During the earliest days of 1951 many journalists and intelligence analysts in the West thought Ho Chi Minh's prolonged absence from public view meant a coup d'état had taken place within the Viet Minh hierarchy. These same minds held that the most likely candidate to launch such a power play was Ho's number two: Dang Xuan Khu (1907 - 1988). This article goes into some detail explaining who he was and what he'd been up to for the past forty years.
An admirer of Mao, Dang Xuan Khu oversaw the executions of thousands upon thousands of North Vietnamese people while in pursuit of Ho Chi Minhs's vision of "Land Reform".
