Secrecy remained attractive to Pol Pot. It was also seen as an essential ingredient of party life. Nuon Chea expressed this view to a Danish Marxist-Leninist delegation that visited Phnom Penh in 1978. Chea’s frankness can be traced to the fact that he considered his remarks confidential and never expected them to be published. “Secret work,” he said, “is fundamental in all that we do. For example, the elections of comrades to leading work are secret. The places where our leaders live are secret.... As long as there is class struggle or imperialism, secret work will remain fundamental. Only through secrecy can we be masters of the situation and win victory over the enemy who cannot find out who is who.”3

In 1976-1977 Pol Pot concentrated on the “Four Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields” and the purging of “enemies,” which was carried out in large part at the party’s interrogation center known as S-21 in the Phnom Penh suburb of Tuol Sleng. These programs fit with his priorities of “building and defending” the country. To build the country it was essential to take charge of its economic activities; to defend it, it was essential to eliminate enemies of the state. Pol Pot later blamed the uneven results of his all-embracing, radical Four Year Plan on “enemies” just as Stalin and Mao Zedong had done when their grandiose economic plans ran into trouble. The speed with which the Cambodian plan was set in motion, moreover, was traced to the urgency of defeating the “enemies” before they could sabotage it. In Pol Pot’s words, “Enemies attack and torment us. From the east and from the west, they persist in pounding us and worrying us. If we are slow and weak, they will mistreat us.”4

The plan and the purges can also be linked to Cambodia’s intensifying confrontation with Vietnam. This smoldering conflict, fanned by Cambodian cross-border raids in 1975 and 1976, burst into flame in April 1977 and led to successive Vietnamese incursions. Contradictory evidence suggests that Pol Pot, always distrustful of Vietnam, did not desire a full-scale war and that he hoped Vietnam would leave Cambodia alone. He was drawn toward confrontation, however, by his military commanders, by Vietnamese intransigence on the frontier issue—which matched his own—and by his patrons in Beijing, who saw Vietnam as a Soviet satellite, a thorn in their side, and an ungrateful client. The ensuing military hostilities, as well as the plan’s shortcomings, kept it from working and accelerated the purges. In 1976-1977 Pol Pot saw the plan and the purges as the best way of building a society that could withstand the Vietnamese.

The Four Year Plan