Vasil Tomov was born in the Rhodopes village of Arda, in the Ottoman Empire.
In January 1903 he finished the school and became an officer with the rank of a second lieutenant and served in the Ninth Infantry Plovdiv Regiment, but in the same year he left the military and the Emigrant Representative Body of the IMARO sent him as a military instructor in the revolutionary region of Serres, where he joined the revolutionary band of Yane Sandanski.
In August 1903, Angelov was a delegate at the Ser region congress that took place in Livadkata, near the village of Pirin, where the action plan for the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising was developed.
In the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, he operated in the region of Demir Hisar together with Iliya Karchovaliyata and Lyubomir Stoenchev, but they did not manage to accomplish the plan to seize the town.
When the uprising ended, Angelov and his revolutionary band went back to Bulgaria, where he joined again the Ninth regiment, but he continued to complete tasks given to him by the IMARO.