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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011  "The DRV had specific political, as well as military, objectives in returning the Southerners, including the overturning of Diem, and eventually, reunification."

The interrogations of the regroupees also indicate that the DRV viewed the regroupees as a long-range political asset, establishing special schools and educational programs for Southern children. A captured Viet Cong Lieutenant Colonel stressed this point, and quoted Phan Hung of the Lao Dong Politburo, speaking at the Third Party Congress in September 1960: ""The Party has tried to develop 10,000 teenage children regrouped from the RVN into a cohes ive group of engineers, doctors, professors, and other specialists for the future. This is proof that the Party has l ooked out for the welfare of the South Vietnamese too." 108/"

The informant stressed that at least until he left North Vietnam in November, 1961,. none of this shadow national elite had been conscripted: in his view, the DRV had yet to use a powerful political force, a cadre for South Vietnam whose attitudes had been carefully conditioned by more than a decade of education in the DRV, the Soviet Union, or other communist countries. As of 1968, there is no information that the DRV had committed these cadres in South Vietnam.

In early 1967, at the request of the Secretary of Defense, an interagency study group was convened from CIA, DIA, and the Department of State for a comprehensive review of U. S. intelligence concerning: "The North Vietnamese Role in the Origin, Direction, and Support of the War in South Vietnam." 109/ The resultant study validates the foregoing ob servations on the regroupees in all respects, as do other captured documents and interrogation reports. Taken together, available evidence indicates that infiltration of regroupees fr om North to South Vietnam began as early as 1955. For example, a U.S. intelligence report of November, 1955 reported on the arrival of 50 regroupees in October, 1955; and the Lieutenant Colonel mentioned above, an intelligence officer, described trips to South Vietnam and back in 1955, 1956, and 1958.

However, from all indications, the early infiltration was quite small scale, involving mo more than a few hundred persons in all. There are no reports indicating DRV preparations of an apparatus to handle large-scale, systematic movements of people and supplies before 1958. Early in that year, according to one prisoner, Montagnards from Quang Tri and Thua Thien Provinces began to receive training in North Vietnam in the establishment and operation of way-stations and guide systems in Laos and South Vietnam; the prisoner left North Vietnam in March, 1959 with a group of other cadre to organize tribesmen for those missions. He testified t hat thereafter he made several inspection trips a long the routes to check on the building of troop shelters in the encampments. 110/ Several other POW have disclosed that in early 1959 they were chosen to man "speclal border-crossing teams" for moving drugs, food, and other materiel across Rh