On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died. On the anniversary of his death, it is fitting to recall not only the horrors he inflicted on his own people, but also this forgotten chapter of the Cold War.
In the history of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, few episodes so starkly contradict the publicly proclaimed principles of defending human rights and democracy as the indirect but consistent support for Pol Pot’s regime after its military defeat in January 1979. After Vietnamese troops overthrew “Democratic Kampuchea” and put an end to the genocide that claimed the lives of 1.5 to 1.7 million Cambodians (nearly a quarter of the country’s population), the atrocities of Pol Pot’s regime included the forced evacuation of all cities on April 17, 1975: within mere days, millions of residents—including the elderly, pregnant women, and the sick—were driven on foot into the countryside for compulsory agricultural labor, at gunpoint, without food, water, or personal belongings. The declared “Year Zero” meant a complete break with the past: money, markets, schools, hospitals, libraries, temples, and even family photographs were destroyed. The entire intelligentsia and “bourgeois elements” were systematically exterminated—teachers, doctors, engineers, monks, officials, artists; people were killed merely for wearing glasses, for having soft hands, for knowing foreign languages, or simply for looking “intellectual.” Families were torn apart; children as young as 7–8 years old were forced to inform on their parents and to take part in executions. Millions perished from starvation, malaria, dysentery, and backbreaking labor in the collective farms, where the daily quotas were lethal.
The most infamous symbol of the terror became the S-21 prison (Tuol Sleng) in Phnom Penh—a former senior high school converted into a center for interrogation and torture. In the classrooms where children once studied, there were now torture chambers and solitary confinement cells measuring roughly one meter by two. In some rooms, the school blackboards remained on the walls—a chilling reminder of what existed before the “Year Zero.” Between 17,000 and 20,000 people passed through S-21; only a handful survived—most sources cite seven to twelve known survivors, with some estimates of additional releases or post-liberation survivals.
The goal for every prisoner was to extract, at any cost, a “confession” of espionage on behalf of the CIA, Vietnam, the KGB, or other supposed “enemies of communism.” Torture was systematic and elaborate: electric shocks, submerging heads in water barrels (near-drowning), ripping out fingernails with pliers, hanging upside down, beatings with iron bars, forcing prisoners to drink their own urine and blood, burning with red-hot tongs, slow suffocation with plastic bags, and amputation of body parts.
Women were raped, and pregnant women were forced to watch as their children were murdered. After the “confession” (usually dictated by the interrogator), the prisoner was photographed, registered, and sent to execution—often along with their entire family, in order to “uproot the seed of traitors.” Thousands of surviving photographs of the arrested—including children and infants—along with documents and torture instruments are now on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and continue to shock with their cold, bureaucratic cruelty.
After interrogations at S-21 and other prisons (many of which were later destroyed or repurposed), people were loaded onto trucks and transported to the “Killing Fields”—thousands of mass execution sites scattered across the country. The most notorious is Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where 8,985 bodies were exhumed (with estimates of up to 17,000–20,000 victims killed there overall), but Cambodia as a whole has more than 300 such burial sites, containing tens of thousands of mass graves and pits in total.
Victims were deceived: they were told they were simply being transferred to another work site, to prevent panic and escape attempts—since ammunition was catastrophically scarce and expensive. Executions took place at night, accompanied by loud communist propaganda music and the roar of generators to drown out the screams, ensuring neighboring villagers heard nothing. People were bludgeoned to death with hoes, iron bars, bricks, axes, clubs, and other ordinary farm tools. Even today, after heavy rains, remnants of clothing, bones, and teeth still surface on the Killing Fields—despite numerous exhumations and investigations.
One of the most horrific features is the “Killing Tree” at Choeung Ek: infants and young children were seized by the legs and swung with full force, smashing their heads against the trunk until they died, after which their bodies were thrown into the nearest mass grave. Those who first discovered it reported that the tree was encrusted with dried blood, brains, and hair.
Nearby stood a sugar palm with sharp, serrated spines along its trunk—these natural “blades” were used to slit some victims’ throats. After the killings, bodies were dumped into pits and covered with earth—often while the victims were still alive.
Washington chose a course of preserving the “Khmer Rouge” as an instrument of pressure on Vietnam and the Soviet Union. This policy, which became part of the so-called “Third Indochina War,” was driven by geopolitical considerations and persisted for much of the 1980s.
The Cambodian crisis of 1979 was a direct consequence of prior American interventions in the region. The overthrow of the neutral Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970—with active CIA involvement—and the establishment of the Lon Nol regime led to a civil war in which the marginal communist group led by Pol Pot received support from China and North Vietnam. By 1975, the “Khmer Rouge” had come to power, but their rule entered history as one of the most tragic pages of the 20th century.
By early 1977, within U.S. military and intelligence circles, a conviction had formed that in Democratic Kampuchea’s foreign policy, anti-Vietnamese nationalism substantially outweighed Marxist ideology. This made it possible to view the “Khmer Rouge” as potential tactical partners for Washington. American authorities not only turned a blind eye to the regime’s mass repressions but also contributed to improving its international image. In particular, in 1978, shortly before the Vietnamese invasion, Cambodia was visited by a delegation from the Communist Party of the USA (Marxist-Leninist). Its leader, Daniel Burstein, spoke highly of Ieng Sary and the achievements of the Kampuchean revolution. Upon his return, he published an article in The New York Times, presenting a favorable picture of the situation in the country. This publication can be seen as a telling example of the emerging trend toward softening the image of the “Khmer Rouge” in leading American media.
When, in January 1979, the Vietnamese army entered Phnom Penh and proclaimed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea under Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, Beijing responded with a brief invasion of Vietnamese territory, while Washington saw an opportunity for strategic revenge for the 1975 defeat.
In contrast to the United States, the Soviet Union condemned Pol Pot’s regime and supported its overthrow. Although the world’s first workers’ and peasants’ state might have been expected to view the “Khmer Rouge” as natural allies, relations with Moscow developed in precisely the opposite direction. Pol Pot, who respected Stalin, considered the Soviet leadership traitors to Marxism-Leninism, and his regime was entirely dependent on Maoist China, which was in sharp conflict with the USSR. Attempts by the CPSU Central Committee to establish contacts with the Kampuchean Communist Party even before the fall of Phnom Penh were unsuccessful: proposals of friendship sent from Moscow went unanswered.
In April 1975, immediately after the capture of the capital, armed Khmer Rouge detachments attacked the Soviet embassy in Phnom Penh. The military attaché reported that about 40 fighters in green uniforms (unlike the usual black uniform of the Khmer Rouge) carried out a pogrom. Soviet diplomats spent 30 minutes trying to explain that this was the embassy of a friendly country, but under threat of fire from bazookas, they were forced to open the doors. All staff were arrested, subjected to rough treatment and threats of execution. In the end, together with other Europeans, they were taken to Thailand—having to walk to the border. “For the Khmer Rouge, our people in Phnom Penh were virtually accomplices of the defeated enemies, and there could be no talk of any contacts with representatives of the USSR <…>,” noted later Dr. of Historical Sciences, Deputy Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dmitry Mosyakov.
Despite this, Leonid Brezhnev continued attempts to establish relations. In September 1975, a Soviet delegation that had arrived in Vietnam for the anniversary of the August Revolution was sent to Kampuchea. Negotiations with the “Khmer Rouge” lasted exactly five minutes: the head of the delegation, M. S. Solomentsev, congratulated them on their victory and offered assistance in rebuilding the country. In response—silence. Then Ieng Sari (Minister of Foreign Affairs and the “third person” in the hierarchy) said that the proposals were taken note of. After new silence, Solomentsev asked: “What should I tell Comrade Brezhnev?” The answer was repeated word for word, after which the Khmer stood up and silently left the room. No Soviet representative had ever before been shown such demonstrative disdain.
While the Soviet Union ultimately supported the Vietnamese intervention and recognized the new government, the United States chose the opposite path. A key role in shaping the American line was played by President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In 1980 he stated outright: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help [the Khmer Rouge]… we ourselves could never have supported Pol Pot, but China could.” Later, in 1998, Brzezinski in an open letter to The New York Times denied any direct American involvement, but his original formulations and subsequent testimonies confirm that it was he who initiated the close Thai-Chinese cooperation in reviving the “Khmer Rouge.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Deng XiaopingSupport was provided along several lines. First and foremost, the United States, together with China and Western allies, ensured that representatives of “Democratic Kampuchea” retained Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations until 1993, even though the regime’s actual control was limited to border areas. This decision blocked any development aid to the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and became the only instance in UN history of the complete isolation of a Third World country from international programs.
From January 1980, secret funding of the exiled Pol Pot forces began along the Thai-Cambodian border. According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, $85 million was allocated from 1980 to 1986. These figures were first made public in 1986 by congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, who served as an adviser to Senator John Kerry; he later confirmed their accuracy in correspondence with Noam Chomsky and in a conversation with journalist John Pilger. The Reagan administration attempted to dispute the leak, but the data were never refuted.
Humanitarian aid was also used as cover. Under pressure from Washington, the World Food Programme in 1980 transferred food aid worth $12 million to Thailand for delivery to the “Khmer guerrillas.” Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke later acknowledged that between 20,000 and 40,000 Pol Pot fighters directly benefited from these supplies. In their 1983 book, two American humanitarian organization staffers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, noted: “The U.S. government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed… Washington preferred that Pol Pot’s operation benefit from the credibility of a widely known international humanitarian mission.”
A special unit at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok—the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG)—led by intelligence officers, including Colonel Michael Eiland, controlled the distribution of aid in such a way that it reached Khmer Rouge bases. By 1981, around fifty American agents were operating in Thailand, coordinating the effort.
Direct weapons deliveries were prohibited by Congress, so intermediaries were used: Thailand provided logistics and bases, China supplied the main armaments (at least a billion dollars over the decade), and Singapore served as a channel for Western weapons from the U.S., West Germany, and Sweden. In November 1980, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline secretly visited the Khmer Rouge headquarters inside Cambodia.
When Australia proposed a peace plan in 1985 that excluded the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. blocked the initiative. After the Vietnamese troop withdrawal in 1989, Washington secured the removal of the term “genocide” from the texts of future agreements and insisted on including Pol Pot and his associates in any transitional government. In 1987, Norodom Sihanouk publicly stated: “As for the devils, the United States also supports the Khmer Rouge. The United States says it is against the Khmer Rouge… But the devils—they are there, with Sihanouk and Son Sann.”
The Khmer Rouge’s survival and prolonged guerrilla campaign were made possible by sustained external backing, turning them into one of the region’s most resilient and resource-rich insurgent forces through cross-border trade in timber and gems via Thailand. The low-intensity war dragged on into the early 1990s, exacting further thousands of lives. It was only the Paris Peace Agreements of October 1991, followed by the UN-supervised elections in 1993, that finally ended the armed conflict. Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, in a remote jungle hideout, never having stood trial for the crimes committed under his rule.
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