Ranking Vietnamese communist leader expelled from the Indochina Communist Party (ICP) in 1951 for unilaterally closing the Vietnamese diplomatic delegation in Paris in 1949 and criticizing Ho Chi Minh and the Party in reports to the Soviets. Born in central Vietnam, Tran Ngoc Danh was the younger brother of Tran Phu, the first general secretary of the ICP, who had criticized Ho Chi Minh’s “narrow nationalism” in the early 1930s. Tran Ngoc Danh completed his primary and secondary studies in colonial Indochina before studying in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. He returned to Indochina in the early 1930s and joined the ICP in 1931 before the French arrested him about a year later. He was not released from prison until the Japanese overthrew the French in 1945. He immediately joined the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in September, serving as a deputy in the National Assembly, and was named an alternate member in the ICP’s Central Committee. In 1946, during his trip to France, Ho Chi Minh named Hoang Minh Giam and Tran Ngoc Danh to create and lead the DRV’s Permanent Delegation to France. Tran Ngoc Danh assumed direction of the delegation in late 1946 and held this position until he dissolved the mission in 1949. During his time in France, he worked to win over the support of the Vietnamese living in France, the French people, and world opinion to the Vietnamese independence cause. He also maintained good relations with Jacques Duclos and other ranking members of the French Communist Party. Duclos helped him escape the French police and make his way to Prague in 1949 where Tran Ngoc Danh created another diplomatic delegation. It was also during this tense time in the Cold War that Tran Ngoc Danh sent a series of letters to the French, Chinese, and Soviet communist parties criticizing the “nationalist” and “bourgeois” tendencies of the ICP in general and of Ho Chi Minh in particular. The ICP expelled him in 1951 for having endangered the country’s foreign relations, for having dissolved the delegation in France without authorization, and for criticizing a senior member of the party. See also H122 AFFAIR; HOANG VAN HOAN; JOSEPH STALIN; LA VINH LOI; NGUYEN DUC QUY.