John Gunther Dean
US diplomat haunted by his inability to protect the Cambodian people from the horrors of Pol Pot
JOHN GUNTHER DEAN, who has died aged 93, arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi Germany, became a US diplomat and dedicated himself to trying to help people find negotiated solutions to conflict; to the end of his life he was afflicted by anger and guilt at his inability and his country’s failure to save the Cambodian people from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
Phnom Penh was Dean’s first ambassadorial posting and by the time he arrived in 1974 the US had been engaged in a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia for almost a decade, their ostensible targets being North Vietnamese and Viet Cong guerrillas who were using the country as a staging area for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam.
However, the campaign, which is estimated to have also cost the lives of between 50,000 and 150,000 civilians, destabilised the fragile government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was deposed in 1970. Following the coup, North Vietnam forces invaded Cambodia at the request of the Khmer Rouge, who had built up an army in the jungles of eastern Cambodia, leading to a brutal civil war between the Us-backed regime of Lon Nol and the Khmer Rouge.
By 1974 it was too late in the Indochina war for the US to secure something that could be presented as a victory, but not too late in Dean’s eyes to try to achieve a negotiated solution with the Khmer Rouge, to whom Lon Nol’s forces were losing ground.
Dean’s idea was to persuade Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. But the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger rejected the notion and criticised Dean for persisting with the idea. Many historians agree that Dean’s “controlled solution’’ was always a forlorn hope.
In early 1975, as the Khmer Rouge surrounded Phnom Penh, Dean’s cables to Washington became increasingly desperate. He recalled: “We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting: ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected.’” The reality was that the American public and Congress had had enough of war and wanted to pull out at any cost.
On April 12, as Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters descended towards Phnom Penh in Operation Eagle Pull, to evacuate US personnel, Dean, who had lost more than a stone due to stress, was in tears. “We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise,” he told an interviewer in 2015. “That’s the worst thing a country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”
A photograph of Dean, clutching the American flag in a plastic bag, became one of the most memorable images of the crisis. Five days after he left, Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed Phnom Penh, drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint and launched one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. “I tried so hard,” Dean recalled. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”
His own background had convinced him the US could have done more: “There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people … You must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”
He was born Gunther Dienstfertig in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on February 24 1926. His father was a lawyer and leader of the local Jewish community. After Hitler’s rise to power, the family fled Germany in 1938 and eventually settled in Kansas City where they changed their name to Dean and Gunther adopted the name John.
Towards the end of the Second World War he enlisted in the US Army and was involved in interrogating Nazi scientists at a secret camp in Northern Virginia.
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in government and international law and relations, he studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris and returned to Harvard for a master’s degree in 1950.
Later he joined the Economic Cooperation Administration, tasked with implementing the Marshall Plan in Europe, then sent to Indochina to. oversee development projects in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In the early 1970s he returned to Vietnam, where in 1972 he led a mission to rescue 100 Americans trapped by the North Vietnamese. His helicopter was shot down, but he was not injured; the Americans were rescued and Dean decorated for bravery.
Moving to Laos in 1973 as deputy chief of mission, Dean negotiated a compromise agreement with the Communist Pathet Lao to prevent further bloodshed.
He risked his own life to frustrate an attempted coup by the dissident Air Force general, Thao Ma, to overthrow the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, by placing the prince in a safe house then driving to Vientiane Airport, which was in the hands of the plotters. Parking his car in the middle of the runway, he demanded that if they did not give up, the army would lose American aid.
In an interview in 2000 Dean recalled that the general was not minded to back down: “He fired up his plane, and he tried to take off. Since I was about midway on the airstrip, he tried to avoid the car. He did not have enough height. In the process of avoiding a collision with my car, he veered off to the right and crashed. He was killed instantly.”
After Cambodia, Dean served as ambassador to Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India. In 1989 he revealed that while in Beirut he held frequent meetings with senior PLO officials with the authorisation of the US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance at a time when official US policy was to refuse to recognise the PLO. While Vance confirmed that he authorised Dean’s meeting, he claimed that their purpose had been to discuss embassy security in Beirut and the release of US hostages in Iran.
Dean explained that he had revealed his contacts with the PLO at a time when its credibility was in question to show that there was “another side” to the organisation. Towards the end of his career, Dean ran into controversy when he claimed that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had been behind an attempt to assassinate him in retaliation for his perceived support for the PLO.
He retired at the end of the 1980s and subsequently served with Unesco as a special envoy to Cambodia. When in 1991 the US reopened a small mission in Phnom Penh, he asked the administration of George HW Bush if he could be sent back as a US diplomat to return the old embassy flag in a ceremonial act of reconciliation, but his request was declined.
In 2009 Dean published a memoir, Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests.
In later life he moved to Paris with his French-born wife Martine, née Duphenieux, whom he married in 1952. She survives him with two sons and a daughter.
John Gunther Dean, born February 24 1926, died June 6 2019