party ... under Ho's authority." 146/
In March, 1962, the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) was reactivated, built around the Nambo Inter-Zone Committee, and given purview over Cochinchina and Annam. The 1962 reorganization is believed to have been intended to improve the coordination of insurgent activity and to lend substance to the newly created PRP.
Available evidence indicates that the PRP is the southern element of the DRV Lao Dong Party. But whether the PRP is a subsidiary of the Lao Dong Party or merely a territorial department of the Party is unclear. Pointing to a parent-subsidiary relationship are the facts that membership requirements in the PRP are considerably less stringent than in the Lao Dong Party) that the PRP regulations are designed for an independent entity) and that the SVN military party system is subordinate to COSVN, whereas the DRV military party system is not subordinate to analogous party committees. But Vietnamese Communists assert that there is only one Vietnamese Communist Party because Vietnam is one country; the Lao Dong Party appears to count PRP members in its official membership figures; and infiltrating Lao Dong Party members are automatically accorded PRP membership. The fact that some members of the Lao Dong Central Committee are officials of COSVN could be consistent with either relationship; whatever the exact relationship, COSVN is the extension of the Lao Dong. COSVN's immediate superior in the Lao Dong Party hierarchy seems to be the party's Reunification Department, which is believed to have issued specific orders to COSVN based upon the directives of the Lao Dong Central Committee. The principal function of the Reunification Department seems to be to act as the COSVN liaison office in DRV, where it forwards correspondence and recruits and trains political cadre before infiltration south. COSVN leadership of the military party system in SVN appears to have been subject to the technical supervision of the Lao Dong Central Military Committee. 147/
George Carver has summarized well presently available information concerning command linkage between Hanoi and the South:
"As the organizational structure of the Viet Cong movement has expanded over the past four years, its general outlines have become fairly well known. In the insurgency's initial phase (1954-1959), the Communists retained the Viet Minh's division of what is now South Viet Nam into 'Interzone V'
