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PEACE IN VIETNAM as some accounts have suggested. In fact, these assassinations were largely on a selective basis. The underground organization showed canny intelligence in eliminating the most unpopular Diem-appointed officials. Thus, the vetcran Southeast Asian cor- respondent, Denis Warner, hardly a supporter of Hanoi, writes in his book, The Last Confucian (p. 89): “Summary Viet Cong justice for a village chief guilty of corruption or brutality did not offend the peasants. On the contrary, it tended to endow the Viet Cong with some of the characteristics of Robin Hood and his band of merry men... .” The exact point at which Hanoi began to support insurrection- ary activity in the South is subject to much dispute, but certainly in 1960 such support was made public by Hanoi. In September of that year, Ho Chi Minh’s government formally acknowledged the southern dissidents as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFLSV). This was in effect the political arm of the insurgents, a grouping that Diem collectively labeled “Viet- cong” and that certainly incorporated a large number of the Viet- minh’s former adherents in the South as well as other elements opposed to Diem. The leader of the Nationa! Liberation Front, Nguyen Huu Tho, is a southerner, a Saigon lawyer first arrested during the period of French control and later, in November of 1954, by Diem. While still in jail, in 1959, he wrote a Ictter to ex-Vietminh southerners urging them to form a national front. In May 1961, approximately a year after the Front was formally established, he escaped from prison and soon emerged as the Front’s principal leader, According to Tran Wan Huu, who served as Bao Dai’s prime minister from 1951 to 1953, Nguyen Huu ‘Tho is “very well known in Saigon as a person who was most active in opposition to the French in the colonial period.” By 1960 members of the Vietcong were being given training in the North, and some arms were being sent south, although the vast majority of the arms employed by the insurgents continued to be American equipment captured from or solid by Diem's troops. Meanwhile, United States officials in Vietnam were increasingly frustrated in their efforts to induce Diem to institute the sort of reforms necessary for winning popular support. The hope that