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Episode: S5 Episode 1 - "The Wolves Are Closing In"

Author: Blowback
Duration: 00:44:42

Episode Shownotes

A prelude and a primer to this season's story: the tragedy of Cambodia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:07 Speaker_05
my fellow Americans.

00:00:10 Speaker_17
August 1964. President Lyndon Johnson announces to the world that the United States will engage in military action against North Vietnam.

00:00:23 Speaker_05
As President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions

00:00:37 Speaker_05
against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action and reply.

00:00:51 Speaker_17
Privately, Johnson doubts that the inciting attack by Vietnamese forces had happened at all.

00:00:58 Speaker_04
And I just say that you want to be sure before you tell me that we were fired upon, that we were fired upon, because you just came in a few weeks ago and said, they're launching an attack on us, they're firing on us.

00:01:09 Speaker_04
And we got through with all the firing, which included maybe they hadn't fired at all.

00:01:14 Speaker_17
March 1969. In order to strike at so-called sanctuaries of Vietnamese forces, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon inaugurate a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. Spring 1970.

00:01:36 Speaker_17
The United States begins an air and ground invasion of Cambodia after a right-wing coup against the country's ruler.

00:01:46 Speaker_20
The next morning, Bravo Company has hardly moved more than a few hundred yards when it runs into an enemy ambush.

00:02:01 Speaker_17
April 1975. Communist insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia. They institute a nationwide program of forced labor, mass executions, and extermination of ethnic minorities.

00:02:20 Speaker_00
All the civilians living in town were sent out into the countryside. It's just a dead city and a dead country.

00:02:30 Speaker_17
December 1978, after nearly four years of Khmer Rouge rule, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam invades Cambodia to oust Pol Pot's government. The United States condemns the action and begins a decade-long policy of support for the Khmer Rouge.

00:02:54 Speaker_06
Why does the United States have anything to do whatsoever with the Khmer Rouge?

00:02:59 Speaker_19
We're still fighting the Vietnam War, and this is the last battle of that war, and if we have to use the Khmer Rouge as a pawn in that, we'll use them.

00:03:18 Speaker_14
Speak about this nonsense! Speak about this nonsense!

00:03:33 Speaker_17
Welcome to Blowback, I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwin. And this is Season 5, Episode 1, The Wolves Are Closing In. Hello everyone, we are back again for another season, a very exciting one for us and hopefully for all of you out there listening.

00:03:52 Speaker_17
As always, we want to say thank you to everyone who tuned in last season and listeners new and old tuning in this time around.

00:04:00 Speaker_09
And as always, this first episode will be free for everybody, and we hope you join us for the rest of the season, which you can do by going to blowback.show and hitting the big button that says subscribe.

00:04:15 Speaker_09
You'll also get 10 more bonus episodes, an ad-free back catalog, and other treats that we'll discuss at the end of this episode.

00:04:24 Speaker_17
Now, what are we up to this time?

00:04:37 Speaker_09
Well, this season, we are finally confronting a subject people have been demanding for a very long time, but not perhaps in the way that people expect it.

00:04:48 Speaker_09
It's the story of how a small, neutral country at the height of the Cold War got fed to the meat grinder as a matter of political expediency. It is the story of Cambodia.

00:05:02 Speaker_17
All of that begins, of course, with the Vietnam War, perhaps the most infamous example of American hubris in the 20th century.

00:05:10 Speaker_17
And we have avoided going for Vietnam in the past because, quite frankly, there is no shortage of movies, books, documentaries, and, I'm sure, podcasts which cover that story. But what we call the Vietnam War was not just a war in Vietnam.

00:05:29 Speaker_17
It was in fact a constellation of conflicts. A chain reaction that shot through Southeast Asia. China, Thailand, Laos, and especially Cambodia.

00:05:41 Speaker_17
It's the chain reaction that we're interested in this season, which resulted in several wars after the one that we all know.

00:05:50 Speaker_09
What happened in Cambodia, first some shadowy special forces operations, then secret bombing raids, then a coup, and then a full-blown invasion, all led to a takeover by a gang now synonymous with the phrase Killing Fields. the Khmer Rouge.

00:06:09 Speaker_09
Pol Pot's seizure of power in 1975 culminates in one of the great human catastrophes of modern history, and a new war, one that many Americans today have probably never even heard about.

00:06:23 Speaker_09
The war in which the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, America's enemy, toppled Pol Pot and stopped what is now known as the Cambodian Genocide. And behind the scenes, you may just be surprised to find out who ends up working with whom.

00:06:42 Speaker_17
This will be a story about Cambodia. But it is also about Vietnam, not only during the American war, but in its exhilarating and troubled aftermath. It's about China and its rivalry with the Soviet Union.

00:06:57 Speaker_17
It's about the crack-up of communism in Asia, the less popular counterpart to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union.

00:07:06 Speaker_17
We'll spend time with the titanic figure of Ho Chi Minh, the manic yet cunning President Richard Nixon, the cryptic and fanatical Pol Pot, the insatiable Dr. Henry Kissinger.

00:07:19 Speaker_17
the judicious Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and perhaps the most enigmatic character that we've ever featured on this program, the Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk.

00:07:35 Speaker_07
What's most important was the fact that we had the opportunity to have talks with Chairman Mao, with Prime Minister John Lai, with the Foreign Minister, and other people in the government.

00:07:48 Speaker_07
With Chairman Mao, with the Prime Minister, and with others with whom we have met, our talks have been characterized by frankness, by honesty, by determination, and above all, by mutual respect.

00:08:03 Speaker_17
This season is also a tale about an historic shift in what is, nowadays, perhaps America's most important relationship.

00:08:12 Speaker_16
— China. — China. — China.

00:08:13 Speaker_17
— China. — China.

00:08:14 Speaker_17
— In the 2020s, at the time of this recording, the United States pursues an aggressive policy against a rising China, accusing it of everything from imperial ambition to genocide to infiltrating the tender minds of Americans through TikTok.

00:08:31 Speaker_17
Despite a symbiotic trading relationship, U.S. government agencies and think tanks propagandize against China. And, most significantly, a network of American military bases surrounds the People's Republic.

00:08:46 Speaker_17
Beijing, by comparison, has opted to spread its influence largely through business dealings, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, a self-proclaimed socialist state outwheeling and outdealing the capitalist West.

00:09:00 Speaker_17
And by the way, the largest Belt and Road project to date is a major expressway in Cambodia.

00:09:08 Speaker_09
But in this season, we'll see a period of time when the US and China would meet in an embrace. thanks to the canny calculations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who today remain officially celebrated in China.

00:09:24 Speaker_09
In fact, in his later years, Henry Kissinger urged the U.S. to do business with rather than attack China's Belt and Road. However, at odds the U.S.

00:09:33 Speaker_09
and China are now, back in the 1970s and 80s, there was a moment in which the interests of Washington and Beijing came together. and it came at the expense of what some called Red Brotherhood in Asia.

00:09:50 Speaker_17
This season is also a kind of sequel to our second series about the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis.

00:09:58 Speaker_17
In his book, The Yankee-Cowboy War, the American writer Carl Oglesby sketches two distinct camps in the American ruling class. The Yankees and the Cowboys. The Yankees are, generally, the liberal-minded, pro-NATO, Eastern establishment types.

00:10:17 Speaker_17
Believers in a strong Europe, supportive of containment over confrontation, and only as pro-war as the markets dictate.

00:10:26 Speaker_17
The cowboys, on the other hand, are the tycoons, the hyper-nationalists, the frontier types, who want that American frontier to keep expanding into Latin America, into China, into Vietnam.

00:10:43 Speaker_17
Yankee, Boglesby writes, is the Council on Foreign Relations, Kennedy, and, at a certain point, the Dulles brothers, and the doctrine of massive retaliation. Cowboy is Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon the city slicker, Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs team."

00:11:05 Speaker_09
This season, with the Cuban fiasco in the rearview mirror, we'll see the Yankee-Cowboy-Palace struggle continue, spilling out of Washington, out of the Western Hemisphere, and into Southeast Asia.

00:11:18 Speaker_09
where an even bloodier and more fateful war spreads across the region, not at the ends of communist bayonets, but American bombs. Cambodia in particular was, in many different ways and for many different parties, a kind of human sacrifice.

00:11:36 Speaker_09
As one senior American general put it, when the wolves are closing in, you throw them something off and let them chew it.

00:11:52 Speaker_17
I was fighting against the U.S. at the Cambodian border. In 1970, there was a campaign to sweep through the area, so our troops fled to Cambodia. After the liberation of the South in 1975, I came back to this land.

00:12:11 Speaker_09
In March 2024, we visited Cambodia and Vietnam. In Cambodia, we traveled to see killing fields firsthand, as well as the Khmer Rouge torture center in the capital city, Phnom Penh.

00:12:24 Speaker_09
We also drove west across the country to see the millennium-old temple complex, Angkor Wat, and ate lunch in a town once famous for catastrophic American bombing.

00:12:35 Speaker_09
In Vietnam, beyond Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, we traveled to villages near the Cambodian border, home to massacres that precipitated the war between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge. All the while, we met with people and conducted interviews.

00:12:52 Speaker_17
In the Cambodian village of Nek Long, along the Mekong River, one man walked us across a field. He informed us it had once been a military base.

00:13:02 Speaker_17
When we reached the far side of the field, he pointed out a crater that had been filled in, like a small pond. Inside that pond, he told us, was an unexploded bomb buried in the water, a simple way to mark the spot and keep people away.

00:13:21 Speaker_09
Another resident of Nakhlong, nicknamed Aunty, made us lunch and told us about how, even when things became normal in the 1980s, there were still explosives buried all across Cambodia.

00:13:35 Speaker_09
For a long time, they produced thousands of casualties across the country, each and every year.

00:13:46 Speaker_17
We were no longer terrified of everything. We enjoyed seeing our family. I would say our lives were good. We were no longer scared of war. The war was over. But there were plenty of landmines around here.

00:13:59 Speaker_17
In Nha Trang, it was normal to hear landmines explode and people die.

00:14:09 Speaker_09
We spoke to people about war, wars against the French, wars against the Americans, and the lesser-known war between Vietnam and what villagers in that country called the Pol Pots.

00:14:23 Speaker_09
In southern Vietnam, one woman, Mrs. Tru, told us the story of a massacre committed by the Khmer Rouge against her village.

00:14:35 Speaker_17
At midnight, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered everyone. They told the villagers that they should leave, and they would die if they stayed home. But actually, they led the villagers into the forest and massacred them.

00:14:50 Speaker_09
We spoke to people about the years under Pol Pot.

00:14:54 Speaker_09
At the grounds of Tuol Sleng, the torture center of the Khmer Rouge, we interviewed some of the handful of survivors of the prison, including one man who was liberated from it as a young boy by Vietnamese forces.

00:15:08 Speaker_10
The place was chaotic.

00:15:13 Speaker_17
It was crowded. The guards ran around the area. The guards shouted at each other, over and over, to bring all the prisoners outside, because the Vietnamese soldiers and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front brought the fight into Tulsa.

00:15:30 Speaker_09
And we spoke about the aftermath, as a new Cambodia has struggled to be born. One Cambodian man in his 50s, also from the town of Nek Lung, and a mechanic at an ice factory, spoke to us about the country's contemporary problems.

00:15:53 Speaker_17
In the past, one person could make money and they could raise the whole family. These days, the economy's been bad, so 10 people need to work to support a family.

00:16:12 Speaker_02
He's a liar. The demon is a liar. He will like to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien. And powerful.

00:16:30 Speaker_17
In the opening pages of William Peter Blatty's classic novel, The Exorcist, published in 1971, within the first year of the US invasion of Cambodia, there is an epigraph about the nature of evil.

00:16:45 Speaker_17
One passage from the Bible, another from an FBI mafia wiretap, and a striking quotation from one Dr. Tom Dooley, a Catholic physician who, in the late 1950s and early 60s, became America's poster boy for humanitarian missions in Southeast Asia.

00:17:05 Speaker_17
Before reading on about Father Karras and the demon Pazuzu, Blatty prepped readers with Dr. Dooley's account of Asian Communism.

00:17:16 Speaker_09
There's no other explanation for some of the things the communists did. There were the seven little boys and their teacher. They were praying the Our Father when soldiers came upon them.

00:17:26 Speaker_09
One soldier whipped out his bayonet and sliced off the teacher's tongue. The other took chopsticks and drove them into the ears of the seven little boys. How do you treat cases like that?

00:17:37 Speaker_17
Dooley, a Notre Dame grad turned Navy doctor, penned best-selling books about his medical missions in Indochina and the clear moral case for U.S. aid.

00:17:49 Speaker_17
A Gallup poll from the early 60s ranked Dooley third on its list of the 10 men most admired by Americans, behind President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Pope, reported the LA Times.

00:18:03 Speaker_09
It was only later that people learned the good Dr. Dooley had been a CIA asset. His sensational reports of pure commie evil, such as the passage in Blatty's classic novel, were fabricated, part of a propaganda campaign.

00:18:19 Speaker_09
Agency Chief Alan Dulles and Colonel Edward Lansdale, whom listeners may remember from our second season, utilized Dooley for his prestige and popularity, not only for domestic propaganda, but also as a conduit of intelligence inside Indochina itself.

00:18:38 Speaker_17
This strategy of smuggling agency work through religious philanthropy arguably began in the Korean War. It only grew in Vietnam and soon spread to Cambodia.

00:18:51 Speaker_17
In this season, we dug into the archives and found reports of a massive Christian CIA collaboration in Cambodia that would have made Dr. Dooley proud.

00:19:07 Speaker_11
Perhaps, you know, your government and the CIA are not cooperating with each other.

00:19:15 Speaker_17
We've covered some basket case governments on this program before, but the pro-American regime installed in Cambodia following the U.S. invasion might be the most dysfunctional of all time.

00:19:30 Speaker_17
If Italy can be described as a state with a mafia, Cambodia in those years was a mafia with a state. Officers would pilfer freely from the tranches of cash sent from Uncle Sam, sending fake invoices and even running the old mob scam of no-show jobs.

00:19:47 Speaker_17
Salaries for fictional commanders and soldiers that ended up lining the pockets of the clever devils making the claims.

00:19:54 Speaker_09
It wasn't just the Casa Nostra of it all. Some of America's go-to guys in Cambodia were positively Strangelovian. One commander purposely filled his office with miniature furniture and decor in order to make himself appear larger and more imposing.

00:20:11 Speaker_09
Another, who was almost always liquored up, one day demanded that a subordinate place a cat on his head, then back off several yards to shoot it off. The poor soldier tried to say no, but orders are orders.

00:20:23 Speaker_09
Of course, the cat jumped off, and the soldier instead blew a chunk of the commander's head clear off. The commander survived, though, and was subsequently placed in charge of the most important campaign against the communists.

00:20:37 Speaker_01
Today the nation paused to remember on this National Prisoners of War and Missing in Action Recognition Day. The Defense POWMIA Accounting Agency. The POWMIA flag.

00:20:49 Speaker_16
A POWMIA bracelet. The President and First Lady have restored the POWMIA flag to its original location on top of the White House residence.

00:20:58 Speaker_17
One of the intrigues of this season is the diplomatic war between the US and Vietnam that came after the military saga itself.

00:21:07 Speaker_17
You see, in a private letter, Richard Nixon, as it turns out, promised Vietnam what amounted to reparations for the American war.

00:21:16 Speaker_17
That money, which amounted to an entire year's worth of GDP for the struggling Vietnamese government, became one of the biggest priorities for Hanoi in normalizing relations with the U.S.

00:21:29 Speaker_17
But by the time the war was over, Nixon, who had made the offer, was out. And no one in the American government wanted to pay the bill. Many problems were suddenly invented to deny Vietnam this money.

00:21:44 Speaker_17
And perhaps no other trick in the bag worked as well as the invention of a cause. The POW-MIA cause.

00:21:53 Speaker_09
The term MIA, or missing in action, had itself been invented by the Nixon administration.

00:22:00 Speaker_09
In an effort to demonize the Vietnamese and stoke the hopes of American military families, the White House took an old category, that of Soldiers Killed in Action, Body Unrecovered, and gave it a very different name, Missing in Action, and or POW, Prisoner of War.

00:22:19 Speaker_09
This meant that American soldiers who were all dead were now, in the minds of people at home in America, hostages waiting to be found and rescued from the dastardly clutches of the duplicitous Vietnamese communists.

00:22:34 Speaker_09
In fact, writes historian Rick Perlstein, the wars in Indochina saw fewer American prisoners taken than any previous war.

00:22:43 Speaker_09
No matter, on came the POW-MIA flags, pins, t-shirts, and lobby campaigns, which, despite their cause having been debunked by the U.S. Congress itself, all live on to this day.

00:23:02 Speaker_17
headline from an op-ed in the New York Times, August 17th, 1990. Quote, Paul Pott, brutal, yes, but no mass murderer.

00:23:15 Speaker_09
The poll quote, Vietnam is the real threat to Cambodia.

00:23:20 Speaker_17
Many Americans may not know that there was another war in Vietnam after the US one, and yet another only shortly after that.

00:23:29 Speaker_17
Many may not know that it was a communist army that drove out the ultimate communist boogeyman, Paul Pott, and his Khmer Rouge. We will see this season how these things happened and why.

00:23:41 Speaker_17
But perhaps the most shocking isolated fact of the story is that when the Vietnamese did put an end to the Khmer Rouge, they suffered international condemnation and sanctions led by the United States of America.

00:23:57 Speaker_09
Not only that, but this international campaign came just as a famine loomed in Cambodia, and the West actively blocked humanitarian and food aid from entering the country.

00:24:11 Speaker_09
President Jimmy Carter soon invoked the word we now associate with Cambodia's history, genocide. But not toward the Khmer Rouge. He instead threw the charge at the Vietnamese, who had invaded to kick out Pol Pot.

00:24:26 Speaker_09
And at the United Nations, it was the Vietnamese, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Bloc who fought to unseat the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia's official spot at the table. The U.S. made sure this did not happen. After one of the U.N.

00:24:42 Speaker_09
votes, writes one reporter, an American delegate found someone shaking his hand with great enthusiasm. He looked up and saw that it was a Khmer Rouge leader, Yang Saree, grinning broadly.

00:24:57 Speaker_12
They publicly voted for the Khmer Rouge to keep their seat at the UN because they considered the Vietnamese occupation worse than what the Khmer Rouge did. Now, nowadays, it's appalling.

00:25:08 Speaker_12
And it was very hard to get people to understand how awful that was.

00:25:19 Speaker_09
This season, we shall meet and bond with everyone from Pol Pot's personal cook to Admiral Jack McCain, father of John, whose breathless rants on the communists in Cambodia would literally cause him to pass out.

00:25:33 Speaker_09
But there are certain figures who will form what we can call the main cast of our story.

00:25:42 Speaker_18
I've been watching your political style. You have a very popular style of speaking. Is it something you've learned from somebody or is it something that is yours?

00:25:51 Speaker_13
As you can see, you know, we are one family. They are always close to me. You make a lot of jokes. Yes, yes. Because here we like jokes, you know. Otherwise we are not Cambodian.

00:26:06 Speaker_17
King. Politician. Filmmaker. Recording artist. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was first and foremost, and by his own account, a naughty boy.

00:26:18 Speaker_17
Cambodia's head of state for most of the 20th century, albeit sometimes in exile or just on vacation, switches sides in this season so many times you may need to pause the show.

00:26:29 Speaker_17
He was originally installed to the throne by Vichy France as a young man who loved ice cream and going to the movies.

00:26:37 Speaker_17
But a few years later, his natural cunning and charisma were on display as he wrapped up a deal with France to get Cambodia's independence and eliminate all his rival power bases.

00:26:48 Speaker_17
When it looked like Cambodian politics might get out of his control, he abdicated the throne and became a politician. For many years, his canny opportunism served Cambodia well as the U.S.-Vietnam War spun outwards.

00:27:03 Speaker_17
When the Vietnamese looked poised to win, Sihanouk railed against U.S. imperialism. When the tide turned the other way, he appeared in Washington, hat in hand.

00:27:14 Speaker_09
It was Sihanouk who coined the term for Cambodia's communists, Khmer Rouge. He cracked down on the young radicals, that is, when he wasn't co-opting them and appointing them as potted plants in his government.

00:27:27 Speaker_09
Yet he was lifelong friends with Communist China's Premier Zhou Enlai and North Korean President Kim Il-sung, and he often enjoyed time at guest mansions in Beijing and Pyongyang.

00:27:40 Speaker_17
It's hard not to take a shine to Sianouk, whether he's forcing his cabinet to act in his homemade movies, or forcing the prudish leaders of the Khmer Rouge to join him in watching porno.

00:27:53 Speaker_17
But most of all, I am enraptured by a clip of Prince Sianouk in which, with his vocal cadence, he presages the viral rant of Australian politician Bob Catta.

00:28:05 Speaker_22
I mean, you know, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities, you know. I mean, let there be a thousand blossoms bloomed as far as I'm concerned.

00:28:20 Speaker_10
I do not want you to be involved again. in the governmental affairs of my country.

00:28:29 Speaker_22
But I ain't spending any time on it, because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in North Queensland.

00:28:39 Speaker_10
But as a citizen, as a patriot, I will speak out against the Vietnamese aggressors.

00:28:52 Speaker_09
There has never been anyone in the American government quite like Henry Kissinger.

00:28:57 Speaker_03
Looking back as you wrote your memoirs, would you have done what differently? In Cambodia?

00:29:08 Speaker_09
A German Jew who fled the Nazis for America as a teenager, Kissinger made the jump from Harvard professor to national security advisor under President Richard Nixon. quickly fashioning himself into a celebrity diplomat with a celebrity dating life.

00:29:25 Speaker_09
Kissinger wasn't just Nixon's right-hand man on foreign affairs, he was a kind of spiritual partner.

00:29:32 Speaker_17
When it came to the Nixon White House, almost no one had a good reputation with the press and the Washington elite, except for Henry.

00:29:41 Speaker_17
And Kissinger used his power publicly, and especially privately, to remake American foreign policy in an age of crises. He could be cunning and ruthless, disposing of small countries like paper meant for the trash.

00:29:56 Speaker_17
He could also be gutsy and visionary, steering the most powerful country on earth into, quite literally, a New World Order.

00:30:04 Speaker_17
We shall see all these qualities on full display, as he and Nixon prolong the Vietnam War and bring in Cambodia, all while making peace with Communist China.

00:30:18 Speaker_03
Was it unforgi- did this government, the government that you served, other Western governments, bear some responsibility for Paul Pott coming to power and having the opportunity?

00:30:31 Speaker_08
Well, you know, this is the year of apologies and of self-flagellation.

00:30:40 Speaker_17
America's man in Cambodia was the right-wing general, Law Nol. A devout Buddhist and a Khmer supremacist, he told everyone to call him Black Papa, proud as he was of his dark skin that, to him, proved he was a racially pure Khmer.

00:30:58 Speaker_17
At first, Law Nol was an imposing figure, a blunt instrument that Sihanouk allowed into his government to beat back left-wing opposition.

00:31:08 Speaker_17
During one of Sihanouk's crackdowns, a Communist Party secretary came home one day, only to be snatched up by the secret police.

00:31:17 Speaker_17
Journalist Philip Short reports that they took him directly to Law Nall's own home, where he was tortured, killed, and buried on a piece of wasteland. One French advisor to Sihanouk called Law Nall a fascist scarecrow.

00:31:34 Speaker_09
Lon Nol joined up with a bitter prince, a rival of Sihanouk's, to execute a coup and institute a religious, traditional, and pro-American Khmer Republic. But there were some problems.

00:31:49 Speaker_09
For one, his virulent anti-Vietnamese racism kicked off pogroms, mass deportations, and mass executions of Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese population, a human catastrophe, and not very helpful to the Americans' plans for their new strongman to play nice with their other strongmen in South Vietnam.

00:32:10 Speaker_09
Also, Lon Nol's military was a disaster.

00:32:14 Speaker_09
The aforementioned corruption was made worse by negative morale among a scared mass of soldiers who, taking religious cues from their leader, sucked Buddhist icons as they marched up against the black-clad Khmer Rouge fighters, whom they began to believe were cannabis-fueled demons from hell.

00:32:33 Speaker_17
Then there was the fact that, beyond his demented worldview, by the end, Lon Nol was simply not well. Kissinger's National Security Council had obtained a psychiatrist's assessment.

00:32:47 Speaker_17
It found that their man in Phnom Penh was suffering neurological decline, thanks to a stroke, which could spiral at any moment.

00:32:56 Speaker_17
Certain envoys to Cambodia, like Kissinger's right-hand man, Alexander Haig, caught a taste of this side of Lon Nol, when, for example, the dictator collapsed into tears in his office, requiring the ice-chewing American, Haig, to cheer the man up with a cold and awkward, they're there.

00:33:20 Speaker_07
Well, I know there are those who totally would disagree with this and say, gee, Boy, if I could just be a millionaire, that would be the most wonderful thing.

00:33:29 Speaker_07
If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that'd be the most wonderful life in the world. They don't know life because

00:33:46 Speaker_07
What makes life mean something is purpose, a goal, the battle, the struggle.

00:33:54 Speaker_17
Richard Milhouse Nixon has been a supporting character on this show before, as a congressman and then vice president beating the drum of anti-communism, an anti-China, anti-Castro hawk defeated by Jack Kennedy in the 1960 election.

00:34:12 Speaker_09
Now we shall see what Nixon does with the power of the presidency that he has sought all his life.

00:34:19 Speaker_09
Always seeing himself as the outsider to the Eastern elite's game, Nixon's administration will be a uniquely paranoid place, even by the standards of White Houses. And this president had much to be paranoid about.

00:34:35 Speaker_17
With Kissinger as his enforcer, Nixon began remapping American power around the world, almost entirely in secret, cutting out the State Department and other pencil pushers at every turn.

00:34:50 Speaker_17
In Pakistan, the president backed up the dictator Yaya Khan in his bloody campaign against Bangladesh. Over in Chile, the Nixonites supported the successful CIA effort to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende.

00:35:07 Speaker_17
And, through his war on drugs, Nixon turned America's sleepy border with Mexico into a narcotics conflict zone. And so on, and so on.

00:35:18 Speaker_09
But Nixon's ultimate puzzle was Indochina. Unable to smash the communists into submission, he doubled down, expanding the war, ramping up the bombing. Nixon's failure stoked his paranoia and his rage.

00:35:36 Speaker_09
After delivering one televised speech on the war in April 71, Nixon rang up Kissinger to vent and, of course, to receive his subordinates' praise.

00:35:49 Speaker_06
But did that come across? I mean, it was... It was the present. I had, after all, heard it before. I had not... I had a lump in my throat when I heard it. Well, you know, it brought a lump to mine, strangely enough. It... I always did.

00:36:01 Speaker_06
When I saw the little kid, I almost broke up, you know, in the room that day, and I'll never forget. I watched it with hague and loathe, and they... What did they think? Absolutely moved and overwhelmed. They said this was tremendous.

00:36:13 Speaker_06
Well, it's a goddamn good little speech, actually. Well, deep down, they all know you and I... That's the hell of it. And they know the other people are just, that's right, and the others are a bunch of goddamn cowards. And they know it.

00:36:25 Speaker_06
And complicity seekers. That's right. And there isn't... Well, I'll tell you this, though, Henry. You've convinced me, the staff, except for Haldeman and one or two others.

00:36:35 Speaker_06
Bill Haldeman has been... Haldeman, well, Schultz is fine, but he's in another league. can do their jobs, but no one really matters. And as far as the cabinet, except for Conway, the hell with them. I mean, that's all there is to it.

00:36:52 Speaker_06
Well, Mr. President, you've done this one. And if it doesn't work, I don't care. I mean, right now, if it doesn't work, then let me say, though, I'm going to find out soon, and then I'm going to turn rights to God damn hard.

00:37:03 Speaker_06
It will make your heads flip. Mom those bastards right off the earth. I really mean it. Well, I... And I think you agree, don't you? I think, Mr. President, we have to make fundamental decisions. That's right.

00:37:19 Speaker_17
The man that history knows as Pol Pot went by many names in his life. His original name was Salath Sar.

00:37:28 Speaker_17
He was born in a village 90 miles north of Phnom Penh to a prosperous family with connections to the royal palace, writes his biographer, David Chandler.

00:37:41 Speaker_17
Several girls in the family ended up as dancers in the Royal Ballet, giving Saar a relative glamour and privilege for a young boy in Cambodia in the 1920s. He was, by all accounts, a shy and polite boy.

00:37:58 Speaker_17
In 1949, he scored a scholarship to Paris, and a few years later, returned to his country and immersed himself in clandestine left-wing politics. By the late 60s, Saar and his friends fled into the jungles of Cambodia with the resistance, the Maquis.

00:38:18 Speaker_17
In those jungles, Tsar adopted the moniker Pol Pot, which, according to Chandler, was a common name in rural Cambodia, but with no independent meaning. Even his cypher was a cypher.

00:38:35 Speaker_17
We will see him rise to the top of the Khmer Rouge and smile through criticism from his communist allies.

00:38:42 Speaker_17
We'll see him and his comrades cut their nation off from the rest of the world in an almost baffling attempt to create a renaissance per Khmer civilization.

00:38:54 Speaker_17
And we will see them drop their Mao jackets for safari suits in khakis, taking help from their one-time enemies in America. to destroy their one-time allies in Vietnam. All the while, smiling. Quiet and polite smiles.

00:39:25 Speaker_21
Guns of a French cruiser fire on the town as colonial extremists decide to teach the Vietnamese a lesson.

00:39:31 Speaker_09
We'll begin this story by going back to tell a brief history of Indochina. How the action begins with the advent of French colonialism in the 19th century.

00:39:43 Speaker_09
From there, we'll trace the rise of Cambodian and Vietnamese nationalism and resistance to French rule up to the all-important Geneva Conference in 1954.

00:39:55 Speaker_09
It was there that Vietnam was divided into Communist North and the U.S.-supported South, while Prince Sihanouk snagged Cambodia its independence.

00:40:06 Speaker_17
But rather than commence a peace, Geneva was a prelude to more war. Specifically, the Second Indochina War, which Americans call the Vietnam War, and which picks up in the 1960s. Now, the first couple episodes you'll probably find are Vietnam heavy.

00:40:24 Speaker_17
That's because at first, it's where the action is, the catalyst for our chain reaction. So, if you want your Vietnam fix from blowback, here is where you will likely get it.

00:40:36 Speaker_17
But the focus will soon shift to the little country next door, which everyone thought would stay neutral.

00:40:44 Speaker_09
In an attempt to destroy supposed communist strongholds and supply lines, Nixon had Henry Kissinger arrange the secret bombing of Cambodia, which soon escalated to a full-blown invasion.

00:40:59 Speaker_09
and a coup ousts Sihanouk for the violent mystic general Lon Nol and opens up a whole bloody Cambodian civil war.

00:41:09 Speaker_17
The victors of that war were the Khmer Rouge insurgents, just as the Vietnamese communists take Saigon. In Cambodia, now called Democratic Kampuchea, three and a half years of darkness begin.

00:41:25 Speaker_17
The country's ruling gang, led by the mysterious Pol Pot, enforces an agrarian slave state, emptying the cities and piling up bodies in the killing fields.

00:41:38 Speaker_09
And so when the Khmer Rouge were finally kicked out of power by Vietnamese troops in 1979, we shall see the emergence of new friends of these radical one-time communists, including the United States.

00:41:53 Speaker_09
Through the 80s, the Khmer Rouge put the screws to America's primary Cold War nemeses, Vietnam and its benefactor, the Soviet Union. The snake eats its tail once again.

00:42:11 Speaker_12
Kill or be killed, Jack.

00:42:13 Speaker_16
Phnom Penh taught me that.

00:42:19 Speaker_17
As always, this season you'll hear from a wonderful array of guests whose work formed the essential research of this story.

00:42:27 Speaker_17
We speak with journalist Elizabeth Becker, historian Vu Minh Hoang, returning champion, the muckraker Sai Hirsch, scholar Ben Kiernan, and of course, all the people we met in Cambodia and Vietnam during our travels.

00:42:41 Speaker_09
So, if you want to join us, head over to blowback.show and hit the big button that says subscribe.

00:42:49 Speaker_09
You will also get 10 bonus episodes consisting of full interviews with guests, a dive into the looting of art and antiquities from Cambodia, a look at the American-backed drug networks in Southeast Asia from this period, and the story of Vietnam era racism against black sailors on the USS Kitty Hawk.

00:43:09 Speaker_17
And as a subscriber, you'll get discount codes for t-shirts, hats, and posters that are available at blowbackshop.com. Our Metal Gear themed stuff from last year is also still available.

00:43:21 Speaker_17
And keep an eye out for this season's soundtrack coming later in the fall.

00:43:28 Speaker_09
Get to it, folks. Head to blowback.show and hit the big button that says subscribe.

00:43:33 Speaker_17
And we'll see you on the other side.