Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
deemed unlikely to launch an attack on the South unless there were unforeseen serious disturbances there:
"Not only are the DRV leaders bound to the Bloc by strong ideological ties, but the very existence of the Communist regime in North Vietnam is dependent on continued Bloc diplomatic, military, and economic support. The Chinese Communists seem to exercise somewhat greater influence than the USSR and have given the DRV greater economic and diplomatic support ....However, there is no evidence that Soviet and Chinese Communists are at odds over North Vietnam."
"The Bloc has recently given less than full support to Vietnamese reunification, to the perceptible discomfort of the DRV. At the May 1956 meeting of the Geneva co-chairmen, the Soviet Union tacitly accepted the status quo in Vietnam for an indefinite period. In January 1957 the USSR further recognized the long term nature of the division of Vietnam when it proposed, as a countermove to Western proposals for the admission of South Vietnam and South Korea, that both North and South Vietnam and North and South Korea should be admitted to the United Nations. Nevertheless, the DRV will almost certainly continue to be guided in its external course of action by the general policy set down by Moscow and Peiping, although it will continue to advocate a stronger policy on reunification."
"The DRV continues to maintain its apparatus for subversion within South Vietnam and has the capability to infiltrate fairly large numbers of military and political personnel into South Vietnam. Although the Communists in the South have been largely quiescent, some trained military personnel remain, loosely organized in small units that presumably could be reactivated for missions of assassination, sabotage, or limited guerrilla activity. South Vietnamese security forces intermittently discover cached Communist arms.
"Because the country-wide elections envisaged by the Geneva Agreements have not been held and because military action has been prevented, the DRV has been frustrated in its hopes of gaining control of South Vietnam. This has caused some discontent among cadres evacuated from the South in the expectation that they would soon return. Unification of the country remains a principal objective of the DRV regime, end it continues to seek support for its pretentions to emerge as the government of the whole of Vietnam. Its 'liberalization' measures are designed to appeal to the population of the South as well as the North. The DRV has maintained its pose of adherence to the terms of the cease-fire agreement concluded at Geneva while accusing the Republic of
