On a visit to the capital, it seems that Saloth Sar made contact with Pham Van Ba, the local representative of the Indochina Communist party, and asked to be inducted into the party on the basis of his membership in its counterpart in France. Ba told an interviewer in 1981 that he had verified Sar’s credentials by communicating with Paris via Hanoi. The procedure took a couple of weeks. Ba then inducted Sar into the ICP, leapfrogging the Khmer People’s Revolutionary party. (Steve Heder has accurately referred to this rudimentary Khmer formation as a “secret united front party,” semantically a contradiction in terms.) Presumably, Sar’s membership in the French Communist party entitled him to join a grouping with international status—the Indochina Communist party—whose continuing existence was kept secret from noncommunist outsiders.

Sar’s initiation probably occurred in eastern Cambodia, which he reached in August 1953. In any case, he was soon absorbed into the Viet Minhdominated resistance. He worked in a headquarters cell that was half Khmer and half Vietnamese. According to Pham Van Ba, Sar was a “young man of average ability but with a clear desire for power.” He went to work in a mass propaganda section and later attended a cadre school.3

Years later, after Vietnamese forces had driven Pol Pot into exile, a statement by his supporters complained that in 1953 intellectuals like Sar “were given tasks that had nothing to do with their skills; kitchen chores and the transport of organic fertilizer for crops among other things.” Such assignments may have offended Sar’s amour propre, but he was never averse to party discipline, and it must have become clear to him that the Vietnamese and their Cambodian colleagues considered him an asset. As an indication of this, Pham Van Ba recalled taking charge of his political training. Because of his background, Sar was ideally suited for united front work bridging gaps between various dissident groups on behalf of the Indochina Communist party. As proof of his usefulness, Sar, who had no combat experience or any competence in Vietnamese, was assigned to the Communists’ headquarters along the border rather than to a less prestigious, more vulnerable unit. It appears that the Vietnamese and their Cambodian colleagues were saving him for important work. Sar’s time at the headquarters, at the edge of two national struggles for independence, was a kind of entrance examination.4