page_title: Central Office for South Vietnam
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Central Office for South Vietnam / History
caption_attribution_description: English: General Nguyen Chi Thanh: Secretary of COSVN, member of the Politburo
context_page_description: Central Office for South Vietnam, officially known as the Central Executive Committee of the People's Revolutionary Party from 1962 until its dissolution in 1976, was the American term for the North Vietnamese political and military headquarters inside South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was envisaged as being in overall command of the communist effort in the southern half of the Republic of Vietnam, which included the efforts of both People's Army of Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and the People's Revolutionary Party. Some doubted its existence but in his memoirs the American commander in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, spoke of it as something whose existence and importance were not in doubt.
  According to PAVN Major General and later dissident Trần Độ, COSVN did, in fact exist and was responsible for organising and directing the Viet Cong and served as overall command. It was however hierarchically directed by the Central Office which directed overall strategy, and was directly controlled by Hanoi. COSVN existed to operate the Viet Cong military and political effort.
context_section_description: The headquarters was reportedly created in 1961 when the southern and central branches of the Lao Dong Party (the Vietnamese Communist Party) merged into the Central Directorate for the South. An advance element of the Party's Central Committee, the headquarters was chartered to direct VC guerrilla operations in South Vietnam. Major General Tran Luong came south in May 1961 to reorganize the structure of the Directorate and its subordinate regions, Military Regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10, known collectively as the B-2 Front. In the process, he created COSVN.
  In October 1963, COSVN organized the Military Affairs Party Committee (MAPC) and the Regional Military Headquarters. COSVN's first secretary, Nguyễn Văn Linh, served concurrently as the secretary of the MAPC, while General Trần Văn Trà became commander of the Regional Military Headquarters. Senior General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, a member of the northern politburo, arrived at COSVN in late 1963 or early 1964 to serve as southern regional political officer and became the dominant figure at the headquarters until his death during a visit to Hanoi in July 1967. This regional command structure reported through Thanh to the PAVN general staff in Hanoi. When Phạm Hùng replaced Thanh as the politburo's representative, he also became the first secretary of both COSVN and the MAPC.
caption: Nguyễn Chí Thanh, the leading strategist and military commander of the Viet Cong. He would die of a heart-attack in 1967 while reporting on the war situation to Hanoi.
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