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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive  : allies who had helped the Communists from time to time in beating French-sponsored candidates for elections in CochinChina (a French colony, then part of the Federation of Indochina which, as a protectorate, enjoyed a measure of legislative representation). And the worst was not yet over. Not authorized by the Comintern to expose himself through a premature return to Vietnam, he now worked only as a low-level communications operator to the Chinese communist 8th Route Army, then fighting the Japanese."


 * 4.

In 1940 Ho was reported in Liuchow, Kwang-Si Province, South China, engaged in training guerrillas under the sponsorship of the local warlord. Shortly thereafter Ho, with the remnants of the central committee of the ICP, crossed into Vietnam, and in 1941 began organizing a resistance movement on a large scale. The ICP prepared for, and advocated, armed insurrection against French Imperialism and Japanese Fascism. However, Ho Chi Minh organized the Viet Minh as a Vietnamese nationalist movement of resistance. The Viet Minh program centered on collaboration with the Allies to defeat Japan and liberate Indochina. In the course of his work, Ho was arrested in May 1942 by Chinese nationalists, under mysterious circumstances, and in June 1943 was as mysteriously released. Ho re-joined the Viet Minh, re-entered Vietnam, and led the Viet Minh to power in August, 1945.

Ho, at the time he became President of the DRV, was undoubtedly a communist in the sense that he had spent twenty-five years in the embrace of Party discipline and doctrine, and that he had been an agent of the Communist International. He was also a dedicated revolutionary nationalist whose cause had exacted of him years of hardship, imprisonment, exile, and conspiratorial isolation. In his, he wrote:

"People who come out of prison can build up a country. Misfortune is a test of people's fidelity. Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit. When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out."


 * 5.

Whatever else he was, Ho was a leader and organizer par excellence, an astute manipulator of men who had successfully threaded a way through the tangle of international intrigue in China to political power for himself and his followers of the ICP and the Viet Minh. He came to power in North Vietnam under the aegis of the Allies, and by popular acclaim. He did not establish a communist government, although besides himself in the Presidency, he had arranged that communist lieutenants would hold the portfolios of interior, national defense, finance, propaganda, education, and youth. The communists, although thus centrally placed, were in a minority, and full account had been taken of independents and several of the principal Rh