Le Duc Tho; Vietnam Peace Negotiator

Le Duc Tho, a hard-line Communist revolutionary named as a winner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a settlement in the Vietnam War, died Saturday in Hanoi. Official accounts say he was 79.

The Foreign Ministry in the Vietnamese capital said by telephone that Tho died early in the day but gave no details.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency, reporting from Hanoi, said Tho died of throat cancer. He had been hospitalized at an army hospital since returning in April from treatment in Paris, the report said.

Tho shared the Nobel prize with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. They negotiated the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. But Tho turned down the prize, saying Vietnam remained at war.

The guns fell silent two years later, when Communist forces defeated the U.S.-backed Saigon government and unified the country.

Tho, one of the organizers and theoreticians of revolution in Vietnam, remained in the ruling Politburo after 1975. He was believed to have played a key role in Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in late 1978.

But in 1986, he was removed from the Politburo as aging veterans gave way to more liberal leaders seeking economic reform.

Western diplomats have speculated that in recent years, Tho’s power had ebbed but that he remained an important figure in the party’s conservative ranks. His official position was adviser to the party’s Central Committee.

Until the end, Tho kept parts of his life from the public domain as did many revolutionary leaders of his generation. There are several different versions of his birth date and accounts of his early life.

By some accounts, he was born of poor parents in a village about 60 miles south of Hanoi. But some Western biographical sources say his father was a civil service official of middle rank in the French colonial administration.

His activities during World War II are still a matter of speculation among Western historians. Some sources say Tho escaped to China and helped Vietnam’s founding father, Ho Chi Minh, form the Viet Minh guerrillas and led them against the Japanese. Others say Tho spent some of the war years in a French prison in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, Tho apparently did not have a direct say in military matters.