Nate Thayer, correspondent who talked with Pol Pot, passes on
Nate Thayer, a courageous correspondent who endure a few brushes with death over many years covering struggle in Southeast Asia and was the last western writer to meet with Pol Pot, the head of the dangerous Khmer Rouge system in Cambodia, has kicked the bucket.
Thayer was found dead at his Falmouth, Massachusetts home on Tuesday by a companion, his sibling, Ransack Thayer, said Thursday. He was 62.
He had been languishing with different sicknesses over a while, and the reason for death was recorded as normal causes, Ransack Thayer said, adding that he had last invested energy with his sibling on Sunday.
Thayer at different times worked for The Related Press, Jane’s Guard Week after week, the Phnom Penh Post, The Washington Post, Agence France Presse and Warrior of Fortune Magazine, however it was while functioning as a reporter for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Monetary Survey that he scored the Pol Pot interview distributed in October 1997. It was the isolated pioneer’s most memorable meeting in almost 20 years.
By then, the development had turned on him.
“After a progression of quick meeting, utilizing coded messages over cell phones, I slipped into one of the most invulnerable, malarial-ridden and landmine-flung wildernesses of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia,” Thayer composed.
Thayer offered the story to ABC understanding it would be a one-week elite with North American TV privileges as it were. Be that as it may, he said ABC disseminated the story overall and put photographs on its site, scooping Thayer’s own print represent the Far Eastern Financial Audit.
“Ted Koppel and ‘Nightline’ in a real sense took my work, assumed praise for it, minimized it, would not pay me and afterward endeavored to menace and blackmail me when I griped,” he wrote in a letter dismissing the Peabody.
ABC said the pre-communicated exposure is normal practice for such a selective story and Koppel lauded Thayer. The sides later settled.
Thayer recovered stories from Asia where most Western writers dreaded to go, and nearly paid with his life.
