The Man Behind the General in Hanoi

GENERAL GIAP may be running the current North Vietnamese offensive in South Viet Nam, but he is by no means his own master in Hanoi. The most powerful figure in the North Vietnamese hierarchy is Le Duan, the shrewd, remote first secretary of Hanoi's ruling Lao Dong (Workers) Party and ranking member of its Politburo. A nervous and intense man who grew up in what is now South Viet Nam, Le Duan is generally regarded as the chief architect of Hanoi's relentless crusade to take over the South. His pre-eminence is underscored by the fact that in recent weeks Hanoi newspapers have taken to calling him "Uncle" Le, an honorary title rarely used since the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969.

Born in 1908 to a peasant family in Quang Tri province, Le Duan (pronounced Lay Zwan) grew up to become a railway clerk and a political agitator. In 1931 he was jailed by the French for 20 years for subversive activities, but was released in 1936 and resumed his work in the Indochinese Communist Party. When the party was outlawed in 1940, Le Duan was arrested again and sentenced to ten years. But when the Communist Viet Minh seized power temporarily in 1945, Le Duan was released. Subsequently he became the organizer and leader of guerrilla forces in what is now South Viet Nam. "In a real sense," says one U.S. expert, "he is the father of the present war."

In 1954, at the time of the Geneva conference that ended with the partition of Viet Nam, Le Duan argued with Ho that the Communists should continue the fight for total victory. According to P.J. Honey, a British specialist on Viet Nam, Le Duan even predicted to Ho that the U.S. would help South Viet Nam and that another war would eventually have to be fought. After the Geneva agreement, 90,000 Viet Minh guerrillas were moved to the North, but Le Duan ordered the other Communists of South Viet Nam to go underground and hide their arms. He told Ho that when war broke out again, there would be an armed Communist force intact in the South as well as the 90,000 available guerrillas in the North. Says Honey: "What Le Duan did was lay the foundations for the Viet Cong at the time of the Geneva agreement."

In some ways, Le Duan's career has been advanced as much by luck as by leadership. In his early years of political activism, he managed, like the young Nikita Khrushchev, to be absent during periods of party turmoil. Between 1954 and 1956, he began to organize political subversion against the regime of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Le Duan was thus preoccupied with other matters at the time of the North Vietnamese land-reform debacle of 1956, which ended with the summoning of troops to put down a peasant revolt in Nghe An province. The crisis led to the fall of the party's secretary-general, Truong Chinh. President Ho Chi Minh then assumed the title of secretary-general himself, but he assigned Le Duan to run the party for him. Le Duan was officially confirmed as first secretary in 1960.

Though North Viet Nam is one of the few Communist states that are run by a genuinely collective leadership, Le Duan is clearly the primus inter pares. The party's eleven-member Politburo, whose average age is 63, has worked together since World War II in notable harmony. But it has traditionally been divided over how to achieve unification: one group has pressed for military victory, while another has favored protracted guerrilla action. Le Duan, like Giap, has always been identified with the first faction. In July 1971, he characteristically admonished the North Vietnamese army to "shatter the U.S. imperialist plan of Vietnamizing the war" and to "fight for the greatest victory."

Khrushchev once said that Le Duan "talks, thinks and acts like a Chinese." In truth, Le Duan has leaned slightly toward the Soviets while adroitly threading his way between Moscow and Peking. The dispute between the Communist titans has helped North Viet Nam to solve the problem of how to wage war against the sophisticated weaponry of the U.S.-backed South with no armaments industry of its own. Because of Le Duan's clever exploitation of the Sino-Soviet schism, notes U.S. Vietnamolo-gist Douglas Pike, "there are virtually no strings attached to the aid given to the North Vietnamese today."

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