Be Careful or Your Body May Disappear: Part 1

The politics of mass murder

1970

“The liberals are waiting to see Nixon let Cambodia go down the drain the way Eisenhower let Cuba go down the drain,” Richard Nixon complained in a phone call, not wanting another country in Asia to fall outside of U.S. influence. His administration had been secretly bombing Cambodia for a year, but these military actions were not sufficient in his view. He was prepared to widen the Vietnam War to end it, or so the thinking went. Less than six months after his Secretary of State said on television that they would not conduct another ground war in an Asian country without the support of the Congress and the American people, Nixon was prepared to invade Cambodia and largely keep it a secret up to the day of invasion. One person he did tell was Bebe Rebozo, a close friend of his who held no position in government. On April 24, Nixon phoned his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who could tell that the President was drunk. His voice slurring, Nixon informed Kissinger that Rebozo had a message for him and handed him the phone. “The President wants you to know, if this doesn’t work, Henry, it’s your ass,” Rebozo explained. Nixon bolstered the point in the background, “Ain’t that right, Bebe?” Still undecided, Nixon later weighed his options paddling in the pool at Camp David, as Kissinger walked alongside the perimeter, mulling the possibilities for ten minutes before dropping the subject.

Upon returning to the White House and to inspire his course of action, Nixon watched the film Patton for around the sixth time. Kissinger politely declined the offer to join him, having already seen it with the President once before. On April 27, Secretary of State William P. Rogers in private argued against U.S. involvement, telling Nixon: “It will cost us great casualties with very little gain. And I just don’t believe it will be a crippling blow to the enemy.” Nixon by this time had already authorized the invasion; he was pushing for a “big play” since it was inevitable, in his view, that there would be “a hell of an uproar at home” regardless. “The opposition would be equally hysterical either way,” wrote Kissinger. Nixon took out a yellow legal notepad to compare a list of pros and cons with Kissinger and remained convinced of his decision. “Now that we have made the decision there must be no recriminations among us,” Nixon told him. “Not even if the whole thing goes wrong. In fact, especially if the whole thing goes wrong.”

Later that year in December, Nixon remained unsatisfied with progress in Cambodia, despite the invasion of U.S. ground troops and the continued bombing operations in the country. Despite 475,515 tons of ordnance having already been dropped on Cambodia, Nixon explained to Kissinger that there needed to be more: “They have got to go in there and I mean really go in…I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?” Kissinger communicated the President’s wishes in a phone call to his Deputy National Security Advisor Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” The transcriber of the phone call could only make out the sound of Haig laughing in response. As they got into logistics and discussed issues with the Air Force, Kissinger asked, “Can we at least get a massive bombing attack into this area?”

In the decade prior to 1975, in the Johnson and Nixon administrations the U.S. had dropped a total of 2,756,941 tons of bombs on Cambodia, leading to the speculation that it may be the most bombed country in history (Laos, bombed by the U.S. from 1964-1973 and Vietnam being other contenders). For comparison, the Allies dropped approximately 2 million tons of ordnance during all of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upon their victory in taking over the country in 1975, Pol Pot pointed to their victory not over their neighboring enemy Vietnam, but rather “U.S. imperialism.” What Pol Pot later described as an army of “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas,” the Khmer Rouge bolstered their numbers and support through the U.S. bombing campaign. A former Khmer Rouge officer, Chhit Do, explained after the war:

Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched…The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them…Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

1975

Mey Komphot did not know much about the Khmer Rouge when they took power in Cambodia in April 1975. Most of his prior knowledge consisted of knowing one party member personally from his past, a teacher named Khieu Ponnary, who happened to be married to its leader, whose real name was Saloth Sâr but was now known under the pseudonym Pol Pot. He recalled she displayed a strong sense of nationalism but nothing about her or her philosophy worried him too much. He thought nothing could be worse than the current Lon Nol government, supported by the United States, with its corruption and suspension of civil liberties.

Cambodians had experienced civil war for years, with an estimated 300,000 killed since 1970. Eager for an end to the bloodshed, some in the streets of the capital city Phnom Penh, where Komphot worked as a bank executive, welcomed the takeover of the Khmer Rouge and hoped for a positive change on their first day in power on April 17. Things got off to an inauspicious start when Khmer Rouge soldiers forced Komphot to hand over all of the money in his bank’s safe, which he promptly made them sign out as if to officially document their theft. Those familiar with the operations of the Khmer Rouge from the recent past were far more pessimistic and frightened of what was to come than Komphot.

As he walked the increasingly vacant streets on that first day, Komphot encountered an engineer he knew, who had already given away his only child to strangers in the hopes of protecting him. Komphot could not believe he would take such an extreme measure so early in the Khmer Rouge’s rule nor the look on his face: “He seemed haunted.” What did he know about the Khmer Rouge and their plans for Cambodia? On this question, Komphot was unfortunately hopelessly naïve and the engineer had no interest in explaining his premonition: “He said he didn’t want to talk to me, that he didn’t know who to trust. Then he disappeared.”

The residents of Phnom Penh, including Komphot, were all evacuated out of the capital city and told to return to the village of their ancestors. They were told it was temporary, that the U.S. was imminently going to attack the city and that it was for their protection. In reality, it was part of their plan to return to an agrarian society through forced labor. Modernity was shunned in favor of a rural, classless society where money, freedom of movement, religion, conventional schooling, foreign clothing, and traditional Khmer culture were banned. Most of the military officers and civil servants from the previous regime were murdered, as well as intellectuals and minority residents, including those who were Cham, Vietnamese and Chinese. The “new people” from the city were subjected to harsher treatment than the “old people” or those who already lived in the countryside, but both were subjected to cruel conditions, physical abuse, mass executions, and malnutrition. Citizens were asked to write their biographies so that the Khmer Rouge could determine if they should live or die based on their vision for a new society. They no longer had any use for banks and soon destroyed the National Bank of Cambodia. Komphot believed that the Khmer Rouge misunderstood his banking role as being no more than a clerk handling money and so his life was spared.

Nevertheless, three months into the regime, every night—a time of day when only the Khmer Rouge were permitted to move—brought the risk of disappearance, with people around Komphot never to be seen again. He would hear footsteps and muffled cries as one of his fellow prisoners would be dragged away, which they termed as a body fading away. Their language reflected the dehumanization process underway. “Be careful,” he was told, “or your body may disappear.” On one occasion, the footsteps reached so closely that he thought he was next to be taken in the night. Komphot was ready to give up on his horrid existence: “It is one thing to suffer to live, another thing to suffer only to die. I decided to give it two years. If nothing had changed I would commit suicide.”

The Khmer Rouge refused at this stage to communicate with the outside world. Kissinger nonetheless attempted to send them a message through the foreign minister of Thailand in November 1975: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.”

1978

“I’m not going to tell you anything about Cambodia.” Elizabeth Becker, 31, journalist for the Washington Post, was spelling out to Richard Dudman, 60, senior journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, how she was going to have a competitive advantage over him in their exclusive coverage of Cambodia. Despite her young age in comparison with Dudman, she knew a lot about Cambodia from her war coverage earlier in the decade for the Post and he knew very little. “You have a big advantage,” she said to him soon after their arrival in Phnom Penh, “because you’ve been covering all kinds of things all over the world for a long time, so you’ve got that advantage.” When Dudman protested her lack of assistance, she replied: “That’s the way it is.”

Facing calls to address allegations of human rights abuses and attempting to block an impending invasion by Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge opened Cambodia for the first time in late 1978 to Western journalists since their takeover of the country three years earlier. Becker and Dudman were joined by Malcolm Caldwell, a Scottish professor from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and were among the first Westerners to visit Cambodia since the new regime had taken power. What they did not know arriving in the country that December was that it had already been decided that one of them would die.

Becker and Dudman were concerned mostly with being first to report on the story. Becker was not alone in her attempt to one-up the competition; Dudman, for his part, had attempted to advance his visit to Cambodia by two weeks by telegramming Phnom Penh; however, he never received a reply. The three participants were likely selected by the Khmer Rouge due to their past work being seen as sympathetic to the cause. Dudman was the author of Forty Days with the Enemy, an account of him being held in captivity by the Vietcong in Cambodia in 1970, in which he expressed criticism of U.S. involvement in the region, which he saw as “radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia and…turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base,” a quotation included in Caldwell’s book Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War. Becker had a strong interest in returning to Cambodia, having previously worked there as a war correspondent for the Washington Post from 1973-74 and she expressed her interest to the Khmer Rouge’s foreign minister Ieng Sary whenever he visited the United Nations. “I tried to speak to him,” she wrote, “and eventually I convinced him I was the journalist he had to invite back.” While she had written a sympathetic account of refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime in a recent book review, she suspected it was the prestige of her newspaper and earlier articles critical of the U.S. interventions in Cambodia that had convinced the Khmer Rouge to allow her on the trip. Alternatively, Caldwell was well known for his support of the Khmer Rouge regime, writing in 1975 that Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge called Cambodia, was on a path “shifting from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all.” Days before before leaving on the trip, he gave a speech in which he noted how the Cambodian regime was undertaking “a very valid and valuable experiment” as well as explaining the “very great tragedy” if “the Kampuchean experiment were to be extinguished.”

The trio spent two weeks in December 1978 on a carefully stage-managed tour of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Even still, the scenes they encountered in Phnom Penh were unlike anything Becker had seen before the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. Most of the people that could normally be found on the busy city streets were gone; the city was largely empty. As they walked down the middle of the street they did not even encounter a car, until their guards showed up to bring them back to their guest house, instructing them not to leave again without permission. Within days of their arrival, Becker realized that the situation was far more dire than they had been led to believe by outside experts. Most of their historical buildings had been left to rot or had been destroyed. The streets were silent, except for occasional young military cadre or women in shops sewing blue pajama suits. “There was no sign of any other life,” she wrote. “There were no foodstalls, no families, no young people playing sports, even sidewalk games, no one out on a walk, not even dogs or cats playing in alleyways.” Caldwell recorded in his diary that “Factories (making clothes) [were] still working at 7:45 PM on Sunday (and still at work at 11 PM on the Sat. night). Request to visit deflected.” He noted conditions as “Dickensian” when he was permitted to visit a factory. Despite this, he remained positive, recording a slogan: “I have seen the past, and it works.” Kept from their view on the first full day of the trip, at the nearby Security Prison 21 (S-21) also known as Tuol Sleng, 35 new prisoners were added: they included three women arrested from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, eight medical personnel, including one 16-year-old girl who worked in a hospital. A day later, 28 prisoners were executed. In total, the former high school turned into a torture and execution center was the site of over 18,000 killings, one of 196 Khmer Rouge prisoners scattered throughout the country.

Their excursions outside of the capital prompted more unanswered questions. The visitors asked to speak to previous residents of Phnom Penh and were rebuffed. Becker eventually met one and she asked if others in his cooperative were from the city; he “guessed certain people were from Phnom Penh by the way they looked working the rice fields, but he had never talked to them.” Becker wanted to examine the issue of human rights through those that were displaced, whereas her minders told her to “stop worrying about the criminals from the old regime.” The new regime managed to bring out one intellectual, Ok Sakun, thought by his friends in Paris to be dead. Becker found him to be gaunt and apparently recovering from malnutrition. He was mostly only allowed to speak through an interpreter and when alone with Becker, he spoke of “only of flowers, how beautiful they looked, how much one could miss them.” At the time, Becker was confused but later realized it was his way of describing being let out of a labor camp. In their reports back from the countryside, the Cambodian regime accused of Becker and Dudman of working for the U.S. government. “The two American journalists clearly serve the American government and the CIA as we have precisely identified,” the report stated. “Specially [sic], the woman, Elizabeth Becker, just keeps collecting information and spotting our weak points.” Dudman was in fact on Nixon’s expanded enemies list for his writing. One of the rare missteps on the trip on the part of the Khmer Rouge occurred when the visitors witnessed “the unforgettable sight of a long line of boys and girls of early school age trudging along in silence, carrying huge bundles of firewood on their backs.” These were volunteers part of a “mobile youth brigade,” they were told.

Even Caldwell was not fooled by the Khmer Rouge’s attempts to hide reality. The trio wanted to see a communal dining hall but were told none were ready. After several requests, their hosts finally relented and the group was brought into a room “with people sitting in front of heaping plates of food with little side tables with Coca-Cola and bowls of fruit on the center of the main table. A kind of lavish noon meal. But there weren’t any of them eating. And they wouldn’t say anything. We tried to talk to them but they wouldn’t talk to us.” After 15 to 20 minutes, Caldwell leaned over to whisper to the journalists, “What a charade.” Despite his general support for the regime and communist movements, Becker also noted Caldwell’s cynical nature throughout the trip. Dudman agreed with Caldwell: “I don’t suppose those people ever ate that food. I think it was just a show put on for ourselves.”

Mey Komphot, listening to a government radio broadcast, heard a news story that Becker was in Cambodia. The announcer was careful not to announce her location until after the group had left for their safety. Komphot refused to believe that Becker, his friend from her early war correspondent days in Cambodia, would have been let back into the country and dismissed the story in his mind as propaganda to distract from an expected Vietnamese invasion.

At the conclusion of the tour on December 23, the two journalists were told they would be granted an interview with Pol Pot and that Caldwell would have a separate discussion with the Khmer Rouge leader. They were asked to submit questions in advance: Becker and Dudman tried to pierce the secrecy of the regime, asking for names of the members of the government, how enemy prisoners were treated, and about nutrition and public health. Pol Pot arrived for their session and sat on “a kind of throne” in Prince Sihanouk’s palace (Sihanouk, then secretly under house arrest, they were told was unavailable). Pol Pot proceeded to give a long speech, made longer by the fact that each sentence was translated immediately afterwards into French and then English. “He launched into a diatribe against the aggressive Vietnamese and said they were plotting to come in and that they would be thrown back. I thought it was kind of a filibuster and I was really bored by it and I didn’t take it very seriously,” Dudman recalled. Pol Pot quickly dispensed with their questions without any chance for follow-ups: “He said he wasn’t going to give us the names of his people,” Dudman explained, “because if they went back into the jungle, they wanted to be anonymous. And he really didn’t give us much factual information of any kind.” Pol Pot ended his speech with a warning intended for the journalists’ U.S. audience: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world…for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia. The situation will be clearer and clearer...what are the criminal acts of Vietnam and the Soviet Union against Kampuchea, Southeast Asia, and the world.”

Caldwell finished his interview with Pol Pot next and the three compared notes at dinner. As far as Dudman surmised, neither interview produced much in the way of substance. Dudman reflected on Caldwell’s experience: “He’d shown himself to be somewhat critical of the regime, and distrustful, skeptical about the things they’d shown us…yet I think he had a kind of an underlying sympathy for the regime and I got no indication that he changed his view.” Becker reported that Caldwell that night tried to convince her to change her distrustful stance, comparing the situation with Cambodia and Vietnam to that of Scotland and England. “I saw no relevance to such a remark,” she recalled.

After finishing dinner, the three said goodnight. Caldwell and Dudman went upstairs to their separate bedrooms on the second floor of a government compound on Monivong Avenue near an old presidential palace. Becker went to sleep first at 11:00 P.M. in her room on the first floor near the dining room. Around two hours later, Dudman was finishing up some notes and getting ready for bed when he heard what he thought was gunfire outside. He exited his room into the hallway and looking towards the back end of the corridor, he saw a young man burst through the double doors. Wearing a military uniform and a cap fashioned like a baseball hat, the man had two belts of ammunition across his chest, a submachine gun over his shoulder, and carried a large pistol in his hand. He looked at Dudman and immediately turned around to go back downstairs.

Becker, who had been awakened by the noise, took a moment to get her bearings and recognized the sound of shots outside. She stepped out of her room as the young man approached from the back door; they met and stared at one another in the dining room. He was pointing his pistol directly at her and “looked more frightened than I felt, and I felt as if my body would burst from fear,” she recalled. She yelled, “No, don’t shoot!” and ran into her bedroom, in her haste forgetting to lock the door. Without stopping and acting on instinct, she continued running into the bathroom and leapt into the bathtub onto her stomach. Rather than pursue her, the young man went back upstairs.

While Becker had been having her encounter, Dudman had moved to the balcony at the opposite end of the second-floor hallway, where he could see people running around in the bushes outside. He knocked on Caldwell’s door, who was equally mystified as to what was transpiring. They mutually decided that the best course of action was to remain in their rooms. As Dudman turned to go back to his room, the young man entered the hallway again, pointing his pistol and firing once at Dudman. Incredibly, it was only then that Dudman realized he was in danger. He quickly stepped back into his room, slamming the door. He had the good sense to stand to one side as two bullets were shot through the door, splintering the wood. Dudman was uncertain if the man would enter to kill him or thought he had already accomplished the deed. Dudman tried to hide under his bed but it was too low to the ground. He settled for a space between the bed and the wall and lay there, wondering what would happen next. Downstairs, Becker feared the man would return and desperately tried to her mind occupied for one and a half hours in the silence until she heard a crash of broken glass and a heavy object being carried down and then up the stairs.

Their tour guides eventually knocked on their doors, informing Becker and Dudman that Caldwell had been shot dead. They were asked to view Caldwell’s body in his room, Becker recounted, where he could be seen “lying on the floor in his pajamas, blood on his chest, his long auburn hair wild around his face.” Strangely, the young assailant was also lying dead in the room. Becker could not understand: “What was he doing there, dead, sprawled across the floor?” she asked in When the War Was Over. Dudman was similarly perplexed. During the waiting period, he had also “heard some moving around, a few shots fired, some broken glass. Some people dragging something around and so on. I didn’t know what was going on,” Dudman remembered in a 2001 interview. Before they departed, they had a funeral service for Caldwell and took his body back with them on their flight the next day. Becker left behind in her room an ax given to her at a worker cooperative as a souvenir: “I did not want an ax from Democratic Kampuchea.”

Becker spent years trying to solve the mystery of the shooting: “Some of the last confessions tortured out of prisoners at Tuol Sleng concerned the murder of Malcolm Caldwell,” she later discovered. “Two Khmer Rouge cadre were forced to confess they were under orders to kill Caldwell—and not Dudman or me—in what appeared to be a plot meant to embarrass the regime on the eve of the war…Only one thing remains clear after years of research. Malcolm Caldwell’s death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired.”

Becker’s series of seven articles appeared in the Washington Post in December 1978. She was cautious in her approach of describing what she saw and what she was unable to observe: “More than 100,000 refugees have fled Cambodia since the Communist victory in April 1975,” she wrote, “and many have told harrowing tales of how thousands—some experts say hundreds of thousands—of people have been killed in what many describe as the greatest systematic slaughter in modern history…During my stay in Cambodia, I made repeated efforts to find people who had been among the hundreds of thousands reportedly driven out of Phnom Penh immediately following the war, and herded on forced marches into the distant countryside. Many are said to have died on these marches. But in the entire visit, I was allowed to talk to only two former inhabitants of Phnom Penh—both of whom said they had left the city voluntarily. I also did not see any signs during my visit of mass graves. For all that I saw and heard, I have no definitive answers to many troublesome questions.” She continued later in her serialized piece:

No one seemed able to explain satisfactorily why if was necessary to empty Cambodia’s cities following the Communist victory in 1975, and send shopkeepers, scholars, engineers and housewives off to agricultural cooperatives to become laborers in the fields.

Nor could I find any explanation of why it was necessary for thousands of Cambodians to die from disease, malnutrition and summary execution in the course of fashioning this new Cambodian society.

Most of the evidence of attesting to the horrors that have taken place in Cambodia has been furnished by the thousands of refugees who have fled the country, and I saw little indication of these problems during a very strictly supervised government tour.

To Becker’s surprise, rather than considering the unanswered “troublesome questions” and refugee testimony in their policymaking, the U.S. government would come to agree with Pol Pot’s warning, conveyed to her during the interview, within a matter of months.