By Elizabeth Becker
Pol Pot is one of the most reviled dictators of the 20th Century, responsible for the death of some two million Cambodians through brutal torture, murder, starvation and hard labor – all in less than four years.
Yet he is the rare monster who escaped justice and died peacefully in his own bed.
I’ve been tracking that man since 1973 and I’m still shadowing him, even though he died in 1998.
This story begins in 1973, at the end of Cambodia’s dry season.It was becoming clear that the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s revolutionary communists, would win the war. The United States had withdrawn its military from Vietnam after signing the 1973 peace treaty. Soon afterwards, the U.S. ended its air war over Cambodia. That meant the weak and corrupt Cambodian government was on its own against the superior and fanatical Khmer Rouge.
I was a young war correspondent for The Washington Post in Cambodia and asked the obvious question: “what would happen if the Khmer Rouge won?” No one knew.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the indomitable former head of Cambodia, was the group’s public figurehead. He lived in Beijing and had so little power he laughingly acknowledged he was had no power. “When they no longer need me they will spit me out like a cherry pit,” he said.
There was something deeply ominous about this secrecy. The Vietnamese communist leaders Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap were public heroes. Why did the true leaders of the Khmer Rouge hide in the shadows, warning journalists that if they tried to come into their territory they would be killed.
I found the beginning of an answer in a popular Khmer language paperback that I initially thought was a romance novel. Titled “Regrets of the Khmer Soul” it was the first and only eyewitness report from Khmer Rouge territory and it was being read around the city. The author was a respected Cambodian school inspector who had joined the Khmer Rouge hoping it would bring about a revolution for the betterment of his country. After a few months he escaped and returned to Phnom Penh to warn his compatriots that the Khmer Rouge were ruthless, brutal authoritarians. They would win because they were highly disciplined and popular in the countryside. They improved the lives of peasants and lived at a primitive level with them, promising egalitarianism. But the Khmer Rouge demanded absolute obedience. Any infraction was punished with violence and often death. There was nothing democratic or free about their rule. The book failed to name the leader.
I was collaborating on an investigation of the Khmer Rouge with Ishiyama Koki of the Kyodo news service. We had the book translated and it became the invaluable basis for our reporting. But Koki grew impatient with our slow progress. In October he crossed into Khmer Rouge territory and disappeared. Our quest had become deadly.
Between daily coverage, I continued the investigation, tracking down information from forbidden Chinese communist pamphlets about the Khmer Rouge pamphlets, interviewing specialists and spies in foreign embassies and quizzing my best Cambodian sources. Finally I found the name of the possible leader: Saloth Sar.
On March 13, 1974, my report “Who Are the Khmer Rouge?” ran in the Washington Post. It was the first and only time Saloth Sar was named in any media during the war.
The reaction was awful. No one wanted to believe my story, especially the brutality. No journalists followed up on my reporting. Several told me I’d shouldn’t have written such a wide-ranging article without interviewing any Khmer Rouge leader. (Forgetting that all who had tried were killed.) The government denied the story. The embassies disagreed among themselves on its veracity. The war ended one year later. The Khmer Rouge won.
Back in Washington, D.C. as a reporter at the Post I was upended by the sparse news coming out of Cambodia. After throwing everyone out of the cities and towns the first, the Khmer Rouge isolated the country completely. No telephone, no mail, no cables, no air traffic save from Vietnam and China. All borders shut. The few refugees who escaped spoke of executions and hunger, of people being treated like work animals. Was this the masterplan of Saloth Sar? His name wasn’t mentioned.
Then on the first anniversary of the victory Pol Pot appeared as the country’s leader. Pol Pot? It was Saloth Sar using his nom de guerre. I had got that right.
I was desperate to go to Cambodia and report on Pol Pot’s revolution. After four years petitioning the Khmer Rouge government through its Beijing embassy and the Khmer Rouge foreign minister at the United Nations, I received a visa.
Now I would meet Saloth Sar alias Pol Pot. I arrived in Cambodia in December 1978 with Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Malcolm Caldwell, a British academic. We traveled the country for two weeks under the equivalent of house arrest; everything we saw and everyone we met were selected by the regime. Of the three I was the only one who had lived in Cambodia and studied the language. Which meant I was the only one frightened by what I saw. On our last day we interviewed Pol Pot.
After five years of chasing this man I was caught by surprise. He was handsome, charismatic and dressed impeccably. There was nothing of the rumpled man I had seen in earlier photographs. At the same time, his aura was of a man who commanded all in his presence.
Dudman and I sat down for our interview only to be told Pol Pot would not answer questions. Instead, he lectured us on the upcoming war with Vietnam. He told us he expected NATO, including the United States to come to Cambodia’s aid and fight the Vietnamese. That’s all he talked about for two hours.
He was utterly delusional. We left happy that this was our last day and would fly home the next morning. That night Cambodian assassins broke into our official guest house, threatened we two journalists and murdered the academic. Two days later the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge government.
We were the only Western journalists to interview Pol Pot while he was in power. Even more amazing, Dudman and I disagreed on what we saw: he believed Pol Pot’s revolution was worthwhile.
Shaken by the experience I spent the next five years researching and writing a history of the nearly four years of Khmer Rouge rule, entitled “WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution.” It was the first history of how and why Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge devastated the country, killing off nearly a quarter of the population with the goal of erasing the culture and civilization to create a new Cambodia.
After their defeat by the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge won a reprieve. With China as their patron, they relocated on the Thai-Cambodian border to fight the Vietnamese. Diplomatically, the United States sided with China and convinced the U.N. to support the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate leaders of Cambodia despite irrefutable evidence of the genocide.
It took the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War to break that unholy alliance. A peace treaty was reached in 1991 and the Khmer Rouge retreated to their border redoubt. Eighteen years later they were brought to trial. By then Pol Pot had died in his bed, never arrested or made to answer for his genocidal regime.
Because of my book and my journalism, I testified in 2015 as an expert witness at the genocide trial of the two surviving Khmer Rouge leader. The judges concentrated on I my two weeks in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and my interview with him and my interviews with his family and colleagues.
Over these years, I was interviewed countless times about Pol Pot. I stayed abreast of new articles and books about him written by other journalists and writers thinking the world would forget him. He came up when I published “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War,” a biography of the pioneer women who covered Vietnam.
But that was not the peak of my connection to the monster. In 2024 the feature film “Rendezvous Avec Pol Pot” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It a movie loosely based on me and my trip to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and that now infamous interview with Pol Pot. I walked the red carpet in Cannes and answered questions about Pol Pot from young French reporters who saw frightening parallels between the film and the would-be authoritarian leaders of today.
Then the film premiered in the U.S. in 2025 as “Meeting With Pol Pot” at New York’s Lincoln Center. Rithy Panh, the Oscar-nominated director of the film, graced the premiere and answered similar questions with me about the Khmer Rouge genocide. (He is a survivor.) This new generation made me see new facets of Pol Pot.
Now I have no doubt that I will be chasing Pol Pot for the rest of my life.