When the delegation reached Hanoi, its members were treated with respect. Saloth Sar gave lectures to his countrymen about the situation at home, and with some of them he discussed “the question of the party’s name” (that it had been changed to the Workers’ party of Kampuchea in 1960). He probably enjoyed meeting with Yun Soeurn and Rath Samoeun, his old friends from Paris. Another colleague from Viet Minh days, Keo Moni, recalled that Sar’s visit to Vietnam lasted “about nine months” and included several courses of study for the Khmer aimed at bringing the party members in Vietnam and those in Cambodia into agreement. Keo Moni also claimed that Pol Pot had brought documents “dealing with building the party, politics, combat, and economics.” When the bonhomie wore off, Saloth Sar and his colleagues must have been intrigued that so many Cambodians like Keo Moni were undergoing political and military training in North Vietnam. They may have wondered what these people were being trained to do and where their loyalties lay.9

The delegates also took part in secret talks with Vietnamese Communist party officials, led by the general secretary, Le Duan. For many years, the only record of these talks was in the so-called Livre noir, a polemical document written (probably by Pol Pot) twelve years after these events to justify Cambodia’s conflict with Vietnam. The book was written in 1978, when Cambodia’s relations with Vietnam had reached their nadir. As such, the text is certainly biased, revealing many of Pol Pot’s obsessions. However, Vietnamese documents concerning the visit, studied in the 1990s by Thomas Engelbert and Christopher Goscha, reveal that the Livre noir’s treatment of events is generally correct.

The Livre noir lambastes the party’s former patrons in Hanoi. Pol Pot’s anger does not necessarily make his allegations false, but he certainly wrote the parts about himself and the delegation in 1965-1966 to make the mission sound more autonomous, successful, and important than it was.10 The Livre noir claims, for example, that Le Duan criticized the Khmer sharply for adopting their own political line. Pol Pot continued: “The Communist Party of Kampuchea had its own political line. Thanks to that line, the revolutionary movement in Kampuchea had taken wing. This disturbed the Vietnamese because ... if the revolution in Kampuchea developed and strengthened itself independently, they would be unable to control it.”

According to the Livre noir, Le Duan then presented the Khmer with a document “in the Vietnamese language” that called on them to “renounce revolutionary struggle [on behalf of Cambodia] and wait for the Vietnamese to win.” This may well be the document cited by Engelbert and Goscha, which stated that “[Cambodian] independence does not mean breaking off and creating a separate movement; instead Sihanouk could be used to appeal to the people on behalf of the movement or the movement could use the cover of Sihanouk’s name to appeal [to the masses], although it would still be led primarily by us.”11