Obsessive Secrecy Shrouds Evil Regime

Pol Pot, the Cambodian guerrilla leader who turned his gentle country into a vast killing field, is one of modern history’s most secretive figures.

The mystery surrounding the Khmer Rouge leader appeared to confound Cambodia’s co-premiers on Sunday, with one announcing that the ailing Pol Pot was in custody and the other reporting that he may already be dead.

If Pol Pot is indeed alive, his capture could give the outside world may its first glimpse in 17 years of the man known by his comrades as “Brother Number One.”

The truth about his communist Khmer Rouge movement has always been obscure, in its decline as well as in its rise.

Once feared, Pol Pot last week fled the group’s northern Cambodian redoubt with a coterie of followers after a leadership split. He was cornered and, according to his former colleagues, captured Thursday night.

Some had expected he would kill himself rather than be taken alive.

Others thought he might disappear - retreating to the relative obscurity from which he emerged in 1975, when his guerrilla army seized power in Cambodia.

When they captured Phnom Penh, Pol Pot’s regime began a three-year, eight-month, 20-day reign of terror which left about one in five of the country’s 7.9 million people dead.

Secrecy is a hallmark of successful revolutionaries, but few carried it as far as Pol Pot and his comrades, who continued to operate in the shadows even when they were in power.

And after losing power in 1979, he kept up the covert life in hideouts on the border with Thailand.

Under a succession of pseudonyms and code names, Pol Pot commanded a guerrilla struggle through the 1980s against the Vietnamese-installed regime which had succeeded the Khmer Rouge. He carried on fighting even after a 1991 U.N.-supervised election brought the current coalition to power.

During the bitter 1970-75 war against a U.S.-backed regime in Phnom Penh, the guerrilla leadership was known to most followers only as the Angka - the Organization. It was “invisible and ubiquitous, like a god,” in the words of one scholar.

The veil of secrecy was lifted slowly and slightly after the guerrillas’ 1975 victory. Only in 1977 was it publicly acknowledged that the Communist party was the actual ruling group in Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia had been renamed.

It took some time before outsiders were able to identify Pol Pot as Saloth Sar, a little known and previously low-profile member of the Khmer Rouge.

Democratic Kampuchea shunned almost all trade and contacts with other countries. Information about Pol Pot trickled out. Historians were able to learn more only after the Khmer Rouge were chased from power in 1979.

Pol Pot was born into a farming family in Kompong Thom province, 80 miles north of Phnom Penh. His most likely date of birth is May 25, 1928.

He was schooled at a Buddhist monastery, and then went to Paris in 1949 on a government scholarship to study electronics. Engrossed by leftist politics, he established a communist cell with fellow Cambodian students.

He failed exams, lost his scholarship and returned home.

After Cambodia won independence in 1953, Pol Pot set up an underground communist party while maintaining a legal front as a teacher of geography, history and morals at a private school.

In 1963 he took the top party job and fled into the jungle after the government, led by then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk, savagely repressed leftist opposition.

In 1970, Vietnam’s Communists decided they needed armed allies, and with their assistance Pol Pot was suddenly the head of a large guerrilla army, which would march to victory five years later.

Almost all accounts of Pol Pot’s personality describe him as a man of charm and charisma.

Pol Pot “was a very polite, gentle boy. He respected old people and they liked him,” his brother, Saloth Suong, told The Associated Press in 1990. “I have no idea why he became so evil. Maybe it was the things he studied and the friends who influenced him.”

His students likewise described him as pleasant, modest and polite - qualities Cambodians admire.

More politically astute observers also were struck by him.

Sihanouk, twice an ally of convenience of the Khmer Rouge and for about three years their prisoner, said Pol Pot was “very brutal,” but at the same time characterized him as “really very charming.”

Insider’s accounts of Pol Pot’s years in power are rare, because - until this past week - those in a position to know either remained loyally silent or silently dead, killed in purges.

Last year Ieng Sary, who was in charge of foreign affairs in Democratic Kampuchea, became the first of the inner circle to break with Pol Pot and live to tell the tale.