Early picture of Nguyen Ai Quoc as a young man, probably taken in Paris.

T H E F U G I T I V E
C ommissaire 1 Louis Arnoux of the French Sûreté waited impatiently on the busy quay of the Port of Bangkok. He had been there since 6am. He wanted to be quite sure that his quarry, one
Nguyen Ai Quoc (‘Nguyen the Patriot’) 2 , would not slip through his net again.
He had been tipped off by a mole in the Vietnamese communist movement in Hanoi that Ai Quoc would be arriving on the SS Gola from Singapore that morning. It was now almost noon, and the SS
Gola had still not made port. In fact, the ocean-going steamship was not able to navigate through the sand bar at the mouth of the
Chao Phraya River at low tide without running aground, so its arrival was delayed by a few hours, waiting for the tide waters to rise.
Arnoux carefully checked each passenger who disembarked from the vessel when it finally docked, but he failed to realize that a tall, bespectacled Chinese businessman wearing a black Homburg hat and a smart white linen suit, under the name of ‘Lai ’, who spoke perfect Cantonese to the immigration officer through an interpreter, was Ai Quoc.
Arnoux had been on ‘the Patriot’s’ trail for more than ten years. He had been stalking this frail, unkempt and unremarkable
Annamite 3 in Paris since 1919, from one cheap hotel to another, and from one alias to another, and kept records of all his clandestine meetings at dozens of locations all over the French capital. The secret service branch of the notorious Sûreté were closely tracking the birth, growth, and activities of the Vietnamese communists and nationalists in France, and were starting to shut down anti-colonial
2 Ho Chi Minh’s name from 1920 to 1940.
3 Present-day Vietnam was once known as Annam, and before French rule, the outside world knew the people as Annamese or Annamites (from An Nam – The
Pacified South – named by the Chinese who conquered them).
5

B A N G K O K operations in Indochina. Most of all, they wanted to nab the new and up-and-coming activist, Nguyen Ai Quoc, who was now roaming
Asia as a covert agent known as ‘Vuong’ to the Moscow-based
Comintern 4 . Disguised as a Chinese tycoon, a Buddhist monk, or a blind beggar, he would surface in Canton, Hong Kong, or Singapore – then vanish. Again and again, he was reported dead, only to reappear in another guise, with a new alias. As long as Arnoux was on his tail, Ai Quoc knew he could never lead a normal life, nor return to
Vietnam, where he would immediately be arrested and sentenced to death. This cat-and-mouse chase was to last twenty years. No one in the Sûreté knew about the Vietnamese communists and their elusive leader better than Arnoux. For Arnoux, the capture of Ai Quoc had become an obsession.
It was the middle of the monsoon, July 1928. He waited at the port for two more days hoping that Ai Quoc would turn up, but when he didn’t, he boarded the next ship to Singapore to continue his investigations there. Merde, he silently cursed to himself. It was not the first time that this wily Annamese chameleon had slipped through his fingers.
The Sûreté Générale was the colonial security and police service in charge of French Indochina, created at the beginning of the last century, with headquarters in Hanoi. Even though most agents of the Sûreté were Vietnamese, all important command positions were held by Frenchmen. In those days, the Sûreté dealt primarily with criminal activity, such as banditry and river piracy.
When France was attacked by Germany in 1914, nearly one hundred thousand Vietnamese went to France during the 1914-
4 Ultraradical and communist organization founded in Moscow in 1919, uniting
Communist groups of various countries and advocating the attainment of their ends by violent revolution.
6

T H E F U G I T I V E
1918 war to serve directly in the French army, or were coerced to work in some auxiliary service organisation. The French government promised independence to Vietnam, in return for helping France in her war against Germany. After the war, the French failed to live up to their promises made to the returning veterans and to the citizens of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina 5 , causing popular uprisings throughout these areas from 1920 onwards. It was the start of strong grass-roots, anti-French nationalistic opposition in Indochina that was to last for the next four decades. Before then, resistance to French colonialism had been purely xenophobic and limited to a small educated class. Now the uprisings were beginning to develop into a general insurrection, and the Sûreté changed from a criminal investigation bureau to an intelligence and anti-subversive operation. Its total strength was increased from 600 to 5000 people.
It had become ruthless, and rural uprisings were now suppressed with ferocity, their leaders often executed, particularly if they were
Communists. Now, most arrests were for political reasons.
A former non-commissioned officer in the French army,
Arnoux arrived in Vietnam in 1912 and started as an assistant police inspector in Saigon. Unlike most newly-arrived Frenchmen, he decided that he would learn Vietnamese. On field trips, he was always accompanied by an interpreter and two armed men. Not knowing the language put him at a distinct disadvantage; he could never quite get to the bottom of his investigation. He was a dedicated intelligence officer and needed to understand the
mentality of his suspects. He also wanted to get closer to their culture. He was successful in solving most of his cases, and gained the reputation for being impartial, incorruptible, and very shrewd.
Arnoux was highly commended by his superiors, and in February
1925, he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In
5 Over the eighty years that France colonized Vietnam, it was administratively divided into three political entities, Tonkin (the north), Annam (central Vietnam) and Cochinchina (the south), an efficient ‘divide and rule’ policy, by exploiting ancient regional animosities, making it difficult to unite the country.
7

B A N G K O K
1932, he was promoted to head the Sûreté for all of Indochina.
Hounded and investigated for over twenty years, Ai Quoc had every reason to hate Louis Arnoux. Paradoxically, Ai Quoc respected his intellect, and in particular his investigative skills. He never spoke ill of him. On the contrary, he learned that to be a step ahead of his nemesis, he had to think like him, and develop novel ways to outwit him. They were, in a way, birds of a feather. They were also born within five years of each other, Arnoux being slightly older of the two.
They met each other for the first time in Paris. Arnoux went out of his way to look for French-educated Vietnamese people who could be useful to the Sûreté for recruitment, either as future agents or informers. In 1919, on home leave 6 , he was introduced to Ai Quoc at the Café de la Paix near the Opera. He deliberately avoided getting into a political argument with this young firebrand, who would continually harp on about a Vietnam libre 7 . Arnoux was immediately struck by his piercing dark eyes which looked directly at him and never left him from the moment they started to talk to each other. He was impressed by Ai Quoc’s ability to charm his listener, and most of all by his intelligence.
Instinctively, he felt that Ai Quoc would one day “amount to something.” 8 He thought that Ai Quoc was extremely clever, so much so that he wanted to introduce him to Albert Sarraut, once his boss and governor general of Indochina, and now Minister of Colonies. Sarraut didn’t think it was important to meet such an insignificant Annamese 9 and asked his deputy to stand in for him. Nothing came of the meeting, but the French police were able to get their first photograph of him as he was leaving the Ministry.
6 Inspectors were given six months paid leave in France every three years.
7 Free Vietnam.
8 Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, A Biography.
9 They eventually met in Paris in 1946, when Ho returned as head of the first
Vietnamese government to try, unsuccessfully, to negotiate independence for
Vietnam, and sat on opposite sides of the table as adversaries.
8

T H E F U G I T I V E
Arnoux was quite possibly the first, and in 1925, certainly one of very few French political analysts, to conclude that the
Communist party was simply an instrument for action against the French. If they acted like fanatics, he said, it was not so much because of their new political faith, but rather because of their nationalist fervour. Although he didn’t necessarily agree with Ai
Quoc’s politics, Arnoux understood his passionate idealism only too well. He had studiously read the political articles written by
Ai Quoc in the left-wing newspaper L’Humanité, and realised that his appeal for Vietnamese rights was highly subversive, but not criminal. Arnoux decided to stake out his residence from 1919 to 1923, and assigned a number of Vietnamese to infiltrate Ai
Quoc’s circle of associates and report back to him. In his effort to collect incriminating evidence against him, they even confiscated
Ai Quoc’s letters and articles that he wanted to send to Vietnam.
Ai Quoc was starting to learn about the art of subterfuge and deception, and so adept was he in not breaking the criminal law, that Arnoux could never succeed in bringing a case against him that would stick.
They were to meet again several times in Paris, and Ai Quoc got to know Arnoux so well, he realised that as long as his pursuer was alive and he “had a free hand, there was no chance of his returning to Indochina.” 10 Indeed, it was entirely due to Arnoux that ‘the
Patriot’ was to be away from his country for the next twenty years.
In Vietnam, it is not unusual for a person to change his or her name over the different cycles of their lives, and as they mature or move on to a new phase, their names would change accordingly.
The choice and meaning of names are very important to their status
10 Nguyen Luong Bang, Mes rencontres avec l’oncle Ho.
9

B A N G K O K in Vietnamese society, and aliases are common. Ho Chi Minh,
‘Bringer of Light’, was to have more than thirty aliases, and as many disguises, in his lifetime. Nguyen Ai Quoc was one of Ho
Chi Minh’s earlier aliases. The name Ho Chi Minh itself was also an alias which he adopted during the Second World War. He was to continually reinvent himself and was past master of disguise.
He had the actor’s skill of playing a part, and was able to blend himself perfectly with his surroundings. Combined with his innate gift of speaking the language of the country wherever he happened to be, even his close associates failed to recognize him whenever they had to meet at an agreed rendezvous.
11 He spoke seven languages, and was most fluent in English, German, Russian, several dialects of Chinese, and of course, he excelled in French. He was soon to learn to speak and read Thai. In France, and indeed in the West, he would wear a suit, normally shabby, in keeping with his revolutionary persona. Sometimes, posing as a wealthy Chinese businessman, he would dress elegantly. In China, he would be attired in mandarin’s clothes and in Southeast Asia he would often shave his head and become a Buddhist monk. In his own country, he normally dressed as a simple farmer, although his garment of choice, when not in disguise, was his characteristic cuo-nao, a cool high-necked white pyjama suit, with open-toed rubber sandals made from old truck tyres.
From the rails of the SS Gola, Ai Quoc recognised Arnoux standing on the quay immediately. Acting the part of Lai, a flashy Cantonese businessman, he put on his gold-framed sunglasses, adjusted his Homburg hat, and commandeered a porter to carry his small trunk down the gangplank in a deliberately loud voice. He joined
11 Ibid.
10

T H E F U G I T I V E the immigration queue, aggressively demanding for an interpreter.
As he moved along the line, he lit a cigarette, and stared through a cloud of smoke straight past Arnoux, standing a few feet away behind the immigration officer’s counter, and calmly handed over his passport. He then headed leisurely for the port’s entrance gate, followed by the porter, carelessly throwing away his cigarette end onto the pavement, and hailed a rickshaw. Without looking back, he told the driver to go to Hua Lampong station.
11