Agents are given one chance in their career to choose a duty station. When Nicoletti’s turn came up, he chose Maui, Hawaii, which had a station manned by just one agent. It was perfect. He could paddle almost anytime he wanted. Nicoletti got the job, but after he arrived in Hawaii and the special agent in charge learned of his background—he’d been the SWAT team leader in Washington, supervisor of undercover surveillance, and a member of the International Joint Terror Task Force, among other choice assignments—he was given a different job. He wasn’t going to be able to loll around on the beach in Maui. He was put in charge of all the terrorism investigations involving American citizens in Southeast Asia. So much for a relaxing job.
When Nicoletti saw the story about the grenade attack, he realized: Here’s work. “I immediately called the Strategic Information-Operations Center at FBI Headquarters,” he said. “‘There’s been a grenade attack on an American citizen in Cambodia.’ They hadn’t heard about it. It took three or four days to get approval, but then I flew to the region.” He needed to speak to the American victim first.
When Abney arrived at Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh with a grenade fragment in his thigh, he looked around, aghast. “That place, it looked like an old Civil War hospital from the movies.” The emergency
room had scant equipment, all of it primitive by Western standards. “People were lying everywhere, and some of them were really hurt.” A few hours later the IRI flew Abney to a hospital in Singapore. Doctors removed a jagged piece of shrapnel about the size of a grape. He stayed there four days.
On the third day, when he woke up he saw a big man, an American, standing over him. “He looked like John Wayne, even talked like him.” The man introduced himself as Tom Nicoletti, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. True to type, he told Abney: “We’re here to get the guys who did this.” He then asked, “Do you think you were a target of opportunity in this attack?”
“Yes,” Abney told him, “a target of opportunity, but not the target.” They talked for about an hour, and Abney said Nicoletti stood there over his bed the entire time. He gave not even the slightest indication of what he was thinking about the investigation, any theories he might have held about who was behind the attack, Abney said. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The piece of shrapnel lay in a dish beside Abney’s bed, and just before he left, Nicoletti asked if he could take it, as evidence. Yes, Abney said, “but you have to give me a receipt. I want it back.” So Nicoletti pulled out one of his business cards and wrote on the back: “4/4/97. Received one small grenade fragment to be analyzed by FBI lab—to be returned to Mr. Abney when investigation completed. T. E. Nicoletti.” Abney still has the card. He is still waiting. (Much later, Nicoletti admitted that the FBI office in Honolulu had lost or misplaced it, but he was too embarrassed to tell Abney.)
Nicoletti flew to Bangkok and wanted to move along to Phnom Penh right away. But the bureau wouldn’t let him go. Getting clearance from Phnom Penh seemed to take forever.
The CPP was fighting hard to block the request. He also learned later that Ralph Horton, the senior FBI agent responsible for the region (the legal attaché, or legat, in FBI parlance), “had personal issues with Rainsy.” He “didn’t like him.” Two weeks later, the bureau finally
let him go. Nicoletti departed for Phnom Penh wondering, “What was I supposed to do? This was a postbomb investigation, and I was sent there seventeen days after the blast.” It took ten more days before another agent, Peter Hoffman, and a sketch artist, Myke Taister, joined him in Phnom Penh. The three of them were stepping into a classic Cambodian hall of mirrors.
Almost every foreigner and opposition figure in Cambodia naturally assumed Hun Sen and his political party were behind the attack. For most foreigners Hun Sen remained Cambodia’s bogeyman. Western news stories still referred to him as the “former Communist leader.” Many policy makers in Washington, in particular, held the view that there was no such thing as a
former
Communist. He was widely hated in Congress and among other policy makers. The IRI, Abney’s federally funded employer, held a particular animus for Hun Sen. With the - grenade attack and Abney’s injury, that animus blossomed into a positive loathing. For the International Republican Institute and most everyone in Washington who was paying attention, this wanton assault perfectly fit the profile of Hun Sen all of them held in their heads.
The Cambodian People’s Party had a history of attacking political opponents, often with hand grenades, and Rainsy had been taunting Hun Sen for months. The government and the municipality had granted Rainsy permits for the rally, even though they had grown into the habit of denying rally permits for opposition parties—as they had for the Buddhist party months earlier. And a phalanx of Hun Sen’s personal bodyguards had been standing nearby—to abet the attackers? Otherwise, the regular police presence was unusually light compared to previous Rainsy rallies.
But then, as was so often the case, some other facts did not fit as neatly. In the first days after the attack, most witnesses said the grenades were thrown from a white car, or a man on a motorbike, or the men on foot who ran away. Only over time did the story coalesce into a single version. By the time the FBI agents began asking questions, all of Rainsy’s staff and followers were saying it was men on foot who threw the grenades and then ran through the cordon of Hun
Sen’s bodyguards standing nearby. Now, the story went, several of the victims, apparently unharmed, managed to get up off the ground and chase the apparent attackers. When these people rushed toward the bodyguards, the unit closed ranks, pulled out their weapons, and would not let them pass.
But then, grenade throwers on foot were not the CPP’s signature assailants: two men on a motorbike wearing black helmets with tinted faceplates. And although one Chinese journalist was injured, Abney was the only attendee whose injury could trigger an FBI investigation. He arrived just as the rally was ending when people were leaving. In that case, why had the attackers waited until just then to throw their grenades?
The narrative was becoming complex. As Seth Mydans of the
New York Times
put it in his story the next day, “Although Mr. Hun Sen appears to have been behind previous smaller attacks on opposition politicians and journalists, one Western political analyst cautioned that it was not clear who had ordered today’s attack. ‘I don’t know whose interests are served by this,’ said the analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ‘It’s a murky situation. This would be exactly the kind of thing Hun Sen’s advisers have been advising him not to do.’” Even Abney, who was utterly convinced that Hun Sen was responsible, admitted, “I thought he was too smart to do something like that, right in front of the National Assembly building, down the street from the palace.”
So if it wasn’t Hun Sen, then who could have done it? Ranariddh and Rainsy were now allies of sorts, so Ranariddh would have little motivation to do such a thing. Actually, the person who gained most from the attack was Rainsy himself. Even with the terrible carnage, the attack was a huge political gift, one he would draw on for years to come. He was a victim. And had there ever been more powerful proof of Hun Sen’s evil? Demonstrating that fact to the West was Rainsy’s single-minded goal. He was obsessed, and this attack made the point better than anything ever before. As Rainsy put it that day, “I think, since the UN election, this is the worst attack.”
At the same time, it is hard to see how any politician, anywhere, could be so savage and cruel that he would allow a murderous attack on his own people, killing a score of them, just to make a point against his political opponent—and simultaneously so brave that he was willing to risk his own life to make that point. Both suppositions were hard to accept. As Nicoletti put it, “Rainsy is no General Schwarzkopf. I don’t think he is going to stand there while people are throwing grenades near him.” So who did it?
Shortly after the FBI team arrived, Rainsy’s office gave them typed statements from some of the survivors, describing what they had seen. Nearly all of them spoke of the phalanx of Hun Sen’s personal bodyguards in riot gear who, they said, stepped aside so the attackers could pass.
The government set up an inquiry called the Joint Investigation Commission. Nicoletti and the other agents were supposed to be a part of that. But they were learning a lot on their own. Midway through the investigation they realized, as Nicoletti put it later, that the Cambodian investigators were pursuing “deliberate, deceptive and delaying actions” to impede the inquiry. Each political party’s police officers were leaking information to their political leaders and sometimes to the news media. The Cambodian authorities were turning up no new information and “seemed reluctant to initiate any investigative efforts that might anger” Hun Sen, Nicoletti said.
So the FBI agents pursued the case on their own, interviewing people in hotel rooms and other private locations. They spoke to dozens and dozens of people, and soon they got a big break. Their sources gave them copies of police photos of the attack. The material did in fact show that “Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit had formed a perimeter around the people at the rally,” Nicoletti said, and that “a major in the unit made an opening in the line for the people who threw the grenades to go through. The bodyguard unit let people through the lines. Not more than 4 or 5 people. It seemed pre-arranged.” Just as many people at the rally had said, when Sam Rainsy’s followers had
tried to chase the attackers, the bodyguards closed ranks, pulled their weapons, and would not let them through. With this in hand the agents went to see the major they had seen commanding the bodyguard unit in those photos.
They met at police headquarters, and a group of police from the Joint Investigation Commission was there, too, including the major general in charge. Also present were an army major general from Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit—and the major Nicoletti and his fellow agent Hoffman had identified in the photos.
Hoffman started the questioning, asking the major, “When the grenade throwers were running toward your position, how many people were chasing them?”
“I have no intention to count how many people were chasing the throwers, and I have no knowledge that those people are the grenade throwers,” the major said. (Reporters for
Mother Jones
acquired FBI tapes of this interview.)
“Do you have good eyesight?” Hoffman asked.
“No, no problem with the eyes. The reason is that there are a lot of demonstrators.”
“So three or four people throw grenades into a crowd,” Hoffman asked, “and you didn’t see anything?”
“I see nothing.”
Hoffman pushed the major harder: “You were briefed very clearly on who was allowed to come through the line.”
“My briefing was that no one was allowed to run through the line.”
Hoffman was growing exasperated. “Are these grenade throwers supermen? Can they just click their fingers”—he snapped his own fingers—“and they disappear?”
“I don’t know.”
Now Hoffman was angry. He pounded the table and declared, “If this country is going to move to freedom and democracy and away from dictatorship and communism, then you have to have people be allowed to speak freely! You have to have that, otherwise a democracy is just pretend.”
Then it was Nicoletti’s turn. His first few questions, he said, “established the fact that the only person who could order the movement of the bodyguard unit was Hun Sen himself. Hun Sen would pass his order through the unit’s commander.” That meant Hun Sen had sent the bodyguard unit to Sam Rainsy’s rally, armed and ready. Nicoletti towered over the major, and very quickly, “I confronted the major with his placement in the line,” he said. “He denied he was there.” And then, “I showed him the photograph. He went ballistic”—screaming at Nicoletti.
Immediately, a door to the hall swung open, and a line of Hun Sen’s bodyguards stormed into the room—grenades, machine guns, assault rifles clanking at their sides. They lined up behind the major, and he looked up at Nicoletti with an expression of pure, unadulterated hatred and fury. “He was really pissed,” as Nicoletti put it.
The interview was over. But as Nicoletti walked toward the door, he shouted at the policemen who were there, members of the government’s own Investigation Commission: “So where are your questions?” The government’s investigators had stood there, silent, as Hoffman and Nicoletti broke the case. None of them wanted to touch his evidence.
Outside Gen. Huy Piseth, head of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit, was chuckling as he told Nicoletti and Hoffman, “You were very hard on the young major.” He was not accustomed to anyone questioning authority. “I wish I had you in my unit.”
After that, the investigation moved forward quickly. The agents found that when they were able to speak to Cambodians alone, out of earshot of their colleagues and supervisors, they were much more forthcoming. Cambodians “were very eager to talk to us, and they didn’t want to talk to the police or the commission,” Nicoletti said. “They didn’t trust the police.” That gave the agents a huge advantage. As the FBI put it in a report later, the agents “conducted extensive debriefings of eyewitnesses who offered information to the FBI but refused to cooperate with the Cambodian Police or the Investigation Commission. Numerous leads were developed.”
After a few weeks Hoffman and Taister returned home, disgusted by what Nicoletti called the “sham of a Cambodian Investigative Commission.” But Nicoletti stayed behind, to advise the Cambodian police, in theory, but actually to follow up on some leads.
Rainsy, of course, remained acutely interested in what the agents were doing. On May 22 Nicoletti met with Rainsy and his wife. They asked him what he had found. More specifically, they wanted to know when they would be given a copy of the FBI report. Never, Nicoletti told them. “That’s not the way the FBI operates.” But it has to be, Rainsy sputtered. He was incredulous. “The people have to know what Hun Sen has done!”