|
P U B L I C P O L I C Y A N D I N T E R N A T L. A F F A I R S
In Search of Brother Number One By Dale Keiger

LAST JUNE, JOURNALIST NATE THAYER GAZED at a computer screen in Washington, D.C., and divined that the time was right to seek an interview with Pol Pot. By his own admission, he had thought the same thing about a hundred times before, but had yet to track down the elusive former dictator of Cambodia. His only consolation was that, since 1978, neither had anyone else.
But now he had a feeling. He was scanning an electronic newslist that circulates reports out of Cambodia on the Internet. Every day when he came to work at Hopkins's Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), he'd log on to the Net and check the Cambodia list. And on this summer morning, Khmer Rouge Radio was reporting turmoil in the party's upper echelon. The defense minister, Son Sen, had been arrested as a traitor, then executed. Something big was going on, and Thayer sniffed an opportunity.
For much of the past 13 years, he had studied, lived in, and reported on Cambodia for Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Phnom Penh Post, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. When the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Cambodian government in 1975, Pol Pot, known within the party as Brother Number One, led his country into what has been described as autogenocide. The Khmer Rouge turned on its own citizenry, emptying the cities, forcing the entire population into slave labor as part of a radical economic scheme meant to create an agrarian utopia, and murdering anyone who stood in the way. Before the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978, and sent the Khmer Rouge fleeing into the jungle by early 1979, hundreds of thousands of people had died from torture, starvation, or an executioner's bullet. No one knows how many perished. Estimates swing wildly from one to two million. Were comparable percentages of the American population to die, 35 to 70 million people would be gone in less than four years.
No Westerner had seen Pol Pot since the day before Vietnam invaded in 1978. He was, in Thayer's words, "the last great interview on the planet," and Thayer wanted him. The 37-year-old reporter stood out at SAIS, which tends to be a sober, earnest place, populated by buttoned-down foreign policy experts and students who want to be the next Zbigniew Brzezinski, not the next Hunter S. Thompson. Thayer shaved his head. He preferred T-shirts to jacket-and-tie. He wedged tobacco up under his lip, and didn't mind being taken for a daring, hard-living foreign correspondent. He was on leave from Cambodia for a year to be a visiting fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, to complete a book on the Khmer Rouge.
Excited by what he read on the Internet, he called the Review and requested airfare to Phnom Penh. The magazine, a weekly based in Hong Kong that reports on East Asian politics and economics, didn't share his conviction that this was the moment Pol Pot would reveal himself, and turned him down. So he borrowed the money for a ticket and headed to Cambodia anyway. Six weeks later, he emerged from the jungle with his friend, cameraman David McKaige, and the news that he had, indeed, gotten to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge had slipped the two men into one of their enclaves near the border with Thailand, to witness a choreographed public denunciation of the former dictator. Thayer had quite a story, and for a few weeks last summer, he was the most famous journalist in the world.
When word got out that an unnamed Western reporter had found Pol Pot, ABC's Nightline called Elizabeth Becker, now assistant Washington editor for The New York Times. Becker was one of two reporters last to see the dictator in 1978. She recalls, "They said they didn't yet know who had gotten the story. I said, 'I know who got it. It had to be Nate Thayer.'"
A FEW WEEKS AFTER PUBLISHING his scoop, Thayer is tired. He's on the telephone from a hotel in Bangkok, where the message slips have been piling up. A lot of people want the man who tracked down Brother Number One, and Thayer seems both stunned and pleased by the attention. He keeps bringing it up whenever a reporter succeeds in getting through to him. "I had 600 calls today," he told his friend Andrew Drummond of The Times of London. "I have gotten more than 2,000 calls in the last 72 hours," he said to Indira A. R. Lakshmanan of the Boston Globe. When Hopkins Magazine reaches him on his mobile phone, he notes, "I got more than 5,000 phone calls in a 72-hour period."
Some of the callers have offered cash, apparently a lot of it, for his story. Reports of how much Thayer might gain from his adventure have varied as widely as the other numbers that come out of Cambodia. Thayer says that he sold the first rights to the Review for its standard fee ($2,000 - $3,000); further sales have grossed more than $400,000, which he must share with agents, lawyers, and McKaige. He says, "This story was never about money or I would have sold to the highest bidder from the beginning. We wanted to do the story with integrity. That is why I chose to publish in the Review and go on Nightline."
The Review actually published five stories by Thayer, and ran his photo of a dazed Pol Pot on the cover. The lead piece is an I-Nate-Thayer-was-there account of the public denunciation: "After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malaria-ridden and land-mine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia."
You don't have to look far to find opinions about Thayer. Steven Solarz, former congressman and recently U.S. special envoy to Cambodia, says, "I've been deeply involved in the Cambodia issue for more than 20 years, and he stands head-and-shoulders above anyone else reporting on the country." Karl Jackson, now director of the Southeast Asian Studies program at SAIS, was a member of the National Security Council in 1990, where he followed Thayer's work; he says he found it more useful than reports from intelligence agencies. Alan Dawson, an editor at the Bangkok Post and former manager of the Saigon bureau for UPI, says, "In my opinion, which is shared by many colleagues, Nate is simply the best reporter to come to the Indochina scene since the fall of Saigon [in 1975]."
But other journalists and Cambodia watchers, many of whom seem personally fond of Thayer, say he's not skeptical enough, that he's too close to the Khmer Rouge and sometimes sounds--whether he means to or not--like a mouthpiece for the organization. Naranhkiri Tith, an expatriate Cambodian and adjunct professor at SAIS, says, "Nate tends to be lost in detail, and lose the analytical point of the big picture. He looks in the trees, but doesn't see the forest." A journalist who has reported extensively from Cambodia (and who requested anonymity--several of Thayer's critics were reluctant to be quoted) says, "He continues to be very soft on the Khmer Rouge. I think his analytical skills are missing. It's just awful. He can see things in front of his face, which not every reporter can do by a long shot--he sees a story--but someone should kindly tell him, 'Listen, you're a good reporter, but once you start analyzing....' I couldn't believe that the Review ran all that stuff. But that's what you do for prizes."
Friends and critics do agree on one thing: Nobody has persisted in covering Cambodia like Thayer. Says Becker of The New York Times, "If anyone deserved to witness Pol Pot's denunciation, he did, because he's put so much of his life into it."
THAYER COMES FROM A PROMINENT NEW ENGLAND family. Harvard University has a Thayer Hall; Webster Thayer, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge in the 1920s, presided over the infamous murder trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; Nate's father, Harold, is former ambassador to Singapore. The younger Thayer began hanging around the Thai-Cambodian border in the mid- 1980s, at first on an academic project to research a group of Moslem refugees called the Chams. When he became fascinated by the various rebel factions across the border in Cambodia, he stayed on in Thailand and began trying to make a living as a freelance journalist.
He based himself in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet and began roaming both sides of the border, establishing contacts with all the political factions that opposed the Vietnameseinstalled government. This roaming was dangerous business. The guerrilla fighters who controlled various parts of the jungle were unpredictable . The landscape was strewn with land mines. Mary Kay Magistad, now a correspondent in China for National Public Radio (NPR) but formerly a stringer covering Cambodia, remembers a United Nations official saying, "I keep telling Nate that he should wake up every morning and kiss his feet, because at this rate, he's going to wake up one day and find them gone."
The official was close to prophetic. In October 1989, Thayer, Magistad, and an Australian photographer, Philip Blenkinsop, planned to slip into Cambodia with an anti-government group known as KPNLF. Says Magistad, "We had to get clearance from the Thai special task force that controlled the border. Because they knew Nate, they granted him permission for this first trip, and told Philip and me that we could go later. A couple of days after, we got word that Nate had come out, much worse for wear. He'd been in a truck, sitting in front between two KPNLF guerrillas. The truck hit an anti-tank mine. The young men on either side of Nate were killed instantly. Those in back were thrown out--some killed, some seriously injured. Miraculously, Nate was able to walk away from it with shrapnel in his feet and what he believed was a fractured rib. Besides the trauma of being in such an accident, Nate emerged with a great story and a new cachet, certainly among the guerrillas."
Thayer used his doggedness and his new street cred to develop contacts that other journalists didn't. He began venturing further into dangerous territory. In July 1990, he was the first reporter to accompany guerrillas far into Cambodia, confirming in his AP dispatches that rebel troops were operating not just along the Thai border, but deep inside the country. He traveled up the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1992 and found a secret army of montagnard tribesmen who had remained loyal to their former American commanders. A few years later, he mounted, on elephants, an expedition to find a rare Cambodian bovine known as the kouprey. The trek failed to turn up any of its quarry, but entered the lore about Thayer, who laughs at himself when he recounts the story.
Leah Melnick is now a human rights observer posted in Sarajevo, Bosnia. But in the early 1990s she was a photojournalist covering Cambodia, and she recalls a trip with Thayer that was both farcical and harrowing. A ceasefire had halted fighting between the Vietnambacked government and the rebel groups (which included the Khmer Rouge and other factions). Thayer and Melnick were the first journalists to cross the battle lines from the government to the rebel side. Thayer was malarial at the time, weak and feverish, and as Melnick remembers, "spitting large wads of tobacco out the window, which somehow always managed to fly back in the car. His luggage consisted of a plastic bag with three cans of Camembert cheese, a towel, and a T-shirt--this for a trip that could have been up to a month. We set out from Phnom Penh in one of these Russian jeeps, which have the unique propensity for losing large pieces of their machinery every time you hit a bump. By the time we pulled up to where we were to cross over to areas held by the resistance, the steering wheel literally fell off in his lap."
She continues, "Things got kind of hairy as we were crossing the line. The government soldiers were a bunch of your typical 12-year-old kids, with very large automatic weapons and blank looks in their eyes. They seemed to know we were coming, and when they stopped us there was some extremely strange vibe. We went ahead and made it to the other side, where the resistance leader there met us. He looked very worried. He said, 'I can't believe you made it. We had received information by monitoring the radio that [government troops] were going to ambush and kill you.'" Thayer and Melnick later heard the same report from worried United Nations officials, and concluded that they'd had a narrow escape. Some of Thayer's reporting had angered the government, and apparently someone had seen an opportunity to rid the country of a pest.
Thayer cultivated a persona that Magistad characterizes as "a rugged, wild Heart of Darkness journalist." He began contributing pieces to Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine devoted to stories about weaponry, military operations, and adventure in the world's combat zones. He acquired a reputation as a hard partyer. When the peace accord signed in 1991 temporarily ended the guerrilla war, Thayer moved to the Cambodian capital, where he figured prominently in one bacchanal that, according to Drummond of the London Times, featured a concoction that flattened several bureau chiefs for two days and caused Drummond to fall down three flights of stairs at the Phnom Penh Post's office.
Thayer sometimes simultaneously plays down and plays up his image. On the phone from Bangkok, he says, "I've taken many, many risks in reporting wars in Asia over the years. I've been kicked out of Cambodia several times. I've had innumerable death threats. I've been wounded in battle. I've been literally on my deathbed from malaria and other illnesses. When you put it like that, it sounds dramatic, but it comes with the territory. You can overdramatize these issues. Of course it's risky, but frankly that's not a big issue."
Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker, knows Thayer from Cambodia. "There's these two sides to Nate," he says. "There's Nate the cowboy character, the slightly spooky, great raconteur, of whom you're almost not sure what to believe, but most of it all turns out to be true and the exaggerations seem to be of the most small kind. And there's Nate the hardcore investigative journalist, who takes very seriously his effort to be a writer of exposés. The two are absolutely in balance. One of the important things that Nate does, one reason he's good, is that he has covered Cambodia not just for the outside world but also for the Phnom Penh Post. He looks at it from the point of view of the people whose news it really is, rather than from the narrow, Western-interest point of view that a lot of foreign coverage comes from."
|
Recent Comments