“Grandfather 87”

Scattered sightings, recollections, and rumors in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided glimpses of Pol Pot—carrying his baby daughter, being hospitalized in Beijing, or traveling between military bases in a white van with blackened windows. Attempts by journalists to get closer than this, until Nate Thayer’s journalistic coup in 1997, did not succeed. A posed family photograph, seen by chance by James Pringle in a photography shop in Beijing in 1989, revealed that Pol Pot’s hair had whitened since the photographs taken ten years before, but that was as close as any journalist managed to get.28

Reports from defectors in the 1990s suggest, however, that Pol Pot’s ideas about Cambodia, about himself, and about his faction’s returning to power remained unchanged. His modus operandi was the one he had perfected in the 1950s. To understand Pol Pot in this period, it is important to recall that he had been teaching, in one way or another, for thirty-five years without a break.

Defectors described Pol Pot’s headquarters—Office 87—as an oval compound a few kilometers inside Thailand near the city of Trat. The “zone,” measuring roughly 300 by 500 meters, was surrounded by two barbed wire fences guarded by more than one hundred Cambodian troops. Access was controlled by Thai army units. The compound contained a house for Pol Pot, a separate one for his wife and daughter, six barracks for visiting students, a kitchen, and a cafeteria. Small cabins for his bodyguards surrounded Pol Pot’s house. Of all prerevolutionary Cambodian institutions, Office 87 most closely resembled a Buddhist monastic compound. The study sessions, for that matter, resembled Buddhist retreats. Extending the comparison, Pol Pot can be seen as a kind of “forest monk” adept at meditation.29

In this controlled environment “Grandfather 87,” as Pol Pot came to be called, conducted periodic study sessions for Red Khmer battalion, brigade, and division commanders. The sessions lasted for fourteen days. Students were in class eight hours a day; they were also expected to study for five additional hours and to attend a political meeting every evening. The session ended with two days of feasting before students returned to their military units. In the sessions, high-ranking Red Khmer, including Son Sen, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea, gave lectures dealing with their areas of expertise. Pol Pot was everyone’s favorite: “Funny and warm with students; he lectured without notes,” a former student recalled. In his lectures, Pol Pot spoke of Democratic Kampuchea regaining power. He also proposed tactics for the months to come. Depending on external circumstances as Pol Pot interpreted them, the tactics ranged from political to military and back again. After 1988 the emphasis fell on political warfare and preparing to compete in national elections. After the Paris agreements, “Office 87” shifted back onto Cambodian territory.30

Pol Pot’s teaching techniques varied from lectures to sharp, Socratic question-and-answer sessions that recalled monastic styles of teaching. Roger Normand, drawing on defectors’ interviews, described one of these sessions as follows: