Nuon Chea’s anonymity may also have been an inspiration to him. During the DK era, Brother Number Two never revealed anything about himself in public. In his statements to the visiting Danish delegation, Chea suggested—echoing one of Pol Pot’s phrases—that “secret work is fundamental”; he added that “the leadership apparatus must be defended at any price ... as long as the leadership is there, the Party will not die.” “Secret work” included moving unexpectedly to different houses, using messengers, living under guard, testing food for poison, and so on. To illustrate the importance of anonymity, Nuon Chea, unconsciously perhaps, fails to mention Pol Pot—good evidence, from another angle, that no cult of personality was in effect in Cambodia at that time.29

Except for Nuon Chea, Pol Pot was the least accessible Cambodian leader since World War II. Given the extent of the two men’s power between 1975 and 1979, we must assume that their inaccessibility was deliberate. Being hidden provided security and room for maneuver. In a sense they both spent their lives as secret agents, even when they were in charge of seven million people. Their concealment kept their enemies off balance and convinced their followers and friends that they were working full-time for the revolution. This was probably true, especially since the essence of the revolution, as Chea told the Danes, was keeping themselves in power. Their self-effacement, however, had different effects. Pol Pot’s was a key element in the loyalty and affection he commanded from those who managed to get close to him at various points in his career. Many Cambodians who came into his presence found him charismatic because he embodied the ideals of conduct—self-control, elegance, kindheartedness—that had been drummed into them for years. Foreigners, brought up to admire (or at least to single out) individuals as “personalities,” found him exasperating, hypocritical, and elusive. Nuon Chea eschewed publicity altogether. Aside from a stray reference to his “emotionalism” from the 1980s and reports that when he was in power he favored the inhabitants of his native village in Battambang, he left no personal traces.

In September 1978 Pol Pot convened a national congress of the party. It lasted a week and was attended by about sixty people. Brother Number One sat at the dais, flanked by Nuon Chea and Ta Mok, the secretary of the southwest who had provided cadre to replace those purged in other zones. Pol Pot’s speech “outlined a new four year plan to oppose the Vietnamese.” In the context of “building the nation,” he “outlined a need to create model cooperatives” that would be more or less self-sufficient. Pol Pot set a target for one-third of the country’s cooperatives to be self-sufficient by 1980. On the eve of Democratic Kampuchea’s collapse, Pol Pot was still “learning from Dazhai”—or lulling his audience into thinking he was.30