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When the communist guerrilla, then known only as Brother No. 1, took power in April 1975, he vowed to turn back the clock to "Year Zero." In the name of a bizarre blend of peasant romanticism and radical Maoism, the Khmer Rouge conducted a reign of terror intended to give birth to an agrarian utopia. At the point of their guns, they emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money and markets, shut down schools and Buddhist monasteries and forced the entire country to wear black pajamas as a sign of "instant communism." Inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot carried its practices to the extreme. Anyone who questioned the system, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone who wore glasses, was executed. Thousands upon thousands perished from starvation and disease in the slave camps of the countryside, as the fatally isolated economy ceased to function.
Pol Pot ignored the disaster he was inflicting on his people. Living in a deserted Phnom Penh, he was obsessed with his own safety, regularly changing houses in paranoid addiction to secrecy. He trusted very few comrades for long: he had 16,000 Khmer Rouge cadres tortured to death in the infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation center--"strings of traitors," as he saw them, who had to be "burned out." Yet when confronted with this by Thayer, Pol Pot claimed he had never heard of Tuol Sleng and showed no sign of remorse. "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?"
The conundrum of the man is that he did not seem savage at all. Before fleeing into the jungle in 1963, the French-educated son of prosperous landowners, born Saloth Sar, taught school in Phnom Penh, and his former students remember him as a soft-spoken, even-tempered man who loved to recite his favorite poet, Verlaine. Francois Ponchaud, a French priest who first moved to Cambodia in 1965, says that when he heard the leader who called himself Pol Pot give a speech on the radio in 1977, "I remember saying to myself, this man knows how to speak. Not angry shouting, but with a gentle, well-modulated voice."
Even after his record of genocide was known the world over, Pol Pot inspired affection among the countryfolk who harbored him for nearly 20 years. "The people found him very kind--I mean the poor people," said Mit Sim, head of Pol Pot's bodyguards in northwestern Cambodia until 1994. During a visit to the area last fall, Sim led the way uphill to the remains of Pol Pot's house and pointed out a large rock at the edge of a nearby cliff. "This is where he would come and sit in the evening," said Sim. "When he was depressed he would call me, and I would come sit with him. He drank expensive ginseng tea, and he kept a bottle of Thai whisky, and he would talk about developing the country for the poor people."