The Coup

 CHAPTER 8 

The Coup

Shanouk was overthrown by his Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, and by his cousin, Prince Sirik Matak, in March 1970. Ever since then, allegations of American complicity in the coup have persisted. Such allegations of United States involvement in right-wing takeovers have not proven justified, and the use that Nixon and Kissinger are known to have made of the CIA has helped to legitimize paranoia. It is true, however, that suspicions of this nature can reflect not only an agerated view of the Agency’s own powers but also a slightly contentious belief that other societies have no political strengths or issues of their own. There were, inside Cambodia, persuasive reasons for removing Sihanouk: the hostility of two of the most powerful groups—the urban elite and the officer corps—toward him could itself provide an adequate motive. Nonetheless, it is also true that to some extent external interests, especially those of the United States, coincided with and supported those who plotted against the Prince inside the country.

No direct link between the United States government and Sihanouk’s usurpers before the coup has been established. Nixon and Kissinger have maintained in public that there was no United States involvement; however, that the coup came as a shocking surprise to the White House and that the first reaction was dismay, since relations with Sihanouk had been improving steadily. Later, when the secret Menu bombing was revealed, the Prince’s alleged “acquiescence” (or at least his failure to protest) was used to demonstrate how amenable he had become by March 1970. What was denied, in other words, was not only foreknowledge of Sihanouk’s fall and complicity in it but also any motives for seeking it. However, when the coup is considered in the light of contemporary documents and post-factum interviews with Cambodian, French and American officials, two things become clear. There was ample American motive for Sihanouk’s removal, and if the administration was, as Kissinger and Nixon claimed, surprised by the coup, then its most senior members cannot have been reading their own intelligence reports.

By fall 1969, General Creighton Abrams and the Joint Chiefs had accepted that the Menu bombing had failed in its primary military purpose; neither COSVN headquarters nor the sanctuaries themselves were destroyed. But it was having another effect. To escape the bombardment, the Vietnamese Communists had begun to move deeper into Cambodia—thus, as Abrams later acknowledged to the Senate, "bringing them into increasing conflict with the Cambodian authorities." More and more reports of serious clashes between the Communists and Cambodian villagers and troops reached Phnom Penh. The effect was inevitable (especially when it coincided with a deepening economic crisis); Sihanouk’s balance of right against left became more precarious. The bombing was destabilizing him.

Abrams had no problems with this—"I did not like what was happening in Sihanouk’s Cambodia." Nor, presumably, did the White House. Nixon and Kissinger had embarked on a "two-track" policy toward the country whose purpose, by one track or another, was to clean out the sanctuaries. Although the Chiefs’ request for invasion had been deferred, the bombing had been expanded while diplomatic relations with Sihanouk were restored. The hope was that eventually Sihanouk would take effective action against the Vietnamese Communists himself or that changed circumstances would allow the United States to do so.

In August 1969 Sihanouk appointed a "Gouvernement de Sauvetage" that was far to the right of the previous "Gouvernement de la Dernière Chance." His new Prime Minister was General Lon Nol—the man who had told General Taber back in 1963 how much he hoped that United States military aid would soon be restored to Cambodia. For some time now Lon Nol, as Minister of Defense, had been the principal scourge of the Vietnamese Communists while privately profiting from the thriving covert business that they brought through Sihanoukville. Now, however, the Vietnamese presence was becoming less easy to tolerate. Lon Nol claimed that they had between 35,000 and 40,000 troops in the country.

He published maps of their bases and supply lines, and he pointed out that their spread was due to flooding and to “the operational pressure exerted by their adversary,” that is, to “clearing operations by American and South Vietnamese troops.” At Ho Chi Minh's funeral in September, Sihanouk apparently asked Hanoi’s leaders to try to restrict their use of his country. When this had little effect, he seems to have begun complaining privately even to North Korean officials. Publicly he announced that in the provinces of Mondolkiri and Rattnakiri “a vast part of our territory has been occupied by the North Vietnamese.” Phnom Penh complained that “Cambodia is not in a position to prevent these infiltrators with restricted and poorly equipped forces”; but the new government, with Sihanouk’s compliance, began to harass the intruders in several of the eastern provinces.

Toward the end of 1969, Lon Nol flew to France for medical treatment, leaving Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak as acting premier. It was Sirik Matak’s family that had been passed over by the French when Sihanouk was crowned king in 1941. Sirik Matak had resented the Prince’s unexpected accession to power then, and his differences with Sihanouk had grown ever since. He was now the most important Cambodian in the business community, he opposed Sihanouk’s attempts to collectivize the economy, and he was a fervent supporter of American policies in Southeast Asia. He had always despised Sihanouk’s tolerance of the Vietnamese Communists. Some Cambodians suspected that his links with the United States were not merely informal; a profile compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington noted that, “he had been a friend of the West and was co-operative with U.S. officials during the 1950s.” During the 1970s, CIA officials had ready access to him and his entourage. Now he and Sihanouk clashed over the speed with which the economy should be denationalized to spur recovery. The row led to speculation in Phnom Penh chancelleries that a government crisis was at hand. But it did not develop, and in early January 1970, Sihanouk himself left for one of his periodic rest cures at a clinic in the South of France. His health was not that poor, and presumably he felt that the political situation was containable. He was mistaken. A few weeks later he was overthrown. It was more than five years before he returned to Phnom Penh.

In assessing how the coup took place, the testimony of two former CIA agents must be considered. The first is Frank Snepp,* who in 1970 was a 

* in 1978 Snepp published a book, Decent interval, detailing the way in which inadequate preparations by kissinger and the embassy in Saigon caused thousands of Vietnamese employees of the United States to be abandoned when Saigon fell to the Communists in  Strategic analyst in the CIA station in Saigon. At that time many CIA operations in Cambodia were being run out of South Vietnam. The Agency had in the Saigon embassy a Cambodian reports division that handled the processing, hiring of agents, debriefing and instructions. Snepp maintains that in early 1970 both MACV and the Agency believed that if Sihanouk was replaced by Lon Nol, “he would follow the United States with open arms and we would accomplish everything.” At the same time, he says, “there was a lot of speculation among my colleagues that we were cultivating Son Ngoc Thanh [the leader of the Khmer Serei rebels based in South Vietnam] as a possible replacement for Sihanouk. At the beginning of 1970 we were encouraging both him and Lon Nol.”

The other agent is Drew Sawin whose own account for his role is mysterious. The son of missionaries, Sawin had lived in Indochina since 1947 and had worked for the CIA since 1960, largely in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. His superior was Gilbert Layton, the Chief of Combined Studies of the CIA in South Vietnam.

Sawin says that he resigned from the CIA at the end of 1968; but he continued to report to Layton at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In 1969 Sawin moved from South Vietnam to Phnom Penh in an attempt, he says, to secure the release of American missionaries captured by the Communists in the Central Highlands. He says he thought that neutral Phnom Penh, with its North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies, would be a good place for an individual to do such work in, on a private basis, and that Sihanouk, whom he claims to have known well, would help him.

Sihanouk arrived in France in January 1970. He met there with Lon Nol, who had completed his own medical treatment. One version of the conspiracy theory alleges, without much evidence, that Lon Nol and representatives of the CIA had already plotted Sihanouk’s overthrow at Lon Nol’s hospital bed at Neuilly-sur-Seine, in late 1969. Other stories, recounted by many Cambodian sources and by Sawin, claim that the Prince and the Prime Minister now devised a neutralist foreign policy together that was aimed at persuading the North Vietnamese to moderate their use of Cambodia.

Sihanouk was planning to return to Phnom Penh via Moscow and Pre-king While he was there, Lon-so the accounts go - was to stage anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Phnom Penh to drive home the extent 

April 1975, the book was published without permission of the Agency ,which then took Snepp to court for violating the oath of secrecy that all its members sign of Cambodian anger over the way in which their territory was being abused. Sihanouk would then implore the Soviet and Chinese leaders to exert pressure on their Vietnamese ally to withdraw from Cambodia.

It is certainly true that by early 1970 Sihanouk appeared more and more alarmed by the way in which the war was intruding into Cambodia and was directing most of his public anger against the Communists, and such a plan might well have appealed to his agile mind. Drew Sawin makes the remarkable claim that he met Sihanouk in France at this time and that the Prince told him he had ordered Lon Nol to stage such demonstrations. Sawin says he questioned the wisdom of this and suggested that Sihanouk discuss the whole range of his concerns with someone from the CIA. In previous anti-American outbursts Sihanouk had often blamed his troubles on the Agency, and after his overthrow he published a rather tendentious memoir, My War with the CIA, which laid almost every Cambodian problem at the door of that organization. But Sawin asserts that early in 1970 the Prince asked him to arrange such a meeting. Given Sihanouk’s deviousness, this is not impossible; to the Prince the preservation of Cambodia’s peace was always far more important than political consistency.

He was secretly receiving the Vesuvius intelligence packages—there is no a priori reason why he should not have had contacts with the CIA.

Sawin says he went at once to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. He informed Gilbert Layton and others of his talks with Sihanouk, but, he claims, their superiors decided against closer involvement with the Prince; if Sihanouk wanted to make contact he should speak to the United States ambassador in Paris. Layton confirms this account. Sawin relayed this suggestion to Sihanouk, who, he says, was disappointed and rejected it. He then flew back to Phnom Penh.

In February Lon Nol called a meeting of provincial governors in Phnom Penh to discuss the Vietnamese situation. Apparently the governors painted a dismal picture of the high-handed manner in which the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were behaving in several provinces. Lon Nol then closed Sihanoukville to Communist supplies and shipments as Sihanouk had done for a time in the spring of 1969. A report on Communist infiltration, designed to stir up public anger, was presented to the Assembly; there were now alleged to be 60,000 Communist troops in the country—20,000 more than Lon Nol had estimated in September.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, General Abrams was pressing Secretary Laird to agree to an invasion of the sanctuaries. Such an invasion would have little long-term military effect. But the arguments of American commanders shifted to accommodate failures. A new cause was sought for each new setback, and a hitherto denied target that had compromised the entire war effort had to be located. A year before, the military had argued that the destruction of COSVN in one “surgical” B-52 strike would cripple the Communist war effort. When that failed they urged a sustained bombardment of the sanctuaries. Now a ground attack assumed major significance in the mouths and the memos, if not truly in the minds, of the military.

For his part, Melvin Laird considered that poor economic performance and leadership were now the most pressing issues in Vietnam. In a report to the President on his trip there in February 1970, he made absolutely no mention of the risks posed by the Cambodian sanctuaries. But he authorized clandestine South Vietnamese ground attacks across the border to begin at once. A full-scale invasion was still ruled out, because of the certain opposition of Sihanouk. Later, Abrams told The New York Times that “the ouster of Prince Sihanouk and the change in Phnom Penh really did an awful lot to assist the orderly withdrawal [of American troops].” Elliot Richardson told Congressmen privately that it was only Sihanouk’s overthrow that allowed the invasion even to be “considered.”

The last ten days of Sihanouk’s rule were a period of uncertainty. What was intended by whom, and even what happened, are still unclear. The motives of Lon Nol and Sihanouk themselves are obscure. On March 8 Lon Nol staged anti-Vietnamese demonstrations in the border provinces, particularly in the Parrot’s Beak, where infiltration and bombing had been especially heavy. In Paris, however, Sihanouk publicly declared that relations with North Vietnam were reasonable now, and that the number of Communist troops in the country had been dropping. North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong, he announced, would visit Cambodia in two months’ time. (At a private dinner party, by contrast, he complained that since 1954 the North Vietnamese had always ignored his requests to withdraw from Cambodia.) If any rebuke or warning was implicit in his public remarks, it was lost on Phnom Penh. On March 11 several thousand students, soldiers, Buddhist monks and bystanders gathered at the Independence Monument and began to march toward the embassy of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam.

To begin with the crowd was peaceful as it strolled down Norodom Avenue in the sunshine. When it reached the Viet Cong embassy, cheerleaders began to whip up angry shouting. The embassy and then the North Vietnamese mission were assaulted by teams of raiders, said to have been organized by Lon Nol’s aggressive younger brother, Lon Non. To the delight of the onlookers, furniture was flung through windows, cars were overturned and burned, and the Cambodian flag was run up on both buildings. There was little doubt among the few journalists there that the violence had been organized. An American official, Robert Blackburn, watched part of the attack and then retreated to his embassy. The chargé d’affaires, Mike Rives, cabled the State Department: "Knowing propensity for Cambodians to balance attitudes in maintaining ‘neutrality,’ embassy personnel keeping out of sight."

Now, in Paris, Sihanouk angrily denounced the demonstrations, saying they were "organized by personalities aiming at destroying beyond repair Cambodia’s friendship with the socialist camp and at throwing our country into the arms of a capitalist, imperialist power." He cabled his mother to say he was canceling his trip to Moscow and Peking and returning home at once to prevent his country from becoming a second Laos. In Phnom Penh, the bunting was laid out for his arrival, but his ministers continued their anti-Communist policies. On March 12, Sirik Matak canceled the trade agreement that allowed the Vietnamese to use Sihanoukville port and purchase supplies in Cambodia. Lon Nol formally apologized for the attacks on the Vietnamese embassies, but he also issued an ultimatum that their troops must leave the country in seventy-two hours. This was a crucial event for Cambodia. It was a ludicrous demand, one that could only be made by a man who had a tenuous grasp on reality, and promises of external support.

Up to this moment Sihanouk’s ministers in Phnom Penh do not seem to have been united in an attempt to remove him. In fact Lon Nol may well, as suggested, have discussed the demonstrations with the Prince; If accounts of Cambodians close to Lon Nol are to be believed, his original intention was not to overthrow Sihanouk but to wrest executive authority from him and force him to adopt a more aggressive attitude toward the Vietnamese Communists. Sirik Matak, on the other hand, seems to have been determined from the start to remove his cousin.

On the twelfth of March, the CIA received a report entitled, “Indications of Possible Coup in Phnom Penh.” (It appears that this and other reports about the political crisis in Phnom Penh were not distributed at once through Washington.) The report informed Washington that the demonstrations the previous day were planned by Sirik Matak with Lon Nol’s support. “Sirik Matak decided to adopt a showdown policy against Sihanouk’s followers. The demonstration had support from all the anti-Sihanouk elements who had been without a leader for the past few years,” and the army had been put on alert, “to prepare . . . for a coup against Sihanouk if Sihanouk refused to support the current government or exerted pressure upon the government.” It seems to have been Sihanouk’s attempts to do that which encouraged Lon Nol to move to the right, to Sirik Matak’s position.

The Prince now made a series of uncharacteristic misjudgments which were to prove fatal. Although his welcome-home plans were proceeding, he decided after all to continue to Moscow and Peking. He refused to meet two envoys sent by the Queen Mother and Lon Nol to show him documents, seized from the North Vietnamese embassy which revealed the extent of Communist designs upon his kingdom. Instead, in the Cambodian embassy in Paris, Sihanouk ranted about his turbulent ministers, threatening them with imprisonment, even death. Reported back to Phnom Penh by embassy staff, the threats aroused, as might be expected, considerable fear among his cabinet. Sihanouk in a rage was not predictable. A few days after the coup, Lon Nol told The Times of London that it was the Prince’s angry behavior in Paris that transformed the idea of a constitutional amendment to limit his royal powers into a coup d’état.

Why Sihanouk reacted thus is unknown; had he returned quickly and calmly to Phnom Penh he would most likely have been able to avert disaster. Frank Snepp, observing from Saigon, asserts that the CIA can claim some credit: “We exacerbated the crisis by throwing up misinformation.” He says, for example, that the CIA persuaded the Queen Mother to reassure Sihanouk that the situation was not so serious as to require his return. This cannot be proved, but it is certain that she did send such a message.

Throughout this period, Snepp and others assert, various United States agencies were in touch with Lon Nol and Sirik Matak and their associates. One link was through Son Ngoc Thanh and his Khmer Serei. At the end of 1969 several units of Khmer Serei ostentatiously "defected" from South Vietnam to Cambodia; they were incorporated into Sihanouk's armed forces. The Prince later claimed that their defection was a ruse and that they were a Trojan Horse. Snepp does not disagree; he says that the Agency was assuring Lon Nol, through the defectors, that he had American support for a hard line against the Communists. Again, specific allegations are hard to prove. But it is certain that the United States had links to Son Ngoc Thanh and that he had links to Phnom Penh during the coup. To preserve its "deniability," the station in Saigon maintained contact with him through South Vietnamese intelligence. One CIA report from Saigon quoted him as assuring a South Vietnamese officer that he had kept in close touch with Sirik Matak by courier throughout the crisis, and that Lon Nol had approved a plan he had submitted to use the Khmer Serei to attack the sanctuaries. He did not, however, plan to return to Phnom Penh, because, according to the report, “he feels his presence . . . would only cause embarrassment to Lon Nol” (because of his known connections with the United States) “and would serve the Viet Cong as a major target for propaganda exploitation.” (A few weeks later he did, in fact, return to Cambodia and in 1972 be came Prime Minister.)

Son Ngoe Thanh was only one channel between American officials and men around Lon Nol or Sirik Matak. Snepp says there were links between the Defense Intelligence Agency in Saigon and Lon Nol. General William Rosson, Creighton Abrams’ deputy, confirms that United States commanders were informed several days beforehand that a coup was being planned; he says that American support was solicited. A further channel used by the Agency was the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh. This was a two-way street. The Indonesians were giving tactical advice to Lon Nol and reporting to the Agency his plans and other diplomatic intelligence from Phnom Penh.

On March 15, three days after the demonstrations, Lon Nol’s ultimatum to the Communists expired. They were still on Cambodian territory, and the Cambodians asked the South Vietnamese to provide artillery support against the sanctuaries. The request was granted. Nonetheless, the next day Viet Cong, North Vietnamese and Cambodian officials met in Phnom Penh to discuss Lon Nol’s demands. It was now, according to Son Ngoe Thanh, that Lon Nol finally decided to go along with Sin Matak’s proposed coup.

On the seventeenth of March two cabinet members loyal to Sihanouk attempted to have Lon Nol arrested. They were detained along with other supporters of the Prince, while Lon Nol placed the army on alert. More anti-Vietnamese demonstrations were organized, the airport was closed, and troops and armored cars took up positions around the ministries, the radio station and the Assembly. But Sihanouk's usurpers had still not determined to abandon his policy of accommodation with the Communists.

. During this period American public attention fixed on Cambodia only when the Columbia Eagle, an American munitions ship en route to Thailand, was hijacked by two American hippies in the Gulf of Thailand and brought into Sihanoukville on March 13. Some left-wingers have assumed that the hijacking was part of a CIA plot to furnish arms to Lon Nol. They have discovered no evidence. The two hijackers were arrested by the Cambodians. One escaped and disappeared; the other was repatriated and was imprisoned in the United States nists On the morning of March 18, the first anniversary of the Breakfast attack on "COSVN HQ," the American charge Mike Rives was summoned to the Ministry of Defense, where a colonel carefully read him a rumorous, Cambodian relatively would continue. He repeated the message several times. Rives cabled the State Department: “I believe that this may be a special effort by [the government] to inform [the United States] that if coup d’état should occur it will not alter policy . . .” and beginning. Rives urged that Washington make “every effort to avoid” Soon after this message was transmitted, most communications between Phnom Penh and the outside world were severed.

Some hours later a telex was received in the White House Situation Room. It was a message from the CIA Operations Center: “According to monitored broadcasts of Radio Phnom Penh, both houses of the Cambodian legislature met in special closed session on March 18 at the request of the government. The legislature then voted unanimously to withdraw its confidence in Sihanouk as Chief of State.” The message then cited a supposedly “reliable” source, who said that the March 11 demonstrations had “involved a behind-the-scenes struggle between pro- and anti-Sihanouk elements” and that Sirik Matak, with Lon Nol’s support, had decided to take a showdown with Sihanouk. Between March 11 and 17, Sirik Matak had controlled the government. The coup “represents a reversal of the slow nibbling-away at [Sihanouk’s] power that had been underway for the last six months.” Lon Nol apparently believed that Sihanouk had decided, while he was in Paris, to overthrow the government. He therefore agreed with Sirik Matak that “the time was propitious for the move against Sihanouk.”

The message concluded : 

If the army is as loyal to the new government as it now appears and if Sirik Matak and Lon Nol are as determined to have their way, Sihanouk faces a rough road. The question then becomes whether the Prince’s enormous vanity will get the better of his usually astute judgment and cause him to embark on a course that could bring a period of prolonged instability in Cambodia.

Sihanouk did embark on such a course but what caused him to do so is less clear than the Agency’s analysts have suggested. Across the world.

says Frank Snepp, the CIA began to put out more “misinformation,” this time assuring the Prince that there was absolutely no chance of his return. United States recognition was immediately conferred upon the men who overthrew him.

This account of the coup is neither complete nor conclusive; the extent of American complicity (if any) could probably only be uncovered by a Congressional investigation. Privately Henry Kissinger has raised the possibility of United States intervention. At a lunch in January 1971 with a group of European journalists, he defended his role in the whole Cambodian drama and said that the United States had not been involved in Sihanouk’s overthrow, “at least not at the top level.” Nobody pursued this qualification. But whatever individual agents did in the final days of Sihanouk’s rule there is a more general and important sense in which some responsibility should be assumed by Washington.

The United States had always found the Sihanouk regime inadequate. Eleven years before the coup the Pentagon had identified the political elite and the officer corps as the groups that would best serve United States interests. Represented by Prince Sirik Matak and General Lon Nol, these two groups had no reason now to doubt that their removal of Sihanouk would be acceptable to Washington. For the past decade the Cambodian organization with which American officials had had the closest contact was the Khmer Serei, an illegal armed force of exiles dedicated to Sihanouk’s overthrow. Even tacit support by the United States for Son Ngoc Thanh inevitably enlarged the extent of opposition in Cambodia. Prom Thos, an opponent of Sihanouk, who was Lon Nol’s Minister of Industry and is now in exile in Paris, says that whether Lon Nol had specific promises of United States help before he overthrew Sihanouk in early 1970 is unimportant. “We all just knew that the United States would help us; there had been many stories of CIA approaches and offers.” before then . " 

William Colby, the former Director of the CIA agrees—“Lon Nol may well have been encouraged by the fact that the U.S. was working with Son Ngoc Thanh. I don’t know of any specific assurances he was given but the obvious conclusion for him, given the political situation in South Vietnam and Laos, was that he would be given United States support.”

Laird, confirming that there were contacts between Lon Nol and Son Ngoc Thanh before the coup, says “I have no direct knowledge that the approval of Sihanouk’s overthrow was made.” When finally they made their move  The fabric of Sihanouk's Cambodia, already patchy, disintegrated very fast after his removal. It became clear how artfully he had preserved some peace in his isolated country and how hopelessly ill-equipped was his court to rule without him.

At first Lon Nol promised to pursue the same policy of ardent neutralism as had Sihanouk—just more effectively. But the interests of others, if not his own inclinations, precluded that.

In Washington the administration’s initial response was low key. The South Vietnamese ambassador told the State Department that, although the coup put the North Vietnamese in a very embarrassing position, “any public enthusiasm about Cambodian events would be contrary to our interests and might harmfully affect the outcome in Cambodia.” The State Department accepted his warning and Secretary Rogers forwarded it to the Saigon and Phnom Penh embassies, adding, “All elements of the U.S. mission should similarly be directed to avoid comments on events in Cambodia.”

In Saigon, President Thiệu, who apparently had advance warning of the coup, was obviously delighted. He remarked that he expected excellent cooperation along the border now, and thought that together the two countries would “drive the Communists out.” South Vietnamese troops and air force began to attack the border areas and following their contingency plans the Communists soon dispersed even farther west than the Menu strikes had already driven them.

Prince Sihanouk heard the news of the coup in Moscow on March 18 as Premier Alexei Kosygin was driving him to the airport for his flight to Peking. The Russians were clearly unsympathetic to him, as Washington had known they would be. Recent CIA reports from Bangkok and Vientiane had quoted Soviet officials as calling Sihanouk “a blundering fool,” “finagler,” “a spoiled child” who would not be able to blackmail them into pressuring Hanoi. Kosygin thrust the Prince onto the plane without any offers of help. In My War with the CIA, Sihanouk claims that his immediate response was to fight. On the flight to Peking, he writes, he rejected the advice of his wife, Monique, to retire to France and declared:

Of all times this is not the moment to hide ourselves. We would be condemned by history if we permitted Cambodia to become not only a military dictatorship but once more a colony. All my life I have dreamed and fought for my country’s independence. I did not win it from France in order to abandon it now... The Americans will be beaten by the Vietnamese and by our own Khmer Rouge, together with us. And the Pathet Lao will win in Laos. It is the duty of the monarchy to remain with the people.

It is a splendid speech, and it is attractive to think of the little Prince standing in his Soviet plane high above Mongolia, en route from one Communist capital to the next, proudly proclaiming his independence and his solidarity with his former enemies. But although his memoirs have charm and contain some useful material, they are not always an accurate record. In fact, Sihanouk arrived in Peking uncertain as to what he would do next, but tending toward exile in France.

The Chinese too were undecided. The initial Chinese reaction to the demonstrations in Phnom Penh had apparently been to try to arrange Sihanouk’s return. On March 15, the day before the Prince was originally due to arrive from Moscow, the French Ambassador Etienne Manac’h was summoned to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and asked if an Air France plane could fly the Prince to Phnom Penh as soon as he arrived in Peking. Why no, Manac’h replied, Air France had been refused landing rights in Peking on the grounds that the runway was inadequate. Chinese officials conferred briefly. Improvements had been made; the runway was now quite suitable. The French began to make the arrangements. But Sihanouk did not leave Moscow until March 18, the day of the coup, and the plan was abandoned.

Peking's immediate priority appears to have been to try to persuade Lon Nol to leave the sanctuaries alone. When Sihanouk arrived at Peking airport on March 19 he was greeted by Chou En-lai with the honors due a head of state. But the Chinese Premier was, at first, noncommittal. In Phnom Penh the Chinese Ambassador Kang Mang-chao was negotiating with Lon Nol to renew the agreement for the use of the sanctuaries and Sihanoukville.

The uncertainties of the situation were outlined in a March 21 CIA report, which pointed out that Lon Nol had ordered Cambodian border units "to avoid friction with VC/NVA forces and to take no action at this time as talks are continuing with VC/NVA representatives in Phnom Penh." It added that the Communists were equally circumspect:

COSVN has not issued any order to VC/NVA forces in Cambodia to either withdraw or to fight. COSVN is currently trying to resolve its differences with the Cambodian government through negotiations in Phnom Penh. COSVN attributes the recent coup to U.S. backing.

In the event that negotiations with the Lon Nol government are unsuccessful, the VCNVA will support the red Khmer in launching a guerrilla war against the Cambodian government similar to the one in Laos.

In Peking, Sihanouk's first reaction also appears to have been to extricate himself. He sent for Ambassador Etienne Manac'h. Manac'h is a highly intelligent diplomat who had known Sihanouk for years. The two men understood one another. (Kissinger was to claim that Washington was initially interested in securing Sihanouk’s immediate return home. If Kissinger had seriously wanted to be in touch with the Prince, Manac'h would have been a crucial intermediary. No approach was made to him.)

Sihanouk wished to know whether he would be able to return to his house at Mougins in the South of France. Manac'h responded that the French would be glad to give him asylum.

But plans for retirement were short-lived. Although it was still negotiating with the Communists, the new Phnom Penh regime unleashed furious attacks on Sihanouk and his family, denigrating his policies and their corruption. One newspaper published a picture purporting to show him with a naked woman, and the government radio harped on “the abuses, gaffes, and monumental errors he has committed.” His pictures were ordered out of shop windows and off office walls, and streets that were named after him were renamed. Frank Snepp maintains that the CIA encouraged this iconoclasm. Its predictable effect was to drive Sihanouk into a rage and a desire for revenge.

 On March 21, the Prime Minister of North Vietnam, Pham Van Dong, [flew secretly to Peking] and, after further conversation with Chou En-lai, Sihanouk agreed to swallow his distaste for the North Vietnamese, stay in China, and accept leadership of the Cambodian Communists he had bitterly fought. It was a fateful decision, and his motives may have mixed injured pride and fury at his usurpers, genuine dislike of the prospect of atrophying like Vietnam's former emperor Bao Dai... perhaps distaste for what he perceived as the American role in [his removal]. A few weeks later he said: "I had chosen not to be with either the Americans or the Communists,because I considered that there were two dangers,American  imperialism and Asian Communism.It was Lon Nol who obliged me to choose between them.

On the twenty-third of Marchc the Prince issued his first public call to arms, castigated his " unpardonable naivete in trusting Lon Nol ,irre vocably dissolved the government in Phnom Penh and announced he would soon establish his own new administration. In the meantime, he established a National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK), whose task was "to liberate our motherland." Sihanouk called upon all those who had the stomach "to engage in guerrilla warfare in the jungles against our enemies."

The North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, and the Pathet Lao immediately pledged their support to the new Front, and in Hanoi, a statement of support was issued in the name of the Khmer Rouge. In Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese Communists canceled a meeting with Lon Nol officials that was to have made another attempt to accommodate Communist supply needs to the new government’s policy. But the Communists still did not break off relations with Lon Nol.

Most of their diplomats flew out of Phnom Penh, but a skeleton North Vietnamese staff remained throughout April. The Chinese also stayed and in the coming weeks attempted to negotiate an agreement with Lon Nol on the use of the sanctuaries. It took the United States invasion at the end of April to bring the final break. Only then did Lon Nol finally tell the Chinese that there was no possibility of tolerating the sanctuaries longer. On May 5, Sihanouk announced the formation of his government, the Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea (GRUNK). Peking recognized it.

Sihanouk’s appeal had little effect in Phnom Penh. His removal had been welcomed by the middle class, and many diplomats and foreign journalists were also infected by the enthusiasm with which educated Khmers now talked of their future. Lon Nol released political prisoners on both the right and the left. A committee of intellectuals was formed to support him, and the mass of students, wearied by the fear of imprisonment for criticizing Sihanouk, applauded.

"We were bored with him and humiliated by him. His damn film shows and endless radio speeches in that singsong voice. If he tries to come back, I hope they shoot him at the airport," said one rich young man.

The middle class was promised that the economic stagnation of recent years would be denationalized; that interest rates would rise; that industry would be modernized; and that tourists and capital would flow into Phnom Penh.

The army was behind Lon Nol; the change in regime suggested a resumption of American military aid. When he made a call to arms, it was popular in the capital for its offer of employment and the prospect of killing Vietnamese.

But in much of the Cambodian countryside, where Sihanouk's corruption had been less visible and his autocracy less painful, the Prince's overthrow seemed an act of sacrilege. Rioting broke out in several provinces; opposition was strongest in the market town of Kompong Cham.

Cambodia’s second city, fifty miles northeast of Phnom Penh. After Sihanouk’s radio broadcast, the town filled with peasants, fishermen, and rice farmers from the neighborhood. The townspeople refused the government’s orders to remove the Prince’s portrait, and they burned down the house of the new governor whom Lon Nol had appointed. Demonstrators gathered in buses and trucks to march on Phnom Penh. They were halted by an army roadblock, and after that, “it was very rapid, very calm,” said the governor; “three salvos of repression and then—fini.” About ninety people were killed or wounded.

The violence spread to other towns. In Skoun, an important crossroads north of Phnom Penh, police and troops opened fire on a crowd that the government said was, like all hostile crowds, Viet Cong. Over six hundred arrests of other demonstrators were made around Phnom Penh. The most vivid display of anger against Lon Nol occurred, again in Kompong Cham, when peasants seized his brother Lon Nil, killed him, and tore his liver from his stomach. The trophy was taken into a Chinese restaurant, where the owner was ordered to cook and slice it. Morsels were handed to everyone in the streets around.

Some years earlier Bernard-Philippe Groslier, the French archaeologist, had noted that in Cambodia “beneath a carefree surface there slumber savage forces and disconcerting cruelties which may blaze up in outbreaks of passionate brutality.” In March 1970, those forces were aroused, and for years to come they simmered and shifted as war spread.

In a cable describing “atmospherics,” Mike Rives reported to the State Department the story his servants were whispering in dismay. The Queen Mother (who had fainted on hearing news of the coup) had held a special ceremony at the palace to determine whether or not her son would return. The climax required the Queen to draw a sacred sword from its scabbard. Usually, the sword was gleaming and burnished, but when Queen Kossomak now withdrew it, she and her courtiers were horrified to see that the blade was a filthy black. The story was around the city within hours, and Rives reported with the understatement of cablese that the event “portends negative answer and trouble ahead.”