The letter is dated April 18, 1975:
My dear Sebastian,
The Khmer Rouge have finally arrived in Phnom Penh. Yesterday everyone was very glad to see them, people were clapping and cheering in the streets. Many think this is the end of the war though I fear for the worst. . I tried to speak with one of the soldiers but he only screamed at me to back away. His eyes were dead. When I saw this, I knew very bad things are ahead. These soldiers have not been trained to run a country. They are trained to kill. Maybe I’m wrong about this. I hope. I hope.
I’m mailing you this letter on the off chance it will get out of Cambodia. Most probably it will never arrive. I miss you and our laboratory in the fields. It feels so incredibly far away right now. What a privilege it is to work there. If anything happens know that I will never forget you.
Fondly,
Raksmey de Broglie
P.S. I had the strangest dream last night. It was very vivid. I was on a river, lying in a boat. I’m not sure what river. It wasn’t the Mekong. But then suddenly I felt as if I was no longer alone. I felt another person was with me — there was no one else on the boat but I felt whole, as if I had found my other half. When I woke up this morning I was still filled with this feeling of completion. I wonder what it means? Maybe I am just suffering from nerves.
Miraculously, this letter survived, according to Røed-Larsen, although it was delayed somewhere along the way and was not delivered to CERN until five years later.
Per Røed-Larsen also includes a telegram sent to Raksmey while he was staying in Bangkok. The telegram was sent from Kirkenes and received on November 10, 1979:
Fig. 4.12. The initial telegram, November 10, 1979. The only surviving piece of communication between Raksmey and Kirkenesferda.
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670
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After some negotiation, including several telephone calls, Dr. Christian-Holtsmark gradually made clear to Raksmey the extent of his request. Raksmey was to help negotiate their passage to the highly secretive “Camp 808,” just north of Anlong Veng on the Thai border, where the Khmer Rouge had retreated to a jungle base following the Vietnamese invasion. It is unclear how much Raksmey came to understand, over the course of these transmissions, the extent of Kirkenesferda’s ideology or motives, or what they planned to do once they had entered the camp. These telephone calls were not recorded, nor did Raksmey keep any journal or notebook, so Røed-Larsen is left to speculate why, given his horrific experience at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime, he would have agreed to place himself so dramatically in harm’s way on behalf of an unknown group. Røed-Larsen is quick to stress that, once onboard, Raksmey was not merely a hired gun, as Kirkenesferda did not believe in mercenary fixers. Writes Røed-Larsen, “From the minute they landed, [he] was accepted into the group, full stop, as an equal player. . Kirkenesferda’s eighth official member” (675).
Raksmey met Kirkenesferda at the Bangkok airport the day after Christmas. The team consisted of Dr. Christian-Holtsmark, the de facto leader of the troupe and director of the show; Tor Bjerknes, the primary puppet-maker; Ragnvald Brynildsen, Tor’s mentor and aging Kirk patriarch; Professor Jens Røed-Larsen, who was responsible for the theoretical physics in the show; Siri Hansteen, his wife, who had designed much of the mise-en-scène; and their child, young Lars Røed-Larsen, puppet savant and torchbearer for the next generation.
In Bangkok, they hired two canopy trucks and drove to Sangkha, just north of the Choam border crossing into Cambodia. At the time, the Thai military were collaborating closely with the exiled Khmer Rouge army, providing cross-border supplies and support in exchange for a political allegiance that would act as a buffer to the perceived threat of a growing Vietnamese empire. It was critical for Thailand that Cambodia function as a self-governed country with an actual populace and not just as a cavernous Vietnamese puppet state. Such a calculated realpolitik approach had already led to horrific humanitarian failures, as many Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to the relative safety of Thailand were now forced at gunpoint to return to their homeland. Military trucks dropped them at the border, often in the middle of the minefields, leaving the refugees paralyzed in a state of territorial limbo: they could go neither forward nor backward, and so they remained exactly where they were until starvation eventually gave them the courage to test their fate in the sea of mines.
Raksmey turned out to be a wise choice as both guide and counselor: somehow he managed to coerce and/or bribe the Thai border guards into letting him and the other performers through the blockade and into Cambodian territory. The rough track into the mountains wound through several live minefields, and it was not unusual for them to pass half-exploded cows or carts blown to bits, their onetime owners nowhere to be seen. After crossing into Cambodia, Raksmey again managed to convince the Khmer Rouge soldiers guarding Camp 808 to let them through. Røed-Larsen explains:
[Kirkenesferda’s entrance] seems entirely improbable until you consider that at the time the Khmer Rouge were attempting to boost their image as one of the legitimate government factions that would take part in the anti-Vietnamese Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). . Realizing any hope in future political viability lay with disassociating themselves from their failed occupation, [Pol Pot and his loyalists] rebranded the Khmer Rouge as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) and embarked on a (short-lived) PR blitz to counter the reports only just now beginning to emerge of genocidal horrors during their three and a half years in power (681).
One must thus assume that Kirkenesferda caught a murderous regime in a unique window of existential recalibration. Khieu Samphan, the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea — once upon a time one of the most secretive governments in modern history — was now the charming public relations figurehead attempting to resurrect the PDK’s image. Barely a month after Kirkenesferda’s unprecedented visit in December, he would invite a group of prominent Western journalists to dine at 808.
“Reality was suspended,” recalls Henry Kamm of that trip, in his book Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. The New York Times journalist describes his strange January 1980 sojourn to 808’s oasis of indulgence in a region of squalor:
The Khmer Rouge guest camp was the very latest in jungle luxury. That evening the soldier-waiters filled the table with platters of Cambodian, Chinese, and Western dishes of infinite variety and saw to it, following the prime minister’s discreet, silent commands, that the visitors’ plates stayed filled. The best Thai beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, American soft drinks, and Thai bottled water were served; the ice to cool them, which also must have been brought in from Bangkok hundreds of miles away, never ran out. The contrast between the real Cambodia and the holiday resort atmosphere was shocking (178).
Kamm makes no mention of Kirkenesferda’s visit only a few weeks prior, which is no wonder, for Samphan and the rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership would have done their best to eradicate all evidence of the disastrous events that transpired on December 30, 1979.