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The CIA's secret war in tibet  (ST)
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Seattle Times
January 26, 1997
By Paul Salopek

Parts: 1 Dateline: KATMANDU, Nepal Memo: Three decades later, former
Tibetan guerrillas come forward to discuss  an episode that both the United
States and the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile would prefer to forget.
Their battle lasted nearly 10 years, until the U.S. cut them off. Copyright
Chicago Tribune

THE CIA'S SECRET WAR IN TIBET

The first Americans Nawang Gayltsen ever saw had small, silver eagles
pinned on their caps. Nawang will never forget those eagles. They seemed
auspicious, like totems of victory or success. Today, his face wrinkles
into a sad smile remembering this. The Americans came, he said, in a big
turboprop plane, a gleaming machine that he and other awed Tibetans called
a "sky ship." They wore sunglasses and baggy flight suits. They packed
shiny automatic weapons on their hips. And speaking through an interpreter,
they asked Nawang if he wanted to kill Chinese. "I told them I would be
very happy to kill many Chinese," recalled the 63-year-old rug merchant,
one of thousands of exiled Tibetans living in this picturesque Himalayan
capital. "I was very young and strong then. Very patriotic. I told them I
would even be a suicide bomber." The strangers, Air Force pilots working
with the CIA, must have liked what they heard because on that hot day back
in 1963, at a secret air base in India, they took Nawang and 40 other
Tibetan recruits on the first airplane ride of their lives. It was a
journey that would stretch halfway around the world and into one of the
murkiest chapters of the CIA's long history of covert activity in Asia: a
secret war in Tibet.  Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, say Tibetan
veterans such as Nawang and U.S. intelligence experts who corroborate their
stories, the American government flew hundreds of eager Tibetan exiles to
far-flung bases in Okinawa, Guam and even Colorado. There they were trained
as guerrillas against the Chinese troops that had invaded the remote
Buddhist kingdom in 1950. The Tibetans, many recruited from the warrior
Khamba tribe, were parachuted back into their homeland at night with
submachine guns and neck lockets with photos of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's
spiritual leader. Some CIA trainees ended up commanding a Kiplingesque army
of 2,000 resistance fighters dubbed the Chusi Gangdruk, or "Four Rivers,
Six Gorges."

Their specialty was ambushing the People's Liberation Army from bases high
in the cloud-colored mountains of Nepal.  Others floated down through the
moonlit skies of central Asia never to be heard from again: At least 40
were presumed captured by the Chinese and executed by a pistol-shot in the
back of the head.  Today, this obscure Cold War skirmish in a high, lonely
place many Americans associate with Shangri-La is a tale that both the CIA
and the Dalai Lama's pacifist government-in-exile would prefer to forget.
After all, China's grip on Tibet remains stronger than ever.  Yet at a time
when the Dalai Lama's non-violent campaign for independence has captured
the attention of Hollywood--where Walt Disney and Tri-Star are producing
elegiac hymns to "lost Tibet" and Richard Gere and fellow actors champion
the mountain land's cause--the Tibetan foot soldiers of that quixotic war
are beginning to break their decades-old vow of silence to the CIA. Most of
the ex-guerrillas are grandfathers now. They run carpet factories in
Katmandu or tend dusty farms in the foothills of western Nepal.

They admit that going public about their American connections is as much a
sign of growing frustration with Tibet's languishing drive for freedom as
it is a reckoning with mortality. For many, speaking out seemed a final act
of resistance. "We are old, and we will be gone soon," explained Nawang,
who says he was taught to blow up bridges by CIA instructors at Camp Hale,
a now-abandoned Army base near Vail, Colo. "People should know that men
died for this. These things are no longer secrets. They stopped being
secrets when we lost."  Truth be told, little about the CIA's skullduggery
in the Himalayas is a real secret anymore--except maybe to the U.S.
taxpayers who bankrolled it.  Within the close-knit Tibetan exile
communities in Nepal and India, the exploits of the Khambas and their CIA
patrons have become a folk legend, albeit one retold grudgingly, with an
awkward mixture of pride and bitterness. In the U.S. meanwhile, the
insurgency has received at least fleeting treatment in books about the Cold
War.  "The real

Thanks for posting those articles.  I had no idea CIA give a little bit of support to some Tibetans.  It's reassuring to know that the CIA actually managed to help the good guys on occasion, even if it was only a small amount that had no real chance for attaining liberty for the Tibetans from the vile scum Chinese Communists.

FJV

 

Here is another book free online:

 

"  " target="_blank">link

"http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Index.htm"

 

For what it's worth, I've read an article in Dutch about the way Tibet was ran before the Chinese took over. Needless to say that it wasn't pretty. Tibet might not have been a decent democracy to begin with.