THE THREAT OF FOREIGN VOLUNTEERS TO AID THE VIET CONG

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79T00472A000700020012-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 16, 2004
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: March 31, 1965
• Content Type: IM

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OCI No, 0795/65
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Directorate of Intelligence
31 March 1965
INTELLIGENCE MEMORANDUM
The Threat of Foreign Volunteers
to Aid the Viet Cong
1. Recent Chinese and North Vietnamese state-
ments are intended to raise the political tempera-
ture in the Indochinese situation, but do not neces-
sarily commit either Peiping or Hanoi to any par-
ticular action.
2. On 22 March the Chairman of the Viet Cong's
political arm, the National Front for the Libera-
tion of South Vietnam (NFLSV), stated that the
Front is "ready to continue to receive all assistance
including weapons and war materiel from the socialist
countries and all peace-loving peoples throughout
the world." He further declared that "if the US
imperialists continue to send their troops and the
troops of their satellites into South Vietnam and
to expand the war to the north and to Laos, the
NFLSV will call on the world peoples to send troops
and youths to come and side with the South Vietnamese
people." The statement also threatened that the
Front "will call on the South Vietnamese," who were
regrouped north, "to return to take up weapons to
exterminate the enemy and save their country."
3? Peiping's affirmative response to
the Front call was summed up in a 28 March message
from Communist China's Foreign Minister Chen I to
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his 1MW counterpart. Chen I declared that "we firmly
support the 22 March statement of the NFLSV. The
Chinese people will exert every effort to send the
heroic South Vietnamese people the necessary mate-
rial aid, including arms and all other war material,
and stand ready to dispatch their men to fight
shoulder to shoulder with the South Vietnamese
people whenever the latter so require." Chen I's
warning was restated in a People's Daily editorial
on 29 March which asserted t a o owing the US
"occupation" of South Vietnam and "aggression" against
North Vietnam, "its next step will be aggression
against China." It is, therefore, the editorial
added, "the sacred internationalist duty of the Chi-
nese people" to aid the Vietnamese people.
4. Hanoi has given full coverage to the Front
statement, It has publicized the "eagerness" of
bloc youths to volunteer for service in Vietnam,
and the readiness of regrouped southerners to re-
turn south. On 27 March, the Fatherland Front, a
regime propaganda organization, issued a statement
affirming that "the struggle of the people in the
two zones (North and South Vietnam) against US im-
perialism is being more closely coordinated than
ever before. The Presidium and Secretariat of the
Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee fully
approve and warmly support the stand of the NFLSV
in calling back, if need be, the sons and daughters
of South Vietnam who have regrouped to the north."
Hanoi has, so far, however, avoided any public com-
mitment to send native northerners to South Vietnam,
stressing instead that their duty is to defend the
North.
5. The Front call for volunteers was carefully
phrased as a contingency move, to take place should
future US action further escalate the war either
in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, or Laos, The
issuance of the call at this time, together with
the rapid and apparently coordinated responses by
Hanoi and Peiping, suggests that the Communists
hope to deter the introduction of further US com-
bat troops into South Vietnam
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6. We believe the National Liberation Front,
Hanoi, and the Chinese Communists are trying to
boost the morale of Communist forces in South
Vietnam, and, more importantly, are trying to
raise the spectre of general war on the Indochi-
nese mainland in order to increase the diplomatic
and political pressure on the US and to deter
the US from continuing, and perhaps increasing,
its present policy line.
7. We do not believe that these statements
portend any over infusion of North Vietnamese
or, especially, Chinese manpower into the war in
South Vietnam, though there may be some increase
in covert North Vietnamese support to the Viet
Cong. As the Communists must certainly realize--
indeed, Peiping is almost certainly counting
heavily on just this--current Chinese and Vietnam-
ese statements raise recollections of Korea in the
fall of 1950. Actually, the Korean situation of
a decade and a half ago and the present situation
in Vietnam differ in many material regards. In
Korea, US forces had either actually reached or
were rapidly advancing toward the very borders of
China itself and all indigenous (i.e., North
Korean) opposition to such US advances had been
virtually eliminated. No comparable situation
exists in Vietnam, north or south, at the present
time. Peiping and Hanoi almost certainly intend
to play heavily on US and free world fears of
another Korea, but we believe the chances of the
Communists' responding in Vietnam within the near
future as they responded in Korea in 1950 are con-
siderably less than even.
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