That's right Anon. The OSS (CIA forerunner) had partnered with Ho to get intelligence on the Japanese who were then occupying INdochina. Many Americans aren't aware that Ho actually pleaded for U.S. airstrikes against the Japanese in Vietnam, and he got them. U.S. airstrikes were made in Nam Dinh, Khanh Hoi, Hai Phong, and other parts of Vietnam in the 1940s through that program.
The OSS was courting Ho to run a U.S.-backed postwar government in Vietnam, but the arrangement fell apart largely due to demands that the Rockefellers and Standard Oil were making on Ho for Vietnam's oil resources. Also, Ho was never really comfortable with Americans as he'd bee trained in Moscow and China. He had lots of sweetheart offers from his contacts in those countries so it was easy for him to turn away from the OSS.
Sauce: https://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-and-the-oss.htm
Even earlier than that, during World War I, the Vietnamese nationalist Phan Chu Trinh had written to Woodrow Wilson asking for U.S. assistance in negotiating an end to French colonialism in Indochina. Trinh's letter was never answered but I'm told it is still in the National Archives.
Trinh had written a historical novel about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and was eager to lead a U.S.-allied democratic Vietnam if the French could be induced to leave. In retrospect, if the U.S. had pursued such a policy from the 1910s, the 'Vietnam War' would probably never have occurred.