Cambodians opposed to Sihanouks rule, who operated out of the two neighboring countries. The Khmer Serei ( Free Cambodians ) were described by Shawcross as the Cambodian organization with which American officials had had the closest contact .9 Sihanouk once equated them to the free Cubans the United States maintained in Florida.10

These forces-recruited, financed, armed and trained by the CIA and the US Special Forces (Green Berets)11-began to infiltrate into Cambodia in the latter part of 1958 as part of a complex conspiracy which included, amongst others, a disloyal Cambodian general named Dap Chhuon who was plotting an armed uprising inside the country. At its most optimistic, the conspiracy aimed at overthrowing Sihanouk.

Sihanouk discovered the plan, partly through reports from Chinese and French intelligence. The French were not happy about the American intrusion into what had been their domain for close to a century.

By February 1959 the conspirators had been apprehended or had fled, including Victor Masao Matsui, a member of the CIA station in Cambodias capital city Phnom Penh, who hurriedly left the country after Sihanouk accused him of being a party to the plot. Matsui, an American of Japanese descent, had been operating under State Department cover as an attache at the embassy.

The intrigue, according to Sihanouk, began in September 1958 at a SEATO meeting in Thailand and was carried a step further later that month in New York when he visited the United Nations. While Sihanouk was away in Washington for a few days, a member of his delegation, Slat Peou, held several conferences with Americans in his New York hotel room which he did not mention to any of his fellow delegates. Slat Peou, it happened, was a close friend of Victor Matsui and was the brother of General Dap Chhuon. In the aftermath of the aborted conspiracy, Slat Peou was executed for treason.12 Sihanouk was struck by the bitter irony of the CIA plotting against him in New York while he was in Washington being honored by President Eisenhower with a 21-gun salute.13

In a similar vein, several years later President Kennedy assured Sihanouk on his honour that the United States had played no role in the affairs of the Khmer Serei. I considered President Kennedy to be an honourable man, wrote Sihanouk, but, in that case, who really represented the American government? 14

CIA officer (later Director) William Colby, stationed in Vietnam at the time of the Dap Chhuon plot, has written that the Agency was well aware of the plot and had recruited someone on Dap Chhuons staff and furnished him with a radio with which to keep the CIA informed. The Agency wanted to be kept informed, Colby asserts, in order to dissuade the Thai and Vietnamese from overthrowing Sihanouk. Colby adds:

Unfortunately, in putting down the coup, Sihanouk had captured our agent and his radio. And, not unnaturally, he drew the conclusion that CIA was one of the participants, and that the gold and arms furnished from Bangkok and Saigon to be used against him were only part of the over-ail plot of which the radio was a key element.15

The Cambodian leader has attested to several other plots he lays at the doorstep of the CIA. Amongst these was a 1959 effort to murder him which was foiled when the police picked a nervous young man, Rat Vat by name, out of a crowd surrounding Sihanouk. He was found to be carrying a hand grenade and a pistol. Investigation showed, writes Sihanouk, that the would-be assassin was instigated by the CIA and the Khmer Serei. Sihanouk also cites three incidents occurring in 1963: an attempt to blow up a car carrying him and the visiting president of China, Liu Shao Chi; an attempt to

smuggle arms into Cambodia in a number of crates addressed to the US Embassy; and a partially successful venture aimed at sabotaging the Cambodian economy and subverting key government personnel through the setting up of a bank in Phnom Penh.16

On 20 November of the same year, two days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Cambodian National Congress, at Sihanouks initiative, vote to end all aid granted by the United States in the military, economic, technical and cultural fields . It was perhaps without precedent that a country receiving American aid voluntarily repudiated it. But Sihanouk held strong feelings on the subject. Over the years he had frequently recited from his register of complaints about American aid to Cambodia: how it subverted and corrupted Cambodian officials and businessmen who wound up constituting a clientele necessarily obedient to the demands of the lavish bestower of foreign funds ; and how the aid couldnt be used for state institutions, only private enterprise, nor, as mentioned earlier, used against attacks by US allies.17

After some American bombings of Cambodian villages near the South Vietnam border in pursuit of North Vietnamese and Vietcong, the Cambodian government, in October 1964, announced that in case of any new violation of Cambodian territory by US ground, air, or naval forces, Cambodia will immediately sever diplomatic relations with the United States . The government did just that the following May when American planes bombarded several villages, killing or wounding dozens of peasants.18

The pattern over the next few years, as the war in Indochina intensified, was one of repeated forays into Cambodian territory by American, Saigon and Khmer Serei forces in search of Communist supply lines and sanctuaries along the Ho Chi Minh Trail; bombing and strafing, napalming, and placing land mines, with varying numbers of Cambodian civilian casualties; angry accusations by the Cambodian government, followed on occasion by an American apology, promise of an investigation, and the taking of measures to prevent any recurrence of such incidents .19

Sihanouk did not at all relish the intrusions into Cambodia by the Vietnamese Communists, nor was he wholly or consistently antagonistic to American pursuit of them, particularly when there was no loss of Cambodian lives. On at least one occasion he disclosed the location of Communist bases which were promptly bombed by the US. However, Sihanouk then went on the radio and proceeded to denounce the bombings.20 Opportunist that he often revealed himself to be, Sihanouk was nonetheless truly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and by the late 1960s his predicament had compelled him to resume American aid and re-establish diplomatic relations with the United States.

Despite all the impulsiveness of his personality and policies, Sihanouks neutralist high-wire balancing act did successfully shield his country from the worst of the devastation that was sweeping through the land and people of Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia had its own Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, who surely would have unleashed a full-scale civil war if faced with a Cambodian government nestled comfortably in the American camp. This is precisely what later came to pass following the overthrow of Sihanouk and his replacement by Lon Nol who was closely tied to the United States.

In March 1969, the situation began to change dramatically. Under the new American president, Richard Nixon, and National Security Affairs adviser Henry Kissinger, the isolated and limited attacks across the Cambodian border became sustained, large-scale B-52 bombings- carpet bombings , in the euphemistic language so dear to the hearts of military men.

Over the next 14 months, no less than 3,630 B-52 bombing raids were flown over Cambodia.21 To escape the onslaught, the Vietnamese Communists moved their

bases further inside the country. The B-52s of course followed, with a concomitant increase in civilian casualties.

The Nixon administration artfully played down the nature and extent of these bombings, going so far as to falsify military records, and was largely successful in keeping it all a secret from the American public, the press and Congress.22 Not until 1973, in the midst of the Watergate revelations, did a fuller story begin to emerge.

It was frequently argued that the United States had every right to attack Cambodia because of its use as a sanctuary by Americas foes in Vietnam. Apropos of this claim, William Shawcross has pointed out that:

During the Algerian war of independence the United States rejected Frances claimed right to attack a Tunisian town inhabited by Algerian guerrillas, and in 1964 Adlai Stevenson, at the U.N., condemned Britain for assaulting a Yemeni town used as a base by insurgents attacking Aden. Even Israel had frequently been criticized by the United States for attacks on enemy bases outside its territory.23

On 18 Match 1970, Sihanouk, while on a trip abroad, was deposed as Head of State by two of his leading ministers, Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. To what extent, if any, the United States played a direct role in the coup has not been established, but there are circumstances and testimony pointing to American complicity, among which are the following:

According to Frank Snepp, the CIAs principal political analyst in Vietnam at this time, in early 1970 the Agency was cultivating both Lon Nol and Son Ngoc Thanh, leader of the Khmer Serei, as possible replacements for Sihanouk. The CIA believed, he says, that if Lon Nol came to power, He would welcome the United States with open arms and we would accomplish everything. 24 (This, presumably, meant carte blanche to wipe out Vietnamese Communist forces and sanctuaries in Cambodia, as opposed to Sihanouks extremely equivocal position on the matter.) Both men, as matters turned out, served as prime minister in the new government, for which diplomatic recognition was immediately forthcoming from Washington.

The United States could seemingly also rely on Sink Matak, a committed anti-Communist who had been profiled by the Pentagons Defense Intelligence Agency as a friend of the West and ... co-operative with U.S. officials during the 1950s. 25

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in his biographic work on Kissinger, states chat Sihanouks immediate overthrow had been for years a high priority of the Green Berets reconnaissance units operating inside Cambodia since the late 1960s, There is also incontrovertible evidence that Lon Nol was approached by agents of American military intelligence in 1969 and asked to overthrow the Sihanouk government. Sihanouk made similar charges in his 1973 memoir, My War With The CIA, but they were not taken seriously then. 26

An opponent of Sihanouk, Prom Thos, who became a minister in the new government, has said that whether Lon Nol had specific promises of American help before the coup 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. 27

The CIAs intimate links to the conspiratorial circle are exemplified by an Agency report prepared six days before the coup, entitled Indications of Possible Coup in Phnom Penh . It disclosed that anti-Communist demonstrations against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese embassies in the capital the previous day had been planned by Sirik Matak and Lon Nol as part of a showdown policy against Sihanouk and his followers, and that the two men had put the army on alert to prepare ... for a coup against Sihanouk if Sihanouk refused to support them.28