While the Pracheachon Group was being smashed, the Workers’ party of Kampuchea remained hidden, its leaders fearful of Sihanouk’s vendetta. In 1978 the Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, told an interviewer that the Cambodian Communist party had been “paralyzed by mistrust and disorder” between 1960 and 1962. Some of this paralysis can be traced to Vietnamese advice to the Cambodians to continue with political struggle—a line of action that was suicidal. These instructions and Sihanouk’s unpredictable conduct knocked the Cambodian party off balance and drove it into a corner.

To make things worse, the party’s secretary, Tou Samouth, disappeared in July 1962. Party members assumed that he had been killed by Sihanouk’s police. If Lon Nol’s agents did arrest Samouth, they probably did not realize who he was. At any rate, they learned nothing from him about the Workers’ party, for no arrests of its members followed his disappearance. His colleagues, however, had no way of knowing this. From their point of view, Samouth’s disappearance had ominous implications. Nuon Chea wrote years later that “the night Tou Samouth disappeared, I was terrified,” while Vorn Vet wrote in his confession, “When Grandfather Tou was captured ... the Brothers [the leaders of the party] pulled back and went into clandestinity (dook choul somngat), ceased going out, stopped working in the open.”37

The facts of the matter are still unclear, although since 1979 the Vietnamese have maintained that he was murdered with the connivance of Pol Pot—a view supported by Ben Kiernan, who has called Pol Pot’s involvement the “most likely” explanation for Samouth’s disappearance. Given Saloth Sar’s relatively low status at the time, Samouth’s popularity, and the possibility of leaks, Kiernan’s argument depends on reading Pol Pot’s power and villainy back into 1960. Presumably, Sar would have wanted Samouth killed because Samouth was “pro-Vietnamese” and his removal would clear the way for Sar to rise inside the party. In fact, as we shall see, Saloth Sar himself was assiduously pro-Vietnamese in all his activities before 1967 and retained Vietnamese confidence until the 1970s.

Sihanouk never claimed responsibility for killing Tou Samouth, although in 1990 an informant in Phnom Penh said that it was “well known” in party circles that Samouth had been taken by the police, tied up, weighted with stones, and thrown from a canoe into the Mekong. Two confessions extracted from Samouth’s former bodyguards in 1977 and 1978, on the other hand, assert that Samouth was betrayed by Sieu Heng, by then allegedly back in the capital. One of them recalled Heng saying that “if we smash [Tou Samouth], communism will never succeed in Cambodia.” Perhaps these two men—who had been Sieu Heng’s bodyguards in 1957-1958-knew that Samouth had been abducted and once they were seen as counterrevolutionary for other reasons nearly twenty years later, they were forced to confess their own responsibility to tidy up the file. On balance, it seems unlikely that Saloth Sar was the one responsible for turning Tou Samouth over to the police.38