Nathaniel Talbott Thayer (April 21, 1960 – c. January 3, 2023) was an American freelance journalist whose work focused on international organized crime, narcotics trafficking, human rights, and areas of military conflict.

He also wrote for Jane's Defence Weekly, Soldier of Fortune, the Associated Press, and more than 40 other publications, including The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post.

[9] Thayer began his career in Southeast Asia on the Thai-Cambodian border, taking part in an academic research project in which he interviewed 50 Cham survivors of Khmer Rouge atrocities at Nong Samet Refugee Camp in 1984.

[18][19] In August 1992, Thayer traveled to Mondulkiri Province and visited the last of the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO) Montagnard guerrillas who had remained loyal to their former American commanders.

[20] Thayer informed the group that FULRO's president Y Bham Enuol had been executed by the Khmer Rouge seventeen years previously.

[31] In July 1997, Nate Thayer and Asiaworks Television cameraman David McKaige visited the Anlong Veng Khmer Rouge jungle camp inside Cambodia where Pol Pot was being tried for treason.

"[1] Thayer believed that the trial had been staged by the Khmer Rouge for him and McKaige:[34] It was put on specifically for us, to take the message to the world that Pol Pot has been denounced.

[36]ABC News responded that they had "agreed to pay Nate Thayer the sizable sum of $350,000 for the rights to use his footage of former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.

"[37] In October 1997, Thayer returned to Anlong Veng and became only the second western journalist (after Elizabeth Becker in 1978[38]) ever to be granted an interview with the former dictator[39][40] and, along with McKaige, was certainly the last outsider to see him alive.

"[44] Thayer was then asked to transport Pol Pot's body in his pickup truck to the site a short distance away[45] where it was later cremated.

[46] Thayer claims that Pol Pot committed suicide by drinking poison because of his belief that the Khmer Rouge were planning to "hand him over to the Americans".

[64][65][66][67] In December 2011, he came out in opposition to the International Treaty to Ban Landmines, believing that militant groups would then resort to alternative tactics, many of which pose a greater risk to civilians.

[68] In 2015, Thayer was the author of a controversial series of articles about racially-motivated demonstrations which occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, in the wake of the shootings which were carried out by Dylann Roof.

[71] In the original version of the story, Thayer claimed that a Ku Klux Klan leader named Chris Barker was doubling as an undercover FBI operative "working for and protected by the U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force".

As a result of Barker's outing and in September 2015, Thayer wrote that "Mr Barker (has called and) hung up the phone several times, sent me incendiary emails and made threatening phone calls, and has since gone on White Nationalist internet forums to try to denounce the articles and defend his reputation" and Thayer also wrote that other Klan members had "threatened to decapitate my dog".

[74] Mark Ziegler, author of the article in question, told the Columbia Journalism Review that he was "not ready to accuse Thayer of plagiarism", and said "I have no reason not to respect him as a fellow journalist."

Ziegler said he was "not completely satisfied with the way [his article] was ultimately attributed" even in the corrected version of "25 Years of Slam Dunk Diplomacy".

[75][76] The Columbia Journalism Review concluded that Thayer's "attribution was sloppy and he represented quotes that were said in other places as if they were said to him" but that it did not appear to be a case of plagiarism.

"[83] In a final article posted to the Exit Wounds Substack, Webber announced Thayer's death and that, "Nate was working on a major exposé which we will publish here.

His investigations of the Cambodian political world required not only great risk and physical hardship but also mastery of an ever-changing cast of factional characters.

[90]According to Vaudine England of the BBC, "Many of the region's greatest names in reporting made their mark in the pages of the Review, from the legendary Richard Hughes of Korean War fame, to Nate Thayer, the journalist who found Cambodia's Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

"[91] Thayer was also the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody Award, because he did not want to share it with ABC News' Nightline who he believed stole his story and deprived him and the Far Eastern Economic Review of income.

[92][93] Since 1999 Hofstra University's Department of Journalism and Mass Media Studies in the School of Communication has awarded the Nate Thayer Scholarship to a qualified student with the best foreign story idea.