Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
After the internal turmoil of 1956-1957, the DRV~s domestic decks were cleared for more direct action abroad. Internal dissension died down as the regime effectively suppressed or mollified the farmers and the Catholics, the epicenters of discontent. Also, privations afflicting the society stemming from the war and the regroupment were somewhat alleviated.
3. Support from Abroad
The DRV, within its own resources, probably could not have achieved or maintained its independence, and it certainly could not look for reunification without foreign support. During the period 1950 - 1954, the Viet Minh had accepted significant amounts of foreign aid, especially Chinese aid, 70 / and the Geneva Agreements were in large measure the product of the diplomacy of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic, rather than their Vietnamese allies. 71/ The DRV, as it emerged from Geneva in 19 54 , consisted of a society-torn by the war and undergoing the trauma of a 900,000 person exodus, a food deficit, a modest and Ivar-damaged industrial plant, and a drastic shortage of technicians and public administrators . Internal and external defense were almost immediately a principal policy aim -- certainly through the 1956 peasant rebellions, and their consequences . Whatever extraterritorial ambitions the DRV may have had, these were necessarily subordinate to survival as a state. In the view of the Lao Dong leaders, apparently even the realization of even that minimal goal hinged upon the DRV's receiving substantial military assistance from abroad. 72/ Additional foreign aid dependency stemming from the broad domestic:reform programs which the DRV undertook -- discussed above -- further impelled Ho Chi Minh and his government to turn to t he Chinese and the Russians. The DRV's dependence upon its communist allies increased markedly over the decade following Geneva.
a. Foreign Military Assistance
The DRV had sound reason to maintain a large military establishment in the aftermath of Geneva. The presence of the French forces in South Vietnam through 1956, and the US-aided GV1J military forces thereafter, taken together with the GVN's claims to DRV territory and people, GVN diplomatic hostility, and GVN belligerent propaganda, probably justified a large army for national defense. 73/ Moreover, internal security placed heavy demands upon DRV forces-,-at first to deal with the exigencies of establishing DRV control, pushing the Land Reform Campaign,
and coping with the refugee problem. Large forces were also needed in 1956 to suppress uprisings, particularly in the predominantly Catholic rural areas . 74/ Beyond simply security, however , in orthodox communist fashion, the DRV regarded the armed forces as a primary instrument for indoctrination of the masses and for support of other Lao Dong Party programs; they also served as a reserve labor force to meet agricultural crises . 75/ And·the foreign policy of the DRV required a military instrument of extensive capabilities in insurgency operations -- subversion, infiltration, and guerrilla warfare.
