Quinn enjoyed the job, especially since it had allowed him to fend off a draft notice that would have brought him to the same country,
as a soldier, not a State Department officer. Soon after he arrived, another foreign-service officer had taken him up the hill to show him the impressive view. Once, in the late 1960s, he brought Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of state—the department’s third most powerful officer—up the hill to have a look at the panorama. Rostow was an older man and had trouble clambering over rocks on the climb up. But he made it to the top and appreciated the sight—even though, like every American official then, Rostow regarded Cambodia as an irrelevant little country. The United States had only one interest there: to prevent Vietcong troops from using eastern Cambodia as a sanctuary. After the United States began bombing eastern Cambodia in 1969, the next year American and South Vietnamese troops briefly invaded the area, on a hunt for Vietcong bases.
In 1972 Quinn asked Nguyen thi LeSon, a beautiful young Vietnamese woman from Saigon, to marry him, and she accepted. So it was only natural that when she came to visit from Saigon, he took her up the hill to see the view. But when they reached the peak and looked out across the verdant plains of eastern Cambodia, they stood stockstill and stared.
Below them in all directions, almost as far as they could see, scattered pillars of black smoke reached skyward. Quinn had no idea what he was looking at. “It was not comprehensible to me. Was it some sort of ceremony? No, it was too big. There were still American air strikes, but this didn’t look like that. It looked like dozens and dozens of fires in villages all over the area.” At that time, “Cambodia seemed a strange and mysterious place,” and when he asked his colleagues back at the consulate about what he had seen, “no one seemed able to explain it very well,” except to say that maybe it had something to do with the Khmer Communists—a poorly understood insurgent group that later came to be known as the Khmer Rouge.
They had not been considered a threat. As Quinn and the other American officers saw it, “they were like the minor leagues, not even triple A. Just double A.” They were thought to be allies of the North Vietnamese who, it was assumed, funded and armed them. But why
would Vietnam want to burn dozens of villages in eastern Cambodia? None of it made sense.
A few days later, hundreds of Cambodian refugees began pouring into Vietnam across an old, little-used border crossing. This was quite unusual. Cambodians hate the Vietnamese. For many Cambodians, the Vietnamese are infamous for a story, probably apocryphal, of Cambodian workers digging a canal in western Vietnam in the nineteenth century. Vietnamese soldiers grabbed three of them, buried them up to their necks so their heads formed a narrow triangle, then placed a pot on their heads, started a fire, and boiled water for tea. In the 1950s Prince Sihanouk used an image dramatizing this scene on a scarf he gave out to supporters.
For the Cambodians to flee into Vietnam, something really terrible had to be happening. Quinn was curious. Maybe these people could explain what he and his fiancée had seen from the hilltop. He decided to go talk to them.
Quinn interviewed several dozen of the Cambodians. They informed him that the Khmer Rouge—that’s what Sihanouk was calling them—was forcing villagers out of their homes across the East, herding them to collective farms, and burning their houses to be sure they did not return. By mid-1973 the Khmer Rouge now controlled much of the Cambodian countryside.
At the same time, the Communists were attacking any Vietnamese troops they encountered, trying to push them out of the country. For Quinn this was even more surprising. It was a State Department verity that the Khmer Communists were a weak appendage of Vietnam. Henry Kissinger liked to say that when “we settle Vietnam, we will also settle Cambodia.” At about that time President Richard Nixon wrote to Prime Minister Lon Nol in Phnom Penh, saying, “The United States remains determined to provide maximum possible assistance to your heroic self defense,” adding that “the continuing warfare in Cambodia results solely, I believe, from the unreasoning intransigence of the North Vietnamese—and their Khmer communist supporters.”
Quinn now believed that Nixon and Kissinger were wrong. This was important, and he had to tell Washington. So he decided to write an “airgram.” These were longer than normal research reports that included new, revelatory information. He spent almost a year researching and writing it while also doing his other work. When he finally finished, in February 1974, he found a friendly secretary in Saigon to type it for him, and then the embassy sent it off to other American embassies across Southeast Asia and a dozen offices in the State Department. For Quinn, this was the end result of a year’s hard work; his airgram offered important news. For a young officer, this was exciting!
Quinn’s airgram was fifty pages, single-spaced. Its primary message: The Cambodian Communists (he called them the “Khmer Krahom,” meaning Cambodia Reds) were trying to remake Cambodian society through force and terror:
The Khmer Krahom’s programs have much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly regarding efforts to psychologically reconstruct individual members of society. In short, this process entails stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual’s life until he is left as an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine by substituting a series of new values, organizations and ethical norms for the ones taken away. The first half of this process can be found in the KK attack on religion, the destruction of vestiges of the Sihanouk regime, attacks on parental and monastical authority, prohibitions on traditional songs and dances, and the use of terror. Psychological atomization, which can result from these practices and which causes individuals to feel effectively isolated from the rest of their community, can be seen to have actually occurred: refugees from Kampot and Kandal Provinces have said they were so afraid of arrest and execution that even in their own homes they dared not utter a critical word and obediently complied with every KK directive.
Quinn’s airgram was a revelation. No one outside of Cambodia knew anything about these Khmer Communists. But based on what Quinn had heard, they appeared to be extremely determined, brutal revolutionaries who were trying to remake Cambodian society. His airgram was the first warning, the earliest indication for the West, of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal intentions.
For Washington, another of Quinn’s conclusions was even more controversial: The Communists were not allied with Vietnam. In fact, as his airgram put it, “The KK are strongly anti-Vietnamese and desire to force all Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army units out of Cambodia.” Wasn’t one of the justifications for bombing eastern Cambodia that the attacks would also cripple Hanoi’s allies, the Khmer Communists? Quinn couldn’t wait to get the phone calls from Washington, maybe even see a story in the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post.
In Phnom Penh Donald Jameson was a political officer in the U.S. Embassy. When Quinn’s airgram arrived, he and others simply turned up their noses. “It had no impact,” he said, “mainly because it was from outside. It’s ingrained in every embassy: Protect your turf.” Quinn’s document brought just one visceral reaction: Why on earth did this young fellow think he had the right to do reporting on Cambodia? The Phnom Penh embassy sent a telex back to Quinn’s consulate. Its message, in sum, was
We’ll do the reporting on Cambodia, thank you
. Then, for good measure, a few weeks later a Defense Intelligence Agency official came down to see him.
Where’d you get this?
he asked with a belligerent tone. He then set out to tell Quinn why he was wrong.
Quinn’s airgram had landed with a thud. The State Department is little different from other large organizations. Thirty-one-year-old junior officers are in no position to challenge corporate orthodoxies. Furthermore, in Quinn’s case, his evidence was considered unreliable. State Department officials didn’t place much value on the testimony of refugees. Who knows what their political motivations might be? What’s more, refugees generally know little more than what they are able to see happening in their own little villages. They can offer no
context. That was especially true for most of the poor, illiterate refugees Quinn interviewed, though there were exceptions, a few refugees who had broader knowledge. In fact, Quinn’s sources had indeed led him to one false conclusion—that the Khmer Krahom in southeastern Cambodia were a breakaway sect that was anti-Vietnamese while the larger body of Khmer Communists remained firmly allied with Vietnam. The truth was that the Khmer Communists nationwide were both united and staunchly anti-Vietnamese.
Nevertheless, Quinn’s airgram offered an essential truth that was prescient for its time: The Khmer Rouge was a brutal, murderous revolutionary group intent on destroying Cambodian society. Before February 1974 no one outside Cambodia had known that. Even in Phnom Penh, knowledge was scant.
Within the American Embassy no one really knew or cared about the Khmer Rouge. In fact, paradoxical as it may have seemed, the embassy wasn’t particularly interested in Cambodia—except as events there affected the war in Vietnam. “The mind-set,” Jameson said, “was that there was no one of interest out there but the Vietcong.” Even if they had wanted to go look for themselves, embassy officers decided it was too dangerous. By 1974 the Khmer Rouge frontier was just ten miles outside Phnom Penh. But what was the point? “Washington and the embassy could have cared less about the Khmer Rouge.”
The embassy did care a great deal about Lon Nol, the military leader who had deposed Sihanouk in that coup in 1970. He was the State Department’s man, and he did more or less what he was told. In return, between 1970 and 1975 the United States provided about $1.85 billion in military and economic aid. Accounting for inflation, that’s about $9 billion in 2010 dollars. All of that American aid money brought out the worst features of Cambodian society.
The government and the military fell into an orgy of theft that knew no bounds. In the field, army officers sold uniforms and ammunition, even artillery pieces, to the enemy. They stole their units’ food rations and medicine, then sold them at market. They created
staff rosters with thousands of ghost positions and pocketed the salaries. They even failed to report men killed or captured in battle so they could continue collecting their pay. And when all of that was done for the day, they drove back to Phnom Penh for dinner at the most expensive and flamboyant Western restaurants they could find. For the evening they rejoined the Phnom Penh bacchanal.
The United States Congress ordered an end to the bombing of Cambodia in August 1973. By that time American aircraft had dropped about 2.75 million tons of ordnance, causing massive carnage that has never been fully documented or accounted for. Yet Congress’s ban was enacted not out of concern for the Cambodian victims. As Representative Tip O’Neill said during the floor debate, “Cambodia is not worth the life of one American flier.”
The areas bombed, in eastern and central Cambodia, were hard to get to—and at war. Reporters, diplomats, and aid workers did not travel there. No one was able to total the destruction; no one counted the dead. The only accounts of the horror came from peasants who fled the bombing and the Khmer Rouge. They ran to Phnom Penh, whose population more than tripled to 3 million people. Most of the survivors were illiterate, and even if they were inclined to talk, they had no one to tell.
The Lon Nol government supported a large expansion of the target area for American bombers more or less in exchange for cash. The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh wasn’t interested in the victims. And among the other Westerners in town, undoubtedly some of them agreed with Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” he said in 1974. “Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.” Today those parts of eastern Cambodia are pockmarked with bomb craters, most of them now fetid ponds—hideous scars of a terrible crime.
Lon Nol suffered a stroke in early 1971 and never fully recovered, though he did retake nominal command a short time later, awarding
himself the title of field marshal. He famously declared that Cambodians had no need for “the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy”—joining a parade of Cambodian leaders, before and after, who offered that view. But he seldom left his villa and succumbed to his weakness for spiritual solutions to real-world problems. Once, he had military aircraft sprinkle “magical” sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeter to ward off enemies.
None of it worked. As the Khmer Rouge noose tightened around Phnom Penh, the United States began airlifting food, medicine, and military equipment into the city. Cambodians looted the supplies to the end. Finally, in early April 1975, as Khmer Rouge troops advanced on the city, the airlifts stopped, the United States evacuated its embassy, and the leadership of Lon Nol’s government fled.
No one knew exactly what to expect from the Khmer Rouge. Its leadership remained a mystery; the movement had never explained its intentions. Quinn’s prescient airgram had no impact, and in the meantime Sihanouk sent several U.S. senators a letter in which he predicted that the Khmer Rouge, his allies, planned to set up “a Swedish type of kingdom.”
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh. Over the next few frantic days, journalists covered what they saw before they were forced to leave. They watched, astounded, as Khmer Rouge soldiers, young peasants from the provinces, mostly uneducated teenage boys who had never been in a city before, swept through town. For them, Phnom Penh offered many mysteries. The boys didn’t know what to make of telephones, or toilets. But they set to their job right away, evacuating Phnom Penh, forcing all of its residents, at gunpoint, to leave behind everything they owned and march toward the countryside. Hospital patients still in their white gowns stumbled along carrying their IV bottles. Screaming children ran in desperate search for their parents.