Distant Voices (54 page)

The Kampuchean Emergency Group maintained close contact with bases like Phnom Chat. Working through ‘Task Force 80' of the Thai Army, which has liaison officers with the Khmer Rouge, the Americans ensured a constant flow of UN supplies. KEG was run by Michael Eiland, whose career underscored the continuity of American intervention in Indo-China. In 1969–70 he was operations officer of a clandestine Special Forces group code-named ‘Daniel Boone', which was responsible for the reconnaissance of the American bombing of Cambodia.
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By 1980 Colonel Eiland was running KEG from the American embassy in Bangkok, where it was described as a ‘humanitarian' organisation. He was also responsible for interpreting satellite surveillance pictures of Cambodia and in that capacity was a valued informant of a number of resident members of Bangkok's Western press corps, who referred to him in their reports as a ‘Western analyst'. Eiland's ‘humanitarian' duties led to his appointment as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief in charge of the South-east Asia Region, one of the most important positions in American espionage.

In November 1980 direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a secret visit to a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters inside Cambodia. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-
elect Reagan's transitional team. Within a year, according to Washington sources, fifty CIA agents were running America's Cambodia operation from Thailand.

The dividing line between the international relief operation and the American war became more and more confused. For example, a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel was appointed ‘security liaison officer' between the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit (DPPU). In Washington he was revealed as a link between the US Government and the Khmer Rouge.
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By 1981 a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about the charade of the United Nations' continued recognition of Pol Pot. This was dramatically demonstrated when a colleague of mine, Nicholas Claxton, entered a bar at the United Nations in New York with Thaoun Prasith, Pol Pot's representative. ‘Within minutes,' said Claxton, ‘the bar had emptied.'

Clearly, something had to be done. In 1982 the United States and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea.
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It was what the CIA calls ‘a master illusion'. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little had changed. The two ‘non-communist' members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF), were dominated by the Khmer Rouge. The urbane Thaoun Prasith – a personal friend of Pol Pot, he had called on Khmer expatriates to return home in 1975, whereupon many of them ‘disappeared' – continued to speak for Cambodia.

The United Nations was now the instrument of Cambodia's punishment. Not only was the government in Phnom Penh denied the UN seat, but Cambodia was barred from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organisation. The United Nations has withheld development aid from only one Third World
country: Cambodia. In the United States, religious groups were refused export licences for books and toys for orphans. A law dating from the First World War, the Trading with the Enemy Act, was applied to Cambodia and, of course, Vietnam. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated in this way.

By 1987 KEG had been reincarnated as the Kampuchea Working Group, run by the same Colonel Eiland of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Working Group's brief was to provide battle plans, war material and satellite intelligence to the so-called ‘non-communist' members of the ‘resistance forces'. The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress, spurred on by an anti-Vietnamese zealot, Stephen Solarz, to approve both ‘overt' and ‘covert' aid estimated at $24 million to the ‘resistance'. Until 1990 Congress accepted Solarz's specious argument that US aid did not end up with or even help Pol Pot and that the mass murderer's American-supplied allies ‘are not even in close proximity with them [the Khmer Rouge]'.
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While Washington has paid the bills and the Thai Army provided logistics support, Singapore, as middle man, has been the main ‘conduit' for Western arms. Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is a major backer of American and Chinese insistence that the Khmer Rouge be part of a settlement in Cambodia. ‘It is journalists', he said, ‘who have made them into demons.'

Weapons from Germany, the United States and Sweden are passed on directly by Singapore or made under licence by Chartered Industries, which is owned by the Singapore Government. The same weapons have been captured from the Khmer Rouge. The Singapore connection has allowed the Bush administration to continue its secret aid to the ‘resistance', even though this breaks a law passed by Congress in 1989 banning even indirect ‘lethal aid' to Pol Pot.
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In August 1990, a former member of the US Special Forces disclosed that he had been ordered to destroy records that showed American munitions in Thailand ending up with the Khmer
Rouge. The records, he said, implicated the National Security Council, the President's advisory body.
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Until 1989 the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the
Sunday Telegraph
, written by their diplomatic and defence correspondent, Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, who had close professional and family contacts with the highly secretive Special Air Services, the SAS. O'Dwyer-Russell disclosed that the SAS were training Cambodian guerrillas allied to Pol Pot.
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Oddly, for such a major story, it was buried in the paper. ‘I could never understand why,' O'Dwyer-Russell told me. ‘When I filed the copy, I had the clear impression I had a page one lead. I never received an adequate explanation.' Shortly afterwards,
Jane's Defence Weekly
, the ‘military bible', published a long article alleging that Britain had been training Cambodian guerrillas ‘at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years'. The instructors were from the SAS, ‘ . . . all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain'.

One result of the British training, reported
Jane's
, was ‘the creation of a 250-man KPNLF sabotage battalion [whose] members were taught how to attack installations such as bridges, railway lines, power lines and sub-stations. Their first operations were conducted in Cambodia's Siem Reap province in August, 1986.'
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Other diplomatic correspondents were able to confirm the
Jane's
report; but little appeared in print. In November 1989, after the showing of
Cambodia Year Ten
, a film made by David Munro and myself, British complicity in Cambodia's international isolation and civil war became a public issue.
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Some 16,000 people wrote to Prime Minister Thatcher, seeking an explanation.

The film repeated the allegations about the SAS and drew attention to an interview the Prime Minister had given shortly before Christmas 1988 to the BBC children's programme,
Blue Peter
(which had raised large sums for Cambodia). Thatcher was asked what her government could do to help stop Pol Pot coming back to power. ‘Most people agree', she said, ‘that Pol Pot himself could not go back, nor some of
his supporters, who were very active in some of the terrible things that happened.' She then said, ‘Some of the Khmer Rouge of course are
very
different. I think there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge: those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much, much more
reasonable
group with the Khmer Rouge.'

At this, the interviewer was taken aback. ‘Do you really think so?' she asked, to which Thatcher replied, ‘Well, that is what I am assured by people who know . . . so that you will find that the more
reasonable
ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government . . .'
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This raised urgent questions, several of which I put to a Foreign Office minister, Lord Brabazon of Tara, in a filmed interview for
Year Ten.
I asked him to explain Thatcher's statement that there were ‘reasonable' Khmer Rouge. Who were they? I asked. ‘Um,' he replied, ‘the ones that Prince Sihanouk can work with.' When I asked for their names, a Foreign Office minder stepped in and said, ‘Stop this
now.
This is
not
the way that we were led to believe the line of questioning would go.'

The minder, Ian Whitehead, had earlier taken me aside and urged me to ‘go easy on him'. Now he refused to allow the interview to proceed until he had approved the questions. As for the minister, he had left the interviewing chair and could not be persuaded to return. The head of the Foreign Office News Department later claimed that David Munro had given an ‘assurance' that Whitehead's intervention in front of the camera would not be shown. No such assurance had ever been given. This was a taste of Foreign Office disinformation, of which a great deal more was to come. What the episode demonstrated was that the government was keenly aware that its policy on Cambodia was indefensible.

British special military forces have been in South-east Asia since the Second World War. Britain has supplied advisers to the Royal Thai Army since the 1970s, along with the Americans, in what is known as Operation Badge Torch. In 1982, when the American, Chinese and ASEAN governments contrived the ‘coalition' that enabled Pol Pot to retain
Cambodia's UN seat, the United States set about training and equipping the ‘non-communist' factions in the ‘resistance' army. These were the followers of Prince Sihanouk and his former minister, Son Sann, the leader of the KPNLF, who were mostly irregulars and bandits. The resistance was nothing without Pol Pot's 25,000 well-trained, armed and motivated guerrillas, whose leadership was acknowledged by Prince Sihanouk's military commander, his son, Norodom Ranariddh. ‘The Khmer Rouge', he said, are the ‘major attacking forces' whose victories were ‘celebrated as our own'.
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The guerrillas' tactic, like the Contras in Nicaragua, was to terrorise the countryside by setting up ambushes and the seeding of minefields. In this way the government in Phnom Penh would be destabilised and the Vietnamese trapped in an untenable war: their own ‘Vietnam'. For the Americans, in Bangkok and Washington, the fate of Cambodia was tied to a war they had technically lost seven years earlier. ‘Bleeding the Vietnamese white on the battlefields of Cambodia' was an expression popular with the US policy-making establishment. Of course, overturning the government in Hanoi was the ultimate goal.

The British provided jungle training camps in Malaysia and in Thailand; one of them, in Phitsanulok province, is known as ‘Falklands camp'. In 1991 David Munro and I filmed an interview with a Cambodian guerrilla who had been trained by the British in Malaysia. Although a member of the KPNLF, he had worked under cover as a Khmer Rouge. He described a journey by train and covered truck from Thailand to an unknown destination. He was one among troops from all three Cambodian groups, including the Khmer Rouge. ‘The Khmer Rouge were much more experienced and older,' he said. ‘We eventually arrived in a camp in Malaysia, run by the Malaysian Army, where the instructors were British and Americans in uniform. Although we slept and ate separately from the Khmer Rouge, we wore the same uniforms and trained together with the same equipment
as one army. We were all taught exactly the same. The British taught us about laying mines and setting booby traps.'

The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after the ‘Irangate' arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986. ‘If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot,' a Whitehall source told Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, ‘the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements. It was put to her that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show, and she agreed.'

Shortly after seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong and the SAS base in Hereford, a new British ambassador took up his post in Bangkok. This was Derek Tonkin, who had previously been at the embassy in Hanoi. During his time as ambassador the British operation in Thailand remained secret.

This was extraordinary, but not surprising. Western correspondents based in Bangkok have long relied upon ‘intelligence sources' and ‘Western analysts' for stories about communist Indo-China, and have accepted the constraints of official advice. This partly explains why so much reporting of Indo-China has reflected the attitudes of Western governments or, more precisely, of Washington. Bangkok is a convivial place for cold warriors and for those seeking what the journalist Paul Quinn Judge once described as a ‘better result in Indochina'.
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It is also a ‘place of mirrors', as a Thai friend calls it, in which an ostensibly free press is tolerated within a fixed ‘consensus'. Journalists who step outside this are intimidated or even murdered, and transgressing foreigners are often told quietly to leave.
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The bloody events that stripped away Thailand's mask in May 1992 left a number of journalists among the dead and injured.

For whatever reason, there was little reporting of the activities of KEG and the true nature of its successor, the Working Group. The fact that British soldiers were training Cambodians to kill and maim each other was not known, or covered up. Similarly, Operation Badge Torch was not considered
newsworthy. Neither was Pol Pot himself, who could commute from his headquarters at Trat to his beach house at Bang Saen without hindrance from curious Western journalists. The military hospital in Bangkok where he was treated regularly for haemorrhoids was but a few minutes from the bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club. When Pol Pot slipped into the beach resort of Pattaya in June 1991, to direct the Khmer Rouge delegation attending a major peace conference, his presence was not reported until much later.
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