At the time of the coup, U.S. intelligence estimated that the Red Khmers had fewer than three thousand men and women under arms. Not many of these guerrillas were organized into units larger than platoons, and few were trained for combat. Their Marxist-Leninist reading was patchy, and few had any understanding of the international aspects of the movement. In early 1970 they were scattered in small bands in the forested periphery of Cambodia in Kompong Speu, Kampot, Battambang, Kratie, and the northeast.

Saloth Sar Comes Home

While “Brother Number One” was visiting Vietnam and China in 1969-1970, Nuon Chea took command of the party’s headquarters in the northeast. Ieng Sary was in charge of a secondary base in Ratanakiri. Shortly after the coup, before Saloth Sar returned home, Vietnamese officers visited Sary’s camp asking for Cambodian support. According to Kheang Sim Hon’s confession, “They asked for support for their combatants, help with their cadre at all levels, and our help to build a hospital. [Ieng Sary] tried to evade these requests, but it didn’t work, and a Vietnamese divisional commander, who claimed to have had a working relationship with Saloth Sar, slept at the base and wouldn’t leave.”

After acceding to the Vietnamese demands, the Khmer allowed the Vietnamese to train their soldiers. In other parts of the country, the Vietnamese were more abrupt. Without consulting local Cambodian Communists, they mobilized Cambodian villages to “fight for Sihanouk” and took command of the young people they recruited. They hoped to capitalize on people’s shock at the coup and Sihanouk’s popularity to secure their bases and supply lines in Cambodia. In these early phases of resistance, as Ben Kiernan has written, “revolutionary administration was essentially the creation of Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer working ... with them.”3

Meanwhile in Hanoi, according to the Livre noir, Saloth Sar and his colleagues, en route to Cambodia from Beijing, were feted warmly by the Vietnamese. Pol Pot later wrote that at a banquet in Hanoi, “the Cambodian delegation was covered with praise from beginning to end.... [T]he Vietnamese had a pressing need for Cambodian friendship, aid and assistance.” The exact opposite was closer to the truth. In fact, Pol Pot admitted as much when he wrote that the Vietnamese at this stage offered him mixed combat commands, five thousand rifles, and international propaganda support. These were offers he was in no position to refuse. Writing in 1978, however, he said that he had refused to be a client and asserted that he had taken a strong line with the Vietnamese. “For those in charge of Vietnam,” he fantasized, “the problem of the liberation of South Vietnam was not their greatest concern. In their eyes, the problem of Cambodia was much more important” (emphasis added).4