24 Steve Heder’s interview with Mey Mann, July 1997. Mey Mann added: “The secret was not its name, but that it was nameless, which made its secrecy very deep.” See also Kiernan, HPP, pp. 177ff.; and Becker, When the War Was Over, pp. 100-101. Thiounn Mumm, interviewed in 1988, remembered meeting Saloth Sar “in empty fields at night” in 1954-1955. According to Khieu Kannarith, Cambodian officials in the early 1990s occasionally referred to each other in private correspondence by code names and numbers, years after coming to power (author’s interview, October 1990).

25 Author’s interview with Pel Nal, who befriended Sary and Thirith in Paris; and author’s interview with Khing Hoc Dy (October 1991). Mey Mann, who saw a good deal of Sar and Sary at this time, told Steve Heder that “when Ieng Sary came back to Cambodia, Sar told me to be wary of him because he was the kind of person who didn’t know how to take orders. It was my impression that Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary didn’t get along. Indeed, it seemed as if they couldn’t stand each other. The problem with Ieng Sary, according to Sar, was that he wasn’t prepared to do immediately what the party decides.” This memory is of interest when set against the Vietnamese formulation of the DK period as one dominated by the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary genocidal clique” and also when viewed from the angle of Sary’s 1997 defection. Mey Mann also recalled that Ieng Sary, born in southern Vietnam, was more vocally anti-Vietnamese than others in the movement at this time.

26 Information about Nuon Chea’s early career is from Hin Sithan in an October 1990 letter to me (conveying information gathered from Chea’s surviving siblings); from Nuon Chea’s “History”; Non Suon’s confession; author’s interviews with Suon Kaset Sokho (whose late husband was Nuon Chea’s cousin); and conversations with Somsak Jeemtearaskul. On Sieu Heng, see U.S. Embassy Phnom Penh, Airgram A-23, February 17, 1972.

27 On rural/urban responsibilities, see Kiernan, HPP, pp. 172-173. In his September 1977 speech, Pol Pot asserted that Nuon Chea had been put in charge of urban affairs after 1955, not in 1963. Presumably this legerdemain was effected to place “Pol Pot” retroactively in charge of the peasant sector, which was more honorable twenty-two years later.

28 Kiernan, HPP, pp. 169-248. See also the confessions of Chhim Samauk, Keo Meas, and Saom Chea; and Becker, When the War Was Over, pp. 94-105. A 1973 party history states: “Because there had not been any indoctrination, criticism or self-criticism sessions, and no directives on organization, liberalism was born in each individual [party member] which had a bad effect on the masses.”

29 Nuon Chea, “History,” which adds: “After Sieu Heng’s betrayal, Tou Samouth didn’t do any new work because he was old and also didn’t understand much” (ot sou yu‘l eichung). This uncorroborated assertion is obscure; Samouth at this stage was still in his 40s. On Sieu Heng, see author’s interview with Ty Sophen; and Kiernan, HPP, pp. 186ff. See also Saom Chea’s confession (April 1978). Vorn Vet’s confession, p. 9, declares that “in the Sihanouk era, the masses stopped believing in the revolution.”