Nate Thayer (pic), a fearless reporter who survived several brushes with death over decades covering conflict in South-East Asia and was the last Western journalist to interview Pol Pot, the leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, has died.
Thayer was found dead at his Falmouth, Massachusetts home on Tuesday by a friend, his brother Rob Thayer said on Thursday. He was 62.
He had been suffering from multiple ailments for several months, and the cause of death was listed as natural causes, Rob said, adding that he had last spent time with his brother on Sunday.
Thayer at various times worked for The Associated Press, Jane’s Defence Weekly, The Phnom Penh Post, The Washington Post, Agence France Presse and Soldier of Fortune Magazine, but it was while working as a correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review that he scored the Pol Pot interview published in October 1997. It was the reclusive leader’s first interview in nearly 20 years.
By then, the movement had turned on him.
The leader of the Communist Khmer Rouge, under whose regime some two million Cambodians died, shocked the world by saying his “conscience is clear”.
He blamed piles of human skulls in the nation’s “killing fields” on his country’s historic enemy Vietnam, and asked for international sympathy for this own poor health and personal suffering.
Thayer “spent years developing contacts within the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence and elsewhere to gain this access, and seized an opening when the movement turned in upon itself”, his editor at the Review, Andrew Sherry wrote in 2005.“By no means a Khmer Rouge apologist, he presented a straight, unvarnished picture of the past and present, and confronted Pol Pot with the evidence that he was a mass murderer.”
Pol Pot died in April 1998. — AP
