The Prince

 CHAPTER 3 

The Prince

Norodom Sihanouk presided feudally over Cambodia from 1941 to 1970, as King, Chief of State, Prince, Prime Minister, head of the main political movement, jazz-band leader, magazine editor, film director and gambling concessionaire, attempting to unite in his rule the unfamiliar concepts of Buddhism, socialism and democracy. His exercise of power was so astonishing and so individual that he came to personify his country and its policies abroad as well as at home. He was vain, a petulant showman who enjoyed boasting of his sexual successes. He would not tolerate criticism or dissent, and he treated his aides as flunkies. He could be generous with those who served him well, but everyone feared his temper. His speech was high-pitched and idiosyncratic, and his comments were often ambiguous.

At the same time he had enormous political skill, charm, tenacity and intelligence. After an uncertain beginning he exploited all these qualities in the interests of one overriding cause—the preservation of Cambodia’s peace and its independence from further encroachment by its neighbors. This concern inevitably won him enemies abroad just as his autocracy created them at home. Indeed, his relations with his own people and with foreign powers—in particular with the United States as it came to replace France as the dominant power in Indochina—are an essential part of the history of Cambodia’s destruction.

The Japanese occupied much of Southeast Asia in 1941. In Cambodia they left Sihanouk on the throne and the Vichy French in nominal control, but they insisted that the provinces of Battambang and Angkor (now Siem Reap), which the Cambodians had regained in 1907, revert once more to Thailand. There the Thais encouraged the growth of an anti-French Cambodian guerrilla movement known as the Khmer Issarak ("Free Khmer"). The Japanese also supported Son Ngoc Thanh; he spent most of the war in Tokyo. Sihanouk spent the time in Phnom Penh, offering no visible resistance to either Vichy French or Japanese interests.

In March 1945, as the Allies approached Indochina, the Japanese took full control from the French in order to block moves by French officers to overthrow them. They declared that the colonialist era was over and ordered the Emperor of Vietnam (Bao Dai), the King of Laos and Sihanouk to declare independence. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Communist resistance, the Viet Minh, refused to accept Bao Dai's declaration and seized Hanoi.

In Cambodia, the more docile Sihanouk appointed Son Ngoc Thanh Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister, at the request of the Japanese. The war years had somewhat radicalized Phnom Penh’s tiny educated class, and in spite of his Japanese associations, Thanh’s republicanism contrasted well with Sihanouk’s apparent acquiescence to any form of foreign control and with the inbred, corrupt elitism of the monarchy. But “independence” and Thanh’s incumbency were short-lived. When Japan surrendered, Thanh tried to seize power and declare a republic and de facto independence of France, but he was arrested by the French with the help of the British and, to Sihanouk’s relief, was exiled to France.

For the next fifteen years Thanh conducted his republican fight from Thailand, South Vietnam and the forests along Cambodia’s peripheries, where he first joined the Khmer Issarak and then formed his own guerrilla group, the Khmer Serei, which also means Free Khmer. He became important as a symbol of consistent opposition to Sihanouk, and over the years he attracted at least emotional support from some sections of Cambodian society. His conviction that only armed struggle against France and an end to the monarchy could liberate Cambodia was shared by the Viet Minh, and in the late forties Thanh was prepared to collaborate with them. Gradually, however, as the United States became the dominant power in both South Vietnam and Thailand, he came to look to the Americans for support against Sihanouk.

In 1946 the French secured the return of the Battambang and Siem Reap provinces. Cambodia’s prewar borders were more or less restored, though neither the Thais nor the Vietnamese respected them. The hazi- ness of the maps led to bitter disputes, which continue even today. The French then induced Sihanouk to agree to a quasi-French constitution, similar to that of the Fourth Republic, whose main effect was to legitimize new political parties. Almost all of these were run by various princes, yet Sihanouk complained that the monarch’s power had been handed over to politicians. This was the start of a long conflict between him and the elite of Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk soon began to understand that the only way to preserve his own position against parliamentary democratic sentiment was to identify himself more completely with the nation; independence alone could guarantee his rule. In 1949, he negotiated partial freedom from the French, and then in 1952 he emerged as a real national leader by conducting a brilliant anti-French campaign in Phnom Penh and around the world, employing all the tricks of threat, bombast, arrogance, and ultimatum that later became his trademark. The French, hard-pressed by the war in Vietnam, were anxious to be rid of this minor concern; in November 1953 Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh from self-imposed exile, claiming independence from France.

In 1954 the Geneva Peace Conference on Indochina agreed to the temporary division of Vietnam into North and South. It also recognized Cambodia’s neutrality and territorial integrity, and it guaranteed that the Viet Minh would withdraw from the country’s eastern areas that they had used in their war against the French. Those Cambodian Communists who were operating in the jungles of their country were required to unite with the national community. Some stayed in the bush, and several thousand were taken north to Hanoi. Those who remained in the maquis and those who joined them later came to regard this as an outright betrayal by Hanoi, done in Vietnam’s national interest with no regard for proletarian solidarity. This concession by Hanoi, under Soviet and Chinese pressure, at Geneva had considerable impact on the development of Cambodian Communism.

Geneva also committed Cambodia to elections based on universal suffrage and supervised by the International Control Commission. Despite Sihanouk’s new standing, it seemed clear that the election would be won by the Democratic Party, which in the last two elections had won most seats and whose members, many of them republican-minded civil servants sympathetic to Son Ngoc Thanh, had little time for the monarchy. Sihanouk had refused Thanh’s offer that he return from the forests and run openly, but there seemed to be no way to prevent further erosion of his power in favor of the politicians. The Control Commission rejected  Sihanouk’s suggestion that the suffrage should be limited, and so he abdicated his throne in favor of his father. As Prince but no longer Monarch, he announced that he was now a politician. It was deftly done.

He claimed that he wished only to establish a truly democratic government, end the rule of privilege, and cut out the “whole hierarchy of court mandarins amongst whom slide the intriguers, like bloodsucking leeches that fasten themselves on the feet of elephants.” He formed a movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community), which cut across party lines and took as its themes loyalty to Nation, Buddhism, and Monarchy.

The new electoral process was quite unable to withstand the attraction of a charismatic former king. His appeal was irresistible to the mass of the peasantry, and several parties immediately merged with the Sangkum. The others were almost all eliminated by Sihanouk’s victory at the polls; only the Democrats and the left-wing Pracheachon group, which had links to the Viet Minh, survived at all. But despite his sweeping victory, the way in which Sihanouk had used his status to isolate the political elite from power and bypass the country’s new institutions was bitterly resented by, perhaps, a few hundred people in Phnom Penh—as well as by Son Ngoc Thanh and those few Cambodian Communists, or as Sihanouk later called them, “Khmer Rouges,” who remained in the forests.

From now on Sihanouk would tolerate no intermediaries. He took his mandate from the vote of 1955, renewed it by regular elections and referenda, and continued for the next fifteen years to assume that legitimacy derived uniquely from his communion with the peasantry. The communon did exist, and Sihanouk guarded it well. Like the kings of Angkor, he held popular audiences at which the people could present their grievances personally; he would stand in the courtyard of the palace in Phnom Penh shouting shrilly above the din of the eager villagers, "Water shortage in Mondolkiri, corruption in Kompong Cham? I'll deal with it. Where is the Minister?" If the unfortunate man was not at hand, another courtier would be ordered to fetch him and he would have to stand and listen while the Prince gave a high-pitched peroration of abuse against corrupt and inefficient officials, food prices and the "imperialists."

Other times Sihanouk would fling himself around the country with fe- rocious energy, scattering bales of cloth and sacks of food in remote hamlets of Ratanakiri, standing in village squares and mopping the sweat from his face as he swapped raucous jokes with the delighted peasantry, exploiting both his semidivinity and his obvious humanity in a unique brand of personal populism. His thoughts he delivered, not like Mao, in pithy aphorisms, but in speeches, several hours long, which he shouted into the microphone of Radio Phnom Penh. These rambling, disjointed harangues were vigorous and often quite unrestrained. When Sukarno was deposed in Indonesia, Sihanouk declared that he was a "scatter brained old man fond of virgins" who had been destroyed by his Japanese wife.

Through the 1960s. Etudes Cambodgiennes hiri43' alightr more subtly in the magazine with the foreign pr'evvss-Own.tafineee:itel He also conducted his relatiotsthilip correspondent so bold as to ask for an interview personal basis. A visiting Penh might be answered by a tirade ‘II ervie as soon as he arrived in Phnom the radio. He denounced critical articles and banned authors from telegrams of praise to reporters whose country: and he sent long, warm observations he approved. "

He loved to upset the diplomatic corps and once insisted mfistdeidsc that °an am__ bassadors take part in digging a new railroad track; the this caused the men from the Quai d'Orsay, Foggy Bottom, Gorky Street and  Whitehall wa only slightly mitigated by the fine lunch and vintage cha pagne with which he later refreshed them. Sometimes he would fl il: Y home from abroad, not to Phnom Penh but to Stem Reap near Angkor WateTh-- entire corps had to drive there; at the ferry long lines of ambassadorial limousines stretched away in the heat, their Occupants mopping them_ selves. 

It was an adroit performance, but Sihanouk, believing that only his relationship with the populace assured the stability of the country, never fully succeeded in unifying Cambodia. It remained a feudal kingdom in which various barons, war lords and landowners ruled in their own fief-doms, paying him varying tributes and recognition. His political organi-zation, the Sangkum, was little more than a loose coalition of powerful families and cliques of different ideologies, which remained subservient tho Sihanouk partly because there was no alternative and partly because ruiners/ enjoyed real popularity. 

He control over such political life as he tolerated was total: there was no real role for other political or sections of the community. Above Ml, there was no place for a expanded and a Cambodian Civil SCIV. ' . -1 bittoti or 'lowly degence in Phnom Penh in influ • "Ic enu meant in effect, developed, but nothing court, and that was not a prospect that • Ilbei?g a 1.11 pride. To obtain a job of ember of Sihanouk's a university graduates, Particularly  those educated abroad, relished. Sihanouk idly t for the political elite and the educated class. " catcall' ftical defeat in my life. You can do have never rated P° as you vizi ac- lc that you can defeat me, for 1 am the kind  wish, but you must I will only accept punishment from the of man who never steep ts defeat' pie. You belong to a special category, another Pheople' for You are not the Pe° ot er class, for you - neither prince nor people." 

This became increasingly hard to bear. Students returning from France • d for venturing thoughts that they had been en noguraged to de-were Jade Skepticism could mean criticism, criticism bate at college. m iese majeste prison. sometimes death. Throughout the sixties Sihanouk: mcdeste autocracy became increasingly unpredictable and a trickle of young men s both on the right and on the left retired to Paris or faded into aapd wonlen the forests to join either Son Ngoc Thanh's Khmer Serci or the few Communists who had remained after 1954. Even so. most Cambodians ackrl°v"'edged that in his central ambition, to preserve the country's in-dependence. dence. Sihanouk. the God-King, fared remarkably well. Until 1970 prevent the Vietnam War from spilling very far inside re- managed to  Cambodia's frontiers. 

In Cambodia, as in few other countries (Israel provides something of an analogy), the very survival of the nation was a major political issue. From the start of his rule Sihanouk devised methods of playing his neigh-bors off against one another, exploiting both their ambitions and their weaknesses. He called this policy "extreme neutrality," and for a time it worked well, though it pleased few people outside Cambodia. In particu-lar the United States never found Sihanouk or his Cambodia easy to appreciate. Richard Nixon, as Vice-President of the United States, visited the country in 1953, and twenty-five years later wrote in his memoirs that Sihanouk was "vain and flighty. He seemed prouder of his musical talents than of his political leadership, and he appeared to me to be totally un-realistic about the problems his country faced." American anxiety over Sihanouk's neutralism, particularly his accommodation of Hanoi, grew in direct proportion to United States involvement in Vietnam and. to a lesser extent, Thailand. 

In the 1950s and '60s history repeated itself in Cambodia. After the United States began to increase its political and military commitment to the anti-Communist regime in Saigon, American officials found that Cam-bodia Posed for them the same sort of problems as it had for the French  a century earlier. Sihanouk’s refusal to cooperate became all the more irksome as the difficulties of controlling South Vietnam became manifest.

The Prince had been disappointed in America’s leaders when, on a world crusade for independence in 1952, he had visited Washington. He felt both snubbed and rebuked by John Foster Dulles, who lectured him that French protection was essential if Cambodia was to be saved from the Communists. (Dulles could not accept Sihanouk’s contention that French control was feeding the Communists’ basic support.) Shortly after independence, Sihanouk’s Prime Minister Penn Nouth announced, “As long as we are not Communists we do not oppose Communism as long as the latter is not imposed on our people from outside.” Such expressions of neutralism did not accord well with Dulles’ own attitude, although the latter was at this time himself virulently anti-Communist. Throughout 1953 and 1954 he threatened to bomb Viet Minh-controlled villages whether or not any Cambodians lived there, and in 1954 he requested United States aid after the Viet Minh launched a probe into northeast Cambodia from Southern Laos. At Geneva, Cambodia had established the right to enter foreign alliances in certain circumstances. The United States then pressed Sihanouk to associate himself with SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which was formed under American influence in 1954 and which included the United States, Britain, France, Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. Dulles saw SEATO as a critical chain that would contain China; a protocol committed it to protect Indochina. Sihanouk, however, refused to recognize it. Although he requested military aid from Washington he also sought assurances of non-interference from both Peking and Hanoi.

Dulles considered that his attitude weakened SEATO. A National Security Council study of September 1956 asserted that United States policy toward Cambodia itself must be to “maintain Cambodia’s independence and to reverse the drift towards pro-communist neutrality, encourage individuals and groups in Cambodia who oppose dealing with the communist bloc and who serve to broaden the political power base in Cambodia.”

The policy was not pursued subtly. In 1956, after Sihanouk attacked SEATO while visiting Peking, his army suddenly had to cope with a number of incidents on the Thai border; the South Vietnamese Air Force began to violate Cambodian airspace; Cambodian fishing boats were harassed when both the Thais and Vietnamese closed their Cambodian frontiers, and supply convoys up the Mekong, the country’s main artery—it had no deep-water port on the sea—were stopped in South Vietnam.

These measures were temporary, but their effect was long-lasting and counterproductive. Sihanouk exploited the rift to the full, established relations with the Soviet Union and Poland, accepted aid from China, and repeated his denunciations of SEATO. In May 1957 the National Security Council acknowledged that “the United States has been unable to influence Cambodia in the direction of a stable government and non-involvement with the communist bloc.”

The Prince’s relationship with Washington was in part a casualty of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s manhandling of the State Department. Its Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs had recently been purged of the men who had “lost China,” and sympathy for a nonaligned Prince who was wedged strategically south of China and between Thailand and Vietnam could not be eagerly expressed by those who survived. There were never many foreign-service officers who displayed enthusiasm for Sihanouk; even those who tolerated his neutralism claimed to find his jokes, his high-pitched voice and his grasping mother-in-law offensive. A pattern of misunderstanding between the United States and Sihanouk was established with the arrival of the first American Ambassador after the Geneva Conference. Robert McClintock was one of those individuals who prosper on a reputation for brilliance that travels before and, somehow, even after them. His most obvious characteristic was an overweening arrogance. He considered that the posting was beneath his talents, and he treated both the country and Sihanouk with disdain, making it clear that he found the Prince’s extravagant gestures, his five-hour harangues and his unpredictable reactions evidence of an essential triviality. His visits to the palace were made more for the purposes of lecturing than for diplomatic inquiry or advice, and he openly displayed his contempt by arriving in shorts or, on other occasions, with a walking stick and his Irish setter. It was not the way to treat the ruler of a newly independent country, but McClintock would not abide Sihanouk’s brand of neutralism. He would protest extravagantly when the Cambodian press lavishly praised some American gift or aid as “Made in America” one evening and ignored it the next morning entirely. At the opening of an American-equipped maternity clinic the Ambassador, according to Sihanouk, “strutted about praising the material and said, ‘Ah, Prince Sihanouk, this should particularly interest you as a one-man manufacturer of babies.’”

McClintock's successor,Carl Strom, was more tactful,but he infuriated Sihanouk in 1958, after the South Vietnamese attacked across the Cambodian border, when he warned that no arms supplied under the United States aid program could be used against them. That the United States should have sided with its clients Saigon or Bangkok in the endless border disputes is not surprising. Neither was Sihanouk’s response. To fill the void, he promptly began to negotiate full diplomatic relations with Peking. In Washington, a Presidential study by the Operations Coordinating Board warned that this meant “a net loss to the free world’s position in Cambodia.” Strom was called to Washington and was told that Sihanouk would now have to go and that United States aid would be cut off to precipitate his fall. He managed to convince the State Department this was not wise, but Washington’s displeasure was evident; relations between Bangkok and Phnom Penh completely broke down. NSC papers from the period cited in the Pentagon papers confirm that Washington saw Thai and Vietnamese pressure across the borders as one of the principal weapons to be used in an effort to move Sihanouk toward a more pro-American position. Sihanouk later claimed that the CIA also then began to give consistent support, through the South Vietnamese, to Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei.

Relations between Phnom Penh and Washington deteriorated after the following year, 1959, when Sihanouk proclaimed that he had discovered a plot by which the Khmer Serei was to terrorize several provinces while its right-wing enemies fomented dissatisfaction in the capital. He claimed that French and Chinese intelligence services had warned him that the military governor of Siem Reap province, Dap Chhuon, would secede with Khmer Serei support. The plan, said Sihanouk’s paper, Réalités Cambodgiennes, was to topple him so that “the present monarchistic, neutral and independent Khmer state would be replaced by a republic adopting a pro-Western stance.” Dap Chhuon was shot, and Victor Matsui, a member of the CIA station in Phnom Penh, hurriedly left the country after Sihanouk accused him of being party to the plot.

William Colby, who was then in the CIA in Saigon, claims now that the CIA was not plotting with Dap Chhuon. But he agrees that Matsui had contacts with him. He says, “The Thais and the South Vietnamese were in league with Dap Chhuon and we had links with them. So Sihanouk assumed that we were behind them. In fact, we were urging them to desist, but as part of our intelligence coverage, we developed an agent in the Dap Chhuon entourage. We gave him a radio to keep us informed, not to encourage Dap Chhuon.”

The explanation seems somewhat disingenuous, and Colby admits that “Sihanouk’s misapprehension was understandable.” In the United States press, the Prince’s allegations were virtually dismissed, just like many others he had made over the years. Time magazine reported that Dap Chhuon had given Sihanouk “something to chew on.” Dap Chhuon was a great patriot and the “saxophone tootling” Prince who “tries to play it real cool at both ends of the scale” had been duped by the Communists. According to Time, Washington was not the least hostile to the Prince, but considered him “as a likeable but volatile fellow whose popularity among his 5,000,000 people is undisputed.”

Sihanouk’s charges of American interference are worth considering in the light of a study that was commissioned by the Pentagon in 1959. The document, Psychological Operations: Cambodia, is 471 pages long, and it is of significance today because it was probably a fairly accurate reflection of the official American view of Sihanouk’s regime.

The report was intended to discover which social groups in Cambodia were both “effective” in the society and “susceptible” to American pressure; the groups which most interested the planners were those who scored high in both categories. Of the country as a whole, the report noted that almost all Cambodians were fishermen or farmers, whose prowess did not impress their neighbors. “From the French, Chinese and Vietnamese points of view, Khmer are indifferent farmers, incapable traders, uninspired fishermen, unreliable laborers.” Soldiers were little better; they lacked stamina, did not understand machinery, behaved arrogantly and had poor officers. The police were untrained, underequipped, extortionists, “the most corrupt group in Cambodia.”

The report shared the conventional belief that the Cambodians were “by and large a docile passive people.” As such they were disappointing material from the American point of view. They could not be easily recruited; their horizons were limited to village, pagoda and forest, they respected their government, knew of no other countries, they feared ghosts and, in short, “they cannot be counted on to act in any way for the benefit of U.S. aims and policies.”

But if the United States could not woo the society, it could disrupt it and encourage the spread of " privization ( the preoccupation of the individual with his personal rather than his social situation ) , discouragement, defeatism and apathy. There were two groups in Cambodiaa that could be counted upon to further American aims. The middle-class urban elited and the officer corps. ( It was the coalition of these two groups that in 1970 overthrew Sihanouk and brought Cambodia into the American camp,)

in 1959 the report noted that the older elite was " repidly becoming  

susceptible to exploitation by the United States," because of the way

Sihanouk forced it either to collaborate with him or to "languish in frustration and bitterness." The younger generation was equally valuable because it was "crass and materialistic . . . bribed thus compromised. . . a weak spot in the Cambodian government and social structure."Neutralism made them all nervous, and they were frightened by the Prince's "mercurial" temper. There was one problem—"until the popular image of Sihanouk is tarnished they will not resist or rebel"—but it was not insuperable.

The report stressed the necessity for Americans to behave correctly in Cambodia. They should dwell upon Angkor and the glorious past rather than upon present weaknesses; they should eat all food offered to them, "even if it does not look appetizing." Typical American "locker-room language" must be avoided, because "courtesy to the point of formality, gentleness and dignity" were essential forms of address in Cambodia; and they must never "show anger under any circumstances, because anger is synonymous with madness in the Cambodian language." Photographs should be carefully used. "Candid shots" of the political elite must not do them discredit, "unless such is intended." More importantly, they should recognize that "the prototype of the successful American might be objectionable because of the connotation of disparate wealth. The economic gap is so great that Cambodians have no understanding of the typical American version of "play." Nonetheless, the report said, Cam- bodians were a jolly people who loved to laugh; humor could be an effec- tive weapon. But care should be taken; "jokes about Texas or income taxes will not strike the Khmer as funny even if they are explained—they have no base in Cambodian experience.

A large part of the report was made up of 207 different "appeal ideas" to be directed at different sections of the population—peasants, Chinese, Vietnamese, the police—in the attempt to win them to the free world. Enlisted men in the Cambodian army were to be persuaded that they were fighting only for Peking, while Chinese merchants seduced their wives and venal politicians sat at ease in Phnom Penh. They must be convinced that their officers were corrupt and were appointed on the basis of nepotism; if they deserted, "your family will consider you a hero

... it will also be a joke on your officers." The Buddhist monks were another target. They could not, unfortunately, be aroused to violence—"this would be asking the clergy to be non-Buddhist"—but "psy-warriors" could play on the fact that "the monks are also human" and try to persuade them that they were hated by the intelligentsia.

Great stress was placed on the importance of American aid in winning over the military and the elite—and in frightening the mass of the people.The officer corps would, by its very nature, be grateful for military aid.Its effect on the soldier would be different: "Soldier, you have seen the  power of American equipment. You have seen the power of the American army. You cannot win." The report noted that there was one problem with such a slogan: "For this appeal—as in others which treat of American power—effectiveness would depend upon the extent to which Cambodian soldiers would have felt that power."

 But once extended, United States aid could be used in many mysterious ways. One "appeal idea" in the study was a leaflet showing Phnom Penh railway station blown up, with the bodies of dead monks and women all around. This was an exceptionally good idea, because "the railway station is one of the finest public buildings in Cambodia and a source of great pride to the people. (Note: upon completion, the port of Kompong Som and the road to it, now under construction with U.S. money, will be important objectives.)

There were ideas that placed the blame for rice shortages on the elite, on the Chinese merchants, on the Peking government (to whom the merchants were said to owe allegiance), on neutralism, on loss of United States imports, on broken promises of the government. Panic was to be encouraged by illustrations of young men being carried off into the distance on Chinese trucks. Whole sections of the study were devoted to trying to convince the people that the United States alone wanted freedom, peace, happiness and independence for Cambodia. Others sought to persuade Cambodians that an American victory was inevitable, come what may.

The analysts appreciated, at times, the contradictions of their work. One suggested picture of an American and a Cambodian embracing has the American saying that when the war is over "I'd like to come back and work in Cambodia. I know something about animals and perhaps could help you." A word of caution is added: "Some Cambodians might not relish the idea of Americans in their land even if they were there only to assist." Another appeal idea suggests showing a map of the United States dotted with Buddhist temples. But the comment points out that "Those Cambodians who have been in the United States know the difficulty in locating a Theravada Buddhist temple. Those who know only Cambodia would not recognize a makeshift location such as a converted storeroom as a 'temple.'"

As a satire on the way in which the military-sociological complex might have set about subverting a society in the late 1950s, the report's language assumptions and cautions are droll. It was, however, a serious exercise and not unique to Cambodia; within the same series similar studies were made of Burma, Egypt, China, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Syria, Thailand and Vietnam. The report helps to explain the paranoia that many smaller nations, especially nonaligned countries of the Third World, have long felt about the real purpose of American military and economic aid. And, in the case of Cambodia, the "special audiences" considered most likely to work for United States interests—the officer corps and the elite—were just those who did so and who eventually replaced Sihanouk.

United States aid, which Sihanouk at first encouraged, had some obvious effects on the country. Throughout the fifties and sixties Cambodia remained an overwhelmingly rural society, and the vast majority of peasants worked their own land. But by 1963 American aid provided about 14 percent of its annual revenue and accounted for around 30 percent of the military budget. The sums involved were not enormous, but they did have an impact, particularly in Phnom Penh, where the American presence helped to create a large new servant class—waiters, bartenders, auto air-conditioner mechanics, clerks, messengers, drivers, prostitutes. Khieu Samphan, who became the Khmer Rouge commander in chief after 1970, bitterly described the development of this service sector even before the Americans arrived, in a thesis on the Cambodian economy written in 1959.

The effects on the middle class were also marked. For many of the graduates disillusioned with Sihanouk’s system, American power and aid offered the one hope of economic and social progress. Because the Americans' standard of living was high (and more conspicuous than that of the French), their presence also encouraged greed and envy among the rich, who spent much of their time building villas to rent to foreign officials at high prices and trying to emulate their lifestyle.

All this was inevitable in such a tiny society, but the way the American embassy was constituted created further problems. It prefigured, to some extent, the military and aid missions that were sent to Phnom Penh after 1970. Many officials who were stationed there considered Phnom Penh a delightful provincial town, but professionally it was a backwater; a high-flier in the State Department or Army would prefer Bangkok or Saigon. Phnom Penh was rated a hardship post; few officials remained there more than two years, almost none of them knew Khmer, and an extraordinarily high number could not even speak French.

The military mission faced an added problem. After independence, Cambodia’s relations with France improved considerably, and the French

had left their own military-training cadre behind. The traditions of the Cambodian army were French, and the Americans found it difficult to change them. Although the official purpose of the American military group was to help Cambodia’s tiny army “to maintain internal security against Communist subversion and insurgency and to encourage a pro-Western orientation,” many officers spent more time worrying about their French counterparts than about the Viet Minh. They stressed that the French had lost the Indochina war, that American aid and methods were now the only hope. But since they were allowed to give advice only, not training, to the Khmers, and since Cambodian officers generally were looking forward to periods of study in France, it was a difficult task. No command or staff relationship was set up between the two missions. French officers strolled down one side of the boulevards and Americans strolled up the other, the French saluting laconically as they passed. Sihanouk, it must be said, delighted in the mutual distrust and did all he could to provoke it.

The French had encouraged the Cambodians to base their defense on hundreds of police posts that stretched out along the borders and the lines of communication. It was a sensible enough idea since it enabled the army to mix with the population. But the Americans, inculcated with the idea of an army as a heavily equipped expeditionary force, tried to persuade the Cambodians to concentrate their troops in a brigade structure. It was exactly not the way to cope with small guerrilla attacks in isolated parts of the country. But it was what U.S. Army field manuals advised.

Through the late fifties and early sixties, the United States military mission began to provide more and more equipment, much of it surplus material that had been destined for the French before their surrender and much of it unsuitable. Some was distributed to units, but a great deal piled up in Phnom Penh warehouses.

Under United States law it was (and is) the responsibility of the military mission to inspect the “end-use” of all equipment supplied by the United States, to ensure inter alia that it is not being sold to the Communists (as happened after 1970) or simply misused. Sihanouk, and a good many of his officers, found these inspections humiliating and often canceled them at the last minute with explanations that troops or vehicles were suddenly “en mission.” The American embassy renamed the inspections “technical visits” and tried to make them social occasions. They would ask the Cambodians to arrange lunches or dinners and send the bill to the embassy. The Cambodians very quickly understood the possibilities and produced great quantities of champagne and cognac; Brigadier General Robert Taber, head of the United States military mission until 1964, complained in his after-action report that “many unit commanders exhibited not only lavish tastes but a shameless propensity for padding the bill. Discreet requests for ‘less opulent hospitality’ were generally ignored.” Attempting to explain the phenomenon to the Pentagon in terms of a Khmer tradition of hospitality, he admitted, “It is also possible that [the Royal Khmer Armed Forces] felt that the more the visits cost, the fewer [we] would be able to afford."

American Air Force officers were the most frustrated of all. The Cambodians did not take the idea of the maintenance of equipment very seriously and hated to retire planes. The Americans felt as if they were flying an “aerial museum,” and they intensely disliked the Air Force Chief of Staff, Major General Ngo Hou, who was also Sihanouk’s pilot and one of his favorite medical advisers. Taber’s report refers to the general as “a sycophant and a toady” with “dubious business interests.”

But there were many Cambodian officers, of course, who accepted American equipment and American advice in the way the 1959 survey had hoped they would—with friendship and gratitude. American aid, in particular military aid, began to create a new focus of loyalty that was quite separate from the government and might have been even stronger but for French competition.

By 1963, Sihanouk suspected that too many of his more conservative generals and ministers were becoming dependent upon both American aid and American attitudes. He also believed, at that time, that Hanoi would eventually win the growing war in South Vietnam. He shifted leftward. Just after the assassination of President Diem in November 1963, he commenced a broad program of economic reform, nationalizing foreign trade and the banks. At the same time he made a crucial decision—he renounced the American economic and military aid program that he had accepted since 1955. He demanded that the United States embassy close down its aid missions and that their personnel leave the country.

In explaining this new policy, he denounced the United States for continuing to support Son Ngoc Thanh, whose Khmer Serei troops were being trained in South Vietnam and whose radio was beaming vituperative broadcasts into Cambodia. He also complained about the corrupting effects of the American missions on Cambodian attitudes.

The head of the United States military mission, General Taber, paid his final call on the Minister of Defense, General Lon Nol, on January 4, 1964. It was a warm encounter, Taber recorded.Lon Nol  displayed a friendly attitude and expressed appreciation for the help given by MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) to the Cambodian Armed Forces. He remarked on the great friendship that had been built up between the Cambodian and American officers and between the people of the two countries as well. He then made the following statements which may have significance as indicators of the present attitude of Sihanouk's ministers: 1) the departure of the MAAG had not been brought about by “the Government” (this was interpreted as implying that Sihanouk alone was responsible); 2) Cambodia would never join the Communist bloc unless militarily overcome by the communists; 3) at some unspecified time in the future "the U.S. might wish to furnish aid to Cambodia without preconditions, perhaps as in Burma or Indonesia"; and 4) the Cambodians cannot understand the inability of the U.S. to stop the Khmer Serei broadcasts.

Taber was delighted with his visit and wrote, shrewdly:

Lon Nol's friendliness was apparently genuine and his indirect placing of responsibility on Sihanouk for the termination of U.S. aid, as well as his assurance that Cambodia will never voluntarily become a communist country imply the possibility that there is a point beyond which the military will refuse to support the Chief of State. It is obvious that Lon Nol regrets the present turn of events and it is safe to say that he is not the only Cambodian official who is already anticipating a time when political factors will permit the RKG (Royal Khmer Government) to make a request for renewed military assistance.

General Taber was correct, though it took six years for that time to come.

After he threw out the American aid missions, the Prince continued to try to play off Chinese, Soviet, and American interests, describing the superpowers as “depraved” and insisting that he had no wish to see Cambodia turn Communist. He ordered his police and army brutally to suppress the tiny groups of Khmer Rouge in the countryside. At the same time he was edging toward Hanoi. In 1965, after Newsweek had published an article (written with the help of the United States embassy) that scorned him and accused his family of running the profitable Phnom Penh brothel business, he broke off diplomatic relations with Washington altogether. He cited the article as an intolerable intrusion—but a more important tant reason for the break was that the first American combat troops had just splashed ashore at Danang in South Vietnam.

Relations with the United States now began to deteriorate further. Nonetheless, Sihanouk still tried to remain detached; he wrote to The New York Times to acknowledge that "after the disappearance of the U.S.A. from our region and the victory of the communist camp, I myself and the People's Socialist Community I have created would inevitably disappear from the scene.