Making plans and dreaming of success were as much as the Khmer could do. From Office 100, Cambodia’s revolution seemed a long way off. To begin with, the Cambodian Communist party was unarmed. The cramped, malarial conditions under which Saloth Sar, Son Sen, Ieng Sary, and a handful of others lived for two years probably explain Pol Pot’s failure to cite any party initiatives from this time. In his five-hour speech announcing the existence of the party in 1977, he limited himself to two events in Phnom Penh over which the party’s leaders exercised no control.6

He called the first of these “a great event in our struggle.” This was Sihanouk’s decision to cut off U.S. military aid in November 1963. Sar failed to mention Sihanouk’s name. The second event was the demonstration against the U.S. Embassy in March 1964, when several thousand students, soldiers in mufti, and other Cambodians demonstrated against the U.S. bombing of a Cambodian village near the Vietnamese border. In fact, the demonstrations had Sihanouk’s approval and took the Communists in the capital by surprise. Vorn Vet, who participated in them, noted later: “I had never imagined that there could be such a large movement; the revolutionary forces by themselves were incapable of such a thing.”7

In 1965 Saloth Sar left Office 100 to visit Vietnam and China. He had probably been asked to make the trip by those in charge of the Workers’ party of Vietnam. He was gone for more than a year. The trip closed off a period in his life that he never mentioned later. At times in Office 100, despite the brave front he presented to subordinates, he must have come close to despair. He was certainly far removed from his time as a teacher in Phnom Penh or as a student in Paris, when he had been free to move around, life had been easier, and continuous conversations made a revolution seem a genuine possibility.

The Visit to Vietnam

Saloth Sar, Keo Meas, and several other Cambodian Communists, including Um Neng (Vi), a Pracheachon veteran, visited North Vietnam and China between June 1965 and September 1966. Ieng Sary’s wife, Khieu Thirith, claimed in 1981 that she and her husband had been in the delegation. Their participation is unlikely.8

Saloth Sar and the others were probably summoned north by the Vietnamese to discuss the escalation of the war and the expanded role the Cambodian Communists would be called upon to play. Tactics, as well as a suitable political line, needed to be ironed out. Furthermore, the Vietnamese wanted to familiarize themselves with Tou Samouth’s thirty-seven-year-old successor; the Cambodian Communists who had resettled in North Vietnam in 1954—1955 and after were also eager to meet Sar.