XUAN THUY: Abrasive Advocate

HAD he been born in the U.S. instead of in Ha Dong province, on the outskirts of Hanoi, Xuan Thuy, 55, most probably would have become a corporate executive--if never a board chairman. As a youthful agitator and underground journalist and later as a diplomat, jowly Xuan Thuy (pronounced Swan Twee) earned the trust of Viet Nam's Communist chieftains. Even during a three-year eclipse from public view before last month when he was named minister without portfolio to head Hanoi's negotiating team, Thuy retained a resonant string of official titles, notably as a member of the Lao Dong (Communist) Party Central Committee and head of its foreign relations section.

Politburo membership and the policymaking power that goes with it have always exceeded Thuy's grasp. He stands at the front of the second rank. "Thuy is a thoroughgoing professional," concedes a U.S. diplomat. "He knows what he's doing, even if he is only doing what he has been told." As Foreign Minister from 1963 until his removal two years later for undisclosed--and hitherto unnoticed--"health reasons," Thuy mouthed Hanoi's message, glad-handed visitors, and facelessly executed orders from above. He was replaced by Nguyen Duy Trinh, a pro-Peking hardliner. Although favoring Moscow, Thuy nimbly sidestepped the Sino-Soviet dispute: he was a founding member of Hanoi's friendship organizations with both the Soviet Union and China.

Promoting the Cause. As second-in-command of North Viet Nam's team. Thuy was a stubborn, wily opponent to U.S. Negotiator Averell Harriman at Geneva in 1961-62 for 15 wearying months of bombast and bargaining over Laos. In Paris he can be counted on to be an equally abrasive advocate, doing his best to erode American stamina with long-winded tirades and propaganda points before the negotiators get down to substantive issues.

Whatever Thuy's official ranking, he has been one of Ho Chi Minh's closest and most trusted cronies for two decades. Rising steadily upward from his initial efforts as a schoolboy agitator against French colonial rule in the 1920s, he attracted the attention of the French Surete, and at 18 was shipped off to the penal colony on Poulo Condore archipelago in the South China Sea, the Asian equivalent of Devil's Island. Two more jail terms followed, interspersed with propaganda work; from 1939 to 1945, he edited a clandestine pro-Communist newssheet in Son La penitentiary. Thuy was later rewarded with the editorship of Cuu Quoc (National Salvation), the organ of the insurgent Viet Minh.

It was Thuy's work as an agitprop handyman that brought him into Ho's orbit. In 1950 Thuy was sent abroad, and he is a widely traveled rarity among North Vietnamese officials. Fluent in French and Chinese, he has touted Hanoi's line in Vienna, Stockholm and Rangoon, as well as Peking, Moscow and other Communist capitals, where he has generally appeared in the guise of a journalistic commissar. The softspoken, stumpy Thuy, whose name means spring water, emulates stay-at-home apparatchiki in one respect: his private life is shadowed in secrecy. Thuy is known to have married and fathered children, but his family has been kept as hidden from foreign eyes as the bargaining points he carries to Paris inside his head.

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