Reporter recounts his hunt for Pol Pot Sympathy felt by witness to show trial
HONG KONG -- After spending 14 years trying to track down the brutal leader of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, a onetime Bostonian suddenly finds he's the one being sought after.
"I have gotten more than 2,000 calls in the last 72 hours and literally hundreds of faxes," Nate Thayer, a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review, said in a telephone interview from his hotel room in Bangkok yesterday. "All this while I'm trying to write my story and do my job."
Thayer entered the spotlight after emerging from the Cambodian jungle. There, last Friday, he was the first Westerner in 18 years to see the notorious Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, during whose rule in the late 1970s as many as 2 million Cambodians died. Thayer, whose dedication and knowledge of his subject -- as well as his trademark shaved head, short pants and derring-do -- have made him a well-known figure in Southeast Asia, said he was puzzled by his fame. He said he was pleased, however, with the interest in Pol Pot's tale, if not with the methods his colleagues have used to get his story. "We had to literally set up security perimeters. Some people called posing as relatives saying my mother was sick and I had to come to the phone," Thayer, 37, said in disgust. Though he is on the staff of his Hong Kong-based magazine, Thayer owns the rights to his story and pictures. He said he has turned down offers of millions of dollars for the photos. "I made a decision to do this story seriously, and I'm very relaxed about that. I just hope this story gets distributed to every human being on the planet. . . . The world needs to know why {Pol Pot} did what he did," he said. In a Khmer Rouge stronghold near the Thailand border, Thayer witnessed a show trial in which former comrades denounced Pol Pot and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Thayer's account is to appear in today's edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review. ABC newsman Ted Koppel flew to Bangkok to interview him for a dramatic "Nightline" segment aired Monday night, in which an emotional Thayer shared extraordinary video footage of the trial. It was shot by cameraman David McKaige, a 31-year-old Boston College dropout and Connecticut native who owns a production company in Thailand. Yesterday, Thayer said the man he saw on trial was white-haired, frail and "close to tears" -- a far cry from the image of the invincible and merciless dictator Pol Pot had been. "Any time you see a human being who at one time controlled the lives of 7 million people sitting in a wooden chair in a remote jungle outpost being denounced, on a human level you can't help but feeling sympathy, and I did," he said. "Here was a man who had devoted his entire life to a vision that had culminated in ultimate destruction and defeat, a man breaking down in tears and humiliation. . . . That's profoundly ironic when you're talking about a man like Pol Pot," said Thayer, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Boston and of the school now known as Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Thayer said his interest in Cambodia dates from his days in Cambridge, when he developed deep friendships in the Cambodian communities in Lowell and Chelsea. He has lived in southeast Asia on and off since 1981, learned the Khmer language and conducted extensive research during 14 years tracking Pol Pot. Even so, he brushed aside descriptions of himself as an expert on the Khmer Rouge. "There is no such thing as a Khmer Rouge expert," said Thayer, who is writing a book on the subject. "The only real Khmer Rouge expert is Pol Pot himself. Even his own people aren't real clear on who he is or was. What he did to destroy the lives of millions of people is something that needs to be analyzed so people can understand how something like this occurred. Of course, we will never know exactly."