Hoax Hunt

A story too good to be true

The article had just about everything: exclusivity, drama and sparkling quotes, all splashed over nine pages in the Sunday New York Times Magazine last Dec. 20. Entitled "In the Land of the Khmer Rouge," the story by Freelancer Christopher Jones vividly described a month-long journey in the summer of 1981 with Cambodian guerrillas. Along the way, the author chatted with Cambodian Premier Khieu Samphan and Foreign Minister leng Sary, and caught a glimpse of the elusive Pol Pot. He even witnessed jungle battles with the Vietnamese forces that have occupied the country for the past three years. But Jones' tale may have been too good to be true. At least part of his article was plagiarized, and other parts may have been fabricated.

Jones had visited Cambodia briefly in September 1980, in part on assignment for TIME. (The Khmer Rouge confirmed last week that he had made this trip.) A five-paragraph account of Jones' visit appeared in TIME's Asian editions in October 1980, along with a longer story by a TIME correspondent who toured the country at the same time.

Questions about the New York Times piece were first raised last month by Village Voice Columnist Alexander Cockburn. He was incredulous at what Jones espied through binoculars one dark night during a jungle skirmish. Jones wrote: "On the summit of a distant hillside, I saw a figure that made me catch my breath: a pudgy Cambodian, with field glasses hanging from his neck. The eyes in his head looked dead and stony. I could not make him out in any detail, but I had seen enough pictures of the supreme leader to convince me, at that precise second, that I was staring at Pol Pot." Cracked Cockburn of this unlikely night vision: "Jones clearly has an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time."

More damning was a paragraph in which Jones described an old blind man "chanting the Ramayana, a part of Cambodia's cultural heritage, as he twanged a primitive guitar." Cockburn produced an almost identical passage from Andre Malraux's novel about his Cambodian travels in 1923 and 1924, La Voie Royale. Reckoned the Voice writer:

"If he was old when Malraux heard him . . . the singer must be quite marvelously venerable by now."

Cambodia experts have picked up numerous errors of fact. Samples: Phnom Malai is a mountain range, not the capital city of Democratic Kampuchea; the Khmer Rouge do not put poison on their punji sticks; Comrade Kanika, who is described by Jones as "a wiry man with short gray hair," is actually a woman--and has represented the Cambodians in Paris for several years.

Times Magazine Editor Edward Klein said Jones was given the assignment because he had reported reliably for TIME and seemed knowledgeable about Cambodia. When Klein looked up the original TIME piece last week, he discovered that three of the four quotes in it had been resurrected by Jones and presented in the New York Times Magazine a year later as fresh interviews. Did Jones simply use his old notebook to spin a grander tale? Times Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal refuses to speculate. Says he: "As far as I'm concerned, the man, until somebody proves otherwise, is totally honest." Only Jones can say for sure, and no one is answering his phone in Spain. Vows Klein: "We intend to clear this matter up."

The Khmer Rouge representative in Bangkok may have cleared part of it up last week. He said that Jones had not visited their territory in 1981, nor met with some of the people he said he interviewed.

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