Founded by the Indochinese Commuist Party (ICP) in late 1947 and run by Inter-Zone IV (Lien Khu IV), the Lao Issara Committee for the East operated from Con Cuong, located on the Vietnamese-Lao border. Although the committee was theoretically a part of the Lao Issara government-in-exile in Thailand, its location on Inter-Zone IV’s western border allowed the ICP to use it as an opening into a Lao Issara nationalist movement largely suspicious of communism and the Vietnamese. The Eastern committee counted among its Lao members Ōkham Anurak, Nūhak Phūmsavan, Som Phommachanh, and Kaisôn Phomvihān, all future allies of Vietnamese communists. The Lao Issara Committee for the East allowed the Vietnamese to keep close tabs on the development of the Lao Issara movement and, upon its dissolution in 1949, be in a position to rebuild a new Lao nationalist movement under the supervision of the ICP (with the creation of Party Affairs Committees for Laos) and in collaboration with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s military goal to retake all of Indochina from the French. The committee for the east worked in close collaboration with the ICP’s Administrative Office for the Frontier operating simultaneously in the same area. See also ADVISORY GROUP 100; CHU HUY MAN; COMMITTEE FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS; INDOCHINESE FEDERATION; NGUYEN KHANH; NGUYEN THANH SON.