Nate Thayer, reporter who interviewed Pol Pot, dies

Nate Thayer, a fearless reporter who survived a number of fatalities over a long time protecting conflicts in Southeast Asia and was the final Western journalist to interview Pol Pot, chief of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, has died.

Thayer was discovered useless Tuesday by a pal at his residence in Falmouth, Massachusetts, his brother Rob Thayer mentioned Thursday. He was 62.

He had been affected by a number of illnesses for a number of months and the reason for demise was listed as pure causes, Rob Thayer mentioned, including that he final frolicked together with his brother on Sunday.

Thayer labored at varied occasions for The Related Press, Jane’s Protection Weekly, the Phnom Penh Submit, The Washington Submit, Agence France Presse, and Soldier of Fortune Journal, whereas additionally working as a correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Far Jap Financial Assessment that he Pol Pot Interview printed in October 1997. It was the reclusive chief’s first interview in virtually 20 years.

By now the motion had turned towards him.

“After a sequence of clandestine rendezvous utilizing encrypted cellphone messages, I slipped into some of the impenetrable, malaria-ridden, and landmine-ridden jungles on this planet: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia,” Thayer wrote.

Pol Pot, “a tormented previous man, frail and struggling to keep up his dignity, watched his imaginative and prescient of life collapse in utter, final defeat,” he wrote.

The chief of the communist Khmer Rouge, underneath whose regime some 2 million Cambodians died, shocked the world by saying his “conscience is evident”. He blamed his nation’s historic enemy, Vietnam, for the mountains of human skulls within the nation’s “killing fields” and requested for worldwide compassion for his personal sick well being and private struggling.

Thayer “had spent years forging contacts inside the Khmer Rouge, Thai intelligence and elsewhere to achieve that entry, and seized a possibility simply because the motion turned itself round,” wrote his Editor on the Assessment, Andrew Sherry. in 2005. “Bis Nr means an apologist for the Khmer Rouge, he introduced a transparent, unvarnished image of the previous and current and confronted Pol Pot with proof that he was a mass assassin.”

Pol Pot died in April 1998.

Thayer was additionally concerned in a public feud with ABC’s “Nightline” and Ted Koppel over a Pol Pot storyline that ended with him turning down a prestigious Peabody Award.

Thayer bought the story to ABC figuring out it could be a week-long unique with North American tv rights solely. However he mentioned ABC circulated the story worldwide and posted images on its web site, hijacking Thayer’s personal print account for the Far Jap Financial Assessment.

“Ted Koppel and ‘Nightline’ actually stole my work, took credit score for it, belittled it, refused to pay me, after which tried to bully and blackmail me once I complained,” he wrote in a letter , wherein he rejected the Peabody.

ABC mentioned pre-air promotion was commonplace apply for such an unique story, and Koppel praised Thayer. The edges later settled.

Thayer dug up tales from Asia the place most western journalists dreaded, and virtually paid together with his life.

In a web based weblog he maintains, he described the horrifying second in October 1989 when the truck he was driving with a number of Cambodian guerrillas ran over two anti-tank mines. Most of the guerrillas died.

“My eardrums have been blown out,” he wrote. “The concussion from the blast was so extreme it shut off my mind. I keep in mind the liquid in my physique getting so sizzling I felt it virtually boiling. I might hear my blood boiling, gurgling with what seemed to be warmth. I felt my mind being flung round like a rag doll bouncing off the within wall of my boned cranium.”

He had shrapnel in his head, torso and legs, a number of damaged bones and a dislocated kidney.

The two half ton truck, he wrote, “appeared like a shredded child’s toy Tonka truck.”

Later in his profession he reported from Iraq, the previous Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania, North Korea and Mongolia.

By the point he died, he had additionally been engaged on a treatise tentatively titled Sympathy for the Satan.

Born right into a distinguished Boston household and son of a diplomat, Thayer virtually grew up in Asia as his father was posted to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Beijing and Singapore, Rob Thayer mentioned.

He attended the College of Massachusetts Boston however didn’t graduate.

“He had dreamed of being a journalist, and in 1984 he went to the Thai-Cambodian border, began freelancing and began making a reputation for himself,” his brother mentioned.

He spent his closing years on Cape Cod, writing towards far-right US activists and white nationalists, and telling tales of his adventures together with his beloved canine, Lamont.

Along with his brother, Nate Thayer is survived by his mom Joan Leclerc and sisters Marian Vito and Meg Thayer. He had no kids.

Agreements are pending.