{"id":462,"date":"2011-10-12T16:00:32","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T16:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adhoc-press\/?p=462"},"modified":"2011-10-12T16:00:32","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T16:00:32","slug":"why-were-s-21-prisoners-accused-of-being-spies-for-the-cia-or-kgb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/why-were-s-21-prisoners-accused-of-being-spies-for-the-cia-or-kgb\/","title":{"rendered":"Why were S-21 prisoners accused of being spies for the CIA or KGB?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Why were S-21 prisoners accused of being spies for the CIA or KGB?<\/span><\/div>\n
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\"\"In testimony by witnesses this week, three former prisoners at S-21 have described their experiences of interrogations and beatings.\u00a0Chum Mey and Bou Meng, in particular, recalled being asked about their alleged affiliation with the CIA or the KGB, even though they knew nothing about these agencies.\u00a0Under the pressure of torture, Chum Mey, as well as many other prisoners at S-21, eventually \u201cconfessed\u201d that he was an agent of the CIA.\u00a0As Duch explained during his testimony, the interrogators blindly assumed that all of the prisoners who were arrested and sent to S-21 had been correctly identified as \u201cenemies\u201d of the regime. \u00a0The interrogators thought that their only role was to extract confessions by any means available, rather than trying to discover the truth.\u00a0So, who were the CIA and the KGB?<\/p>\n

\"\"The Khmer Rouge regime took power in Cambodia during a time of global conflict, often referred to as the \u201cCold War\u201d between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\u00a0The communist USSR and the capitalist US waged a long war of attrition during the latter half of the twentieth century after the end of World War II.\u00a0However, this war did not involve direct conflict on the battlefield between those two nations.\u00a0Instead, it was a war fought through economic pressure, propaganda campaigns, localized wars fought indirectly through military coalitions within other nations, weapons development, and espionage.\u00a0Their aim was not to acquire land or natural resources, but to spread each nation\u2019s political ideology by supporting factions in other countries who had similar political aims and helping them to achieve dominance over the other parties.\u00a0While the Soviet Union supported communist efforts in Vietnam, Korea, and South America, the U.S. supported opposing parties in those areas, with each side trying to increase the global power of its own ideology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Each nation had its own well-funded, extremely powerful, global network of spies and informers.\u00a0The United States used the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, used the KGB, or Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (\u201cCommittee of State Security\u201d).\u00a0Both of these organizations were given wide discretion to do virtually anything necessary to accomplish their goals.\u00a0They conducted secret, often illegal activities all over the world, including espionage, torture, and assassinations.\u00a0They often sent spies into enemy governments to collect secret information and spread false information in order to weaken other regimes.\u00a0One of the major theaters of this war was SE Asia.\u00a0During the Vietnam War, the CIA sent many agents and spies into Vietnam and Laos.\u00a0The CIA also suspected that the North Vietnamese army had established a headquarters in Cambodia.\u00a0Prince Norodom Sihanouk claimed that the CIA had engineered the coup that expelled him in March 1970.\u00a0In 1970, Lon Nol received millions of dollars in aid from the US government because he took a stronger stance against the North Vietnamese than Prince Sihanouk had done.\u00a0The devastation caused by US bombings of areas of Cambodia where the North Vietnamese were staying was one of the reasons for the increasing popularity of Pol Pot\u2019s communist Khmer Rouge regime, which deposed Lon Nol in 1975.\u00a0Yet, there is no evidence that the CIA attempted to send spies to infiltrate the Khmer Rouge.<\/p>\n

So why did the Khmer Rouge accuse the prisoners of S-21 of working for the CIA? On Tuesday, 30 June 2009, Chum Mey asked Duch this very question, and he responded that, \u201cthe term CIA was used to arrest those against the organization\u2026they were not really CIA agents employed and appointed by the US\u2026[the accusations were only a pretext] to arrest people like you who were against [the Khmer Rouge].\u201d\u00a0Previously, Duch has admitted that he knew even then that many of the coerced confessions from alleged enemies were false.\u00a0The Khmer Rouge leaders invented their concept of \u201cthe enemy\u201d to create fear, to perpetuate their extreme ideology, and to justify their exercise of brutal authoritarian power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former prisoners at S-21 have recalled being asked to DUCH about their alleged affiliation with the CIA or the KGB. Why were S-21 prisoners accused of being spies for the CIA or KGB?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unused"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adhoccambodia.org\/km\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}