Relationship With Hanoi
The relationship between the Viet Cong and the Hanoi government was highly controversial during the war. Communist and anti-war spokesmen insisted that the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South. These sources identify the Viet Cong with the National Liberation Front, which they stress was a multiparty organization. Although the People's Revolutionary Party, the South Vietnamese communist party, was the front's "paramount member", there were two other parties in the NLF, the Democratic Party and the Radical Socialist Party.
Anti-communists countered that the Viet Cong was merely a front for Hanoi. Numerous statements issued by communist leaders in the 1980s and 1990s confirm that southern communist forces were strictly under the authority of Hanoi. Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, the NLF's non-communist chairman, was a figurehead. According to the memoirs of Trần Văn Trà, the Viet Cong's top commander and PRG defense minister, he followed orders issued by the "Military Commission of the Party Central Committee" in Hanoi, which in turn implemented resolutions of the Politburo. Trà himself was deputy chief of staff for the PAVN before being assigned to the South. The official Vietnamese history of the war states that, "The Liberation Army of South Vietnam is a part of the People’s Army of Vietnam".
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