In spite of these handicaps, Saloth Sar and his colleagues proceeded to plan a revolution. In late 1964 Sar convened a study meeting at the base. A party document from 1978 asserts that the “meeting ... decided to counter any eventual coup by the Americans”—an opinion confirmed by a former party member interviewed by Steve Heder in 1980. The coup they envisaged would have involved the United States supporting Lon Nol or the exiled Son Ngoc Thanh in a move against Sihanouk. In such an eventuality, the Communists would not be able to count on Sihanouk’s alliances with China and Vietnam or his anti-American stance and would have to consider initiating a mixture of armed and political struggle. This was precisely the decision the party reached two years later, shortly before Lon Nol became prime minister in another Sihanouk regime.5

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