If at the height of the Vietnam War (1965-76) you had asked an American who their country was fighting in Vietnam, most would have said the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong was a network of communist agents and subversives, supplied and controlled by North Vietnam but active within South Vietnam. The origins of the Viet Cong begin with the Geneva Accords of 1954. Under the terms of the Accords, military personnel were ordered to return to their place of origin, either North or South Vietnam. Many Viet Minh soldiers and sympathisers, however, stayed in South Vietnam and remained ‘underground’, mostly in rural or remote areas. Their reasons for doing this are in dispute. Some historians suggest that indigenous communist groups in South Vietnam chose to remain there, rather than shift to the North. Others claim they did so under orders from Hanoi, which wanted to disrupt the development of the South and prepare for a future war. Whatever the reasons, by 1959 there were as many as 20 different communist cells scattered around South Vietnam. In total, these cells contained as many as 3,000 men.
The formation of an organised communist insurgency in South Vietnam was masterminded by Le Duan. A native of Vietnam’s southern provinces, Le Duan was active in communist groups in the Mekong region in the 1940s. By the mid-1950s, he was a high ranking member of the North Vietnamese government, occupying a seat in the Lao Dong Politburo. In 1956 Le Duan developed a plan, the ‘Road to the South’. In it he called for communists to rise up and gather support, overthrow South Vietnam’s leader Ngo Dinh Diem and expel foreign advisors and businessmen. Le Duan presented this plan to members of the Politburo but they did not support his call for a full-scale war. The Politburo considered North Vietnam’s domestic policies, such as economic and military reform, to be more pressing. It would be better, they said, to wait three years for attempting to facilitate a revolution in South Vietnam. Nevertheless the Politburo authorised communist insurgents in the South to begin a limited campaign of violence.
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