Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
revolutionary's entire mature life. 58/ His main obstacles, as he saw them, were first France, then a Franco-American combine, and finally the U.S. alone; toward the expulsion of U.S. power and influence from Vietnam Ho, after 1954, directed most of the international power of the DRV. 59 / Nonetheless, while Ho's testimony is extensive on his deep antipathy to U.S. imperialism as the major danger to the DRV, his behavior in the Chinese-Russian rivalry indicated that he perceived yet another serious threat to Vietnamese independence in his northern neighbor: China, ancient overlord of the Viet peoples. 60/ Accordingly, the foreign policy of the DRV, though pivoted upon anti-Americanism, has guarded against encroachment by the Communist Chinese.
As an upper limit on reasonable expectations after 1954 , the DRV might have hoped, in the context of a worsening political climate within South Vietnam, or of some form of plebescite per the Geneva Settlement, that foreign military forces would be withdrawn from the South and foreign influence attenuated . A Franco-American withdrawal could have acceptably taken place under a neutralization formula, provided that the formula permitted pursuit of other DRV policies, such as reunification, and socialization.
Minimally, the DRV might have bee n willing t o accept a continued foreign presence in the south, especially a French presence, with as surance of eventual withdrawal, and compensatory concessions to the DRV on the issue of reunification.
In the literal sense, the DRV won its independence at the Geneva Conference of 1954, as attested by Pravda upon the close of the Con ference, July 22, 1954: "the freedom-loving peoples of Indo-China ... have won their national independence." In January, 195 7, the Soviet UN delegate requested entry of the DRV into the UN as a separate, distinct state, as it then existed in North Vietnam. 61/ But Ho Chi Minh, also on 22 July 1954, issued an appeal stressing the temporary nature of the partition, and the impermanence of the French military presence in the South. Moreover, he said: "North, Central and South Vietnam are territories of ours. Our country will certainly be unified, our entire people will surely be liberated." 62/ By 1957 the bar to independence and unification, the b a l eful foreign presence in Vietnam was plainly, in Ho's view, the US:
"The Vietnamese people have perseveringly carried on the struggle for the implementation of the Geneva Agreement to reunify the country, because South Viet-Nam is still ruled by t he US imperialists and their henchmen. In completely liberated North Viet-Nam, power is in the hands of t he people; this is a firm basis for the peaceful reunification of Viet-Nam, a task which receives ever-growing and generous help from the Soviet Union, China, and other brother countries. Thanks to this assistance, the consolidation of the North has scored good results." 63 /
