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of Vietnam. They organized the National Liberation Front, a coalition of political groups opposing the South Vietnamese government. These included idealistic youths, peasants in areas where land reform had failed, Saigon intellectuals, and victims of Diem’s anti-Communist campaign. It was a classic example of the Communist tactic of the united front. Though some non-Communist groups gathered under this umbrella organization, the Communists always dominated it. As distinguished from the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, in which the Communists captured what were at the outset primarily non-Communist movements, the guerrilla insurgency in South Vietnam was started, controlled, and dominated by the Communists from the beginning. When the non-Communists were no longer useful to the Communist cause, they were eliminated.
    The nature of the National Liberation Front became a central issue in the debate over the propriety of the American intervention in the Vietnam War. There were two critical questions: Was the front an indigenous political movement independent of North Vietnam? Did it represent the legitimate aspirationsof the South Vietnamese? The answer to both questions was unequivocally no .
    It was vitally important for North Vietnam to create the appearance that the National Liberation Front was an independent movement. Communist leaders went to elaborate lengths to maintain this illusion. But Hanoi’s hand was hidden only from those who chose not to see it.
    North Vietnam decided to use armed force to unite Vietnam in January 1959 and sent out orders to that effect in May. By July, Communist infiltration into South Vietnam markedly increased. These agents organized a political and military revolt against the Saigon government. A few months later, the number of guerrilla attacks escalated dramatically. In September 1960, North Vietnam’s Communist party publicly called for “our people” in South Vietnam to “bring into being a broad National United Front against the United States and Diem.” In January 1961, the creation of the National Liberation Front was announced in Saigon. North Vietnam called for the formation of separate military and political organizations for South Vietnam’s Communists. By December 1962, both the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Revolutionary party had appeared.
    One Communist defector explained that North Vietnam could hardly permit the International Control Commission, which supervised compliance with the 1954 Geneva cease-fire agreements, to say that there was an invasion from the North, “so it was necessary to have some name . . . to clothe these forces with some political organization.” When two other defectors were shown American publications arguing that the National Liberation Front was independent of Hanoi, they remarked with amusement that North Vietnam had been more successful than expected in concealing its role.
    There was direct evidence of North Vietnam’s role as well. In April 1960, North Vietnamese Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan said, “The liberation of the South is not only a task for the southern people, but also of the entire people, of the South as well as of the North. The northern people willnever neglect their task with regard to one half of their country, which is not yet liberated.” At the Geneva Conference on Laos in July 1962, a leading member of the North Vietnamese delegation divulged to journalists that the names of some members of the Central Committee of his country’s Communist party were being kept secret because “they are directing military operations in South Vietnam.”
    A few simple calculations proved that the guerrillas in the South could not hold out for long without material support from North Vietnam. Until mid-1964, the National Liberation Front conducted low-level military assaults while it recruited members and organized and strengthened its