John Dewhirst was forced to confess to being a spy before his execution by the Khmer RougeFrom Nick Meo, in Phnom Penh
July 08, 2006
Times Online (UK)
IT WAS a dream trip for the young adventurer and his hippie friends on a motorised junk cruising the Gulf of Thailand — until the Khmer Rouge patrol boat spotted them.
They had come too close to the coastline of the most dangerous regime in the world and John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from Newcastle upon Tyne, paid for the error with his life.
After he was captured at sea in August 1978 he was tortured, forced to make a ludicrous confession to being a CIA spy and executed just weeks before the regime was toppled by invading Vietnamese forces. He was the only Briton to die in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Now, 28 years later, his family in Britain hope to discover what really happened in one of South-East Asia’s most enduring mysteries.
Prosecutors for the UN-backed trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders begin work in Phnom Penh on Monday and their investigation will include the cases of 200 foreign victims held at the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, a former high school in the capital.
Last week 17 Cambodian and 13 international judges were sworn in at the beginning of a £30 million UN-backed trial, which Cambodians are hoping will help their nation to come to terms with its bloody past.
Surviving members of the Khmer Rouge regime will be charged with crimes against humanity and genocide for their part in the deaths of up to 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979. The man believed to have ordered Mr Dewhirst’s execution is a former maths teacher called Duch, who was Tuol Sleng’s commander and is now a repentant born-again Christian facing trial next year.
Mr Dewhirst’s disappearance was not solved until after the fall of the regime. His extraordinary typed confession was discovered in 1996 in Phnom Penh’s Ministry of the Interior.
The document, carefully typed in flawless English, describes how Mr Dewhirst was recruited into the CIA by his father at the age of 12, then learnt the spying trade in part-time lessons at his teacher training college in the Midlands.
The signed document, which has been seen by The Times, appears under the title Details of my course work at the Annex College in Loughborough, England.
It describes how he was trained by retired CIA agents between 1972 and 1976, apparently mixing his real CV with a fantasy conjured up to please his interrogators. One section states: “My father was a CIA agent whose cover was headmaster of Benton Road Secondary School.”
This week Hilary Holland, Mr Dewhirst’s sister, said she would like her brother’s case to be detailed in the prosecution indictment against Duch, who remembered the 26-year-old as an unfailingly polite prisoner.
Mrs Holland, 51, a solicitor in Cumbria, said: “I have found this whole case incredibly difficult . . . I would be happy to see justice done.”
Her brother had been teaching in Japan before leaving on the sea trip with two friends, a New Zealander and a Canadian who also died. Their boat, Foxy Lady, had been en route to India. How the three young adventurers came to be in such dangerous waters has been a source of intense speculation, with rumours that they were hippy marijuana smugglers or even taking part in a spying mission when Western intelligence agencies were desperate for information about the closed nation.
Mrs Holland rejects both scenarios. She said: “John hated drugs, and although he liked adventure he wasn’t adventurous enough to be a spy.”
They had come too close to the coastline of the most dangerous regime in the world and John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from Newcastle upon Tyne, paid for the error with his life.
After he was captured at sea in August 1978 he was tortured, forced to make a ludicrous confession to being a CIA spy and executed just weeks before the regime was toppled by invading Vietnamese forces. He was the only Briton to die in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Now, 28 years later, his family in Britain hope to discover what really happened in one of South-East Asia’s most enduring mysteries.
Prosecutors for the UN-backed trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders begin work in Phnom Penh on Monday and their investigation will include the cases of 200 foreign victims held at the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, a former high school in the capital.
Last week 17 Cambodian and 13 international judges were sworn in at the beginning of a £30 million UN-backed trial, which Cambodians are hoping will help their nation to come to terms with its bloody past.
Surviving members of the Khmer Rouge regime will be charged with crimes against humanity and genocide for their part in the deaths of up to 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979. The man believed to have ordered Mr Dewhirst’s execution is a former maths teacher called Duch, who was Tuol Sleng’s commander and is now a repentant born-again Christian facing trial next year.
Mr Dewhirst’s disappearance was not solved until after the fall of the regime. His extraordinary typed confession was discovered in 1996 in Phnom Penh’s Ministry of the Interior.
The document, carefully typed in flawless English, describes how Mr Dewhirst was recruited into the CIA by his father at the age of 12, then learnt the spying trade in part-time lessons at his teacher training college in the Midlands.
The signed document, which has been seen by The Times, appears under the title Details of my course work at the Annex College in Loughborough, England.
It describes how he was trained by retired CIA agents between 1972 and 1976, apparently mixing his real CV with a fantasy conjured up to please his interrogators. One section states: “My father was a CIA agent whose cover was headmaster of Benton Road Secondary School.”
This week Hilary Holland, Mr Dewhirst’s sister, said she would like her brother’s case to be detailed in the prosecution indictment against Duch, who remembered the 26-year-old as an unfailingly polite prisoner.
Mrs Holland, 51, a solicitor in Cumbria, said: “I have found this whole case incredibly difficult . . . I would be happy to see justice done.”
Her brother had been teaching in Japan before leaving on the sea trip with two friends, a New Zealander and a Canadian who also died. Their boat, Foxy Lady, had been en route to India. How the three young adventurers came to be in such dangerous waters has been a source of intense speculation, with rumours that they were hippy marijuana smugglers or even taking part in a spying mission when Western intelligence agencies were desperate for information about the closed nation.
Mrs Holland rejects both scenarios. She said: “John hated drugs, and although he liked adventure he wasn’t adventurous enough to be a spy.”
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