(5 of 10)
Lost: an Open Mind. In secret, aboard an ice-covered Soviet vessel, Ho Chi Minh put into Leningrad. "So here you are!" a Communist contact greeted him, and for two years the Russians paid him flattery. In Leningrad they lent Ho a fur coat, treated him to roast meats and two-finger-long cigarettes. In Moscow they invited Ho, about 30 years old, to sit with the President of the Third International. In return, Ho helped the Russians organize their "University for Toilers of the East," and accepted training-like China's Chou En-lai—as a "professional revolutionist." There was no doubt about Ho's enthusiasm. "There comes a time when you end your period of study and become a man of action," an American who knew Ho much later explained it. "Ho was like that. He had widely read French, German, Russian philosophy, and he decided for himself what his own philosophy was to be. Ho's choice was Communism, and he never again had an open mind."
After graduation from Moscow in 1925, Ho embarked upon a slithering, 15-year journey through the Communist underground of the world. He would appear shaven-headed in Thailand, disguised as a Buddhist monk; he would show up in the Latin Quarter of Paris, explaining to waiters how to prepare his food. In Canton, Ho worked for Borodin, the Russian intriguer who helped undermine China. In Singapore, Ho organized Southeast Asia's Comintern. And when IndoChina's Nationalist Party rebelled against the French in 1930, Ho Chi Minh played it coldly; although he was constantly posing as a Nationalist, Ho and his Reds stood aside and let the Nationalists die. "My itinerary is carefully prescribed," Ho Chi Minh once confessed. "You cannot deviate from the route, can you?"
Men in Black. The patient Ho Chi Minh got his chance in World War II. Three months after the Germans swept into Paris, the Japanese, almost unopposed, took effective control of Indo-China. In what amounted in Asian eyes to a crowning loss of face, the Vichy-French agreed to cooperate with the Japanese. With flexibility and imagination, Ho patched together a "United Front" of Communists and Nationalists to harass both Frenchmen and Japanese. Ho called the new party the Viet Minh.
During the war years, the Viet Minh organized a guerrilla force of 10,000 men who did so well in the jungles that they became known as "Men in Black." And Ho Chi Minh, at almost no cost, gained a position from which he could: 1) guide and control the Nationalists; 2) win prestige in the country as the only effective anti-Japanese underground; 3) earn the good will of Nationalist China and the U.S. merely because he was helping to fight the Japanese. "I was a Communist," Ho Chi Minh would later remark, "but I am no longer one. I am a member of the Vietnamese family, nothing else."