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.

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.