Swashbuckling reporter gets story on show trial
He chews tobacco, has a five-o'clock shadow, and knows his weapons.
Nate Thayer is a swashbuckling reporter who has a reputation for landing himself in the middle of the action -- and at the center of his stories.
At 37, Thayer already had a long list of foreign adventures on his resume before Friday, when he became known around the world as the guy who saw Pol Pot. Yesterday Thayer, who attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston years ago, spent the day in his Bangkok hotel writing the exclusive story of the Pol Pot sighting. Along with a cameraman, Thayer was allowed to witness a court proceding in which the Khmer Rouge denounced the mysterious leader and sentenced him to life under house arrest. It was the first time a journalist had seen Pol Pot in nearly two decades. And no one who knows Thayer was surprised that he was the one who landed the big story. "Only one reporter -- Nate -- could have gotten that story," said Frederick Brown, associate director of the Southeast Asia Studies School at Johns Hopkins University. Thayer is currently a research associate at the school's Advanced International Studies program, having received a grant from the US Institute of Peace, a Washington-based think tank. He is working on a book on the Khmer Rouge and living in a Washington suburb when he isn't traveling to Cambodia in search of the next big scoop. "He has that ability to conduct three or four conversations at the same time, from all over the world. He's always got a phone buzzing," said Brown, who was with Thayer earlier this week in Cambodia. Thayer got a taste for international travel while his father, Harry E. T. Thayer, was a career diplomat. A former US ambassador to Singapore, Thayer's father said yesterday his son often visited, and lived with him abroad. "He's pretty well known as a colorful character, rather independent-minded, a bit of a risk-taker," said Thayer's father. The family lived in Boston and Philadelphia, and Thayer graduated from the school now known as Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Thayer said his son's college career in political science was interrupted by foreign trips to Cambodia, where he interviewed Khmer Rouge victims as one of his first projects. He lived in Boston and Somerville, and worked as a disk jockey for a radio station at Tufts University. Interviews with Thayer's colleagues and his father yield a portrait of a man with local roots who has risked his life for his passion abroad. He is a distance swimmer who used to compete in races in Boston, and now wins river races in Cambodia. He has battled several illnesses while traveling, including malaria and typhoid disease. He collects guns, and has written for Soldier of Fortune, a magazine for military buffs. And he has always had a taste for adventure, his father said. He lost the hearing in one of his ears while covering a firefight in Burma, and had a brush with death from a landmine in Khmer Rouge territory. Thayer's story will be published tomorrow, when 85,000 copies of the Far Eastern Economic Review hit the newsstands. Owned by Dow Jones, the weekly magazine has exclusive rights to Thayer's story, but Thayer, who was working as a freelance writer for the magazine, owns the photographs that go with it.