After another week of fighting the Vietnamese withdrew, taking thousands of prisoners, as well as civilians to whom they had offered shelter in Vietnam. Radio Phnom Penh treated the withdrawal as a “historic victory”—and so did the Livre noir, in an attempt to conceal the fact that Pol Pot and his military commander, Son Sen, had left the frontier undefended. To cover themselves further, the two men asserted privately that “enemies” in the party had allowed the Vietnamese units to withdraw. The stage was set for a purge of the eastern zone, where the Vietnamese had penetrated deepest and where senior Cambodian cadre had long been suspected of dragging their feet in implementing the party’s policies. Before the purge began, but probably after deciding to set it in motion, Pol Pot visited the zone to congratulate military leaders on their heroism. The tactic of lulling people before attacking them was one he used often.13

The Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia intending to spur negotiations; instead, it was as if they had poked a beehive with a stick. Cambodia’s leaders were now convinced that Vietnam wanted to swallow their country. They began preparing for a holy war. In January and February 1978, Red Khmer units swept repeatedly into lightly defended parts of Vietnam, massacring villagers, burning houses, and disrupting commercial life. At other times the Red Khmer lobbed artillery shells across the frontier. Vietnamese offers for talks were brushed aside. In a speech on January 17, 1978, Pol Pot cited “world opinion” and said: “The majority of it has been confident that [we] would ... defeat and wipe out the Vietnamese for [we] had already defeated the U.S. imperialists.” He was hoping that he had interpreted Chinese opinion correctly and that more aid would be coming from Beijing.14

U.S. officials saw the conflict in terms of the Sino-Soviet split. On January 8, 1978, U.S. presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to it as a “proxy war” between the USSR and China. In February the Chinese accelerated shipments of military aid to Phnom Penh and stepped up their propaganda against Hanoi. In Vietnam, the government began harassing ethnic Chinese residents and strengthened its alliance with the USSR. The Vietnamese also decided on a political solution to the Cambodian “problem,” a solution that involved encouraging opponents of Pol Pot to revolt against him. They also began training Cambodians in Vietnam to take part in military operations and to form the nucleus of a new regime. By mid-February 1978 Radio Hanoi was referring to Cambodia’s policies as “barbaric,” as reflecting “bigoted nationalism” and “medieval rural thinking.” At this point, it seems, Hanoi’s plans for Cambodia began to resemble the intricate fantasies that Duch and his subordinates at S-21 had been concocting since the middle of 1976.15

Opening Up