Nate Thayer, famous for Pol Pot interview, dead – Asia Times
Written by on January 9, 2023
Legendary journalist Nathaniel Talbott Thayer, who had reported for Asia Times among other publications, died in his sleep last week at the age of 62 at his home in Massachusetts after a long illness. Following is the obituary posted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand:
Nothing was normal about Thayer. He was a staunchly independent freelance for most of his career, filing for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Associated Press, The Phnom Penh Post and Soldier of Fortune – among many news organizations. He was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and had a journalism scholarship named for him at Hofstra University.
Thayer had the unique distinction of rejecting a prestigious Peabody Award during a stupendous row with Ted Koppel and ABC News, which he unsuccessfully sued for tens of millions 20 years ago.
The dispute related to one of the greatest scoops in 20th century journalism when Thayer and AsiaWorks cameraman David McKaige filmed the show trial of Pol Pot at Anlong Veng, one of the last Khmer Rouge holdouts, in August 1997.
Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea regime was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.8 million Cambodians between 1976 and 1979. Thayer simply wanted to know how such a thing could have happened.
“Look at me now. Do you think… I am a violent person?” the befuddled old mass murderer asked Thayer. “So, as far as my conscience and my mission were concerned, there was no problem.” Pol Pot’s equally depraved deputy, Nuon Chea, later apologized for all the livestock that also died in the Cambodian holocaust.
Thayer was usually in the thick of things. In October 1989, two men sitting on either side of Thayer in a truck were killed by a landmine near the Thai-Cambodian border. Thayer was traumatized and his feet permanently damaged.
In Thailand’s May 1992 prodemocracy protests, he was caught in a police charge and pummeled from head to foot with truncheons, and lost an expensive Associated Press Motorola cell phone in a canal. Three days later, he and two dozen other journalists were rounded up in a dawn raid on the Royal Hotel by the army. Thousands of young protesters had taken refuge there the previous night after rioting around Democracy Monument saw government buildings set ablaze and many killings.
Thayer once visited North Korea with a group of Cambodian diplomats and later regaled friends with a tale of being slapped across the face by a Korean patriot every time he tried to take a photograph of a military parade. He reported from Iraq in 2003 and other hotspots; his last work as a journalist in Thailand was the Red Shirt uprising in 2010.
There was madness involved in the kouprey hunt Thayer mounted in Cambodia’s remote Mondolkiri Province in 1994, masquerading as Colonel Kurtz – but with a Donald Duck mask worn backwards to frighten off tigers.
Fewer than 70 of the rare bovines had been alive in 1986, and the expedition aimed to locate any survivors in this wild area with Khmer Rouge remnants and ferocious bugs. Thayer called it a “cow hunt” but found none.
The motley caravan included Thayer’s close friends photographer Tim Page and Michael Hayes, publisher of the The Phnom Penh Post. Riding shotgun, literally, on the transport elephants was Robert K. Brown, publisher and editor of Soldier of Fortune and a former Green Beret. Brown liked to be referred to as “the general”, and his hearing was so impaired from years discharging weapons that conversations in restaurants sometimes had to be conducted as yelling matches.
“Suffering from the heat, Page had convinced himself he was in serious danger of dying and needed a helicopter casevac,” Brown wrote. “News of Khmer Rouge in the area corroborated his premonition.” The small plane that finally returned them all to the capital very nearly crashed on takeoff.
The kouprey debacle may have confirmed Thayer’s poor organizational skills, but he had plenty else going for him. He was tenacious in his principles, loyal and warm to his friends, and an observant, empathetic and sensitive writer.
His introspection was unsparing and often painful to read. His failure to deliver his eagerly awaited and fully commissioned Sympathy for the Devil is a major historical loss – a key laptop was misplaced at one stage – but much of his work survives in newspaper archives around the world.
After a recent fundraising effort by friends and old colleagues, Thayer was able to dodge eviction, pay off his debts and pass away peacefully in his own bed with his beloved dog, Lamont, nearby. He left the world knowing that many cared for him and admired his legacy.
“Nate, you could be alternately an infuriating jackass or a loveable friend,” his friend Mark Dodd, a former Reuters bureau chief in Phnom Penh, posted. “RIP you legend.”
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