Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
retain their power to threaten and harass the government until the National Army is strong enough to neutralize their forces."33
The sects thus were regarded as an internal security threat—and more specifically as a threat to the Diem government. By some in Saigon they were regarded as the major internal threat.34 Long subsidized by the French as their partners in the Indochina war, and faced with the end of French financial assistance, major elements of the sect forces were integrated into the Vietnamese National Army; other elements, including the Hoa Hao forces of Ba Cut, were fragmented and reduced to low-level dissidence by government forces, according to contemporary intelligence estimates, by 1956.35 There is some evidence that these fragmented groups were penetrated by the communists, however, and that they were used by the communists throughout the period. In this role the sects represented a continuing, if low-level insurgent threat as an element in the overall internal security problem not qualitatively different from that represented by the communists themselves.
2. The Viet Minh Residue in South Vietnam was generally regarded as the instrument with which "the Communists" would pursue their "objective of securing control of all Indochina."36 Contemporary (1954) intelligence reports indicated the belief that
- ...the Viet Minh will seek to retain sizeable military and political assets in South Vietnam. Although the [Geneva] agreements provide for the removal to the north of all Viet Minh forces, many of the regular and irregular Viet Minh soldiers now in the south are natives of the area, and large numbers of them will probably cache their arms and remain in South Vietnam. In addition, Viet Minh administrative cadres have been in firm control of several large areas in Central and South Vietnam for several years. These cadres will probably remain in place....37
Later reports confirmed this statement and continued to describe the situation as "precarious."38
Estimates during the period of relevance were consistent on the issue of control of the Viet Minh movement in the South: They did not question unity of purpose among the communists of the north and south (or, for that matter, among the members of the communist bloc); they did continue to assert or infer that the Viet Minh in the south were under the control of the Viet Minh in the north.39
Viet Minh force levels in the south were variously estimated by the U.S. during this period but never exceeded 10,000; GVN estimates, which tended to include all organized dissidents, were consistently lower than the U.S. estimates, never exceeding 8,000. Of
