“Fixers” and “Terps” are the dirty little secrets of journalists, investigators, and researchers working in foreign countries. Most of us are dependent on these key middlemen who find and broker interviews with our sources. During the course of my work investigating Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia (1994–2005), I was able to find and interview numerous victims and perpetrators thanks to a Chinese-Khmer man with two sparkling gold incisors named Sok Sin.
The first time I met him was in early 1997 when my friend, Doug Niven, sent him to pick me up at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport. A dozen guys shouting in unison formed a strange chorus: “You take my car okay? My car okay?” I stopped in the crowd of taxi drivers, dropped my duffel bag, and shouted,“Sok Sin! Sok Sin!” When I yelled “Sok Sin” a third time, the cabbies looked at one another dejectedly, mumbled, “Sok Sin,” and magically parted. Then, from the end of the human column, a slightly built Cambodian man began talking at me: “Not at the guesthouse, maybe go out of town.” Though it was our first face-to-face meeting, he did not introduce himself and wasted no time with small talk. “Motorbike at guesthouse where he stay. I see him, Friday, but he no call, maybe go out of city.” That non-introduction was the start of a partnership and friendship that brought many contacts, interviews, and unexpected adventures.
Between 1970-1975, the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime had waged a brutal war against a Chinese-backed communist rebel force called the Khmer Rouge. After Congress learned of the secret American bombing of Cambodia, American aid was abruptly suspended and like our allies in Afghanistan, they were left to fend for themselves. When Sok Sin was drafted into the Lon Nol army, his mother sold her jewelry to buy his freedom. She took him home and then apologized before chaining him to a bedpost, “Son, I like you very much, but right now I buy a chain with a lock.” She spent all of her money to bribe him out of the camp, “so I make her happy and let her lock my foot.”
A single cannon shot marked the dawn of April 17, 1975, and the surrender of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces. Phnom Penh’s residents could only await their fate as long, single files of teenaged Khmer Rouge soldiers streamed into the capital all morning. These barefoot teens, some clad in black rags, others in Chinese olive green fatigues, were all well-armed and glowering with malicious intent. The five-year civil war had already cost at least 250,000 Cambodian lives, and the worst was yet to come. The dean of the Southeast Asian war correspondents, Neil Davis, described the Khmer Rouge as a “xenophobic clique of disenchanted, radical so-called intellectuals” with a “vitriolic hatred” for the Cambodian people. Though it sounded clichéd, even he predicted a “bloodbath” if the Khmer Rouge ever took power. Over the next three years, eight months, and twenty days, the Chinese-backed regime would conduct an experiment in “Stone Age” communism that would cost one to two million lives and prove to be one of the most radically destructive social experiments of the twentieth century. While executions were commonplace under the brutal regime, the majority of Cambodians who died succumbed to starvation, exhaustion, and disease.
When the Khmer Rouge took power, they immediately evacuated Phnom Penh and sent Sok Sin to Kompong Chom, where he worked on a giant rice farm. I asked him how he survived and he claimed that he worked harder than anyone else and sang “revolutionary songs all day like a crazy man! It just say about feudalism, capitalism, about the poor people who own the property—we work for our own selves—like that.” Accused of “betraying Angkar” and put on the Khmer Rouge death list many times, Sok Sin managed to buy his life back with bribes of liquor, jewelry, and even women. When I asked him how he had outlasted the regime, he would reply proudly, “I am excellent survivor.”
Shortly after the Khmer Rouge collapse in 1979, Sok Sin was captured by the Vietnamese and imprisoned for twenty-three days before returning to Phnom Penh. For the next three years, he struggled to feed his wife and young son. His big break came in 1983 when he was able to lease land, grow a crop of mushrooms, and use the proceeds from selling them to buy a pedicab, or cyclo—a leg-powered, three-wheeled taxi. Most of the time he lived in his cyclo outside of Le Royal Hotel. When he got too aggressive with customers, the hotel guard would whip him with a chain. One western photographer remembered that in 1985, Sok Sin was clearly the most enterprising cyclo driver in Phnom Penh: “He slept in his cyclo, but he had business cards.”
A succession of vehicles followed the pedicab, each bigger and better than the last: a motorbike, the white Toyota sedan that became his trademark, and later a beat-up Isuzu Trooper SUV. Because he spoke several Chinese dialects, pidgin English, French, Khmer, and Vietnamese, he was a natural to work as a press fixer. Sok Sin’s greatest skill was his ability to locate people and win their trust in a very brief time. This was a precious gift in a country where trust was in short supply. Because the Khmer Rouge was still kidnapping westerners in the 1990s, I trusted him, quite literally, with my life. Every time we drove up to a military check point, Sok Sin would ask for my Marlboro Reds, and use “the weapon of the mouth” to talk us out of any predicament we faced. His confidence gave me confidence.
The first time I took my interview tapes to my trusted translator, Moeun Chhean Nariddh, a journalist and teacher, and told him that Sok Sin had been my interpreter, Nariddh rolled his eyes. When the transcripts were finished, Nariddh told me, “Sok Sin is not asking your questions.” The transcripts showed me another side of Sok Sin: cajoling, coaching, leading, threatening—in short, breaking every rule in the journalists’ rule book. Sok Sin’s interpretations, however, often yielded more than direct translations of my staid academic inquiries would have. His blunt English, partial interpretations, and refusal to translate my more pointed questions made him more of a collaborator than a fixer.
I remember one time at the Killing Fields at Choeng Ek when Sok Sin approached a group of women with shaved heads and asked if they were willing to be interviewed. An older peasant woman, maybe fifty, with reddish-black, betel nut–stained teeth spoke first. “I am here to participate in a religious ceremony for those who died,” she said. “I always want to come to celebrate, everyone suffered before they died.”The crowd began to grow around us, and as the first woman continued to speak, another began to sob. The older woman consoled her and explained to me, “She lost her husband and child.” More and more women were gathering, all of them speaking at once, pouring out their stories in torrents of tears, words, wails—a psychic dam had broken. Sok Sin could not keep up with the translations, but his shorthand was all too familiar: “Starving, work, overworked, overworked and killed, no period, cannot be sick impossible, herbal medicine was rabbit shit.” Up to this point, I really had only seen Sok Sin’s tough side, but now I watched him approach the women with tenderness and respect. In an instant, they trusted him. As reporter Seth Mydans had so aptly put it, Sok Sin was “burdened with a tender heart.”
Sok Sin was leading four lives at once, making up for lost time. He believed that he had been robbed of his youth. “When I was twenty, Khmer Rouge bombed all over Phnom Penh. Cannot go to learn, cannot go anywhere, just sit in the shelter. Khmer Rouge come at twenty-four, after Khmer Rouge twenty-seven already, twenty-eight! At that time everybody was starving and so we had to solve [that] very big problem. After the big problem I was more than thirty!” He admitted that even so much later, when he saw a young couple in love, he was saddened: “It makes me, oh! Very bad! Bad idea—very bad remorse, remorse!” In Sok Sinese, that meant that the memories it evoked were too painful to bear: “So why I tell you I am not happy with my life, never be happy.” While he had been lucky in business, Sok Sin had been unlucky in love. He had many children, but he also had many ex-wives.
Sok Sin’s ambition knew no limits. In addition to his work as a fixer, he was building an apartment building near the French Embassy that he was very proud of. “If I have guest, anywhere I go. Any battle, I go,” said Sok Sin, “And so I always advise to my children, ‘The property that we have here is from my risking.’” As we drove around Phnom Penh that first afternoon and talked about everything, Sok Sin wanted to know if it was diet or exercise that made me “buff.” At one point during our drive, he pulled over in front of one of the fancy hotels, honked his horn, and waved at the man guarding the driveway. The man tried to ignore him and Sok Sin laughed even harder. “That’s the man who used to whip me with chain. I always like to show him my new cars.”
Because Sok Sin had worked with the majority of journalists and scholars who focused on Cambodia, he knew all about them. His accounts gave the expression “brutally honest” new meaning. He broke down the journalists into different categories: he viewed the “high-profile” parachute journalists as blow-dried sheep sent by the Buddha to pay for the construction of his guesthouse. Some journalists were mocked for physical weakness: “Soft like woman.” Others were ridiculed for their lack of discipline: “Ohhh! This guy drink all night sleep all day!” and still others condemned for their lack of professionalism: “This guy, he take no notes, no tapes, and he quote Sok Sin!” His ultimate and irredeemable condemnation, strangely reminiscent of Khmer Rouge rhetoric, was: “He is very lazy.” Fortunately, Sok Sin considered me a “researcher,” a different, low-rent breed. Once, Sok Sin slipped while describing a journalist and said, “Very, very low class, even lower class than you.”
Before I got married, Sok Sin lectured me like a stern uncle. First he told me not to allow my wife to have a “rubber penis because she will not want man.” Then he got serious and said that because I would soon have a family to support, I needed to become one of the “high-profile” journalists he so despised. Now I needed to stay in “high-profile” hotels, wear safari suits, and trade my boots for loafers. I should swear off riding motorcycles, staying in cheap guesthouses, and teaching martial arts to the shady Frenchmen in Phnom Penh. I needed to eat my meals from steam trays at hotel buffets, drink in hotel bars, and drive around in the back of a European sedan. In other words, I needed to enter the self-contained, air-conditioned bubble in order to “succeed.” The truth was that Sok Sin did not want me to become a high-profile journalist. He enjoyed this grim hunt as much as I did.
At that time, my investigations centered around S-21 or Tuol Sleng Prision. The Khmer Rouge renamed Tuol Svay Pray High School “S-21” in 1976. Also known as Tuol Sleng Prison, they turned it into a torture and interrogation center. It was the end of the road, the last stop before the Killing Fields. Of at least 20,000 people known to have entered, possibly twenty survived. Before the prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed, they were carefully photographed. Simple, wordless documents more eye-opening than the mounds of human bones, the instruments of torture, or even the killing fields, the Tuol Sleng portraits have become a sad distinguishing artifact of Khmer Rouge brutality. The images that are forever seared into my mind are the stoic ones: the boy with the padlock and chain around his neck who stares straight into the camera; the delicate little girl with the pageboy haircut posing as if it were school picture day; the half-dissolved image of a dignified Khmer beauty; the sangfroid of the bare-chested young man with the number seventeen pinned through the flesh of his chest; the sadness in the eyes of the boy thrust into the frame by a disembodied fist clutching his tricep. Susan Sontag compared the photographs to Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, “where Apollo’s knife is eternally about to descend—forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening.”
By 1998, Sok Sin had helped me find and interview both Tuol Sleng Prison guards, survivors, and even the photographer. During the course of this investigation I had been haunted by one discovery. Before I had left for Cambodia the first time in 1993, a friend in California had asked me to look for any records of Chris Delance, an American acquaintance he had known in Hawaii during the 1970s who was rumored to have vanished in Cambodia. In 1994, I found the confession of Chris Delance and three other Americans at Tuol Sleng. Delance was aboard a sailboat off the Cambodian coast in September of 1978 when he saw a Cambodian naval vessel. After a series of warning shots, they were boarded by five or six soldiers who “immediately tied and blindfolded us.”
Delance and his crewmate Mike Deeds were driven to Tuol Sleng Prison and for the next two months, they were tortured, interrogated, and forced to write their confessions. Of limited historical worth, these confessions are more a testament to man’s remarkable creativity under extreme duress. Delance wrote that the CIA recruited him in 1969 to infiltrate radical student organizations and “defend my country from within against communist insurgents.” He claimed that he was trained by “Commander Branley” at the nonexistent U.S. Special Services School; his “CIA number,” 570 80 5777, was strangely similar to a Social Security number. According to his confession, after Delance moved to Maui, the CIA instructed him to infiltrate a cult called “The Source” and the Hare Krishna Temple. After that, he was sent to Jamaica and Haiti to pose as a hippie yachter and learn more about an arms- and drug-smuggling ring. Delance wrote that his mission in Cambodia was to make contact with Cambodian fishermen, turn them into spies, and send them to photograph a Khmer Rouge military base. The captured American even tried to flatter his captors by inflating their international political significance. “The government of Kampuchea is strong and functioning well. The economy is in good shape and the country is prospering. The only way to defeat Cambodia would be a full scale nuclear attack (out of the question),” the prisoner wrote. “This makes any form of bombing out of the question, and on the ground Kampuchea has already demonstrated her superiority to U.S. forces.” Even sadder, Deeds’ confession was dated December 26, 1978, one week before the Vietnamese arrived to liberate Phnom Penh. While some historians and journalists suspected that they might be CIA agents, I suspected they were marijuana smugglers in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Between the Cambodian port of Kompong Som and the Ream Naval Base, the Khmer Rouge had eight Chinese escort boats, a dozen fast torpedo boats, some leftover American Swift boats, and a number of armed fishing boats aggressively patrolling their small stretch of coastline. Now I wanted to interview the Khmer Rouge sailors who captured the American yachts. When I reached out to Sok Sin in 1999 about setting up these interviews, I was surprised when he told me that he would not be available to work with me on my next trip to Cambodia.
I was disappointed, but reached out to a friend in the Phnom Penh press corps who gave me Lokhai’s name with a warning—he is very smart, but keep him on a short leash. Supposedly, Lokhai had served as the Khmer Rouge’s broker for the UN’s buy-back of their stolen vehicles during their occupation of Cambodia in the early 1990s. We first made contact by phone and he offered to travel down to the port of Kompong Som and try to set up an interview with Meas Muth. I was impressed by his initiative and paid him to conduct a preliminary investigation. A few weeks later, Lokhai called to tell me that he had arranged interviews for me with Khmer Rouge leader Meas Muth and others who knew about the captured Americans. That call, however, was followed by more late night calls, tales of woe, and requests for more money. Before I had even landed in Phnom Penh, I was beginning to have doubts about my new fixer.
Dark-skinned, handsome, fit, and very smart, at first glance, Lokhai was impressive. When we met at my guesthouse for the first time, he laid out a very formal and rigid, almost military itinerary of interviews for my trip that was unlike anything Sok Sin and I had ever done. According to his plan, we would criss-cross the nation in my long-time driver Nek’s white Toyota, and conduct more interviews in a week than I usually did in a month. While it sounded ambitious, I knew from experience that investigations take on a life of their own. Flexibility and a willingness to follow new leads had always led to the best discoveries for Sok Sin and me. First, we would go to the Kampot province where we would speak with a man who had served in the Khmer Rouge Navy. Lokhai claimed that he saw the captured Americans and had first-hand information about their deaths. These first meetings in Cambodia were usually just meet-and-greets. I would bring fruit and flowers, introduce myself, and then arrange to conduct the interview later at a neutral location.
Lokhai, my driver Nek and I set out for the Kampot province early in the morning. A few miles before we reached Kampot, we turned down a parched and dusty, red dirt road, drove around pot holes, and bounced our way to a crossroads where a half dozen men sat in plastic chairs under a palm-frond palapa. Lokhai told Nek to pull over, and my driver turned around nervously and asked me, “You have guns?” My new fixer tried to reassure us that he had everything under control, but it only made me more nervous. We got out of the Toyota and all but one man stood up. He couldn’t because he had no legs. Between the six men in tattered military uniforms, they only had five legs.
Lokhai instructed Nek to stay in the car. I greeted the men with a wai and then offered each of them a cigarette. When I turned to offer one to the man missing both legs, I winced when I saw his face. Although he had a krama covering half his head, I could see by his face’s asymmetry that one side of it had been blown off and what skin was left on his face had been pulled taut and somehow sewn back to his skull. His one bulging Cyclopsean eye studied me as I fumbled with the cigarette pack.
One of the men pointed to the plastic chairs and Lokhai said, “Sit, wait.” The cigarettes did nothing to dissipate the tension. An older man driving an old, white Toyota four-wheel pulled up and everyone stood up. I looked at the strange reddish-brown insignia on the door, and realized it was rust in the shape of the UN’s emblem that had been peeled off the door of the stolen Landcruiser. Toyota Landcruisers and AIDS were the two longest-lasting legacies of the UN’s occupation of Cambodia.
The older man approached Lokhai and did not greet him. His facial muscles twitched as he gave Lokhai an earful. “He want to know why you want to know this?” my fixer asked sheepishly. When I told him that I was just a historian trying to make sense of the past, it only made things worse. Lokhai just kept repeating, “Ba, ba, ba, (yes, yes, yes)” over and over. As the lecture continued, it built in intensity and when the older man finally stopped talking, Lokhai turned to me and said, “Ok, we go now.” We said terse goodbyes and as we were walking towards our car, one of the one-legged soldiers picked up a four-foot long section of concrete pipe. He shouldered it like it was a bazooka, pointed it at us, and when he pulled an imaginary trigger and said, “Boom!” the six soldiers all laughed menacingly. That was it, meet-and-greet over. No interview.
A few days later, we drove to a village outside of Kompong Speu to interview Mao, a Khmer Rouge soldier who served in the unit that was stationed on Koh Tang, one of Cambodia’s offshore islands, and knew about the captured Americans. After an hour of bouncing down a dry dirt road, we reached his village. When we got out of the car, most of the village turned out not so much to greet us, but to stare at me.
Finally, the two heads of the village arrived. Much scarier than the older man, was the unblinking, skeletal woman. This Khmer Rouge bruja was clearly the shot caller and carried great power in the community. There was a harsh exchange that ended with Lokhai saying “Ba, ba, ba, ba” once again. The Bruja barked some orders and different people went in different directions. “We wait, they get Mao,” he whispered under his breath.
By the time Mao showed up, the entire village was hovering around us. Bare-chested with a krama wrapped around his waist like a sarong, he had dead eyes, and was missing his right forearm. His body was tattooed with bullet wounds and shrapnel scars from the two decades he spent on the battlefield. Mao sat down on a wooden bedframe and Lokhai explained that we wanted to talk to him about the capture of the Americans sailors. Although Mao stared unblinkingly off into space, the village chiefs did not miss a word. After I handed Mao the flowers and fruit, I turned to Lokhai and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He nodded and we stood up. I looked for Nek’s white Toyota, but it was gone.
The bruja had more harsh words for Lokhai and I tried not to think too much about the fact that our car had disappeared. I began to play with the one person in the village who seemed to like me, a small boy who had been trying to get my attention since we arrived. When I let him play with my hat, he jumped into my lap and began to talk to me like he had known me his entire life. His seventeen or eighteen-year-old mother was holding a tiny baby, and when I smiled at her, she smiled back. I asked Lokhai to ask her where she had her baby and when he did, she pointed to a spot under the palapa a few feet from where we were sitting. She smiled at me again and then began talking to the older women. I was surprised when she, Lokhai, and the older women began to laugh. Next, one of the senior women issued an order and one of the younger girls scrambled off. Everyone began to giggle. Now I was really confused, but made no effort to try to make sense of any of it. I was just happy that for whatever reason, the tension seemed to have magically dissipated.
A few minutes later, one of the older women steered a beautiful, smiling fifteen or sixteen-year-old Cambodian girl towards me. Lokhai said simply, “You can take her back to Phnom Penh to stay with you.” As I politely explained that my wife was waiting for me in Phnom Penh and that second wives were not part of my culture, Nek pulled up and provided me with a graceful exit.
I said goodbye to Mao, and when I reached the car I asked my driver where the fuck he had gone. “I saw Buddhist monk walking so I drove him to next village and got stuck in sand. Have to dig out car.” After this trip, I realized that Lokhai was no Sok Sin and that my presence on the meet-and-greets was not helpful. I told Lokhai to find the subjects and bring them to me in Phnom Penh. In the end, we were fairly successful.
I interviewed three men who I was convinced had seen the Americans, but not the Americans that I was looking for. I soon realized that we were now talking about two different groups of Americans. While I was interested in the two American sailboats captured in the Gulf of Thailand, they were telling me about three Marines who had been left behind on Koh Tang Island after the Mayaguez Incident. Although the U.S. government had always maintained that Marines Joseph Hargrove, Danny Marshall, and Gary Hall had been killed in action, they had been abandoned and lived for weeks before they were captured and killed. After I interviewed Em Som, the Khmer Rouge commander on Koh Tang, I was absolutely convinced that the Ford administration left three living American soldiers behind.
I was very excited to get the translations of my interviews back from Moeun Chhean Nariddh. He rolled his eyes when he returned the tapes and told me that Lokhai had not asked my questions. Unlike Sok Sin who understood my questions, but often rephrased them to soften them, Lokhai did not even understand most of my questions. I cringed when I read the transcripts. Although I had eyewitness testimony about the capture of the Marines left behind, I was extremely disappointed and felt like I had blown my opportunity. Even worse, a day after I interviewed Em Som, I received an email from one of the U.S. defense attaches requesting a meeting to speak with me about the “persons of interest” I had just interviewed. Lokhai had dropped a dime on me to my own embassy!
Read Fixers and Terps: Part 2 here.