Nate Thayer, an unshakeable investigative journalist who was the last reporter to interview Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, has died at the age of 62 following a number of health problems.

Known best for his award-winning fieldwork from the jungles of Southeast Asia, Nate later developed a strong interest in North Korea and wrote extensively on the country during the final decade of his life.

He was also a member of the NK News team from 2013-2015, contributing a range of scoops, exclusive interviews and long-form investigations and helping grow the company in its formative years. 

And from a personal perspective, Nate was somewhat of an inspiration to me: He was a Hunter S. Thompson-type who always refused to take no for an answer and doggedly pursued his stories until the bitter end. 

For the same reasons, however, Nate was one of the most difficult reporters our team has ever worked with — something I suspect he was very proud of. 

Regular objections to edits, refiling stories with major changes at the eleventh hour and threatening to take scoops elsewhere if he didn’t get his way — these were all trademarks of working with Nate.

In short, he was a professional and personal roller coaster to be around at all times.

Affable, empathetic and energetic about his work, I asked him to join the team after what would be one of many vodka-infused late nights together. His first big exclusive for the NK News paywall launch was “White Power and apocalyptic cults: Pro-DPRK Americans revealed.”

Nate had spent months looking into the secret lives of America’s pro-North Korea cheerleaders, meticulously charting the evolution of their work for Pyongyang and casting light on their extremist and white nationalist associations.

Like many of his other NK News articles, the draft weighed in at almost 15,000 words. And given Nate’s angry opposition to boiling down almost any of his work, the final published story came in at almost 13,000 words.

Nevertheless, the report was a hit, helping spark broader interest in the NK News brand at a time when paywalls were few and far between.

Nate also offered tips that helped forge important relationships that continue to help NK News today, and offered hands-on education for anyone who would ask about how to do investigative journalism.

SEEN TO BE BELIEVED

Over lengthy evenings, Nate would regale us with stories from field reporting trips in Southeast Asia, North Korea and beyond — including how he survived a helicopter crash and a landmine explosion and interviewed the leader of one of the world’s deadliest regimes. 

I often asked Nate for advice on how we could push forward reporting on North Korea using some of the lessons he learned in Cambodia, with one tip helping open a door that had long been closed.

“Just go knock on the door and see what happens,” Nate counseled when I asked how to get better access to the DPRK Embassy in London.

And so I did, showing up one day with the story that I was randomly in the neighborhood and wondered if they’d like to go for a cup of tea.

A DPRK embassy staffer named Thae Yong Ho answered, and angrily shooed me away. Nevertheless, that encounter opened the doors for my first official meeting and an eventual invite to come to Pyongyang to cover a major political holiday in April 2017.

When I later met Thae after his defection to Seoul in 2016, he told me the act of showing up at his door uninvited — Nate’s recommendation — prompted him to cable Pyongyang to recommend they allow an official meeting as I “wasn’t going to go away.” 

Working with Nate taught me and NK News team members invaluable lessons about the importance of persistence in news investigation and pursuing primary source material.

Piqued by Associated Press spin about the independence of editorial operations in their newly found Pyongyang bureau, Nate began digging into every aspect of the news agency’s in-country work in early 2014.

He built up a cache of evidence that put serious doubt on the notion that the AP did “not submit to censorship” in North Korea. This included a careful analysis of what was and wasn’t published from the Pyongyang bureau, insider quotes from AP staff and industry peers, as well as insights from those familiar with the typical terms of engaging with North Korean authorities.

But the story lacked a smoking gun, and after months and months of effort we thought we’d have to kill the story. But then, Nate suddenly called and said he managed to obtain a leaked copy of AP’s operating agreement with North Korean authorities.

The result was “The Associated Press in North Korea: A Potemkin news bureau?” — a must-read for anyone trying to understand the challenges of running long-term news operations from Pyongyang.

The story, of course, ruffled real feathers. Prior to publication, an AP vice president called me to offer a character assassination of Nate, describing him as a drunk who had an ax to grind with the organization. Seemingly, it was a last-ditch attempt to stop the story.

After publication, AP media relations director Paul Colford published a now-deleted statement that took that thread further, describing Nate as a “disgruntled” former AP stringer, casting doubt on the number of sources he claimed to have spoken to and justifying the AP’s non-response to so many of Nate’s questions.

But through long calls into Christmas Day that year, Nate kept me calm and collected about the bombshell claims in his story — repeating the mantra that everything he’d collected was akin to court-admissible evidence. 

Ultimately, he was right. No lawsuit ever came and the fiction of a freely operating AP operation in Pyongyang became increasingly clear.

A DIFFICULT PERSONALITY

Things weren’t always positive with Nate, however, as I and anyone who ever worked with or befriended him can tell you. 

He had an unfortunate habit of repeatedly burning bridges among friends and close colleagues, and those trying to help him. 

During later reporting for NK News, Nate would suddenly and without explanation change terms of engagement to demand large additional payments, make threats and occasionally put our startup in difficult editorial and financial positions.

It seemed that money was a perpetual problem in the latter stage of Nate’s life. And after spending significant time with him, I got the growing impression that alcohol and substance abuse were at the hidden core of much of the turbulence that surrounded his work, life and relationships. 

After we professionally parted ways, I sometimes heard from mutual friends who had also tried to help Nate with work or housing, but who ended up burned one way or another.

Nevertheless, it was my pleasure to work with Nate, and I am proud our outlet got to publish much of his work on North Korea. 

I don’t know who else could have tracked down Matthew Miller, a U.S. detainee who spent months in North Korea after ripping up his visa upon entry, and earn his trust enough for an extended, exclusive interview.

I don’t know who else would have thought to interview the author of “Pyongyang F@%K: Deep inside North Korea,” the Scottish woman behind the world’s first erotic novel set in the DPRK.

And I never knew Nate’s work at NK News would become the heart of a huge controversy with the Atlantic about the dire conditions of the freelance journalism scene and subsequent claims of plagiarism — something the Colombia Journalism Review eventually even weighed in on.

I will miss you, Nate.

Edited by Arius Derr