11 Kiernan, HPP, p. 79, mentions this meeting. Nguyen Thanh Son’s speech, in French, is in France, Service Historique des Armées de Terre (hereafter SHAT Archives), Chateau de Vincennes, 10H 284 (Divers Cambodge, 1949-1950). On Son, see Porter, “Vietnamese Communist Policy,” p. 65. See also Khmer Peace Committee, Khmer Armed Resistance (n.p., 1952), which notes that “Toussamoth” [Tou Samouth, a colleague of Son’s] is “an authoritative priest.” Christopher Goscha’s ongoing research will do much to clarify the relationships between the Vietnamese and Cambodian Communist movements in this period.

12 Pol Pot interview with Nate Thayer. “I was not a bad student,” he told Thayer. “I was average ... I studied just enough to keep my scholarship.” Interestingly, Pol Pot, talking to Thayer, named no role models from this period. The room that Keng Vannsak found for him was at 31 rue Letellier. In 1996, Ieng Sary’s protégé Suong Sikoeun referred to the quartier as “a nice area occupied by the children of good families” and said that “Pol Pot spent his time playing music and cards.” House numbers have changed since 1951, but it is possible that the two-story structure at number 29 (with the Café Brazza on the ground floor) was “31” in the 1950s. I am grateful to Lionel Vairon for this detective work. Saloth Sar passed the room along to a former schoolmate at the College Sihanouk, Khieu Komar, in 1952. Keng Vannsak quotation from his wife (personal communication). Mey Mann quotation from Asiaweek, July 29, 1989, p. 17. Mann was interviewed in a DK refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border and again in Phnom Penh in 1997. Pierre Brocheux remembered him as a conscientious member of the CPF in Paris in the early 1950s.

13 See Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over (New York, 1986), p. 74; and author’s interviews with Suon Kaset Sokho (May 1987). Ponnary returned home after her sister’s wedding to resume her teaching career.

14 Steve Heder’s interview with Mey Mann. On the discussion groups, see Kiernan, HPP, pp. 119ff.; author’s interviews with Keng Vannsak and Thiounn Mumm; and François Debré, Cambodge: La révolution de la forêt (Paris, 1976), pp. 81ff.

15 Others affiliated with the group included Khieu Komar, Thiounn Prasith, Ok Sakun, and Kenthao de Monteiro. As a philologist, Keng Vannsak spent many years attempting to modernize the Khmer language by finding or coining terms appropriate to twentieth-century life. Although Vannsak failed to say so, it seems likely that another text discussed by the group would have been Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from which Saloth Sar may well have drawn some of his ideas about conspiracies inside the Cambodian Communist movement and the postrevolutionary continuation of class struggle. See Andrew G. Walder, ”Cultural Revolutionary Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist Theme,“ in William Joseph et al., eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 41-62; and Robert C. Tucker, Stalin: The Years in Power (New York, 1990), pp. 530ff. Sar’s reading of French Communist literature in Paris probably had suggested Stalin, rather than Ho, as a role model. See E. H. Carr, ”A Great Agent of History,“ in T. H. Rigby, ed., Stalin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), pp. 133—142. A Cambodian who attended the study sessions but wished to remain anonymous suggested that the Cambodian-Ianguage meetings angered Vietnamese in the CPF who ”wanted to control the Khmer.“