Resolution on Policy Guidelines and Missions for the Struggle against Chinese Spies in the New Situation

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Ministry of Interior, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Independence - Freedom - Happiness

No. 01/BNV

Hanoi, 15 December 1980

Resolution
on Policy Guidelines and Missions for the Struggle against Chinese Spies in the New Situation

I-Situation and Missions

1) -During the past few years Chinese spies have colluded with American spies in working feverishly to carry out vicious, dangerous, crafty plans and schemes to sabotage and attack the revolutions of the three nations of Indochina in the political, economic, military, diplomatic, cultural, social, and human fields, with the focus of their attack being on Vietnam. Their goal is to weaken and take over our country, to conquer our people, and to create a springboard from which to expand down into Southeast Asia.

Under the enlightened leadership of our Party, our People’s Public Security forces have actively struggled against these efforts and have helped to defeat every sabotage scheme and every act of provocation and incitement, and especially the so-called “ethnic Chinese” campaign directed by the Beijing reactionaries.

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They have identified and arrested many underground [covert] Chinese spies as well as hundreds of Chinese spies, commandos, and commandos who had newly infiltrated into our country; they took pro-active preventative measures to prevent the enemy from carrying out or inciting acts of violence; they fought to help defeat two wars of aggression conducted by the Beijing reactionaries and their Pol Pot-Ieng Sary lackeys; they protected and ensured the absolute security of our leadership agencies and headquarters and of our Party’s and our State’s leaders; and they have protected the security of our Fatherland.

Those are strong points and tremendous accomplishments in the struggle against Chinese spies.

However, we have also been guilty of many shortcomings and weaknesses:

-We failed to obtain a full and deep understanding of our new opponent and dangerous, direct enemy - the reactionary Beijing expansionists; we failed to fully understand the danger posed by the alliance between Chinese spies and American spies in the effort to oppose our country’s revolution, both in the short-term and over the long-term; many of our cadres and enlisted personnel, including even some of our leading cadres, were guilty of subjectivism; they displayed a lack of vigilance; their offensive revolutionary spirit was weak; they did not display a high spirit of responsibility; and at certain times and in certain places they failed to fully absorb and digest the Marxist-Leninist concept of class when carrying out the effort to resolve difficult political problems, especially the problem of ethnic minority groups and the ethnic Chinese.

-Our operations aimed at combatting Chinese spies have failed to meet our mission requirements in this new situation.  Our efforts to combat moles [spies inside our ranks] and to combat the enemy’s efforts to sabotage our ideology and our economy have been weak.  Our reconnaissance operations, our agent operations, and our interrogations of Chinese spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel have been weak and deficient; our preventative efforts have not been proactive and aggressive; and our attacks against this enemy effort have neither powerful nor sharply focused.

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-Our organization and direction of the struggle against Chinese spies has not been focused, unified, or sharp.  Our organizations specializing in the struggle against Chinese spies have not been sufficiently strengthened and their efforts have been scattershot and divided; our reconnaissance forces lack sufficient personnel and their quality is poor; the other forces involved, such as our organizational components, cadre components, logistics support components, have not provided adequate support to the requirements of the struggle against Chinese spies.  Our leadership and direction at the Ministry level and at the Public Security [City] Bureau and [Provincial] Office level has been bureaucratic and insufficiently sharp and focused, and in particular it has been too slow at providing the correct amount of personnel, equipment, and guidance and oversight time to this effort.

These shortcomings and weaknesses, which have limited our achievements, need to be quickly overcome.

2) -Today the class struggle in the world, in individual regions, and in each individual country is raging ferocious and has become very complex.  The Chinese expansionist hegemonists have allied themselves with the imperialists, led by the United States, and are striving to oppose and sabotage the revolutions of the three countries of Indochina.  Our country is now in a situation in which we are at peace but are faced with the possibility of war from the Chinese reactionaries. The Chinese are massing their armed forces right next to our northern border, they are constantly carrying out acts of provocation and causing armed clashes, and they are threatening war.  At the same time they are feverishly carrying out economic warfare, espionage warfare, psychological warfare, and other types of opposition against against us.  They are continuing to send large numbers of spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel into our country to collect intelligence, to commit acts of sabotage, and to recruit agents in order to sabotage us.

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The Chinese will increase their attacks aimed at sabotaging our economy and our ideology in order to disrupt our country internally and cause divisions between our people and our Party and State; they will increase their criticisms and denunciations of our Party and State leaders to create suspicions; they will strive to induce our people to flee the country and to incite internal disorders and riots in order to destabilize us politically and economically; they will try to sow divisions between our people and the people of Laos and Cambodia, between our country and the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, and they will strive to isolate our country from the rest of the world.

In Laos they are actively using commercial activities to send consumer goods from Thailand into Laos while at the same time they use ethnic Chinese capitalists and Lao reactionaries to conduct espionage and psychological warfare in their plot to carry out counter-revolutionary peaceful evolution and to overthrow the Lao government.

In Cambodia, they are actively carrying out a four-step program to “neutralize Cambodia” and are stepping up their economic, political, and military attacks on the Cambodian revolution.  They are increasing their assistance to their reactionary lackeys working to build armed forces and to carry out “guerrilla warfare” inside Cambodia. They are working to incite ethnic divisions between the Cambodian and Vietnamese peoples and they are plotting to return and retake control of Cambodia.

“The economic warfare, the espionage warfare, and the psychological warfare being waged by the Chinese expansionist hegemonists in collusion with the American imperialists and other international reactionaries in reality constitutes a very vicious and all-out war of destruction being waged against our country on the political, military, economic, cultural, and social fronts intended to create instability, to weaken us, to incite violence and disorder. Then, if and when they have an opportunity, they will conduct an invasion of our country.” (Party Politburo Resolution No. 31-NQ/TU, dated 2 December 1980).

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3) -The Beijing expansionist hegemonist reactionaries, who pretend to be revolutionaries and pretend to be socialists, are exploiting the friendship that the Chinese people have for the Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian people to send spies to infiltrate into our countries, to worm their way into positions in each country, to contact and recruit agents, and to disseminate reactionary Maoist policy lines with the goal of creating opposition factions.  They are exploiting the millions of ethnic Chinese who have lived in the three Indochinese countries for many generations by inciting “Greater Han” and “Chinese Blood” ideology in order to develop espionage networks and organize secret political forces to form a “fifth column army” to oppose and attack the Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian revolutions from the inside and to prepare to conduct internal mutinies and uprisings when Chinese army troops attack across the border.  Chinese spies also exploit the common border that China has with Vietnam and Laos, the cross-border ethnic and clan ties between our people’s, and the common languages and customs that people in the border areas have, to send their lackeys to operate in the border area and to infiltrate deep into the interior of each of our countries.

As for their operational goals, Chinese spies seek every way they can to weaken us in order to be able to swallow up [annex] our country and conquer our people. They pay special attention to sabotaging us internally by assembling reactionary political forces and building “flags” [banners, leaders]to conduct operations to oppose and destroy our revolution.

On the one hand Chinese spies penetrate deep into our ranks to contact individuals who are heavily imbued with Maoist thinking, those who are dissatisfied, those whose political stances are vague, those who are unable to distinguish between friend and foe, while on the other hand they exploit our current difficulties, and especially our economic problems, to make criticisms aimed at undermining the prestige of our leadership cadres, to cause divisions superiors and subordinates and between our Party and our people in order to destroy the trust our cadres and people have in our regime, to incite unrest, to incite violence, and eventually to overthrow our regime.

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The individuals that the Chinese spies focus on primarily are those who have reactionary Maoist ideology, cadres who are dissatisfied and unhappy, those whose political positions are vague, capitalists and reactionary among the ethnic Chinese community, and reactionary individuals in ethnic minority groups.

The areas of operations that Chinese spies usually focus on are agencies and state enterprises where Chinese advisors or Chinese specialists once worked; economic organizations to which China provided aid; agencies and enterprises that have large numbers of Chinese personnel or that have many personnel who previously studied or were trained in China; ethnic minority regions (H’Mong, Dao, Nung, etc.) of the provinces along our northern border; and areas where large numbers of ethnic Chinese live.  We need to pay special attention to China’s espionage plots being conducted in cooperation with CIA efforts to contact and recruit FULRO in the Central Highlands.

Although they have a number of advantages, the difficulties and weaknesses of the reactionaries in Beijing’s leadership circle are basic and cannot be overcome. Their public betrayals and the collusion between the Beijing reactionaries and the American imperialists has exposed their dangerous counter-revolutionary nature and has forced them into a position of political isolation. Maoist organizations in other nations are now bankrupt and China’s international influence has seriously deteriorated.  Contradictions between the Chinese people and the reactionary Beijing ruling clique are growing and are becoming serious; there are internal struggles for power and purges within the ruling clique; divisions within the Chinese Party, government, and Army are constantly breaking out; the crimes that they committed in their invasions across our Southwestern border and our Northern border have generated tremendous hatred in the hearts of our people; and although the reactionaries in the Beijing leadership clique and the American imperialists share some immediate, short-term interests, at the same time there are serious contradictions [conflicts] between them in their strategic goals and intentions, and those contradictions cannot be resolved.

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Based on those factors, our struggle against Chinese spies needs to focus on the following focal-point targets [individuals] and focal-point areas:

a) -Focal-point targets: First of all we must focus our struggle on personnel of the Chinese “Communist” [quotation marks in the original text] Party Central Committee’s External Liaison Ministry (the Research Bureau); the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Intelligence Department; the Chinese General Staff’s intelligence agency; the intelligence and military intelligence organizations of the Greater Military Regions and the military branches and specialty branches of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; the intelligence personnel of the Overseas Chinese Association; reactionary Chinese and Vietnamese who are operating under the command and direction of Chinese spy organizations, etc.  Pay special attention to secret informant networks that Chinese spies have recruited and planted within our organizations and in our society in the past along with those spies who have recently entered our country.

In addition, we also need to pay attention to spies from countries that are allies of the Chinese expansionist hegemonists (Thailand, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc.) who are conducting operations that support Chinese spies.

b) -Focal-point areas for the battle against Chinese spies are the provinces along our northern border and our southwestern border; coastal areas and offshore islands; areas where large numbers of ethnic Chinese live; ethnic minority area in the Viet Bac region, in our Northwest, and in the Central Highlands; important economic, political, and defense organizations and facilities, especially those organizations, facilities, and sectors that previously received Chinese aid, where Chinese specialists worked, that had extensive dealings with China; and large cities, especially those that have large numbers of ethnic Chinese residents.

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4) -Our entire Party, our entire population, and our entire army must clearly recognize who our enemy is, constantly remain vigilant, and strive to quickly mass our strength to successfully accomplish our missions of building socialism and defending the Fatherland.

In order to support our basic mission of struggling and protecting political security and public order and safety in our society that were laid out in the Resolution of our 4th Party Congress, on 02 December 1980 the Politburo issued Resolution 31 NQ/TU that laid out the overall mission of People’s Public Security in the new situation as follows: “On the basis of firmly maintaining our proletarian dictatorship and exploiting the collective social mastery of our working class, we must strive to build a People’s Public Security that is pure, clean, and strong in all respects and we must strive to step up our mass movement aimed at protecting the Fatherland’s security in order to crush every plan and action by the imperialist and capitalist intelligence agents and spies, and especially by Chinese spies, American spies, and other types of reactionaries and criminals; in order to protect political security and to maintain order and safety in our society; in order to protect our Party, to protect our revolutionary government, to protect our armed forces, protect socialist property, and to protect the lives and the property of our people.  We must actively contribute to the work of successfully building socialism and of solidly defending our Socialist Vietnamese Fatherland; to the work of strengthening our special relationship with Laos and Cambodia; and to strengthening our friendly and cooperative relationships with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries.”

The struggle against Chinese spies is truly an all-out, comprehensive, difficult, complicated, ferocious, and long-term class struggle and as well as being a national struggle.

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This struggle must be carried out from a powerful, solid offensive posture using the combined power of our entire proletarian dictatorship system, which includes People’s Public Security.  People’s Public Security is both an agency that provides staff assistance to the Party and at the same time is the backbone force, the assault force, that is responsible for directly fighting on the frontlines to protect our political security in order to be able to defeat all of the enemy’s plans to sabotage and overthrow our system.

People’s Public Security must aggressively, pro-actively obtain a firm grasp of the situation so that we can uncover, combat, and quickly suppress every plan and every action of the Chinese spies, paying special attention to the effort to combat enemy moles within our own ranks.  We must aggressively block the enemy’s efforts at long range; quickly detect and combat enemy commandos and reconnaissance personnel trying to infiltrate into our country; eliminate every factor that could incite violence and disruptions; prevent the enemy from sabotaging the material and technical facilities of socialism; struggle against every enemy effort to sabotage our ideology; ensure the absolute security of our leaders and of our Party and governmental agencies at the national and local levels; protect national secrets and protect our economy and national defense; and be ready to fight the enemy in any and all situations, including both during peacetime and in the event of war.

In order to successfully accomplish this mission, People’s Public Security must utilize the combined power of all forces, must uniformly employ every method, including the very basic and fundamental method of mobilizing the masses, must actively build forces, conduct pro-active preventative measures, and continuously attack the enemy - attacking to gain mastery and attacking to destroy and cause the disintegration and collapse of the enemy.  We must build a high spirit of socialist collective mastery in the working class in our work of protecting the Fatherland’s security, and we must do good professional Public Security work, especially in regard to conducting reconnaissance and intelligence agent operations.

We must strengthen our close cooperation with the Lao and Cambodian Peoples Security forces so that the three Indochina countries constitute one battlefield, and we must form  one single integrated counter-espionage posture throughout the entire Indochina battlefield in order to solidly protect the revolutions of each country, which are the forward outposts of the socialist system in Southeast Asia.

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II-A Number of Issues regarding Policies and Policy Guidelines in the Struggle against Chinese Spies

A. -General Policies and Policy Guidelines

1) -Correctly resolve political issues within the population and strictly implement the ethnic minority policy, the policy toward ethnic Chinese, and other Party and State policies

Avoid mistakes and shortcomings in order to prevent Chinese spies from being able to use the ethnic Chinese as a “fifth column” and from using ethic minority areas to create the so-called “Meo [H’Mong] Kingdom” or to create “autonomous zones” in order to carry out their attacks against the revolution. 

-With regard to the ethnic Chinese, we must pay attention to the need to educate and win the support of the laboring masses; make them clearly understand our Party’s policies and enable them to clearly see the difference between the Chinese working class and the true revolutionary forces in China and the reactionaries who are currently in power in Beijing. We must make them clearly see the traitorous nature and the evil, vicious schemes of the Chinese reactionaries so that the Chinese will sympathize with and support the Vietnamese revolution and will help us to mobilize [proselytize] the Chinese revolutionary masses. We must have a firm handle on each individual Chinese family and each individual Chinese so that we will be able to accurately categorize them. We must develop and provide education and support to the ranks of our hard-core supporters among the ethnic Chinese so that they can help us to understand that situation within the Chinese community and so that they can serve as the backbone of our efforts to mobilize and proselytize the Chinese.

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The Politburo Resolution on Organizational Work says, on page 23:

“With regard to ethnic Chinese cadres and cadres who are mixed-blood Chinese, we must view them through the lens of our concept of the working class and strictly follow our Party’s policies and standards for cadres when we decide how to handle them; we must not view them through the lens of narrow ethnic nationalist and capitalist thinking”.

With regard to good, honest Chinese cadres who strictly follow the Party’s policies, who have been trained and tested, and who resolutely oppose the policies and the ideology of the reactionaries in Beijing’s ruling circle, we must give them employment, promote them, and exploit their effectiveness the same as we do for other cadres. 

Party Secretariat Directive No. 74, dated 14 May 1979, states:

“Temporarily suspend the issuance of identity documents to the Chinese in general. However, with regard to good cadres and good members of the masses, we can issue those individuals such documents.  We will conduct elections for people’s councils at all levels in the same way we have done in the past, meaning that ethnic Chinese citizens of Vietnam will still be allowed to vote and to run for offie.  Those who are good can still be nominated as candidates for people’s councils, but we will not allow them to become members of people’s committees at any level.

“For those whose political thinking is vague and unclear, who do not truly demonstrate through their attitudes and actions that they oppose the policies of the reactionaries in Beijing’s ruling circle, we need to help them, educate them, and use them in ordinary tasks and assignments. However, we must maintain our vigilance, investigate and monitor them, and collect concrete evidence in order to correctly assess their true nature.

“With regard to bad elements who oppose the Party’s policies, who support the expansionist aggressors, who serve as the lackeys of the expansionist aggressors, we must punish those individuals in accordance with our laws.”

-We must make sure that we fully and correctly implement the Party’s ethnic policies, especially with regard to the H’Mong, the Dao, the Nung, and other ethnic minority groups that live in the provinces along our Northern border in order to help to strengthen solidarity between our different ethnic groups and solidarity between our army and the people, and so that we can focus our efforts on expanding production and on stabilizing and improving the lives of our people who live in our remote highland areas.

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We must identify, provide supplemental education, and train cadres for our sparsely-populated ethnic minority areas, and we must build up a cadre of hard-core supporters and a network of secret agents to ensure that we are able to successfully accomplish our revolutionary mission in sparsely-populated ethnic minority areas and to combat and defeat every plan and scheme by Chinese spies to conduct operations in those areas.  In locations where serious violations of our policies toward our ethnic minority compatriots have occurred, we must recommend to the relevant Party leadership committees that they take resolute corrective action in order to strengthen the faith and confidence of the masses so that the masses remain committed to the Party and to the regime.  We must be on guard against, quickly detect, and quickly deal with plots and schemes by Chinese and CIA spies who are working in coordination with each other to direct FULRO to attack and oppose us in the Central Highlands and to recruit and assemble reactionary forces within the ethnic Khmer communities in the provinces along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border and within the Meo ethnic minority group living along the border between Vietnam and Laos and along China’s border with Vietnam and Laos.

We must also firmly grasp and correctly follow the Party’s other policies, especially our policies on freedom of religion, on overseas Vietnamese living in China, etc. in order to prevent Chinese spies from utilizing our mistakes to further their espionage plans and operations.

2)-Strengthen and solidify our border security to ensure that it is solid in all respects and is able to effectively combat all Chinese infiltration and sabotage efforts and to prevent Chinese spies from escaping across the border

Under the leadership of Party committees at all levels, our Public Security forces need to work closely with the sectors involved, and especially with the  People’s Army of Vietnam, to carry out the tasks that were laid out for us by the Northern, Southwestern, and Vietnamese-Lao Border Conference and by the Conference on Combating FULRO.  Survey and obtain a firm understanding of the situation in each individual area and identify places where the enemy usually crosses the border, and then implement plans to wait for and catch enemy infiltrators.  Local Public Security forces should work with our border defense forces and our militia-self defense forces to conduct regular patrols, station guards along the border, hunt down and capture enemy spies, commandos, and reconnaissance teams, and plant mines and and booby-traps to prevent the enemy from infiltrating into our territory and from fleeing across the border.

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Actively and aggressively attack the enemy, starting right at the front lines, and especially along the Vietnamese-Chinese border in order to protect the security of our border.  Our Public Security reconnaissance forces operating in the border areas need to receive additional training so that they are able to properly carry out the following four missions: proselytize the ethnic minority masses; institute a movement among the masses to protect the Fatherland’s border; develop a network of recruited agents and secret informants that covers our targets as well as the entire area; and build, train, and provide guidance and direction to village Public Security personnel.  In order to deploy forces to build a counter-spy posture in border areas, we must first of all rely on the people so that they work in close cooperation with our other forces to aggressively detect, identify, capture, and quickly and effectively combat Chinese spies.  At the same time we must also implement measures to suppress, detain, and reeducate counter-revolutionaries and to transfer away from the border area those individuals and elements that endanger our political security.  We must block all efforts by Chinese spies to collect intelligence, to recruit agents, to conduct psychological warfare, and to carry out act of sabotage.

3) -Take aggressive action to eliminate the sources of support for Chinese spies and to place them constantly on the defensive so that we do not allow them to be able to freely and easily conduct operations directed against us.

Step up our research to gain a firm understanding of the different types of Chinese spies and their secret informant networks and correctly implement the appropriate professional measures in order to effectively combat them.  We need to focus on detecting and combating the secret networks organized by Chinese spies.  In our southern provinces, we need to pay special attention to the networks of the Overseas Chinese Committee, members of the so-called Chinese Communist Party,  treasonous capitalists, and reactionaries within the Chinese community, paying particular attention to the secret networks organized by the South China Intelligence Department.  In our northern provinces, we need to pay attention to the  agents and secret informants recruited by spies inside the old “Joint Chinese Association” [Hội Hoa liên] and the former Chinese News Agency, and inside handicrafts cooperatives that have many Chinese members.

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Identify and resolutely combat the Maoist groups and do not allow them to assemble their forces in order to conduct riots and sabotage.  Mount waves of political offensives against the ranks of the Chinese spies aimed at destroying their ideology and their organizations and at encouraging them to surrender to us and to come over to the side of the revolution.  Utilize our mass movement to defend the security of the Fatherland, use various administrative measures (including controls on special types of business and commercial professions), and implement plans aimed at sowing divisions among their leaders and at reforming and reeducating their lackeys in order to put them constantly on the defensive and to prevent them from being freely able to combat and attack us. In parallel with our efforts to eliminate their support inside our country we must also focus guidance and direction on countering the efforts by Chinese spies to infiltrate into our country from the outside.

4)-Purify [clean out] counter-espionage areas and actively identify factors that could cause violence

Public Security should provide staff advice to the Party committees and work with the relevant sectors to launch broad-based mass movements to defend the Fatherland’s security. These campaigns should have concrete subject content that is appropriate to the specific area and specific targets, especially in focal-point areas. Special attention should be paid to building and strengthening Party, governmental, and mass organizations, especially at the grass-roots level. With regard to those organizations that are weak and that can provide fertile ground where the enemy might be able to incite violence and disorder, Public Security must draft comprehensive plans for submission to Party committees and local governments so that they can direct our efforts to incite the masses to participate in this struggle and to reeducate and detain counter-revolutionaries.  In individual areas Public Security needs to conduct research and analysis and then to take measures to eliminate factors that could be used to incite violence.  When dealing with and detaining enemy elements in ethnic minority areas, we also must fully study and digest the Party’s ethnic minority policies and use those policies to educate the people, to punish the enemy, and to deter bad elements.

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5)-Strengthen the work of protecting our internal security, of protecting State secrets, and of combatting internal penetration agents

Those forces that are responsible for protecting our internal security need to strictly implement the measures laid out in Party Secretariat Directives 236/CT/TW dated 18 September 1976 and 94/BBT dated 30 June 1980 and in Ministry of Interior Directive 17 BNV/NG-6 dated 21 July 1977 on combatting internal penetration agents [spies].  The general guideline for the work of protecting our internal security is: To devote the utmost attention to correctly carrying out counter-espionage operations in all of the different aspects of our internal security activities, and especially in our external [foreign] relations activities.  First of all we must quickly and resolutely purify our internal ranks to eliminate enemies and bad elements and we must take stringent preventative measures to prevent enemies from worming their way into our internal organizations.  When we have clear evidence that someone is an enemy penetration agent, we must immediately report this to the responsible Party committee so that a policy decision can be made to handle the situation correctly and completely. At the same time, however, we must also be on guard against enemy efforts to sow divisions and suspicion within our ranks.  With regard to penetration agents and lackeys of Chinese espionage organizations, we need to continue to detect and identify those individuals who have connections with the traitor Hoang Van Hoan or with the secret networks of the different Chinese spy organizations, and we need to pay special attention to those espionage organizations that in the past operated under cover names inside our country. 

We must pay special attention to protecting State secrets, we must strictly implement the four disciplinary regulations laid out in the Politburo’s resolution, and we must prevent the enemy from stealing or eliciting information about the Party’s and the State’s economic, military, and diplomatic policies.  Work with the responsible sectors to make recommendations to the Government on drafting lists of the different categories of State secrets, on promulgating documents with the appropriate legal nature in order to provide the legal basis required to monitor and conduct oversight over the implementation of these measures, to identify and deal appropriately deal with violators, to correct weaknesses and to fill in gaps, and to take preventative action and to actively block efforts by enemy spies to collect intelligence information.

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6)-We must increase the effectiveness of our efforts to protect our economy and counter all efforts by Chinese spies and their lackeys to sabotage our economy.

Strictly implement Politburo Resolution No. 31-NQ/TW, dated 2 December 1980, on protecting our economy, which said “Public Security has primary responsibility for combatting spies, reactionaries, and other types of criminals who sabotage our economy and commit violations against socialist property.  The relevant sectors, agencies, state enterprises, and units must also be held responsible for protecting our economy and for protecting the socialist property of their own agency, state enterprise, or unit.”  Public Security should work with our external relations [foreign relations] and economic sectors to increase investigations aimed at uncovering the enemy’s plans and activities designed to sabotage our economy, paying special attention to the work of preventing and blocking the enemy’s efforts in order to ensure that the enemy is not able to sabotage our economy.  Countering the enemy’s efforts to sabotage our economy means countering the enemy’s efforts to blockade and isolate us economically and combatting the enemy’s efforts to sabotage socialism’s production relations, production forces, and material and technical facilities, with the goal of helping to protect our efforts to build large socialist production facilities and organizations in our country.

People’s Public Security should help our economic sectors (industrial, agricultural, forestry, foreign trade), and especially our oil and gas, electrical power, and other important economic and national defense organizations and facilities, to strengthen their own internal security.  Public Security must conduct speedy investigations that reach definitive conclusions about suspected enemy efforts to sabotage our economy, and it must avoid reaching subjective, overly-simplistic conclusions or being lax about conducting investigations and about verifying evidence.

The Ministry and as our local Public Security authorities need to conduct preliminary assessments of the enemy’s plots, organizations, and tactics aimed at sabotaging our economy, our currency, our prices, and our markets and at sabotaging our production in order to meet our goal of  protecting our economy and our material and technical organizations and facilities.

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7)-Combatting Chinese spies who conduct operations designed to sabotage our ideology is a portion of the struggle between two different ideological concepts

The most important measure, the one that is of decisive importance in the effort to counter the enemy’s ideological sabotage operations, is to focus on educating the masses and on strengthening our political and ideological training of our cadres, Party members, and civilian population in ethnic minority areas, in the provinces along our northern border, in areas with high concentrations of ethnic Chinese, etc., in order to ensure that they clearly understand the reactionary nature of the enemy’s poisonous plots and schemes to sabotage our ideology so that we can increase vigilance and mobilize the combined strength of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must uniformly make resolute, total use of all possible methods in all sectors in order to constantly defeat the efforts by the Chinese reactionary clique to conduct psychological warfare against us and to sabotage our ideology.

In the current situation, the primary focus of the struggle against enemy efforts to sabotage our ideology must be concentrated on detecting, identifying, and struggling to block reactionary poems, songs, cartoons, and jokes spread by word of mouth or through the use of psychological warfare materials like leaflets, loudspeakers, etc. aimed at sabotaging the ideology of our cadres and of civilian residents living in the provinces along our northern border. We need to educate the members of our ethnic minority communities to so that they are able to combat the enemy’s efforts to win them over and to bribe them through the use of material inducements.

The Pubic Security sector should pay special attention to correctly implementing our different professional measures, and especially our reconnaissance and agent operations, aimed at identifying target individuals and enemy psychological warfare operations so that Public Security can fulfill it roles of providing outstanding staff advice to Party committees and governments and at the same time of being the force that directly conducts the battle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage campaigns to help to protect political and spiritual unity in order to be able to unify the will and actions of the local population.

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Our Public Security forces need to effectively implement major operations and concrete strategies designed to counter the enemy’s ideological attacks.

By carrying out these actions correctly you will be correctly employing our guidance concepts for preventing ideological problems and for attacking the enemy on the ideological front with an active and aggressive attitude as part of our overall counter-espionage struggle.

B. -Concrete Policies

a) -For Vietnamese who are suspected of having connections with the Beijing reactionaries: We need to investigate, conduct research, and collect documentation of each individual person in order to clearly differentiate those whose positions are just vague and unclear from those who are serving as lackeys for the Chinese reactionaries.  Pro-actively and aggressively prevent Chinese spies from being planted inside our ranks.  Coordinate with Party organizations to review the personnel in our various services and sectors, in economic organizations and facilities, and in those areas where Chinese specialists previously worked, and check on cadres and Party members who have been influenced by Maoist thought in order to concretely determine the seriousness of the problem and to take measures to resolve the problem on the organizational, ideological, and administrative [governmental] fronts.  When clear evidence of espionage activities is found, reports and requests for advice must be requested from the responsible Party committees. First of all, we must find ways to transfer the individual out of important areas and positions; we must establish investigative files to handle the case; and when there are suspicions we must conduct an investigation to reach a firm conclusion.  As for individuals whom the enemy contacts as a potential recruit, we need to come up with a skillful plan to educate the individual, bring him back into the fold, and block enemy actions directed against us.  In situations where conditions are right, we could use the individual to conduct an operation directed against the enemy [turn the individual into a double agent].

b) -For Chinese who request political asylum: First of all, move them to a separate area far from our headquarters agencies and areas that where we have important economic, defense, communications, and transportation secrets, and treat them well.

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We must quickly interrogate them closely about their organization, the organization’s policies, and its operational targets. Investigate and obtain concrete evidence of whether they are truly seeking political asylum or if they are faking their request.  Those who are truly, honestly requesting political asylum, who have positions and have influence in a [Chinese] district or town, and who have requested asylum because they were dissatisfied or because they were fleeing repression and terrorism by the Chinese reactionary regime, we should meet with them, educate them, and come up with plans to help them to quickly return to China to operate [as our agents].  If the individual is a figure with a political position, someone who has a certain level of influence in China at the province level or higher, we must immediately report this to the Ministry so that we can quickly study and verify this person’s status in order to submit a recommendation to the Politburo to carry out a plan to help the individual form an organization and to pull together revolutionary forces inside China.  This is a complicated subject and we must be very vigilant to guard the possibility that Chinese spies will utilize this method to conduct intelligence collection activities and to infiltrate their agents into our ranks.

c) -With regard to those individuals who were captured by the Chinese during the war and have now been exchanged back to us or who have returned on their own:  First of all, we must view them as victims of the war, we must carry out our policies correctly, we must stabilize their ideological thinking, and we must not  either be overly suspicious of them nor deal with them too easily.  When these individuals return to Vietnam, we need to provide them with separate quarters far from our border defense areas, give them political education, and explain to them the vicious, evil plots of the Chinese aggressors.  As for those on whom we have ample evidence that they served as lackeys of our enemy and have accepted assignments from the enemy to return to Vietnam to carry out actions targeted against our revolution, we must arrest and interrogate them, assemble files to either place them in forced reeducation [reeducation camps] or to prosecute them in our courts. If conditions permit, we might turn them around and use them to attack the enemy [as double agents].  Those who have agreed to work for the enemy but who do not give us a clear confession or who try to hide their actions, we must place them under surveillance to prevent them from causing any damage and from escaping.  For those who agreed to work for the enemy but who have now repented and provided clear, concrete confessions, we should take the appropriate actions, and if it is possible we should recruit and train them to become intelligence agents to use in our struggle against Chinese spies.

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d) -With regards to spies, commandos, reconnaissance personnel, and military intelligence personnel who enter our country by crossing our border or from the sea: Our border provinces need to have forces  ready that specialize in this task, they need to draft preventative and defensive plans, and they must regularly conduct practice exercises in capturing spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel.  When there are reports that enemy commandos, reconnaissance personnel, or military intelligence personnel have infiltrated our territory, we must immediately verify the information; surround the individuals, hunt them down and arrest them; detain them in secret and interrogate them to identify their colleagues, their collaborators, their commanders, their infiltration route, where they are hiding, what equipment and weapons they brought in with them, their specific missions, and their operational areas; and then quickly hunt down and arrest those who are still in hiding.

We need to pay special attention to identifying Chinese spies who have infiltrated by mixing in among groups of Chinese or Cambodians, or who are crew members on Thai vessels or the ships of imperialist and capitalist countries.  Every violation of our borders and territorial waters must be fully dealt with in accordance with our laws. In addition to arresting infiltrated spies so that they can be interrogated, in other situations, once we can verify and conclude that the case does not involve intelligence operations or espionage, we should treat the individuals properly, try to educate them in our policies, and clearly expose to them the reactionary schemes of the Beijing authorities.  We should study them and try to use some of them whom we believe could be used effectively by quickly letting them return home on their own, or we should work with our diplomatic agency [the Foreign Ministry, the Party External Relations Department] to launch a wave of political attacks and publicly return them to China in order to win the support of the international public and of progressive forces in China.

Those individuals who hold important positions in China’s spy, commando, and reconnaissance forces and whom we are holding in local prison camps must quickly be sent to the Ministry’s Interrogation Center to undergo timely and thorough interrogation in order to support our struggle against the reactionary expansionist clique in Beijing.

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g) [sic]-With regard to spies operating from inside permanent missions in Vietnam or who have mixed in among visiting delegations or groups

We must conduct reconnaissance [surveillance, intelligence collection operations] against the Chinese Embassy and the New China News Agency office in Hanoi, and we must strive to block their efforts to conduct intelligence operations, to recruit agents, and to conduct psychological warfare.  We must deploy reconnaissance personnel to tightly surveil Chinese Embassy cadres and employees, especially those who work for Chinese intelligence agencies and for Chinese Public Security, to detect their operational plans and schemes, paying special attention to their efforts to expand their contacts with the permanent missions of imperialist and capitalist countries, with cadres or personnel of our Party and State agencies and sectors, with ethnic Chinese residents of Vietnam, etc.  Coordinate with local Public Security to carry out good investigations and deploy a network of quality intelligence agents to conduct investigations into the enemy’s internal affairs; create conditions that will enable us to conduct coordinated reconnaissance operations; detect and identify the guidance and communications channels between the Chinese Embassy and their agents in our different local areas.

Implement the same policies toward the Chinese permanent mission that we employ against the embassies of the imperialist countries; strive to block actions that violate our rules on contacts with Chinese Embassy personnel, on entering and leaving the embassy, and on reproducing documents, bulletins, and photos belonging to the Chinese Embassy.

Detect and conduct counter-espionage operations against intelligence operations that are coordinated between the Chinese Embassy and the embassies of capitalist countries (British, French, Japanese, Yugoslav, Egyptian).

Conduct reconnaissance [surveillance] operations against Chinese delegations sent to Vietnam to conduct talks with us (should they agree to resume talks),  against the crewmen of Hong Kong and Singaporean-flagged ships, and against groups visiting Vietnam temporarily, especially those from the ASEAN countries that we suspect are being used as lackeys of the Chinese spies.

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III-Operational Methods For the Struggle Against Chinese Spies

1) -Launch a powerful mass movement to protect the Fatherland’s security that is directed at detecting and combatting Chinese spies

Public Security’s various operational methods are tightly connected with one another, and of these, the method of mobilizing the masses is very fundamental and basic. On the basis of utilizing and exploiting the collective mastery of the working class, we must launch a mass movement to combat Chinese spies.

We need to conduct studies and reviews and continue to instigate mass movement campaigns to protect the Fatherland’s security in each individual ethnic minority areas, at key points (such as along our borders, along our coast, among the ethnic Chinese community, and other points that Chinese spies use to infiltrate our territory and to conceal themselves), and we must avoid simply taking overly general, superficial actions.  We must build and strengthen high-quality people’s security cells that conduct concrete, practical actions and we must avoid the phenomenon of “beating the drums to sign people up” simply for form’s sake.  We must focus on resolving basic, urgent issues involving security and law and order, and we must link our actions directly with the actual interests of the masses.

The Chinese Counter-Espionage Department and our local political security offices should cooperate closely with the Movement Department and movement offices in determining the conditions, the content, and the measures to be used to mobilize the masses in ethnic minority areas and in areas where there are large numbers of ethnic Chinese to participate in the struggle against Chinese spies.

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2) -Carry out investigative operations aimed at studying and understanding the situation and at conducting investigative struggles against Chinese spies

a) -Carry out investigative operations aimed at studying and understanding the situation:

Public Security’s specialized professional forces (counter-espionage and intelligence) must strengthen their coordination with other related sectors, and especially with military intelligence and the Party and the State’s external relations [foreign relations] sectors to step up our investigations and intensify our studies of the enemy situation to make them deeper, more timely, and more systematic in order to for Public Security to be able to properly carry out its duty of providing staff advice to the Party and to pro-actively initiate counter-espionage plans to protect our political security.

These investigations and studies must be focused on uncovering the plans, intentions, and operations of the reactionary Chinese expansionists and their spy organizations that are trying to destroy the revolutions of the three nations of Indochina, and especially of Vietnam.  Pay special attention to obtaining solid information on specific details regarding the status, the plans, and the operations of Chinese spies during each individual time period in the various sectors - political, economic, military, cultural, etc. - especially in regard to the scale and size of these operations, to the timing of enemy attacks, and to the sectors they plan to attack sectors in their war of aggression against our country. Also pay attention to collusion between the CIA and Chinese spies, and also collusion with the intelligence organizations of ASEAN countries that are allies of the American imperialists and of China, especially Thailand.

We need to focus our investigations on detecting efforts to assemble forces from the refugee community to form the so-called “Indochina People’s Front” that includes the Hoang Van Hoan-Truong Nhu Tang clique, the Cambodian reactionaries, and the Lao reactionary exiles.  We need to quickly obtain a firm grasp of this situation and to actively attack and disrupt the enemy plans and actions aimed at attacking us.

We need to dig deep to determine what kind of guidance and direction the enemy is giving to their spy networks inside our country, and especially their spy networks within our own ranks, including the enemy’s efforts to sabotage our economy, his efforts to sabotage our ideology, his efforts to incite counter-revolutionaries inside our country, and his efforts to assemble forces to create riots and violent disorders.

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We need to dig deep to gain a firm grasp of the organizations and the centers where the Chinese spy agencies recruit and train the intelligence agents, spy-commandos, and reconnaissance forces that they are dispatching into the three countries of Indochina.

We need to conduct deep research and analysis of the reactionary clique within Beijing’s leadership to learn about struggles for power and position, about divisions between different factions, about who are the leaders of the different factions and groups, about their domestic policies, and about their foreign policies regarding Southeast Asia, regarding the three countries of Indochina, and regarding Vietnam and the Soviet Union.

We must use documents, information from press reports (both domestic and foreign), reports from our own intelligence operations, and practical experience from our own counter-espionage investigations in Vietnam to conduct studies and analyses in order to make assessments and come up with timely recommendations for both strategic and tactical policies to be used in our efforts to combat enemy espionage in general and to combat Chinese espionage in particular, and also to improve Vietnamese People’s Public Security’s professional skills and theory.

b) -File reviews and investigations to verify possible suspects

The Public Security City Bureaus and Province Offices must update and revise their lists of investigative subjects who are considered to be possible Chinese spies. Those locations that have completed their basic round of file investigations should continue efforts to verify information and to update and revise the documents to ensure that there are no mistakes and that no one slips through the cracks in order to make our research and investigation efforts continuous, concrete, and detailed, and we must avoid doing thing in a simplistic, informal fashion, and especially we must avoid the tendency to do just the basic file research and investigation and then put the matter aside.  The provinces along our northern and southwestern borders and Ho Chi Minh City are the areas where there have been many changes in the targets of our research investigations as a result of the war of aggression conducted against us by the Chinese reactionaries, and there is also the situation of various types of targets who fled to our country from Cambodia or who infiltrated into our country from Cambodia - we do not have solid handle on these targets so we need to review, check, and reassess them.

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In a number of locations either the file research investigations have not yet been completed properly or the files have been burnt or destroyed (such as in Cao Bang), so the research must be completely redone, starting from scratch.  All basic file research investigations of possible Chinese spies throughout our entire country must be completed by the second quarter of 1981 at the latest.

Pay attention to conducting file investigations of targets of the kind that Chinese spies usually try to utilize, targets inside our ranks who had connections with the traitor Hoang Van Hoan and his accomplices; targets who were agents of Lam Lap, Quach Minh, Lieu Thang, etc. This file investigation must enable us to reconstruct the  political, economic, cultural, and social organizations that the Chinese had in what was formerly South Vietnam in order to be able to expose the intelligence networks of the Chinese External Liaison Ministry, of the South China Intelligence Department, of the Overseas Chinese Committee, of Chinese Public Security, and of other covert spy organizations in ethnic minority areas.  Pay special attention to investigating targets who were lackeys of the Chinese reactionaries and who moved from North Vietnam into the South after the liberation, and also pay special attention to ethnic Chinese from Cambodia who fled to South Vietnam during the years 1970-1972 and in 1975 to uncover Chinese intelligence agents who were planted among these groups in order to infiltrate our country and to worm their way into our ranks.

We must use the file research investigations to identify potential dangerous Chinese spies and to step up our investigative efforts to identify those who are truly suspects.  Suspects must be handled carefully, exactly in accordance with our procedures,  and we must compile complete files and use our own recruited agents to get close to suspects so that we can reach quick conclusions about them in order to either turn the case into a formal prosecution case if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the individual is a spy, or to take measures to remove all suspicions against the individual if our suspicions have proven to be incorrect.  With regard to important suspicious targets and suspects who are working inside our Party or our State, a Public Security Director, Province Public Security Commander, or Public Security Department Chief must personally direct the efforts to confirm or deny the suspicions in order to be able to quickly reach an accurate conclusion about the suspect.

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c) -Struggle investigations

The Counter-Espionage Department and the Public Security City Bureaus and Province Offices need to conduct preliminary reviews of their Chinese spy investigations in order to come up with plans to advance these investigations.  Those investigations that have so far not detected any current activities (perhaps because the enemy has not been able to establish communications with the target or because the individual was ordered to remain hidden for a long time [i.e., was a sleeper agent]), you should consider those cases very carefully and report them to the Ministry - do not end them too hastily.  The Ministry’s various Reconnaissance Departments must deploy specialized professional reconnaissance forces to investigate cases and to investigate possible contacts and suspects while at the same time they must constantly visit our local Public Security forces to provide them guidance on establishing investigative cases and on conducting investigations, especially in our northern border provinces, our large cities that have large ethnic Chinese populations, and on cases involving targets who are working within our own ranks.

Establishing a formal investigation requires that there be an adequate basis for the investigation and that all the required laws and regulations be strictly followed.  Formal struggle investigations must truly become counter-espionage campaigns that use all of of our intellect and creatively and that use all of the appropriate methods and professional equipment of our Service.  For those incidents and target individuals about which there is sufficient basis to conclude that they involve espionage activities, a formal struggle investigation must be conducted.  We must resolutely eliminate instances of establishing a struggle investigation but failing to employ specialized professional reconnaissance personnel and methods, cases that do not reach a conclusion, or that “just sit there and go nowhere”.  Struggle investigations must be directed against recruited agents and against especially effective penetration agents.  We must be especially vigilant against the enemy’s use of smoke screens involving the use of crooks and fraudsters who conduct political activities designed to disrupt our internal ranks and to attract the attention of our Public Security forces to them so that they can secretly insert spies into our ranks and let them climb to high positions in which they can sabotage and destroy us.  From now on we will only conduct formal struggle investigations against the kind of Chinese lackey intelligence agents, spies, and reactionaries that will enable us to uncover their secret networks inside our country, their lines of communications, and their organizations, plans, and activities.

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We cannot allow the enemy to utilize recruited agents to exploit our own people that they have recruited by persuading them to work as spies and informants to collect intelligence information and transmit it directly back to their intelligence centers.  As for political criminals and fraudsters who conduct political activities, we need to quickly arrest them and deal with them in a timely fashion.  When conducting a formal struggle investigation we must always focus on intelligence operations.  In formal struggle investigations targeted against reactionaries we must make sure to conduct investigations to detect any communications and direction provided by Chinese spies to the reactionary organizations in question so that we can take the appropriate counter-measures.

d) -Intelligence agent and secret informant operations

Intelligence agents [đặc tình] are an important professional tool that pay a key role and are decisive in the conduct of reconnaissance operations. We must pay special attention to the work of recruiting and training intelligence agents and to deploying networks of quality intelligence agents in sufficient numbers to ensure that we cover the target individuals and the target areas in order to support both the immediate and long-term requirements of the struggle against Chinese spies, both in Vietnam and abroad.  We need to prepare plans and goals for recruiting intelligence agents in order to ensure that we have a sufficient number of quality agents, especially for focal-point target individuals and focal-point areas. 

Pay special attention to selecting individuals from among the Chinese spies that we have recruited and that we can control in order to turn them into intelligence agents for our side.  We need to boldly take the step of recruiting and training ethnic Chinese intelligence agents, intelligence agents who are members of ethnic minority groups, and intelligence agents who are foreigners assigned to work in foreign permanent missions, or who are members of visiting delegations and groups, and especially those who are officers or crewmen of ships from the ASEAN countries that visit our countries in order to use these individuals against Chinese spies, but we must in no circumstances use them as double agents. [sic]

In addition to developing networks of intelligence agents, we need to also pay attention to developing “honored collaborators” among those of our cadres who have solid political views and who previously worked with Chinese specialists or advisors and among scientific and technical cadres who received training in China, because Chinese spies could try to reestablish contact or to meet with them.

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We should also try to develop a number of foreign citizens whom Chinese spies frequently meet with in order to turn these foreigners into “honored collaborators.”

We must have effective, capable secret informants [mật báo viên] on all city blocks, in all collective housing compounds [apartment complexes], villages, hamlets, city wards, bus stations, ports, etc., who can spot unusual activity for us, including spotting individuals who seem to be conducting actions that could damage our security and public order, with special attention to espionage activities.

Leaders of Reconnaissance Departments and leaders of City and Provincial Public Security Bureaus and Offices must devote the necessary amount of time to personally developing and recruiting intelligence agents from among leading political figures in ethnic minority groups, clan leaders, ethnic Chinese intelligence agents, and intelligence agents who have a wide range of connections so that they can collect a large amount of information about the enemy, and also to gain practical experience in running intelligence agent operations.  Public Security leaders at the district, precinct, and province capital level must leader and direct our agent operations in their local areas and they must personally recruit and run [direct] a number of effective intelligence agents.

All reconnaissance personnel involved in struggle operations against Chinese spies must be able to handle intelligence agents effectively. We must not allow individuals who are not capable of conducting reconnaissance operations and who do not know how to handle intelligence agent operations to remain as members of our reconnaissance forces.

The Ministry needs to quickly update and finalize a manual on how to conduct intelligence agent operations in this new situation.  The Chinese Counter-Espionage Department should conduct a review of a number of our ethnic Chinese and ethnic minority intelligence agents in order to learn lessons from experience about how to recruit, train, direct, and guide operations involving ethnic Chinese and ethnic minority intelligence agents.

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The chiefs of district, precinct, and province capital Public Security offices are responsible for directing and guiding the recruitment, training, and direction of secret informant nets under the guidance of the leaders of the relevant Public Security Bureaus and Province Offices. 

In our Public Security intelligence agent operations we must be extremely careful to ensure secrecy; we must administer and educate our agents closely; and we must not allow our intelligence agents to do bad things, to lie to us, to betray us, or to cooperate with the enemy.

3) -Operations to interrogate targets and exploit files that the enemy has left behind.

Among the hundreds of Chinese spies, commandos, and intelligence personnel that we have captured and are holding, there are many very important sources of live intelligence.  We must administer, educate, and exploit them properly in order to provide timely and outstanding support to our struggle against Chinese spies. Under no circumstances must we allow them to commit suicide, to escape, or to die as the result of our own shortcomings. Nor should we simply imprison them without also educating them, trying to win over their sympathies, and trying to interrogate and exploit them.

Make sure to exploit American and puppet files and targets [individuals] who were involved with Chinese spies in order to discover the organization, the plans, and the networks of intelligence agents and secret informants that the Chinese spies left behind, and especially to discover moles [penetration agents] who are lackeys of the Chinese.  The Files Department is responsible for maintaining and exploiting enemy files and documents.

Quickly complete the work of building an Interrogation Center at the Ministry level in order to centralize the administration and exploitation [interrogation] of Chinese spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel whom we have arrested.  We must make sure that we first question them about Chinese sabotage plans and attack areas in order to be able to take timely defensive measures.  The Interrogation Center that we will build must be able to support all of our different professional sectors and it must have the necessary technical equipment (to make identity documents, take photographs, make recordings, ensure secrecy), etc.

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The Cadres Bureau needs to assign cadres who speak Chinese to help the officers responsible for interrogating these targets.  The Chinese Counter-Espionage Department will be fully responsible for all aspects of the interrogation and handling of these Chinese interrogation targets.

In the different local areas, especially in the Public Security Offices of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong, Quang Nam-Danang, and the six provinces on our northern border, should build or reconstruct and improve temporary detention camps to turn those camps into local-level interrogation centers that will conduct initial interrogations in order to provide timely support to our operations against the enemy and to categorize and deal with targets in accordance with the Ministry’s delegation of authority and assignments.

The Intelligence Department should conduct direct studies of Chinese spies who are being detained whom we might be able to turn into intelligence agents to support our intelligence operations.

All of the above-described activities must be carried out quickly under concentrated, unified, close direction and leadership, including the organization and guidance of campaigns, and these activities must be basically completed by the second quarter of 1981.

4) -Gradually, step by step, provide technical equipment and exploit the effectiveness of scientific and technological methods in counterespionage operations

Establish a system of truly close cooperation between our scientific and technical agency and our Chinese counter-espionage units in order to avoid divisions and rifts that could create obstacles to the common struggle.

We must properly administer and exploit the effectiveness of the equipment that we currently possess.  Actively study the deployment of technical equipment inside the Chinese Embassy, in the Interrogation Center for Chinese spies, and against targets of ongoing investigations in order to discover their plans and activities.

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Gradually, step by step, build and consolidate offices or components that will conduct technical reconnaissance to support our counter-espionage struggles in the City Public Security Bureaus and Provincial Offices; boldly and rationally make professional assignments of responsibilities and provide additional cadres and technical equipment to ensure that the Public Security City Bureaus and Province Public Security Offices, especially in the focal point areas, are able to conduct increasingly more effective technical reconnaissance operations.

5)--Strengthen our administrative security operations, especially our administration of identity registers, of family registration lists, and of special business [commercial] professions in order to provide outstanding support to our Chinese counter-espionage operations.  We must steadfastly and quickly carry out a program that will give us a solid picture of every family and every individual person and we must tightly administer the professions and equipment that Chinese spies might be able to use to carry out their operations, especially in the large cities, the provinces along our northern border, areas where large concentrations of ethnic Chinese live, and areas that have large numbers of ethnic minority citizens.  On that basis, we must help to develop a group of hard-core members of our mass movement and select from among them candidates to be recruited as intelligence agents or secret informants who can expose enemy elements and bad elements who are in hiding or who have just infiltrated in order to conduct operations. We must make an effort to obtain have a basically solid picture of the situation in order to meet the above-described requirements in the focal-point cities and provinces and the focal-points in the different localities by the end of 1981.

6) -Maintain close cooperation between People’s Public Security forces and People’s Army forces, especially with border defense troops and militia/self-defense personnel in conducting armed patrols to identify, block, and hunt down and sweep away Chinese spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel who  infiltrate across our borders or infiltrate by sea.  Make sure to plant mines, punji stakes, and booby-traps in those locations that we are unable to patrol or guard.  Conduct ambushes at points that enemy personnel frequently pass through in order to capture enemy personnel.  Public Security and Army forces need to draft coordinated plans to cover specific locations, they should conduct practice exercises, and the plans must be regularly updated and perfected.

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When infiltrating spies or commandos are captured by army soldiers or militia/self-defense forces are captured, after initial interrogation to obtain preliminary information in order to quickly hunt down other enemy personnel, we recommend that the captured individual[s] and all of his/their possessions should be turned over to Public Security for further systematic exploitation to support our efforts to combat the enemy.  Public Security is responsible for receiving, administering, and interrogating these prisoners and for reporting relevant information obtained to the Army.  Cooperation between Public Security and the Army in standing guard posts, in protecting targets, in conducting armed patrols, and in hunting down counter-revolutionaries needs to be conducted in accordance with the spirit of Joint Ministry of Defense-Ministry of Interior Directive No. 1, dated 08 May 1980.  With regard to the issue of turning over Chinese spies, commandos, and reconnaissance personnel captured by the Army or by militia/self-defense forces together with all of their possessions to Public Security for detention and handling, the Ministry’s leadership will hold discussions with the Ministry of Defense to reach an agreement on this subject.

Intelligence operations play an important role in investigative operations and efforts to understand the enemy from afar in order to be able to pro-actively deal with enemy plots and provide outstanding support to our counter-espionage operations. Politburo Resolution 31 dated 2 December 1980 states that People’s Public Security is responsible for conducting good intelligence operations against the imperialist and capitalist countries and against international reactionary organizations; for strengthening its counter-espionage operations aimed at protecting our agencies, cadres, and students overseas and for properly administering the ethnic Vietnamese community living abroad.  In the future, we must strengthen and expand our organizations that specialize in conducting intelligence operations at the Ministry level, in our northern border provinces, in Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong, Quang Nam-Danang, and a number of other localities that are able to conduct intelligence operations in order to form a broad, deep network specializing in conducting intelligence operations to meet our current political mission requirements.  We are also responsible for conducting political, economic, scientific and technological intelligence operations, but for the moment we need to focus on doing a good job of conducting intelligence operations that support our struggle against spies.

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We must coordinate with the Army Intelligence Department and the external relations [foreign relations] sectors in developing plans to disrupt the plan of the Chinese reactionaries and the American imperialists to assemble exile and refugee forces abroad to attack and destroy the Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian revolutions.  We need to have a plan designed to sow dissension and divisions between the exile reactionary elements to reduce their influence and the effectiveness of their operations. We must focus the spearpoint of our intelligence operations on China, the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, and the ASEAN countries, and especially Thailand.  Public Security forces at all levels must give priority to transferring cadres who are capable of conducting intelligence operations to our intelligence organization in order to strengthen and reinforce our intelligence efforts.

IV-Consolidate and Strengthen Our Organizations and Build Forces that Specialize in Conducting the Struggle against Chinese Spies

1)-Based on the implementation of Politburo Resolution 31 on operations to protect our political security and to maintain social order and safety in the new situation, we must quickly consolidate and strengthen our organization that specializes in conducting the struggle against Chinese spies.

We need to select cadres with political skills and professional reconnaissance capabilities, cadres who speak foreign languages, cadres who have the necessary knowledge and experience for assignment to the Chinese Counter-Espionage Department to carry out staff duties, to provide guidance and direction, or to personally control counter-espionage operations.  The other specialized professional departments, based on their individual missions and functions, need to have concrete plans to participate in the struggle against American spies.

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The Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong, Quang Nam-Danang, Dong Nai, Hau Giang, Kien Giang, An Giang, Minh Hai, Thuan Hai, and norther border province Public Security offices need to immediately strengthen their Chinese Counter-Espionage Offices. The focal point localities (the six northern border provinces, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Haiphong) might want to study selecting a number of good ethnic Chinese who have clear political histories, who have close links to the Vietnamese revolution, and who a good understanding of ethnic Chinese situation in the local area to become “society-ized reconnaissance” [covert, non-official cover officers]  who will receive profession training and will be deployed appropriately to operate in areas with large ethnic Chinese populations in order to detect and identify Chinese spies.

Reconnaissance forces working to combat Chinese spies, from the Ministry level down to the Public Security City Bureau, Province Office, District, and Precinct levels need to perfect their deployment of reconnaissance forces to monitor targets and enemy methods so that these forces become solid organizations that are strong enough to carry out their roles and duties at each individual level of command.  The Ministry’s reconnaissance organization will send forces down to key, focal-point areas, places that are conducting important Chinese espionage investigations, investigations of penetration agents within our own ranks, or investigative cases that involve a number of provinces or cities in order to coordinate activities and support local reconnaissance forces.  The Ministry’s forces are also capable of conducting independent investigations of cases that are being run directly by the Ministry as well as cases that involve the other countries of Indochina.  The reconnaissance elements of our City Public Security Bureaus and Provincial Public Security Offices are the main local counter-espionage forces that are responsible for guiding, directing, and supporting the reconnaissance forces of our district, precinct, and provincial capital Public Security offices.  District, precinct, and provincial capital Public Security forces are responsible for providing guidance and direction to the wards and districts conducting the work of gathering and monitoring information about the enemy situation at the grass-roots level.

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Working alongside the main reconnaissance elements within Public Security’s table of organization chart are also Public Security’s secret network, consisting of “socialized” reconnaissance [covert, non-official cover] personnel, recruited intelligence agents, “honored collaborators”, and secret informants.  The reconnaissance forces within our Public Security’s own table of organization charts, its secret network, and other forces from our entire Public Security sector (including forces detailed to Public Security and the mass movement to protect the Fatherland’s security) combine together to provide combined strength in our struggle to protect our political security, with the focal point of our efforts being the struggle to combat Chinese spies.  Our reconnaissance personnel must receive deep, extensive political education and good professional training; they must be deployed in depth, and they must have systems to provide them with the proper material and spiritual benefits so that these personnel can give us long-term service in the struggle against Chinese spies and so that we can avoid any unnecessary disruptions.

2) -Hold regularly scheduled specialized training classes on combating Chinese spies for reconnaissance personnel and for a number of others whose duties are related. Initially, we need to conduct Chinese language training classes for our specialized reconnaissance personnel.  During the up-coming five year plan we must ensure that our Chinese Counter-Espionage Department forces have the number of Chinese-speaking reconnaissance personnel that they need. The Training Department is to coordinate with the Chinese Counter-Espionage Department to draft a detailed plan and to implement this task.

3) -We must effectively implement Politburo Resolution 31, Party Secretariat Directive 92, and Ministry of Defense-Ministry of Interior Directive No. 1, which direct that all levels of command and all forces of the Public Security service must undergo a major transformation in their counter-espionage operations in general and in their efforts to combat Chinese spies in particular.  We need to eliminate rightist, purely professional-style thinking among our People’s Public Security cadres and to vigorously reform and reorganize our organization as well as our working methods and procedures to make them correct, precise, intelligent, skillful, and creative in order to ensure combat efficiency and a high level of operational effectiveness.

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Every piece of information and every document involving Chinese spies must be quickly reported back to the Ministry and this information must be collected in one location (the organization specializing in combatting Chinese spies), thereby overcoming the current problem of divisions of responsibility, stove-piping, and unfocused and divided organizational guidance and direction.  At the Public Security City and Province office level, we must ensure that we have focused, unified organization and direction of this effort in accordance with the Ministry’s own division of responsibilities.  We need to strengthen coordination and support between the different forces in our service and in related sectors, especially with the Army, and our external relations [foreign relations] and internal political organizations, in order to exploit the combined power of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle to combat Chinese spies.

4) -Ensure proper cooperation in counter-espionage operations with the Soviet Union and the other fraternal socialist countries in accordance with the agreements and memoranda that have ben signed.  Coordinate closely with the Lao and Cambodian security agencies in operations aimed at combating Chinese spies in the spirit of our concept that the three Indochina battlefields is one battlefield.

5) -Fully and strictly carry out all regulations on reporting, requesting instructions, and conducting preliminary and complete reviews of experience aimed at improving the effectiveness of our efforts to combat Chinese spies.  We must update, finalize, and strictly implement a system of reporting and requesting instructions for the work of combating Chinese spies in this new situation.  We must revise and improve the Service’s communications network to ensure constant, timely, accurate, and secure communications.

The City Public Security Bureaus, Provincial Public Security Offices, and the Chinese Counter-Espionage Department should conduct preliminary reviews of experiences and lessons learned in conducting investigations, including the methods used by Chinese spies and the different types of operations that they carry out, in order to improve the quality of our efforts, modify and improve our operations, and strengthen the effectiveness of our struggle methods.

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V-Implementation

Arrange to conduct training seminars for cadres and enlisted personnel on specialized Chinese counter-espionage training seminars in order to create a powerful change in our concepts, programs, ideological knowledge, operational methods, and revolutionary actions in conducting the struggle against Chinese spies in the new situation.

The Cadre Training Department and the People’s Security and People’s Police high schools and universities should include the subject of combatting Chinese spies in their 1981-1982 study curriculums and in the 1981-1985 five-year plan.

The Political Operations Department, the Public Security Scientific Research Institute, the Public Security Scientific Research magazine, the People’s Public Security newspaper, and the “For the Security of the Fatherland” radio program need to develop plans for propagandizing and educating our personnel internally as well as the civilian population on these issues.  Make sure that secrecy is maintained when conducting these propaganda efforts.

Depending on their own specific duties and responsibilities, our Bureaus, Departments, Institutes, Schools, etc. need to come up with concrete plans to implement this specialized resolution.

The Chinese Counter-Espionage Department and the Staff Operations Department of the General Security Department are responsible for helping the Ministry’s leadership in providing guidance to our Public Security Bureaus and Provincial Offices in drafting plans and setting concrete goals for carrying out operations and for monitoring the results of the implementation efforts of the different local organizations.

The Public Security Bureaus and Provincial Offices are to brief their local provincial and city Party Current Affairs Committees on the spirit and the content of this specialized conference  in order to request their guidance and to arrange for the implementation of this resolution in April 1981, and then report the results of your discussions back to the Ministry.

For the Minister of Interior

Deputy Minister

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Tran Dong