Globusz^® Publishing 

One intriguing aspects of the Vietnam War, still shrouded in mystery and half-truths, concerns the foreign communist volunteers who assisted the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces. During the war thousands of Russian and Chinese advisors were stationed in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. They primarily worked as technical advisors and military engineers, and were usually stationed in the Hanoi-Haipong area. Outside that, there is little or no awareness that these Russian and Chinese advisors, assisted by Cubans, North Koreans, East Germans and other communist influenced nationals also served as advisor to the North Vietnamese forces fighting inside South Vietnam. Although described as ‘advisor’ they also took an active role in combat operations; as a result, some were killed and others were captured.

The full story of these foreign volunteers is difficult the chart; in fact, the complete record of their activities may never be known. Since the war the communist Vietnamese constantly deny these accusations, as do the Chinese, Cubans and all the others who sent their ‘volunteers’ to Vietnam. Even the Pentagon, due to political considerations, has consistently refused to comment. But enough information has emerged from other sources, such as eyewitness accounts, communication intercepts, reports from defectors, and recently declassified documents, to confirm what was previously accepted as rumor.

The first mention of foreign volunteers came during the French-Indochina War (1946-54) when the Chinese newspapers at the time openly boasted that between 20-30,000 men were fighting along side the Viet Minh. They also had had officers attached to the Viet Minh’s General Headquarters. Also there where claims by locals of ex-French Foreign Legionnaires, whom were turncoats and joined the VC as instructors. There was also a international communist unit, mostly made-up of French defectors, called the ‘International Combatants’. During the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, there were frequent rumors of these French defectors who stayed behind and became spies, disguising themselves as Americans newsmen.

By the early 1960s, reports began to surface of Russian advisors assisting the Viet Cong (VC). This came about when South Vietnamese military authorities received hard intelligence that a small Soviet delegation was touring the ‘liberated areas’ in the eastern Mekong Delta. A meticulously planned operation was mounted to capture the Russians, but something went wrong at the last moment, and the VC succeeded in spiriting their guest to safety. However, the South Vietnamese did get to capture several Russian flags, propaganda and magazines which the Soviets had given to their hosts, as well as photographs and a movie film showing the welcome accorded the Russian advisors as the toured through the hamlets in the area. The film provided incontestable evidence that there was a Russian presence in and around South Vietnam. An Army of the Republic of Vietnam Psychological Operation officer who took part in the operation described the film as ‘strictly propaganda’ and said he felt they were intended to show solidarity between socialist countries.

Other evidence soon surfaced. On August 1, 1964, the government of South Vietnam officially complained to the International Control Commission that Chinese advisors were at work in South Vietnam. South Vietnamese government officials claimed that Chinese Communist officers had led the enemy’s 514th and 261st Battalions in an attack on Sung Hieu, in Cai Be two weeks before their report. The South Vietnamese also claimed that commands in Chinese could be heard during the battle and later 43 bodies were found on the battlefield. Eight of the bodies that were found were decapitated and the heads taken away, to prevent their identification as Chinese. The People’s Republic of China did not respond to these charges.

During September 1964, Radio Hanoi began hinting openly at the use of Chinese ‘volunteers’ for combat in South Vietnam, saying tens of thousands had offered their support and service to fight against South Vietnam and its allies. Hanoi also claimed to have received similar offers from volunteers from East Germany and Hungary.

By early 1965, China openly offered its troops as well as material. That the March 25, 1965, edition of Peking’s daily newspaper ‘People’s Daily’ said, “We are ready to send our own men…to fight together with the North Vietnamese people.”

The Chinese were also active in Laos, according to one U.S. Intelligence Information Report. It recounts that in early May 1965 a Chinese mission, referred to as ‘the Embassy’, was located in a cave at coordinates VH 192563, near Sam Neua, in Laos. The mission had its own guards, cooks, and typists. About 80 Chinese in total, they were attached to the Pathet Lao National Military Headquarters, their primary mission was staff-level logistical planning and support. Also, about a thousand to 2,000 Chinese troops and engineers were know to be employed in constructing the ‘New China Road’ a road network in northern Laos. This road network had actually started in 1962. At certain points of the construction the road snaked to within 20 miles of Thailand’s border. This caused concern in that country, that Thai official protested that the road served to link insurgent training camps along their border and provided a supply route to communist guerrillas in northeast Thailand. The East Germans were also known to have fielded an engineer battalion in Laos, these East Germans may have also worked as advisors to communist forces inside South Vietnam.

On July 20, 1966, a unit of South Vietnamese Special Forces penetrated and broke up a high level meeting of the Viet Cong National Liberation Front in Tay Ninh Province. Documents captured during the raid tended to support what many intelligence analysts had believed for some months --- that Chinese personnel were actively advising and even fighting alongside VC units south of the 17th parallel. The raid happened so fast that while VC officials were able to escape across the Cambodian border, they were forced to leave many revealing documents behind. From these documents American and South Vietnamese military intelligence learned that several high ranking Chinese officers were present as military and political advisors to the VC. The captured documents were later turned over to the South Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although American officials in Saigon and Washington D.C. knew of the existence of the documents, they were never made public in the U.S.

These documents, coupled with eyewitness reports by both Americans and Vietnamese officials, tended to further verify the rumors of direct Chinese involvement in Vietnam. The rumors were most common in the provinces just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where many residents claimed first-hand knowledge of Chinese presence. Many locals insisted that Red Chinese soldiers traveled and fought alongside North Vietnamese units in the area. These rumor were especially prevalent among refugees, many of whom cited the traditional Vietnamese fear of the Chinese as the reason for fleeing their homes in the countryside.

The Viet Cong’s willingness to work with the Red Chinese was anathema to many peasants in the northern provinces, and cost the VC much support locally. Resentment towards the VC/NVA increased as rumors of Chinese soldiers in the countryside began to spread.

In late 1966 in Quang Nam Province, many people told reporter David Keene, that they had personally seen Chinese soldiers traveling and working alongside North Vietnamese soldiers. Many also insisted that these same soldiers participated in battles against U.S. and ARVN forces. Some even claimed that Chinese officers, at times, were put in charge of VC/NVA units. American officials in independent reports supported these charges, that VC radio transmissions were often made in Chinese, rather than Vietnamese. Occasionally, enemy orders were intercepted in Chinese instead of in Vietnamese.

There have been allegations that foreign advisors, in this instance Russians, were involved in piloting NVA aircraft on combat missions. In July 1966, an American C-47D was shot down over Laos by a MIG-17 fighter aircraft. This information did not go public until 1978; 12 years later did U.S. officials confirm that a MIG was involved. Some members of the National League of Families, a group of MIA relatives dedicated to a complete accounting of all the U.S. servicemen missing in Southeast Asia, say the cover-up was because the MIG pilot was Russian. It is known that that Russians did fly other aircraft, fixed wing and helicopters, in support missions over Laos in the early and mid-1960s.

The Russians were at work in Laos even prior to their involvement in South Vietnam. William Sullivan, former U.S. Ambassador to Laos, testified before a Senate Subcommittee (U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad) that as early as 1961, more than 500 Soviet personnel were in Laos, working in air operations, logistical support and as military advisors.

In the fall of 1967, a report from an ARVN Military Intelligence coded source (L-003), told of two VC regiments in Phouc Tuy Province, accompanied by foreign advisors. The source reported that the advisors were from China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and North Korea. The source also claimed that the VC in Binh Ba village secretary had openly boasted of the foreign advisors and had attended a celebration with them on September 27, 1967. The secretary also told the source that the foreigners had volunteered to work with the VC.

Chinese advisors also served with Vietnamese communist forces in sanctuaries and base camps inside Cambodia. In late 1967 a French planter who worked for the CIA under the code-name ‘Louis’ was sent into the Ream area, close to Sihanoukville, to confirm the location of a suspected underground arms tran-shipment point. While drive through the area, ‘Louis’ was stopped at a roadblock manned by VC guerrillas and taken to a nearby village for interrogation. His interrogator turned out to be a Chinese officer. Not satisfied with his story, the officer turned him over to a squad of Viet Cong, who took turns torturing him. They later released him, and he managed to get to Phnom Penh. He confirmed that Chinese and Eastern European armaments were being brought in by ship and then transferred across the border to VC forces operating inside South Vietnam. This was the first hard evidence of the existence of what came to known as the ‘Sihanouk Trail’.

A report of Russian advisors surfaced again in 1967. Chief Bill Bixby, attached to a Navy SEAL Team working in Kien Giang Province, told of encountering a tall, heavy, breaded caucasian during an ambush along a remote canal. Bixby recalls that day, “He was riding with two VC in a sampan, sitting up front, and when I first spotted him, I couldn’t believe my eyes. For a few minutes I just stared, then I lifted my Stoner and cut loose.” The caucasian was hit in the initial burst of fire and toppled from the sampan into the water. The gunfire had attracted other VC in the area, and the SEAL team was forced to depart without recovering the body. He then notes, “Back at base I filed my report and a couple weeks later I was called over to NILO ( Naval Intelligence Liaison Office) shack and questioned at length on the details of the ambush. Seemed the Viets had picked up intel that the guy I shot was a Russian.” He then goes on to say “The NILO was very interested in the matter, but they told me the report was classified and therefore treat the information with discreet.”

During the November 1970 Son Tay Raid into North Vietnam, Colonel Arthur ‘Bull’ Simons and 22 men from the Special Forces, mistakenly landed at a secondary school site close to the targeted prison compound. This ‘mistake’, however, might have had been responsible for saving the lives of half the Son Tay Raiders. The secondary school turned out to be packed with hostile troops who were not North Vietnamese. Simons’ men never found out who they were, for once they realized the mistake the helicopters and its raiders on board opened up killing between 100-200 men. Later, intelligence reported that these foreigners were engaged in training the North Vietnamese, especially in air defense. It is also darkly hinted that some of these ‘advisor’ were waiting to go south of the 17th parallel.

It was the defection of a high ranking North Vietnamese communist official that lent final substantiation charges of foreign military intervention into South Vietnam

Doctor Dang Tan, an official of the North Vietnamese Defense Ministry, became disillusioned with the communist cause, and decided to defect from his post in September 1969. He was kept under tight wraps by the South Vietnamese for nearly two years and was finally allowed to go public in the spring of 1971. Speaking through an interpreter at his first public interview since his defection, Tan told media representatives that Russian, Chinese, Cubans, East Germans, North Koreans, and even French ‘advisors’ were active in the North Vietnamese military in the north as well as in the south of Vietnam. Tan also said, he personally saw foreign communist advisors at a number of rest stations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail when he traveled through Laos in 1967. During the next two years, while working as a high level cadre in ‘liberated zones’ in Pleiku, he saw four to five groups of foreigners advisor, each group held between four to five men. He noted that these men were armed, usually wore VC attire (black pajamas) and were accompanied by a large security force of NVA soldiers.

He was then asked if some of the foreign advisors he saw might have been Americans, Tan answered, “No, Hanoi’s propaganda says that American GIs are fighting alongside the VC/NVA, but I have never seen this with my own eyes. The men I saw were Russian, Chinese, Cubans, North Koreans, and some French. They came south to study the battlefields and the situation, and to see how they could help us. I have seen them deep in South Vietnamese territory. I have heard them speaking in their native tongue.”

The reference to French military advisors was puzzling to American intelligence analysts. Some felt they might have been radical leftist volunteers who had come to assist their comrades in arms in ‘fighting imperialism’. Others believed they were some of the hundreds of Frenchmen servicemen known to have deserted to the Viet Minh (VC) during the previous war against the French.

As for Dr. Tan, his credentials are impeccable. He joined the Viet Minh at the age of 16 to fight for his country’s independence; three years later he became a communist. He studied medicine at Binh Dinh and later in Hanoi, where he married (his wife was a senior employee in the North Vietnamese Finance Ministry). In 1967, along with 20 other senior official, he was sent south to Pleiku to set up a health system in areas dominated by the VC/NVA. He attributed his decision to defect through gradual disillusionment, saying that he found communism ‘outdated’ and not an equitable system of government for a country.

The North Korean presence in Vietnam is not as well documented as that of the Russians and Chinese. Aside form the allegations made by Dr. Tan, some additional light has been shed on their presence by declassified documents released by the Defense Intelligence Agency back in the late 1970s. The documents were released as a result of the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the information, in April 1971 VC and NVA units in Soi Ba Huyen area, near Phu Cat Air Base, were reported that each unit was accompanied by a contingent of five North Korean, who acted as military advisor. A month later, another reported reached intelligence officers concerning four North Korean officers attached to the NVA’s 11th Battalion in Phu Yen Province. A report from the U.S. National Military Command Center contains information on two North Korean officers who accompanied a Viet Cong general on an inspection tour of communist controlled areas in Quang Nhai Province in June 1971. The source for this information came from a district level VC who was working as a double agent.

North Korean troops are also said to have participated in combat actions inside Cambodia against troops of the Lon Nol government. During the period of 1971-72 several Korean transmissions were monitored and recorded by Khmer Republic Radio’s radio interception technicians. The transmissions were made during actual combat in eastern Cambodia; it dealt with the then-current tactical situation. Some U.S. official were skeptical and insisted that VC/NVA soldier made these transmissions fluent in Korean, to confuse the situation. Others feel that cleverly prepared tapes were used, while other officials believe this is the real thing.

The Chinese also had their hand in the basket, in January 1973 a Pathet Lao rallier told Cambodian and American interrogators of the presence of 700-800 Chinese military personnel in the vicinity of Pathet Lao Headquarter at Ben Na Kay Neua. He claimed the majority of the Chinese troops were engaged in providing air defense for the headquarters complex, and were armed with 37mm air defense guns and surface-to-air missiles. The source also told of unmarked helicopter, thought to be Russian, flying to and from Hanoi and Sam Neua.

The East Germans, who supplied weapons to the VC and NVA, were alleged to having an engineer battalion at work in Laos around 1970, actively assisting the Pathet Lao. The presence of the East Germans was mentioned in many U.S. Special Forces intelligence reports and U.S. cross-border reconnaissance team reports. U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) personnel also monitored their activities.

The Cuban involvement in Vietnam has been well documented in other reports. It appears that they operated more in the North, around Hanoi, than in the South Vietnam. Fidel Castro, himself acknowledged in January 1973 that a number of Cuban military men had been sent to Vietnam to ‘fight the imperialists’. It appears that some Cuban accompanied VC and NVA troops operating inside South Vietnam, but details are sketchy.

Shortly after the disastrous 1972 NVA Easter Offensive, Castro himself made a trip to North Vietnam. Accompanied by an entourage of Cuban and North Vietnamese security personnel, he also traveled south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into territory held by the communists in South Vietnam. The trip was disclosed by Hanoi’s Vietnam News Agency (VNA), but did not give the date or the places Castro visited around Hanoi, torturing helpless American prisoners of war (POW) seemed to have been a favorite pastime. More than a dozen former POWs have testified that they were regularly tortured by a team of Cubans while held in a prison outside Hanoi known as the ‘Zoo’. The leader of the team was a Spanish-speaking caucasian dubbed ‘Fidel’. His accomplish, whom filled in as a junior assistant, was nicknamed ‘Chico’. Both men were accorded VIP treatment by the NVA. According to retired Air Force colonel Jack Bomar, as a former POW at the ‘Zoo’ he was regularly tortured by Fidel and friends for over a year. Bomar believes that the Cubans were sent to North Vietnam to obtain useful information and to break Americans to get them to publicly confess to being war criminals. The CIA has since identified the duo as Eduardo Morjon Esteves and Luis Perez Jaen. Both men were assigned to the Cuban Embassy in Hanoi as ‘military attaches’ during 1968-69.

Aside from the foreign communist advisors, there were misguided Westerners determined to assist their VC/NVA comrades. One case involved an amateur journalist turned guerrilla fighter, Johannes Duynisveld, a Dutchmen from Voorschoten, Holland. Duynisveld was an ambitious man with leftist tendencies; he had roamed the world when he ran away from home at the age of 16. After holding various jobs, he eventually wound up in Cambodia, wanting to write about the war.

On September 15, 1970 Duynisveld left Phnom Penh on a self-described ‘secret mission’ to find out what had happened to several of the 17 Western journalists missing in Cambodia since the previous April. He was particularly interested in finding Sean Flynn and Dana Stoner, two of the more prominent members of the group.

According to a dairy found on Duynisveld body at the time of his death, he bicycled to Svay Rieng and allowed himself to be captured by communist troops on September 19. Dairy notations for the next three weeks contains many brief entries, describing how the VC were constantly on the move, trying to avoid air raid and artillery bombardment and life in general in a communist unit. As time goes by it seems that through a subtle combination of flattery, propaganda and indoctrination, the VC had little trouble in signing Duynisveld up for the communist cause. On November 28 he was officially welcomed into the fold. The following entries go on about life in a VC unit and how he transported weapons and ammunition for the VC and repair capture equipment.

Duynisveld’s activities did not go unnoticed by the South Vietnamese and Americans. More than one field report conduct by recon units told of a caucasian working for the enemy along the Cambodia border.

Fate caught up with Duynisveld on the night of December 18, when the VC unit he was part of stumbled into a night ambush position manned by troops of the ARVN 25th Infantry Division, then operating inside Cambodia. His death received widespread media coverage, where it was billed (some say erroneously) as ‘the first verified instance in the War in Indo-China of a Westerner accompanying communist troops as a soldier’. The U.S. Joint Public Affairs Office in Saigon had no comment.

One Department of Defense intelligence report, dated September 26, 1966, tells of a foreigner of undisclosed identity who spoke to a crowd of villagers in a VC controlled area of Bien Hoa Province. Villagers claimed that he stated he was an American who was forced to fight in Vietnam, but now that he had learned the truth and changed sides. This statement about the so-called American has never been proven.

A declassified secret report from a report of the summer of 1967 tells of two unidentified whites said to be Americans working for the VC in Tanoy, Cambodia. The alleged Americans were said to have been working for the VC since 1966 and had been sent to Vietnam by a ‘secret party’ in the U.S. Their assignment was to interrogate American POWs. The source of this report was listed as a defector who had worked as a VC security guard. By 1969 the CIA had many documents as an example of a January 9, 1969 report (CS211/00850-69) tells of a caucasian who spoke Chinese as well as English, working with Pathet Lao units in Xieng Khouang Province.

In the spring of 1971, the U.S. Air Force 1021st Field Activity reported that 16 Occidentals were among the headquarters’ staff of the VC’s 3001st Battalion in An Xuyen Province. The source of this information was a VC acting as a double agent, he also provided intelligence on the unloading of an unidentified submarine off the coast of South Vietnam.

During the month of November 1971, an eyewitness told of three caucasians advisors working with enemy units near Takao, Cambodia. The caucasians were described as wearing military uniforms, carrying sidearms, and conversing in Vietnamese.

In April 1973, three months after the ceasefire, a delegation of five foreigners---American, Australian, Hungarian, and Polish---were spotted traveling through Phuoc Long Province with a NVA security escort. Other sighting involving foreighers working with the VC and the NVA inside the territorial limits of South Vietnam continued right up to the collapse of the country in May 1975.

Unfortunately, official America reaction to charges of intervention by these foreign advisors and volunteers has been ignored, though on occasion when pressed by journalists, they have issued a disclaimer. Despite this there is a fact that there is a real possiblity that some American soldiers lost their lives in the Vietnam conflict, as a result of actions by these red volunteers.