How–and Why– The New York Times Didn’t Interview Pol Pot

By Nate Thayer

January 23, 2014

After I interviewed Pol Pot in July and October 1997, my excellent magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review–the sister publication of the Wall Street Journal and both owned by Dow Jones–nominated me and the story for a Pulitzer Prize.

It was a long shot as the Pulitzer is eligible only to correspondents for American media organizations, and the Review was incorporated in Hong Kong. However the story did run the same day on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, so the WSJ asked me to write a bried outline of how the story came about for the Foreign Editor, John Bussey, to formally draft a letter to the Pulitzer committee. Here is one such exchange of letters I wrote to my editor, the extraordinarily talented in his own right Nayan Chanda of the Far Easter Economic Review:

From: Nate Thayer at REVIEW 11/13/97 10:25 PM
To: Nayan Chande at REVIEW
Subject: RE: Pulitzer Nomination by Bussy/WSJ
Dear Nayan:
After several hours composing the letter regarding the Pulitzer we talked about and based on the memo of (Wall Street Journal Foreign Editor John) Bussey, my computer crashed yesterday as I was finishing and I lost everything. Even with the intervention of Vincent in Hong Kong, it was not retrievable, so I have started again. Here is a stream of consciousness, letter to a friend style outline as suggested by you and John:
First of all, I think it would be to our advantage to promote the freelance aspect, rather than to try to weave around the fact that the Review was central to this whole getting to Pol Pot project being successful.

It has been a long time since a freelancer won a Pulitzer, and, as we all know, the politics of these awards sometimes overwhelm the meritocracy of it all, and freelancers–particularly foreign correspondents–take the brunt of risks and often go the extra mile.
The overwhelming number of foreign correspondents killed and wounded each year are freelancers, according to statistics compiled by Reporters Sans Frontiers and the Committee to Protect Journalists. It might be to our benefit to highlight this as an opportunity to recognize freelancers, and the net effect, of course, is that the Review, the Journal and Dow Jones will ultimately revceive the credit it deserves if we are a successful. It is not irrelevant that the Khmer Rouge executed many foreign journalists in their day.

Another macro theme to be addressed is the question of why I was the one “allowed” in by the Khmer Rouge or “invited” in y the Khmer Rouge, the implication being that I cut a deal with the, am a “fellow traveler”, agreed to “conditions”, or paid them off. All of these are accusations that have been floating around and many of them I have been asked directly. The answer, of course, is that none of them are accurate.
I was not “invited” in by them or “selected” by them. I contacted them as I had done scores and scores of times over the last decade and carefully tried to convince them to let me in to interview Pol Pot. It took six weeks for the “trial” and more than four months of non-stop, 7 days a week cajoling, finagling, secret meetings, messages passed back and forth, contacts activated on my behalf etc. until they finally relented–a far cry from being “invited” and all its implications.

On the question of why I was the only journalist is simple–as far as I know, and I think I know clearly–I am the only Western journalist who has managed to open a direct channel with contacts, and it took many years of work on several continents to develop the contacts to the point where I now have the code names of the entire leadership, their secret mail drops, a channel through Europe that is actually a Chinese trained coded radio operator who sends coded messages directly to the jungle, and the mobile telephones of the top leaders that I call directly in the jungle, as well as intermediaries that hand deliver requests and communications.

The reason why the New York Times didn’t get in–which there is all kinds of suspicions being promulgated that I shut them out–is simple: The New York Times or anyone working for them never had any contact whatsoever with the Khmer Rouge.

Even though they traveled around the world to my hotel in the Thai border town of Surin on the eve of the Pol Pot interview, they, in fact were never going anywhere farther than the hotel lobby, little less into the Cambodian jungle.

This is a fact I know because when Elizabeth Becker and her cameraman and fixer arrived at the hotel in high heels and a dozen pieces of designer luggage the evening before I went into the Cambodian jungle, and informed me that they were going with me into Cambodia to meet Pol Pot, I made a couple calls.

I excused myself from my whiskey and notebooks in the hotel coffee shop, went upstairs and simply called up on my mobile phone the chief of staff of the Khmer Rouge army and inquired whether there were other journalists scheduled to come into Khmer Rouge territory the next morning to interview Pol Pot with me.. He said no there was not, that no one had contacted him, and they had never heard of Elizabeth Becker (These are peasant military commanders who don’t read the New York Times.) He further assured me–being the man in control of all the guns and check points accessing their control zones, that he would immediately put out an directive that no one else would be allowed access to their zones the next day except for me and my team. Given the fact that this man controls all the guns at their checkpoints, I was quite confident that Ms. Becker would not be accessing Khmer Rouge control zones.

I then called another friend of mine, the commander of the Royal Thai Army regional sector controlling the Thai border with Cambodia–who controlled all the heavily guarded checkpoints on the Thai side which controlled access out of Thailand into the no mans land between the Thai border and the Khmer Rouge zones. He, also, said that no one was granted permission to exit Thailand to access the Khmer Rouge zones save for me and my team. He further said he would immediately put out a directive to strictly forbid any other journalists or foreigners to exit Thailand the next day through his checkpoints.

So I slept quite confidently that night knowing that Ms. Becker and team would be enjoying the rest of their stay in Thailand, mostly in the hotel lobby in Surin.

However, since an academic I had confided in during researching and preparation that I was scheduled to have this interview with Pol Pot had then called the NYT and said if they paid his way that he thought he could get the NYT in to interview Pol Pot, there was never any question that my competition was attempting to piggyback on four months and upon numerous years of meticulous and very difficult full time work on my part, and I was Goddamned if I was going to be beat on this story by a Washington based NYT “reporter” in high heels, a short skirt, enough luggage to require a bellhop and a luggage cart, who flew in from Washington with letters from senior U.S. officials’ who were her friends requesting she be given assistance in her “reporting” efforts.

It is in fact a classic difference in the way Washington correspondents and those in the field operate. Elizabeth Becker got a call in D.C. and, in exchange for the NYT paying money to a “fixer” based at a University in London, flew across the world, after calling (U.S. State Department officials) Strobe Talbot and Stanley Roth, arrived in Bangkok and called the U.S. Ambassador and asked for their intervention on her behalf with the Thai military to secure permission from the Thai’s to accompany me into the Cambodian jungle. The U.S. embassy staff were outraged at the combination of hubris and arrogance of being essentially ordered around to do the impossible and ludicrous. A more preposterous scenario could not be concocted. They arrived at the border hotel with a truckload of luggage and smug demeanor as if the plan they had hatched was actually not comical, but rather a done deal.
In a place like Cambodia, and to interview Pol Pot of all people, the intervention of high level contacts from foreign governments (particularly those representing a government the Khmer Rouge considered the enemy with which they were at war with), does not work.

On the other hand, if you have slept in the jungle with the field commanders and his troops, and for a decade talked about what a drag malaria is, compare medicines, share your food over jungle campfires eating rice and bugs, and commiserate together on how you haven’t been ;laid for weeks because your girlfriend is living back at a rear base guerrilla headquarters or in (my case) my house in Thailand, and how the food sucks and you are tired of getting shot at and not getting paid shit, when it comes time to raise the bamboo pole by the guys with AK-47′s at the jungle checkpoint, the chances are considerably greater you will be allowed access. It doesn’t matter whether you have a letter from the Pope, the the guy with the AK-47 has been told not to let you in, then you are not going anywhere, which is what happened with the New York Times.

When I arrived back at the hotel the next day from the jungle after interviewing Pol Pot, Ms. Becker was scurrying around frantic still in the hotel lobby, and inquired of me whether I knew why no one would allow her out the hotel. I packed and left for Bangkok with the interviews of the Khmer Rouge leaders on videotape next to me in our Pajero.

The bottom line is the story didn’t take a few days, it took many years and there was a plan to try to interview Pol Pot and I had been carefully working every angle and was poised to jump at any opportunity and be ready for any scenario. I was rejected many times. But it finally worked, because we were ready to grab the opportunity and we had put the time and resources into it when it looked like it might or maybe even had a slim chance of, working. It easily could have failed at the last minute and had many times before. This time it didn’t. So that is part of the reason we were able to access the inner sanctums of the Khmer Rouge and interview Pol Pot.

 The Final Collapse of the Khmer Rouge: How the US Dropped the Ball When Offered to Bring Pol Pot to Trial for Mass Murder

Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript of “Sympathy for the devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge”

Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction or transmission in whole or part without express written permission from the author

PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO SUPPORT THE EFFORT TO ENSURE PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK AND RELATED HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS ON THE KHMER ROUGE AND CONTEMPORARY CAMBODIAN POLITICAL HISTORY

By Nate Thayer

Immediately after emerging from Pol Pot’s jungle trial on July 25, 1997, I had finally achieved what had been my primary goal for more than a decade: to penetrate the inner sanctum of the top leadership of the Khmer Rouge. Immediately, I began daily contact with an expanding circle of Khmer Rouge operatives and foreign intelligence and military officials who’s secret work had long prevented outsiders from accessing them or the Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

At the periphery was a rogues gallery of characters, many whose identity were never volunteered or ascertained. It was genuinely as if I was living a role as a protagonist in an international thriller, and I loved it.

I have always found this to be true of spies and soldiers who engage i covert work: Once they get over the hurdle of being confident you will not betray them or they won’t be killed for having contact with you–a very dangerous and often impossible task–they are anxious to talk; to correct misinformation they have read; to defend or explain their work; to impart information that they have found interesting or important; to boast of their unique knowledge, access, or talents and achievements; to complain about the politicians who are interfering with their mission; and, not the least, to share and engage in the normal human desire to gossip and banter with someone else who shares an interest in what is usually very lonely isolating work.

These were all true with Khmer Rouge General Khem Nuon, who became my close friend and ally. When I was led to a jungle hut in July 1997 to be briefed on the tumult and carnage that had led to the arrest of Pol Pot, I was met by a small delegation headed by General Nuon who was dressed in full Chinese PLA style military uniform.

General Nuon I knew only by reputation and from years of pouring over intelligence documents and military organigrams where his name cropped up as a top military field commander. Nuon, who weeks earlier had been ordered killed by Pol Pot, had in turn led the forces that crushed him in June 1997, and was now clearly in control as the top field commander of the Khmer Rouge as Ta Mok’s army chief of staff. In war, it is, ultimately, the guy with the guns and the troops–not the political leadership–who has the power to make things happen, and Nuon was Ta Mok’s top man. As such, he had immense power and influence to get me access to people, places, and information. With Nuon, I had hit pay dirt, and I began to focus relentlessly on developing a good relationship with him.

He was immediately likable, with kindly, sincere, crinkly eyes. With a shy and easy laugh and chuckle, he would giggle constantly, childlike in his curiosity and his desire to please. He had the natural traits of great leaders everywhere; competent, hardworking, smart, trustworthy. He was also, I made sure never to forget, an accomplished and ruthless killer.

General Nuon’s biography was similar to many Khmer Rouge senior cadre and military officers. He was once one of Cambodia’s best and brightest. A peasant boy who had won a scholarship to Cambodia’s most prestigious university–Sisowath–he was an accomplished mathematician.. He scored the highest int he entire country in his mathematics entrance examinations the year he took them. But he drooped out in 1972 to join the revolution, disappearing into the jungles where he was destined to spend his entire adult life.. In 1976, soon after the Khmer Rouge took power, he was sent for secret naval, language and other training to China, a reward bestowed only on the most promising of Khmer Rouge officers. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Christmas day 1978, and drove Pol Pot back to the jungles, Nuon flew back from China to Bangkok and disappeared over the Thai border into the forest once again.

18 years later, we met in those jungles and began a close friendship. Nuon spoke fluent Chinese, Thai, French, and competent English. I was the first Westerner he had ever met, save for the one he had arrested and executed with a bullet to the back of the head a few months earlier in 1997.

Nuon was unquenchable in his curiosity to know everything about how the world worked. Our friendship was critical to my access to the inner sanctums of the Khmer Rouge, which, while excellent–indeed unsurpassed–in recent years, now became, overnight, genuinely remarkable. Nuon would call me from the jngle or wherever he was daily on his new favorite toy–a cellular telephone–just to chat. ” What are you doing today? he would giggle.

The overthrow of Pol Pot and General Nuon’s concomitant ascent to power within the Khmer Rouge hierarchy was immensely liberating to him. As Ta Mok’s most trusted aide, and bolstered by his language skills, he was tasked with liaising with the unknown world outside the isolated, forbidden Khmer Rouge jungle enclaves.

Secretly, General Nuon came to my house in Bangkok scores of times, accompanied by Thai military intelligence escorts and handlers in unmarked pickup trucks who would lurk around my garden while Nuon drank hot tea with lots of sugar and peppered me with questions from politics to popular culture into the night. Sometimes, the Thais would get nervous and balk at his meetings with me and forbid him to come to my house. Nuon relished in giving them the slip from his Thai military safe house, where he stayed in Bangkok, and sneak over to my place in a taxi. Other times, he would call me and say it was urgent that I make my way to the Khmer Rouge jungle headquarters at Anlong Veng, or some obscure rural noodle shop in a remote Thai border village. There he would seek advice whether some political or military strategy the Khmer Rouge leadership were considering would be prudent or effective. Over time, I became General Nuon’s filter to explain how the world outside the jungles worked, which was critical to the new mission that Ta Mok had bequeathed him: to figure out how to salvage the remnants of the Khmer Rouge movement by establishing relations with an outside world that they had totally cut off for decades.

He would take copious notes gathered from shortwave radio broadcasts or something he had read and ask advice and analysis of each countries policy toward Cambodia, of what strategy might further them towards cutting a peace deal, and, importantly, what to do with Pol Pot, who was being held under arrest behind Nuon’s house. There, in a one room teak house on stilts with a rattan roof and a small vegetable garden tended by Pol Pot’s wife and 12 year old daughter, Pol Pot was confined with no books or access to visitors until General Nuon and Ta Mok could figure out what to do with him.

This gave me unprecedented access to Pol Pot until the day he died. I literally knew what Pol Pot ate for breakfast each day, what his mood was, what was the content of the conversations he had with his wife and daughter, and who visited him. “How is the old man today?” I would ask Nuon during his daily calls to check in. No names were ever used in these telephone conversations as we both knew they were monitored by more than one government, and Nuon would recount the minutia of the mundane existence that were the final weeks and months of one of the centuries most egregious mass murderers, Pol Pot.

Rumours would periodically swirl through diplomatic and journalistic circles in Phnom Penh or Bangkok on the health or status of Pol Pot or the seizure of Khmer Rouge territory by government troops, and I could confidently and accurately ascertain the true facts. I couldn’t get enough of extracting details of life within the Khmer Rouge, both historical and current.

Nuon, in turn couldn’t get enough of life in the world outside the jungles, and we saw each other as a vital trusted link to each others worlds. Nuon, and is comrades, were genuinely in awe at what they viewed as my ability to take an event in their jungle and , within hours of my departure, deliver a synopsis or analysis to the masses in virtually every country in the world. They thought that I must possess extraordinary influence and power. From their perspective, they saw one guy come spend a few days with them with a television camera , a still camera, and a tape recorder and notebook, and, like clockwork, deliver an analysis of those events to every country and world leader on the planet. They did not process or comprehend that it was the rarity and import and content of the reports–not who was delivering it–that resulted in it’s wide dissemination. They would monitor the shortwave radio and within hours my voice or a synopsis of my report would be on the BBC, Australian, French, Thai, and American radio, among others. Their pictures would be on the pages of every newspaper they were given. The video would crackle over the television sets they had hooked up to car batteries on the dirt floors of their huts. World leaders would react to their comments, their voices also broadcast over short wave radio.

They could not figure out how one journalist could accomplish this. Since, in the communist bloc governments and the Cambodian political culture in general that was all they knew–that all news is State controlled, they assumed I had enormous influence with world leaders. I did nothing to dissuade them from this miss-impression. They often would get angry at my reports, disagree with them, but they knew I had the ability to get the message to the world.

That fact was enormously helpful in my increasingly successful and unrelenting negotiations to gain continued and deeper access to their movement. After a whole lifetime of deprivation in the jungle, for Nuon, his life was in many ways, beginning. Grocery stores to books to modern fashion to new-fangled hi tech gadgets fascinated him. He had a thirst for knowledge for just about anything. And he would constantly make excuses to leave the jungles for my house in Bangkok to quench that thirst.

Nuon, like a child at Disney world, would walk with me through the shopping malls and streets of Bangkok taking in the sights of the modern world. Over months, I painstakingly explained to him the role of a journalist in a free society, not obligated to a government or country or politics, but rather to deliver the facts for the public to determine its import and meaning and for the sake of history as a vital tool of maximizing correct and optimum public policy. Nuon thought this was a wonderful concept, and made it his mission to help me. “This is very important history. You must understand it,” he would say to me solemnly.

We would have “study sessions” where he would bring his “homework” on questions I had given him on Khmer Rouge history, and he would bring back his meticulously researched information. “This is very important history. People should understand the true history of our movement.” He was genuinely committed to helping me access the facts of Khmer Rouge history, of arguing my case to Ta Mok for complete access to Khmer Rouge leaders and cadre, and, importantly, their Thai military intelligence liaisons.

On my periodic trips through the guerrilla zones, Nuon was very protective. Concerned with my safety, he ensure his most trusted armed bodyguards accompanied me everywhere once we entered the Cambodian side of the mountainous jungles and descended int o the Khmer Rouge controlled zones.

Nuon was fond of holding my hand tightly, squeezing it, and whispering to me that he had a secret to tell me, with his other hand slicing a finger across his throat, indicating if I didn’t keep the secet a secret he would be killed.. After a few months, when he began criticizing Ta Mok and expressing disagreement on Khmer Rouge policy, I knew he now trusted me implicitly. Such conduct would surely result in ruination, to put it mildly, if it were ver to become known. He would be accused of the most serious of Khmer Rouge crimes–confiding internal secrets to an American–a crime punishable by certain death. I never betrayed a confidence, and he knew it.

Nuon’s trips to Bangkok became more frequent and his stays longer in the months after Pol Pot’s trial. This was good for me. In the jungles and along the border, he would be less free to talk as we were usually accompanied by other Khmer Rouge cadre or Thai military intelligence.. At my house, he felt like he could talk freely–and we did for many hours at a stretch.

Like all Khmer Rouge cadre, he would talk in whispers when subjects were sensitive, irregardless of the fact that no one was even in the house with us. If someone would ring the doorbell at the front gate of my walled off compound, he would go hide upstairs, beckoning me with a loud whisper to ascertain whether they were to be trusted and he could emerge back downstairs.

Other people would come over to visit, meet Nuon, and leave never the wiser that they had just been talking to the most powerful Khmer Rouge guerrilla commander. Nuon loved it and reveled in the camaraderie that we had just put one over on someone. Nuon’s every essence of existence was living a clandestine life.

Nuon loved best to go wander the streets of Bangkok and go to the big modern shopping malls. Hee would squeeze my hand and giggle as we walked the malls, a grin on his face, wide-eyed at the array of consumer goods. We walked by a McDonald’s, which I explained was a popular American restaurant with branches throughout the world. “Is it expensive? he asked.

I tried to explain a woman’s lingerie shop with skimpy, decidedly non-utilitarian underwear displayed on mannequins in the windows. “We don’t need those in the jungle,” he stated matter-of-factly, a confused grimace etched on his face. He would take my hand and hold it tightly before boarding an escalator, giggling.

Nuon was having the time of his life.

But it was bookstores that he loved the most, and we would browse for hours, mainly through the politics and history sections. Nuon would grab whatever interested him, and we would present them to the cashier, whom I would then pay out of my pocket. Nuon had little concept of money or how it was earned or its role in obtaining commodities. He bought textbooks to use to teach his two children, including advanced calculus books and beginning English readers.

I also bought Nuon books I thought he would find useful. “Ethics for Beginners” and The Holocaust for Beginners” were to of my slightly surreptitious favorites, and Nuon thanked me profusely, saying “This is very important. I must study this and then we will discuss it.”

He bought a small electronic address book which he played with for weeks. He loved the function of the map of the world which would display the time zones. “Look! If it is six o’clock in Paris it is midnight in Anlong Veng!” and giggle and clasp my hand tightly.

“We will be friends forever!” he would say sweetly, lock on my eyes and mean it with all his heart. Nuons trips to Bangkok in the fall of 1997 became more serious as he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a Thai military hospital. He had surgery to remove his thyroid. I would visit him in the high security wards, where he was checked in under an assumed name.

I would run his medical records, diagnosis, treatment, and medications by doctor friends of mine and through intelligence agencies of foreign governments for a second opinion, and buy him medicine. He appreciated this very much. Nuon and I shared some medical maladies.

Both he and I had our hearing severally damaged when our vehicles had been blown up by anti-tank mines in the jungles of Northwest Cambodia. He liked the camaraderie that evoked. There are some things shared in life one cannot explain in words, and being on the wrong side of a landmine explosion is one of them.

During one of Nuon’s drop ins at my house in Bangkok, my father–a former U.S. diplomat and retired U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer, Ambassador to Singapore and China specialist—was staying at my house during a visit and we all had dinner together, my father and the the Khmer Rouge army field commander chatting for hours in Chinese, which they both spoke fluently. The Khmer Rouge had long known my father was a former U.S. government official and, mixing Asian cultural norms with their experience as communist trained cadre, assumed that there is no such thing as a retired U.S. government official or a son of one who was not beholden to his father and his government. It was one of things that fueled their suspicion that I was a U.S government agent. Nuon treated this encounter as a high level secret meeting between the Khmer Rouge and a senior U.S. official, grilling my father on options for a rapprochement between the Khmer Rouge and Washington. My father was not amused.

When I mentioned, after Nuon had departed into the night with his entourage of Thai military intelligence agents, that he was perfectly capable of broadcasting the encounter over the Khmer Rouge clandestine radio, my father was genuinely alarmed. US policy had forbid for more than two decades any official contact with Khmer Rouge officials. He immediately called the US Ambassador to Phnom Penh, Kenneth Quinn, and reported the meeting.

On several occasions, I had tried to set up a meeting between US officials and the Khmer Rouge, at the request of both the Khmer Rouge and US spooks whose job it was to observe and monitor and report on the guerrilla group and whatever they were up to.

Several of my friends–spooks who worked for the US and other governments–were anxious to meet with Nuon and others. They were intelligence agents and it was frustaring to them to be tasked with trying to ascertain what the Khmer Rouge were up to and be denied permission to meet with their senior leaders. It was embarrassing for them that their bosses in Washington and other capitols would read of important developments first in the pages of the Far Eastern Economic Review. But both the US ambassadors to Phnom Penh and Bangkok denied repeatedly all such requests, fearing the leak of a secret meeting would serve as a political fodder for partisan opposition in Washington and fuel longstanding and baseless allegations that Washington was supporting Pol Pot and his army. For the Americans, the perceptions of foreign policy towards Cambodia was far and away more important than substance. It was often the case that they were interested in attempts at clever public relations excersizes than thoughtful policy.

One particularly outrageous example involved General Nuon. In May 1975, only weeks after the Khmer Rouge seized power and South Vietnam fell to the North, it was then Khmer Rouge Naval battalion commander Khem Nuon who led the communist forces that fought over the captured American spy ship, the Mayaguez, and the bloody and very high profile battle that followed. More than 30 Americans were killed, many remaining unaccounted for to this day. By the 1990′s, the Americans had spent and were continuing to spend millions of dollars to try and locate the bodies of the Americans still listed as Missing In Action and piece together the events of these fateful days in May 1975.

Nuon, as the top field commander for the Khmer Rouge of that battle, knew every detail and drew me maps of exactly what happened to whom when and where during that ferocious confrontation. Nuon, and now I, knew exactly where the bodies of the MIA Americans had fallen.

But Washington refused to meet with Nuon, and continued sending helicopters and teams of American soldiers with shovels to dig for bones with precious little intelligence and a refusal to accept the precise intelligence available to them through General Nuon with no sTrings attached. Nuon, meanwhile, had all the answers, and I got him to agree to meet with American military intelligence to brief them thoroughly. But Ambassador to Cambodia, Kenneth Quinn, refused permission, and millions of more American dollars were spent in the following months digging holes aimlessly looking for the remains of the American still listed as Missing in Action. It was a cynical and cowardly waste of taxpayers money but an approach to foreign policy which I had long since learned to be routine.

But for me, a positive side effect and consequence of this sort of approach to foreign policy and the US refusal to deal with the Khmer Rouge was that I remained the best liaison for the Khmer Rouge to the outside world.

Virtually every Khmer Rouge operative I ever met knew who I was. They had a cacophonic, although usually positive, view of me. First, as relatively knowledgeable of their movement and intimate with their leaders; second, as an outsider who had spent years in their jungles–something the rank and file soldiers liked and few outsiders had been willing to do. It made me a curiosity. And three, as an American, and therefore a Central Intelliegence Agency operative of their hated enemy. That was dangerous. Thousands had been arrested, tortured, and butchered for being viewed as the same, and entirely incorrect, suspicions.

There was always someone, through politics or personality, in the Khmer Rouge control zones who deeply opposed my presence and would be happy to kill me. I saw the clenched faces and focused glares of hate all the time.

But General Nuon was very protective and I felt safe always surrounded by his grim faced armed bodyguards. I had no doubt that they would instantly slaughter anyone who tried to harm me. My Khmer Rouge guards knew the unpredictability of enemies in the jungle, which is why the insisted on armed Khmer Rouge bodyguards preceding, accompanying, and following me wherever I went.

Pol Pot still had many loyalists, many who blamed me for humiliating and condemning him to the world. By early 1998, I had spent months debriefing the Khmer Rouge on history and current events and they had accepted me as part of the landscape. But under Ta Mok, the guerrilla movement continued to fall apart.

Despite the public renunciation of Pol Pot in July and the impossibly ludicrous attempts to portray themselves as a new, improved Khmer Rouge, the simple fact was they were not fighting against anything by 1998, except the humiliation of total surrender. Khmer Rouge soldiers were tired of fighting and tired of living in the jungle and in March 1998 the discontent exploded in mutiny against Ta Mok.

Fighting between Khmer rouge soldiers erupted near Anlong Veng. On March 21, two Khmer Rouge divisions stationed 30 kilometers east of Anlong Veng mutinied, taking control of their area. Nuon and his troops were dispatched to put down the rebellion. Taking advantage of their absence from headquarters, another division in Anlong Veng itself mutinied on March 24. They commandeered heavy vehicles, fired on the few defenders of the sprawling jungle town, and headed south toward government held territory with more than 500 families of the troops who were rebelling.

When Nuon and his forces returned to Anlong Veng from attempting to quell the rebellion on the outskirts, people were still fleeing and confusion reigned. Some of his soldiers refused to open fire for fear of shooting their own families. Mok fled Anlong Veng to the safety of the mountain on March 22.

On the 24th, the rest of the leadership ran for their lives as their houses were burned and their own heavy guns were turned against them. The Khmer Rouge headquarters at Anlong Veng had fallen–not to government troops but to their own last remaining loyalist fighters. Ta Mok and the rest of the leaders were cowering in bunkers with not much more than the clothes on their backs.

By April 4, 1998, elements of ten divisions, with at least 1893 troops representing more than half the fighting force of the Khmer Rouge, had defected and were advancing up the mountain with fresh resupplies by their new government allies. It was a major, if inevitable blow to the Khmer Rouge movement.

I called a number I had for emergencies that I knew to be a Chinese hand-crank phone in a hut near the Thai border. The Khmer Rouge cadre who answered greeted me with an urgency and gravely promised to get a message to general Nuon. “He is at the front line,” the cadre said, and added the leaders were all safe on the mountain.

Nuon called back late that night. His voice was tired and solemn. ” I want to see you. The situation is very difficult,” he said, and he urged me to come to the border. All telephones were, correctly, assumed to be tapped and he could give me few details. “My friend, we have a lot to talk about. I will explain to you when I see you.” Nuon did confirm that Anlong Veng had fallen but said it was only temporary.

The story–the first official confirmation from the Khmer Rouge–was blasted all over the front pages in Asia. Prior to that it was all second hand reports from Bangkok or Phnom Penh quoting anonymous sources or unnamed western diplomats. This was the first official confirmation from the Khmer Rouge that their headquarters had fallen.

I left once again for the 8-hour drive through Northeaster Thailand to the border town of Surin. When I met Nuon the next day, details emerged. ” Ta Mok asked me to shoot the people but I did not agree because there were many women and children,” Nuon told me.

Khem Nuon was close to desperate. he detailed what amounted to a collapsing movement. he and the other leaders had fled for their lives at night. His and others houses were burned to the ground and they had lost everything.

Tens of thousands of remaining loyalists and their families were sleeping int he jungles. At one point, Nuon took my hand and repeated how we would be friends for life and said he had something important to ask me. ” I want to send my son to live with you in Bangkok so he can go to school until the war is over.”

I returned to Bangkok.

The situation only deteriorated and behind the scenes there was a frenzy of confusion and anger, much of it directed at Ta Mok.. His last loyalists were wavering and many now were prepared to abandon the movement to save themselves.

On March 26, the three Khmer Rouge generals tried with Pol Pot the previous July, and held underground in bamboo cages since then, were executed by Ta Mok. It was an act of unadulterated revenge, because some of the fighters who mutinied were said to be loyal to them.

Now, thousands of guerrillas and their families were hiding in the jungle-clad landmine-strewn mountains along the Thai border, unable to find enough water and at the mercy of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

On March 29, two divisions stationed around the Preah Vwihear temples east of Anlong Veng, surrendered to the government without a fight. In an example of the divided loyalties and distrust that had now riven the movement, the division commander defected to the government, but his wife refused and returned to the Ta Mok loyalists.

Despite the headline grabbing fighting, the most important development was beginning to evolve behind the scenes.

The chaos within the Khmer Rouge forced Ta Mok to play his last card.

On March 25, fearing Pol Pot would be captured and hoping to get international acceptance, Pol Pot was secretly moved to a sanctuary in Thailand and Ta Mok ordered his top aides to arrange his handover to the United States. Pol Pot was being held at a remote Thai military base in the Thai border province of Sisaket, the headquarters of regiment 16, a highly sensitive Thai military unit that technically did not exist and was long charged with handling secret interactions with the top Khmer Rouge leadership.

It was a stunning development. For the first time since he orchestrate the genocide that left millions of lives in ruin and after twenty years on the run as one of the worlds most wanted and notorious fugitives, pol Pot was in custody outside of Cambodia and the decision had been made by his last protectors and loyalists to turn him over to an international court to face justice.

But what followed was an extraordinary series of American bumbling that allowed one of the centuries most notorious despots to cheat justice.

By March 25th, after days of fleeing through the jungle, Pol Pot was weak and despondent. But he accepted his fate without resistance. Ever the disciplined, organization man,Pol Pot did not object to the decision to hand him over to an international tribunal. “Pol Pot said “I will go anywhere. But I will not go to Phnom Penh to work with the Vietnamese.But I will go to the international court, to the USA, to anywhere. I agree if You want to me to go to be tried by an international court comrade.’”

In flight and fearing capture, it was the beginning of a humiliating end for the man who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. He had dyed his hair black in a desperate attempt to avoid capture by mutinying Khmer Rouge troops as he fled to the Dongrek Mountains north of Anlong Veng.

“Pol Pot feared that he could be caught. By dying his hair he was trying to disguise himself. For such a person to do that, it showed real fear in his mind.” said General Non Nou, who was in charge of escorting Pol Pot to safety during those days. The guerrillas had been unable to provide their ousted leader with sufficient food since being forced to flee their headquarters at Anlong Veng.

“For the last few weeks, he had diarroea and we haven’t had much food because of the fighting with the traitors,” Ta Mok told me the day after Pol Pot died. As Pol Pot fled, the remnants of the movement he created 38 years ago crumbled before his eyes.

As he was being driven in a blue Toyota land Cruiser with tinted windows with his wife and daughter to a new hideout to avoid mutinying troops he saw more than 30,000 Khmer Rouge civilians who had been forced from their fields and villages by government troops and Khmer Rouge defectors. “When he saw the peasants and our cadre lying by the side of the road with no food and water or shelter, he broke down into tears, ” said Non Nou.

His wife echoed the account, and said her husband turned to her in the car and said: ” My only wish now is that Cambodias stay untied so that Vietnam will not swallow outr country.”

So when Pol Pot was turned over to Thai custody, he thought the end of the struggle had come. He never would have fathomed that the hated Americans, now the worlds only superpower, who had been chasing him for 30 years and had fought a five year war to destroy him before he took state power in 1975, would be so unorganized that they would be unable–or more accurately, unwilling–to seize him and take him into custody. Still unaware that Pol Pot was being held in Thailand, on April 1st I got an urgent call from General Nuon saying he needed to see me immediately in Surin. “I have something important to discuss with you, my friend.” Nuon never uttered my name on the phone, He began every conversation with “Hello, my friend.”……….(to be continued)

…………   Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript Sympathy for the devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge By Nate Thayer Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights Reserved. No republication, transmission, or quotation without express prior written permission of the author

How to Be Buddy-Buddy With an Guerilla General

It is always a pleasure when someone has positive things to say about ones work. So thanks to scholars-stage.blogspot.com for their generous comments:

How to Be Buddy-Buddy With an Guerilla General

Far Eastern Economic Review (2 August 1997) with Thayer’s investigative work featured as its cover story.Image Credit: Wikimedia

If you read one thing this weekend, this should be it.

Nate Thayer was the Far Eastern and Economic Review‘s man on the ground in Cambodia for most of the 1990s. One of his editors at the Review described his achievements in the following terms:

“Nate broke the story in 1997 that Cambodia’s ex-dictator, Pol Pot, was still alive and had been purged from the Khmer Rouge. He followed up a few months later with the first interview with Pol Pot in 18 years, shedding light on how utopian leftism translated to genocide back in Cambodia…. In an era of instant communication, when scoops are matched in hours and sometimes minutes, the Pol Pot stories went unmatched for months. That’s because Nate had spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence, and elsewhere to gain this access” [1]

Mr. Thayer is currently writing a book that tells how he was able to build a network of contacts in an insurgent controlled jungle and gain the trust of the Khmer Rouge’s top leaders. This week he published a meaty excerpt from his truly remarkable story:

“….Secretly, General Nuon came to my house in Bangkok scores of times, accompanied by Thai military intelligence escorts and handlers in unmarked pickup trucks who would lurk around my garden while Nuon drank hot tea with lots of sugar and peppered me with questions from politics to popular culture into the night. Sometimes, the Thais would get nervous and balk at his meetings with me and forbid him to come to my house. Nuon relished in giving them the slip from his Thai military safe house, where he stayed in Bangkok, and sneak over to my place in a taxi. Other times, he would call me and say it was urgent that I make my way to the Khmer Rouge jungle headquarters at Anlong Veng, or some obscure rural noodle shop in a remote Thai border village. There he would seek advice whether some political or military strategy the Khmer Rouge leadership were considering would be prudent or effective. Over time, I became General Nuon’s filter to explain how the world outside the jungles worked, which was critical to the new mission that Ta Mok had bequeathed him: to figure out how to salvage the remnants of the Khmer Rouge movement by establishing relations with an outside world that they had totally cut off for decades….

This gave me unprecedented access to Pol Pot until the day he died. I literally knew what Pol Pot ate for breakfast each day, what his mood was, what was the content of the conversations he had with his wife and daughter, and who visited him. “How is the old man today?” I would ask Nuon during his daily calls to check in. No names were ever used in these telephone conversations as we both knew they were monitored by more than one government, and Nuon would recount the minutia of the mundane existence that were the final weeks and months of one of the centuries most egregious mass murderers, Pol Pot.” [2]

Mr. Thayer’s account is not only a fascinating look at the nature of insurgencies, intelligence work, and investigative reporting, but also a pleasure to read. I strongly recommend that visitors to the Stage read it in its entirety.

——————————————————————————————–

[1] Andrew Sherry, quoted in “Selected Reviews and Commentary on Nate Thayer,” ed. Nate Thayer. natethayer.wordpress.com

[2] Nate Thayer. “How the U.S. Dropped the Ball When Offered to Bring Pol Pot to Trial For Mass Murder.” natethayer.wordpress.com. 24 January 2013. Quoted with permission from author.

• Nate Thayer: periodismo, crowdfunding y autopromo

  A much appreciated note of support from the Spanish language journalists website Globorama.es for my efforts to fund the publication of my my book “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” http://www.globograma.es/nate-thayer-periodismo-crowdfunding-y-autopromo/

  Myriam Redondo - 26/01/2014 - Comentar

  Por favor, disculpas por adelantado por la insufrible autopromoción en la que debo entrar, buscando financiacion, en las próximas semanas. Créanme, me mortifica, pero las nuevas realidades del periodismo señalan que los periodistas de investigación que trabajan solos deben buscar fondos independientes y entrar en el engranaje del marketing personal dado que el apoyo institucional de las grandes compañías mediáticas se ha evaporado. Prácticamente de modo universal, yo, y los colegas que comparten la confianza en el periodismo de investigación en profundidad y a largo plazo, hemos dejado de disponer de respaldo institucional o de otros modos de ingreso para pagar por los considerables costes de nuestro género de periodismo. Efectivamente, es caro y requiere mucho tiempo y notables recursos. También está, en mi opinión, en peligro de extinción y es vital.

  Please excuse, in advance, the insufferable self-promotion which I must engage in, seeking funding, over the coming weeks. Believe me, it mortifies me, but the new realities of journalism are that individual investigative journalists must seek independent financing and engage in self-marketing as the institutional support of large media companies has evaporated. I, and my colleagues who share my belief in in-depth, long term investigative journalism, almost universally no longer have institutional backing or other means of income to pay for the considerable costs of our genre of investigative journalism. It is, indeed, expensive and time consuming and requires considerable resources. It is also, in my opinion, both endangered and vital.

  Me gustó esta sinceridad sobre el hastío de la autopromoción, palabro que según la RAE no existe. Es el reportero Nate Thayer, describiendo su petición de crowdfunding o financiación distribuida para publicar el libro Simpathy for the Devil: a journalist´s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. La campaña será lanzada oficialmente en la plataforma Kickstarter a finales de enero de 2014. Aquí un extracto del libro. Nate Thayer tiene más de dos décadas de experiencia como corresponsal (Associated Press, Washington Post, Far Eastern Economic Review) y está especializado en el sudeste asiático, particularmente Camboya. Es uno de los periodistas que más ha hecho por contarle este país al mundo. Se le conoce por sus reportajes sobre los jemeres rojos y por ser uno de los dos últimos reporteros que vio con vida al sanguinario Pol Pot. Oímos hablar mucho de él cuando en 2013 alguien en la revista The Atlantic le propuso escribir un artículo gratis a cambio de “visibilidad”, como si fuera un principiante. ["Sympathy for the devil", la canción que los Rolling Stones no han dejado utilizar a Nate Thayer para su campaña, por lo que está rehaciendo su vídeo promocional].

What Happens When Your Ride Disintigrates After Being Blown Up by Anti-Tank Landmines

By Nate Thayer

These photos were taken of the truck I was riding in after it drove over two Chinese anti-tank mines, in northwest Cambodia, in October 1989.

I was sitting in the front seat of Russian Zil 2 1/2 ton military transport truck which the Cambodian guerrilla group I was traveling with had captured hours earlier after seizing a strategic government town. Most people in the truck were killed, including both of the soldiers sitting with me in the drivers compartment, one on either side of me.

The truck I was riding in after the left front tire, which was less than 5 feet from where I was sitting, detonated two anti-tank mines in the jungles near the Thai Cambodian border

I woke up in the remnants of the engine compartment with a severed leg across my face. It wasn’t mine. It was the driver’s who was sitting a few yards from me holding the stump of his thigh and crying out for his mother before he eventually died. The incident happened at night.

These pictures were taken by soldiers who returned the next morning to retrieve the bodies of the dead we left behind as we trekked 7 miles at night carrying the wounded to the closest guerrilla base

The above pictures were taken the following morning by soldiers who returned to the site to retrieve the bodies of the dead we left behind the night before as we walked 7 miles carrying wounded to the nearest guerrilla base.

The below pictures were taken later the same night that I was wounded, a few hours after the incident left an irrelevant jungle path strewn with the bodies of the the dead, the dying, and those few of us who survived.

My feet, which had bones protruding from them and were riddled with metal shrapnel, after being operated on in a CIA funded secret jungle field hospital. Photo Blenkinsop

After being treated at a CIA funded rudimentary jungle guerrilla field hospital, I insisted to my Thai military intelligence escorts that I be taken back to my spartan hotel in the small Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. Before dawn, I knocked on the door of my friend, the brilliant Australian photographer Philip Blenkinsop. I will never forget what he said when he opened the door, still half asleep. He looked at me with an alarmed stare and did not say “What the fuck happened to you?” He said “Great pic, mate! Don’t move! Let me get my kit.” I felt like I was safe and with my people again. The below pics are a couple that he shot then as I sat and lay down on his hotel bed.

Photo: Philip Blenkinsop. I had numerous injuries, including blown eardrums, bones sticking out of my legs, shrapnel in my head torso, and legs, several broken bones, and a dislocated kidney. I also had what would be permanent brain damage

Below is an account, an excerpt from my book that needs your financial support to ensure its final production process can be completed and published in mid 2014 

The Night I Lived: Landmines, War and Journalism: One close encounter with religion, death, and life

By Nate Thayer

Excerpt from the upcoming book, Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

(Copyright Nate Thayer. No reproduction or dissemination in whole or in part without express written permission of the author)

 Your Financial Support is Needed for the publication of “Sympathy For the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge”

Please excuse, in advance, the insufferable self-promotion seeking funding. Believe me, it mortifies me more than it will annoy you. This is a pitch for funding to bring to fruition my campaign to publish my book and related accompanying data and documents and videos of interviews with the Khmer Rouge leaders and and observations of the Khmer Rouge and modern Cambodian political history. The new realities of journalism are that individual investigative journalists must seek independent financing and engage in self-marketing as the institutional support of large media companies has evaporated. I, and my colleagues who share my belief in in-depth, long term investigative journalism, almost universally no longer have institutional backing or other means of income to pay for the considerable costs of our genre of investigative journalism. It is, indeed, expensive and time consuming and requires considerable resources. It is also, in my opinion, both endangered and vital. For those able to support the project financially, it is both needed and appreciated. Please go to the upper right hand corner of this blog where there is a Paypal button. This will easily walk you through the simple steps to donate. As well, at the top of this page is a link to a page on this blog detailing other methods of providing donations. The overhead costs of devoting full-time to the final production of the book are substantial and threaten to derail my ability to focus on finalizing the project. Your support is greatly appreciated to ensure this book is published in both hardcover and as an E book sometime in mid 2014)

By Nate Thayer

It was after midnight, before I was to be picked up before dawn by Thai military intelligence to be escorted into Cambodia to accompany guerrillas on a mission to attack and seize a Cambodian district capital town.

It was monsoon season. As always, I was carefully preparing my equipment. There was an art to fitting everything I might need into a light backpack with lots of pockets and readily accessible under pressure. There were separate Ziploc bags for different speed film, for each Nikon lens, my two Nikon camera bodies, a point and shoot camera (what we then called a “drunk proof” or “idiot camera”), for an extra pair of dry socks and other dry clothes, a small medical kit, notebooks, a flask of whiskey, a poncho, a hammock, extra pens, a carton of cigarettes to give away to grunts on the front line, tape recorder, extra batteries, and more. As always, I never knew how long I would be gone or what I might encounter.

There was a knock on my door, and the manager of my small guest house where I lived in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, a young boy of 17, entered. Ghung, who I had taken under my wing in the previous months, knew I was going to leave in a few hours on what might be a dangerous assignment. Ghung was very concerned.  I invited him into my spartan room and, with a very serious expression on his face, sat down. He opened his hands which clutched two Buddhist amulets.

“I want you to take these with you. Wear them around your neck. If you are respectful to them, they will protect you from danger,” he said. The one on the left, pictured below, is an effigy of a dead baby fetus. He warned me that I should not be afraid if it talked aloud to me. The powerful one, he said, was that image, the Kuman Thong. “This will make sure you don’t die”, he said, if I treated it with a reverence.

Ghung clearly did. “Only wear it around your neck and don’t be afraid. Sometimes it will talk to me.”

Philip Blenkinsop photo. Thai animist amulets of a dead fetus said to protect one from danger. Many Cambodian soldiers believe that it can make bullets bounce off you

The Kuman Thong effigy is revered in rural Thailand and Cambodia by many Buddhists, but it is Animist, not a traditional Buddhist practice, more “black magic”, or necromancy. Kuman Thong was created centuries ago by surgically removing the unborn fetus from the womb of its mother. The child’s body was roasted accompanied by chanting. original Thai Buddhist texts say making a Kuman Thong amulet requires removing the dead baby from the mother’s womb, followed by a ritual of the baby cooked until dry. This process must be finished before dawn.

“Kuman Thong” means “Golden Baby Boy”. They say if you have a good relationship with your Kuman Thong, you will not have very bad things happen to you.

Ghung’s heartfelt gift had not gone through such an involved process, but it represented. to him, the same power. They are widely believed, in rural Thailand and Cambodia, to be very powerful, protecting one from danger, even bullets bouncing off of you.

Ghung was a very sweet and intelligent boy and we had become friends. I thanked him respectfully, because I knew he was very sincere and serious, but I didn’t really believe him. But it was touching.

I wrapped the amulets in my traditional Cambodian scarf and wore them around my neck when I departed for the Cambodian jungle, before dawn broke, riding shotgun in an unmarked Thai military pickup truck.

We arrived at a secret Cambodian guerrilla base in the jungle just over the Thai border and hour later. The guerrillas were gathered, waiting for me, heavily armed and sporting a dozen brand new  CIA supplied Yamaha 250CC dirt motorcycles. They also had a new, powerful, secret weapon that the government was unaware of which had been clandestinely delivered to their enemies in the days before.

We left the guerrilla base before dawn for an arduous trek through monsoon soaked ox cart paths that snaked through the jungle, led by the convoy of  dirt bikes, one of which I was riding shotgun on. Advance teams of troops were ahead and behind us.

The guerrillas had two new weapons; the German-made Armbrust 69 mm shoulder fired one time use anti-tank weapon and the Swedish Carl Gustav 84 mm anti-tank weapon. For ten years, the government had tank superiority. For a decade, once the government tanks broached the front line positions, the guerrillas had no effective weapons to stop them. For years, the guerrilla commanders had offered a 50,000 Baht ($2000) reward to any soldier who could destroy a tank prior to that day. Their only weapon was a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, designed to take out concrete bunkers,which required one to get within 20 meters of the tank, from behind, crouch and aim upwards and so it hit the undercarriage of the tank and took out the tracks to halt its advance. More often than not, the guerrilla would be killed attempting to do so, and if he was lucky enough to survive, it was likely he would be wounded by his own shrapnel backwash from firing the RPG from so close.

New covert anti-tank weapons supplied to the guerrillas used for the first time this day which were responsible for the destruction of 8 government tanks and capturing towns and vehicles as government soldiers fled in fear of the new superior firepower

This time was different.

We entered the first government held town and immediately destroyed three tanks. The German and Swedish weapons, covertly supplied through Singapore, penetrated the tank’s armor but the round would not explode until it was inside the tank, vaporizing the 3 or 4 man crew instantly. I took pictures of their incinerated, burnt corpses still sitting in the driver’s seat and manning the tank turret gun, the twisted carcass of the feared armored T-54 Soviet tank smoking and twisted and neutralized.

We captured that town within an hour.

The government troops fled in sheer terror, the psychological impact and confusion of knowing they no longer had tank superiority changed the face of the war that day.

Within two hours we advanced without hesitation and had captured the district capital of Thmar Puok.

There, we destroyed 4 more tanks defending the perimeter of the sprawling city.

Government tank destroyed by secret covert anti-tank weapons supplied to the guerrillas first used the day I was blown up by an anti-tank landmine. Photo and story by me published worldwide via the Associated Press

The guerrilla’s had a celebratory lunch in the former Vietnamese military headquarters, the former only school-house in the city and the only concrete building. Graffiti spray painted on the inside walls read in Vietnamese Roman script: “Long Live the Communist Party of Vietnam!”

This was 30 kilometers from the Thai border, more than 500 miles from Vietnam.

It was the first district capital seized by the guerrillas during the long 12-year war. Government troops, terrified young boys who didn’t care a whit about politics and were conscripted like all troops on both sides of the war, surrendered by the hundreds, along with their Russian jeeps and transport trucks and weapons.

We drank lots of whiskey in the mid day sun. The people I was with were very happy. Other people, not so much.

For the civilians, none were happy. They were satisfied, like most Cambodian’s,  if they did not die, their daughter was not raped, their life possessions not looted, and their water buffalo not stolen. Peasant villagers in Cambodia knew that no army or government, regardless of ideology, actually had anything to offer to make their lives better. It was the faction that wreaked the least havoc, who took away the least from their already meager lives, which they would least detest.

It was a big story, I knew. I had very good pictures and an exclusive eyewitness account.

We toured the new liberated zone of dozens of villages with no electricity, schools, running water, or hope. This stretch of real estate, for a very, very long time, only knew war.

Then, after 12 hours, we began the return trip towards the sanctuaries of the rear military bases straddling the Thai Cambodian border, as dusk began to fall, west, towards the Dongruk mountain escarpment far on the horizon marking the border.

The heavy, daily late afternoon monsoon rains had begun.

I was eager to file my story and pictures, which would be, still, many hours away. I still needed to cross out of the jungle, be transported back across the border to Thailand, and down 60 kilometers to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet.

From there, I would call the Associated Press office in Bangkok and dictate my story by landline telephone.

Ghung, the sweet and cocky 17-year-old boy, who had given me the Buddhist amulets late the night before, would always, for months now, push the button on a stopwatch and time my calls and charge me by the minute.

The undeveloped photographs, still on 35 mm film, would be given to the long distance bus driver of the commercial bus company which made a half a dozen trips through the day and night from Aranyaprathet to Bangkok. We would give him no money for fear he would then take the film and sell it to local Thai papers. In Bangkok, an AP messenger on motorcycle would be dispatched from the AP office and meet the bus at the bustling Moenchit bus terminal. There, they would exchange cash for film and he would return to the AP office, where the film would be souped and developed. A few pictures would be chosen and put on a roller and sent over telephone lines to Tokyo and New York. From there they would be transmitted to AP customers worldwide. To get story and pictures out from when they were taken to when they were seen and read could often be days.

But this day it didn’t work out, as it really never did, as planned.

We began the motorcycle ride on our CIA dirt bikes through the uninhabited savanna and jungle, headed west towards Thailand. Bombs and gunfire were everywhere. This area had been under government control when dawn emerged earlier that day. It was, in reality, now under control of no one, but the government had fled. The guerrilla’s had never been here before.

Then the motorcycle convoy of a dozen or so got separated. The dirt tracks were a meter deep in mud. We got separated. Then our motorcycle broke down. Dusk was rapidly approaching. One guerrilla stayed with me. We finally abandoned the motorcycle and began walking west towards the silhouette of the Dongruk Mountains still a dozen miles to the west. That was Thailand and that is where I wanted to be.

“Are there any landmines around here,” I asked the young guerrilla grunt.

“No. No landmines,” he replied

“Where are we,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

What it feels like after not dying. Photo: Philip Blenkinsop

What it feels like after not dying

“Well, if you don’t know where the fuck we are, how the fuck do you know there are no landmines? I asked, now tired, dehydrated, and hungry.

It had been 12 hours since we left the guerrilla base on motorcycles and seized a couple hundred square kilometers of territory. Many, many were dead. That didn’t much bother me. I had not eaten all day. That didn’t much bother me either. I was dehydrated. That made my mind fuzzy. But, mostly, I wanted to get my story and pictures, which I knew would be a minor scoop in the world news, out, safely.

We entered a thicker jungle and bushwhacked ourselves through by hand.  We did not know where we were. It was now dark. There were no longer front-lines defined. No one knew what territory was now controlled by the enemy or friends. As far as I was concerned, there were no friends and there was no enemy. I only wanted my pictures and story to get out.

Then we heard the sounds of trucks idling ahead in the jungle.

That was a very bad, frightening sign.

The guerrilla’s I was with—troops of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, did not have any trucks.

We halted. We moved slowly through the light forest and peaked through the trees and foliage.

There, idling on an oxcart path, were two Soviet Zil transport trucks with several Cambodians, in government military uniforms, carrying Soviet issue AK-47’s.

My lone guerrilla companion turned to me, after a long period of silence, and said: “I think they have defected to us.”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘You think they have defected?” That is not fucking good enough! They either have defected or we are about to be dead or become prisoners of war.” I was, honestly, ready to surrender if the latter was the case.

He had a look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. That scared me even more.

“You wait here. I will go check,” he instructed me, failing in his attempt to give the impression he was in control of the situation.

He tried to be quiet as he pushed aside the forest brush and not alarm the armed men in government uniform in government military trucks.

I waited, crouched, decidedly not comfortable in the savanna. My guerrilla guide returned with a smile on his face. The armed men and vehicles had, indeed, defected in the previous hours.

I was ecstatic. It was dark. We were lost. Our motorcycles had broken down and been abandoned. It was rainy and muddy and hot. I was hungry and we had no water. We were in territory under unclear control. Now we had a truck and we would be back in Thailand within an hour.

I emerged from the jungle and was greeted warmly although with the concomitant, quizzical look that is directed towards animals in a zoo.

There were about a dozen troops in the jungle clearing with two trucks. Some were guerrillas and some were freshly defected government troops. We all piled into one truck. The driver was a government soldier hours before. Now he was a guerrilla. Three of us were in the front seat, myself squeezed in the middle, between the driver and an impressive fat guerrilla officer. About a half-dozen troops were in the open back carriage of the 2 ½ ton Russian military transport truck.

We were laughing and giddy as we slowly negotiated the mud soaked, deeply rutted ox cart path, headed west, towards Thailand. The dim silhouette of the Dongruk mountain escarpment still visible under the moonlight about ten miles to the west.

I remember being scrunched up tightly between the fat guerrilla commander and the skinny young boy government conscript, now a defector, in the driver’s cabin of the Zil. I was sitting in the middle. I was in a very happy mood. I had great pictures and a great story and I was the only journalist there and I was now in a truck being driven towards a safe place where I could transmit them to the few interested around the world. I remember chatting to the driver, smiling and laughing. He was happy, too, mainly because he was not dead, a fact I am sure he was concerned about at the start of that day.

I loved this life.

We had been driving only a few minutes and then something–in an instant–terrible, something life altering, and for some, life extinguishing happened.

The truck I was riding in after the left front tire, which was less than 5 feet from where I was sitting, detonated two anti-tank mines in the jungles near the Thai Cambodian border

The sound was so profoundly loud that I could not hear it. My eardrums were blown out. The concussion of the explosion was so great my brain shut down. I remember the liquid in my body became so heated I could feel it simmering near boiling. I could hear my blood boiling, gurgling from what seemed like heat. I felt my brain being tossed around like a rag doll bouncing off the insides of the wall of my boned skull.

Our 2 ½ ton truck was thrown in the air several meters and, luckily, hit the side of a tree, and bounced back down, landing upright. Actually, I don’t remember that part. I saw it, afterwards. It looked like a shredded child’s toy Tonka truck.

We had driven over two Chinese anti-tank mines.

Specifically, our left front tire, which was less than 1 ½ meters from where I had been sitting.

This is very Cambodian. One does not need two anti-tank mines to blow up a tank.  One will do. But, for good measure, just in case, the guerrillas had placed one on top of another. The mines were placed by the guerrilla’s themselves. Because they had no vehicles—until that morning.

We had just driven over our own landmines.

These pictures were taken by soldiers who returned the next morning to retrieve the bodies of the dead we left behind as we trekked 7 miles at night carrying the wounded to the closest guerrilla base

I don’t know how long I was unconscious.

I do remember waking up that night, with clarity and vividness, that startles me in my sleep and jolts me awake, regularly, now many hundreds of nights and some days, to the present, years later, in a mixture of unspeakable fear and grief and confusion and sadness.

There was a severed leg lying across my face. I held the leg up and looked at it. It was not connected to a body.

I was in the remnants of the engine compartment of the truck, its tattered carcass spread meters across the muddy jungle ox cart path.

I needed to know whether it was my leg I was holding in my hand. But I was very scared to find out. I reached down and ran my hand over my left leg and it was still attached to me body. I did the same with my right leg. It, also, was still attached to my body.

I had no idea what happened. I looked around me.

A few feet away was the young Cambodian truck driver, moments before with whom I was laughing and smiling and chatting. Life, for both us, would be, from that moment on, very different. His would be much shorter than mine.

He was sitting up, with a look on his face of raw terror and amazement I will never, ever forget. He was holding tightly the stump of his thigh, eyes locked, fixed, wide open, staring at what was no longer there. He did not panic. He didn’t seem in pain. He cried—no he moaned–loudly, but in words profoundly mournful.

He only called for his mother.

“Mother, please help me!” he repeated over and over and over and over.

What it feels like after not dying. Photo: Philip Blenkinsop

I extricated myself from the engine and went over to him and held him in my arms. “You will be OK,” I lied. “Everything will be fine.”

For perhaps ten minutes, he called for his mother, staring in utter terror and horrid curiosity, his mind racing over, I suspect, his brief past, perhaps his never realized hopes, and his now very, very brief future, while grasping tightly the shredded stump of his muscle and bone and meat in his hands, the end of what was his leg, now within easy reach of his clutching hands.

And then he died on this irrelevant, muddy jungle dirt ox cart path, in the rain, at night, far from his mother. Probably, no one, other than the half-dozen of us there that night who remained alive, to this day, knows how and where he died. He just never came home.  There are millions of Cambodians whose loved ones simply never came home and they don’t know why.

We left him, dead, on the dirt path, in the dark, alone. I am sure, no one amongst us even knew his name.

The man who was sitting to my right, the fat guerrilla commander, before the driver died, was angry.

He had taken shrapnel to his head. It penetrated his skull. There was a gaping hole on the side of his skull, above his ear, leaking increasing amounts of blood and other, whitish, grey colored liquid, mixed with chunks of solids. It was his brains.

I remember him cursing the truck. He got up and he kicked the side of the truck with a ferocious boot and yelled and blamed the truck. Who else was there to blame?

Then he died, too, falling on the mud path, on his face.

We left his body there as well.

An account of the landmine incident by then Boston Globe correspondent Mary Kay Magistad

After I had fled in slow motion the dying, legless driver, another man, lying down, prostrate,  who I thought was dead, bolted upright.

He jumped up and yanked his pants down and, terrified, grabbed hold of his cock and balls and inspected them to make sure they were intact.

That made sense to me and I immediately did the same. I later learned this is a common reaction to the freshly wounded in war.

I remember asking him: “What just happened?” I had no idea. I had no idea we had run over a landmine. I did not understand why, in the dark, and mud and rain there were people dying and suffering.

“”We hit a landmine,” he said, with no discernible emotion.

But a journalist being killed on assignment rarely makes significant news. Here it was relegated one sentence in the For the Record briefs section in the Washington Post

Then, strangely, I became obsessed with locating my film, my cameras, my notebook from the wreckage of the debris of the truck and human carnage littering this irrelevant jungle patch, which, really, was of importance to no one, save those of us who died, or didn’t die, there that night.

I became obsessed and started  sifting through the metal and mud, in the dark and the rain, looking for them.  I need to salvage a purpose, an excuse that I had a reason to be there. Two other surviving troops came over and helped me. We found my Nikon and lenses and film and small,little backpack next to the bodies and under the remains of the truck. They had survived unharmed. I was greatly relieved.

Most everyone that night was killed, but several of us were not. Two were severely wounded. We cut two tree branches and attached hammocks to them, and two guerrillas carried the badly wounded through the night, in the rain and dark, for three-hour, for 7 miles, a silent, sad trek, everyone lost in their own thoughts, to the nearest guerrilla base.

There, 7 miles away, they had felt the earth shake from the explosion from the landmine that was planted under the dirt less than 2 meters from me that night.

We began a long silent, sad walk.

I didn’t know that bones were sticking out of my leg until I stepped in a mud hole on that walk and a jolt of pain went from my leg to my brain. I didn’t know that I had shrapnel in my head until I tasted blood dripping into my mouth and wiped my hand over my face and looked, in fear, as it was covered in bright crimson fresh liquid.

My feet. Photo Blenkinsop

I didn’t know I had permanent brain damage. Or that my ear drums were burst, or that my sternum was broken. Or that my liver was dislocated. And other stuff.

I just walked. Because we had no choice.

We arrived, hours later, at the guerrilla base. They knew we were coming. They piled us wounded into the back of a pickup truck and took us to a CIA funded guerrilla operating theatre in the jungle. It had a gas-powered generator to provide electricity for an antiseptic operating room. There was an air conditioner in it. But we were put into an open air thatch roofed room. The loud din of a chorus of frogs croaking in celebration of the heavy monsoon rains, along with crickets, was soothing, but was so loud one had to speak louder to be heard.

A dozen or so soldiers,  all on crutches, their freshly bandaged stumps of legs covered in bright red fresh blood, their legs and arms and some one or both of each, gathered and stared at us, the new arrivals to their new world.

I was placed on an elevated military cot. Next to me was the most badly wounded soldier. The kind eyed, French trained doctor spoke softly and touched and poked me, my badly wounded neighbor on the stretcher next to me, and one other severely wounded guerrilla.

Then two soldiers walked in with a chainsaw, headed towards me.

Photo: Philip Blenkinsop. I had numerous injuries, including blown eardrums, bones sticking out of my legs, shrapnel in my head torso, and legs, several broken bones, and a dislocated kidney. I also had what would be permanent brain damage

I had bones sticking out of my feet. I jumped up like a Olympiad on methamphetamine and screamed in at least three languages to get the fuck away from me. I was forcibly restrained and reassured that the chainsaw was not destined for me. It was for the man next to me in the stretcher. They were massaging his heart. His leg was attached by a few strands of ragged tendons to his torso. he was not conscious. The medics, who, in truth, only had training in amputating limbs,  cranked it on and cut his leg off with no anesthesia, two feet from me. I stared emotionless at this. I was drained of any reserves of emotion by then.

I watched, in retrospect, with a calmness fueled and mitigated, I guess, by the context of the evil of that night. He died not so long afterwards.

They took me to the operating room. They took pieces of metal out of my legs, my torso, and my head. They sewed it up. They did their best.

Honestly, I felt very little pain, even then. I had just been blown up I then walked 7 miles with bones protruding from my foot, dozens of holes in my body, pieces of metal embedded in my head my torso, my legs, my feet. I had several broken bones. But in the coming days, for weeks, I would not be able to move from the pain.

Despite the unpleasantry of the previous hours, I was fixated, oddly, on one thing–to get my photographs and story to the Associated Press office in Bangkok. I knew then I could relax, my job done.

I repeatedly asked to be taken back the 60 kilometers to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. I needed—not wanted—I NEEDED—to file my pictures and story. In the darkest hours before dawn, I was driven by Thai military intelligence in an unmarked truck back to my hotel.

I was bandaged. I was confused. My whole body hurt by then.

My good friend, Philip Blenkinsop, the photographer, was staying in another room in the sparse ten room ground floor motel. I knocked on his door. It was before dawn.

Philip Blenkinsop (r) and myself a couple of years later in Phnom Penh Cambodia

He opened the door and stared silently for a few seconds. Philip, who I love dearly, didn’t say “What happened to you? Are you OK?”

He said, and I won’t forget these words: “Don’t move, mate, Great pics. Let me get my kit.”

I felt comforted,  as if I was now home and out of danger and with my people. He took these, and other pics.

A long day just begun Photo Philip Blenkinsop

The young boy, Ghung, the 17 year old Thai hotel manager, came to the room a while later. He had  a serene and loving look on his face. He looked me in the eyes and said ‘I told you they would protect you.”

Ghung knew he had saved my life that day. And I was pleased he believed he did. His black magic dead fetus was still wrapped around my neck.

Philip Blenkinsop photo. Thai animist amulets of a dead fetus said to protect one from danger. Many Cambodian soldiers believe that it can make bullets bounce off you

Both he and I were very thankful and quite satisfied with the day, for different reasons.

Later the commander and chief of the guerrilla army came to my hotel room with a dozen roses. I liked this man. He smiled and chuckled and said: ” I told them not to drive down that path” and he handed me the flowers.

But the memory since has never left me, and never will leave me with any sense of peace or conclusion. I am not sure this story can be adequately conveyed. But that is the best I can do, today, 22 years later.

No More Creampuff Journalism Sometime public commentary on the published writings of a journalist can get nasty, sometimes snarky, and sometimes downright witty. Here, readers react with a series of letters to the editor to an interview I did with Khmer Rouge Prime Minister Khieu Samphan published in the Phnom Penh Post. It wasn’t pretty, but it […]

The post No More Creampuff Journalism: Readers React in Letters to the Editor appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

My Sordid Love Affair with Journalism Excerpts from Sympathy for the Devil: A Foreign Correspondent Inside Pol Pot’s Cambodia Copyright Nate Thayer. No republication in whole or part without prior written permission of the author By Nate Thayer Journalism and I have a love affair that will never be extinguished. From the beginning, I was […]

The post My Sordid Love Affair with Journalism appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

Korean Sex And Cambodian Govt Corruption: Why You People Read My Blog And What You Are Fiddling Around With On The Internet By Nate Thayer It is, together, alarming, confusing, depressing, and downright fascinating sometimes when reviewing the analytics of who you people are that come and read my blog–and exactly how you get here. […]

The post Korean Sex And Cambodian Govt Corruption: Why You People Read My Blog And What You Are Fiddling Around With On The Internet appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

Big things are on the way at www.nate-thayer.com… Just as soon as we iron out the glitches…

The post Something is coming… appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

Cambodia to British “Killing Fields” director ‘Sir’ ‘Lord’ Puttnam: “What planet did you arrive from?” British movie director ‘Lord’ David Puttnam returns to “The Killing Fields”, defends ex Khmer Rouge, condemns journalists, embarrasses London By Nate Thayer March 10, 2014 This is why Hollywood and journalism should be separated by an electrified iron curtain, like […]

The post Cambodia to “Killing Fields” director, now ‘Lord’ Puttnam: What planet did you arrive from? appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

By Nate Thayer (excerpts from the unpublished Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. (c) Nate Thayer. No republication in whole or in part without express written permission of the author.) March 16, 2014 Daddy’s little girl has grown up. Pol Pot’s only child got married today. 26 year-old […]

The post Pol Pot’s little girl grows up: Wedding of dictator’s only child is divorce from childhood trauma appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.

High Praise from a freelance journalist for Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge: “The book also promises to be a rollicking account of a bygone era of journalism, when reporters were colorful characters who nonetheless possessed serious intent and influence. The remarkable thing is that Thayer did it as a […]

The post A Freelance Journalist’s High Praise and Kind Words for Sympathy for the Devil appeared first on Nate Thayer - Journalist.