In December 1960 a group of Vietnamese revolutionaries met in a hamlet near the Cambodian border. They proclaimed the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The Second Indo-China War began. It ended with the expulsion of the USA and its allies, the destruction of non-communist Vietnamese nationalism and the unification of Vietnam. This study is the first to place the creation of the NFLSV in its full historical context. It reveals how this organization was able to achieve nothing less than the revolutionary transformation of an agrarian Third World economy. Thayer\'s account is set within the the wider international context of the Cold War years and the emerging Sino-Soviet dispute, and has been meticulously reconstructed from captured Communist Party internal documents, clandestine radio broadcasts, and interviews with many government officials, intelligence analysts and defectors from the communist movement itself.\"Carlyle A. Thayer is an acknowledged international authority on Vietnam, who, after serving in Vietnam as a volunteer with the International Voluntary Services, devoted over two decades of study to this subject, including three field-research trips. He teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.\".