20 On the foundation of Kambuj’bot, see author’s interview with Thonn Ouk. Among the Communists who taught there were Ieng Sary, Hou Youn, and Khieu Samphan. Chamraon Vichea was located in a set of humble buildings near the Lycée Yukhanthor, not far from Tuol Sleng. I am grateful to Sok Pirun and Om Narong for information about it.

21 From author’s interview with Chhay Yat.

22 From author’s interview with Soth Polin (October 1988) and from Polin’s letter to author (November 1989). See also Polin’s “La Diabolique douceur de Pol Pot.”

23 From author’s interview with Om Narong (March 1991). Narong’s older brother told him in the 1960s that it was “inevitable” that Cambodia turn Communist, although he was not a radical himself. Still another former student, who prefers anonymity, remembered Sar’s geography classes as “prudent and conscientious,” adding that Khieu Ponnary had a reputation at the time of being far more categorical and intolerant than her husband (author’s interview, January 1992).

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.