In memoriam: Nate Thayer, bold reporter who interviewed Pol Pot

By SETH MYDANS

NEW YORK: Nate Thayer, a risk-taking, publicity-drawing journalist whose career was capped by an exclusive jungle interview in Cambodia with Pol Pot, the leader of one of the worst convulsions of mass killing of the last century, has died at his home in East Falmouth, Massachusetts. He was 62. Thayer interviewed Pol Pot in October 1997 after months of clandestine meetings with Khmer Rouge guerrillas, whom Pol Pot led. After crossing the border from Thailand, Thayer sat with him in a forest clearing, facing a broken man whose followers had turned against him as his movement collapsed into opposing factions.

During Pol Pot’s four years in power, in the late 1970s, 2 million people — as much as one-fourth of Cambodia’s population — died of execution, torture, starvation or overwork as he attempted by force to create a pure, pre-modern communist state.

In the interview, Pol Pot offered a bland defense of the carnage. “I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people,” he told Thayer, who quoted him for an article published in the Far Eastern Economic Review, an Asian newsmagazine. “Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?” he asked in the interview, which was videotaped by David McKaige and Marc Laban, whom Thayer had hired. “My conscience is clear.”

He added: “I only made decisions concerning the very important people. I didn’t supervise the lower ranks.”

Thayer had competition for the interview from Elizabeth Becker of The New York Times, but when she arrived at the border, he used his connections to block her entry and maintain his exclusive. She had conducted the last American interview with Pol Pot 18 years earlier, for The Washington Post, and had narrowly survived an attack by unidentified gunmen.

Thayer’s interview was his second clandestine trip across the border. Earlier that year, his Khmer Rouge contacts had taken him to witness an outdoor show trial in which Pol Pot, the movement’s founder, was denounced by comrades.

“‘Crush! Crush! Crush Pol Pot and his clique!’ shouted the crowd,” Thayer reported. “There, slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man, frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his vision crumble in utter defeat.”

Less than six months later, in April 1998, an ailing Pol Pot died at 73. The jungle meeting produced a minor drama of its own when Thayer gave Ted Koppel of the ABC News program “Nightline” the American broadcast rights to his video. The network immediately distributed both still pictures and the video around the world with credit to ABC, which Thayer said violated their agreement and scooped his own article. ABC News said it had followed standard practice, paying him for the material, giving him credit but presenting it as its own. He declined to share a Peabody award with the network and brought suit, winning an out-of-court settlement after years of litigation.

He also won a cluster of awards for his investigative reporting. Thayer spent many months writing a book about the Khmer Rouge titled “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge,” which offered vivid descriptions of the trial and interview. The book was advertised online, but for unclear reasons, it was never published, and Thayer carried the manuscript with him for years afterward.