"http://www.timbomb.net/buddha/archive/msg00087.html"

 

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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 mystery is why the conflict isn't more famous given all the
romance and fascination surrounding Tibet these days," said Warren Smith,
an author and scholar in Washington, who has written extensively on the
politics and history of Tibet. "In that sense at least, the CIA has good
reason to call Tibet a qualified success. It was a complete disaster
militarily, but few Americans have a clue." This much, though, can be
pieced together from a little-known war in the once-forbidden heart of
Asia, a war waged by tough Buddhist monks turned warriors and disillusioned
CIA agents turned Buddhists.  The U.S. government, Tibetan sources say,
only began poking into their independence struggle following years of
inaction and indifference, long after the Dalai Lama called for United
Nations help when Mao Tse-tung annexed the country, claiming that it had
once been part of the ancient Han empire.  The turning point in American
policy came in 1959, when Tibetan anger at China's communal farming drives
and the destruction of Buddhist monasteries boiled over into a popular
revolt.

That bloody uprising failed, forcing the Dalai Lama and 80,000 followers to
flee across icy Himalayan passes to India, where they remain to this day.
Another 15,000 fled to Nepal.

But the CIA, eager to stoke even a doomed anti-communist rebellion, saw its
chance. Using American pilots who would later carry out "black operations"
in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the agency began flying
unmarked C-130 aircraft across the highest mountains in the world to
airdrop guns and ammunition to bands of pony-riding Tibetan guerrillas who
wanted to fight on. Nawang Gayltsen was one of them. "We had five guns and
fifty bullets to share among 80 men," Nawang said of his part in the
fruitless defense of Lhasa, Tibet's medieval capital. "The Chinese had
machine guns and artillery, and many, many of us died. We knew it was
hopeless, and we rode our horses south to India to escape and regroup."
And to retrain, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Tibetans working for the CIA quietly
began recruiting fighters in refugee camps in northern India, veterans say,
by handing out bus fare and directions to the Indian city of Darjeeling, a
sleepy colonial tea-growing center that the exile resistance had chosen as
its headquarters.  At first, only a few dozen trainees were shipped in
trucks and freight trains across the border into what was then East
Pakistan where they were bundled onto American planes bound for Guam and
Okinawa.

But by late 1962, India was brought into the shell game, and an airfield
near New Delhi was made available to fly out Tibetans in batches of 40 or
50--this time all the way to Camp Hale, the Army base in the Rocky
Mountains and the former home of World War II's famed 10th Mountain
Division.  "They gave us sleeping pills when we got into the plane," said
Nawang, a reserved, courtly man who was born on a rustic farm in eastern
Tibet and who had never seen an aircraft up close.

"They put curtains on the windows because they didn't want us to know where
we were going. But we all knew we were flying to America. We were all
laughing, all very happy." According to Tibetan sources, between 200 and
400 fighters were cycled through a six-month-long boot camp in a secluded
part of the sprawling, craggy base from 1959 to 1966.

The Tibetan training program lurched ahead even as the CIA endured the
worst military humiliation in its history: the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.
"None of us knew how to fight the Chinese the modern way," recalled Nawang.
"But the Americans taught us. We learned camouflage, spy photography, guns
and radio operation. We played Ping-Pong on Sundays."  His guerrilla
education complete, Nawang says he was flown back to India "clean," without
a single scrap of identification in his pockets.

For the next year, he helped monitor struggling guerrilla cells in Tibet
from a joint CIA-Indian command center in New Delhi. He was given the
all-American code name "Bernie." Today, the CIA neither confirms nor denies
such detailed allegations about an operation that proceeded through the
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. "Regardless of how much time
has passed, we can't comment publicly on any of this," said Mark Mansfield,
an agency spokesman.

But a retired CIA agent identified by several Tibetan sources as a major
figure in the secret war corroborated much of Nawang's story.  "The idea
was to make Tibet very expensive for China," said the former agent, who now
lives in the eastern U.S. "The Chinese had these long, vulnerable supply
lines. The guerrillas were supposed to harass them, tie up troops,
generally make life miserable. And for a while, they actually succeeded."
Yet from the very beginning, the agent said, planners at CIA headquarters
in Langley, Va., had few illusions about pushing well-equipped Chinese
divisions out of the kingdom. "Did we tell the Tibetans that? Of course
not," he said. "But if we used the Tibetans for our own ends, then they
also used the Cold War to get support for sovereignty. I feel no guilt
whatsoever over the operation, especially given what the Chinese have done
in Tibet since."  Few issues are as sensitive for China as the
international crusade against Beijing's control of the vast, windswept
peaks and deserts of Tibet.  Human rights groups long have condemned China
for jailing thousands of political prisoners there, many of them Buddhist
nuns and monks. More than two decades ago, during the fanatical height of
the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards blasted 90 percent of the nation's
exquisite monasteries into rubble.  Beijing asserts that Tibet is an
indivisible part of China. Today the dwindling survivors of Tibet's secret
war complain that their country's martyrdom has effectively erased their
own sacrifices.  "For years, the only way Tibetans could get a hearing in
the world's capitals was to emphasize our spirituality and helplessness,"
said Jamyang Norbu, a leading Tibetan intellectual who joined the
guerrillas briefly as a teenager. "Tibetans who pick up rifles don't fit
that romantic image we've built up in Westerners' heads. So these old guys
are ignored, have no pension, no medals, and are just fading away."
Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama's official representative in the U.S.,
disagrees, saying that the aging guerrillas are still honored "as heroes
even though the use of force has long since been abandoned."  Maybe so. But
the old CIA links are still controversial enough that the Dalai Lama, who
won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, traditionally has declined to talk about
American meddling in the Himalayas even though his elder brother, a
businessman named Gyalo Thondup, is widely known to have coordinated most
of the clandestine aid flowing through Darjeeling.  "We were desperate, and
the Americans stepped in to help," said Lobsang Tsultrim, 55, a former
security chief for the Dalai Lama's government in Dharamsala, India, who
says he was recruited by the CIA in 1964. "I am not ashamed about that. I'm
just disappointed that it was too little too late."  Lobsang, a melancholy,
crewcut-topped man who retired from his government post in 1989 to start a
carpet export business in Katmandu--the lucrative carpet trade is virtually
a Tibetan monopoly in Nepal--says he was instructed by the CIA to launch
the most delicate guerrilla operation of all: demobilization. By mid-1960s,
the CIA had switched its strategy from parachuting commandos into Tibet to
setting up the Chusi Gangdruk, a grizzled army of 2,000 ethnic Khamba
fighters, at secret bases across the border in pro-U.S. Nepal. From there,
the thinking went, the gung-ho Tibetans could strike across the
international boundary at will. Many of them were ex-monks who had taken up
arms to defend their faith against communism.  "Aside from a few
intelligence coups the Khambas didn't accomplish much," Tibet expert Smith
said. "Their job was to cut the east-west highway running along the Tibetan
border, but the Chinese just moved the road farther north."  In 1968, U.S.
sources say, the Johnson administration did some cutting of its own: It
stopped funding the pointless war.  Victor Marchetti, a top CIA aide who
has written several books on the agency's activities in the 1970s,
described the outrage many U.S. field agents felt when Washington pulled
the plug, noting that several "(turned) for solace to the Tibetan prayers
which they had learned during their years with the Dalai Lama." The
Khambas--outfitted with World War II-era guns, tribal amulets and jackets
stitched from scraps of parachute silk--were less philosophical.

Despite growing protests from both Nepal and China, hundreds of warriors
held out with Indian and Taiwanese support until 1974, two years after
President Richard Nixon normalized U.S. relations with China.  The death
knell, when it finally came, arrived via audiotape. "His Holiness urged
them to put down their weapons," Lobsang said of a recording of the Dalai
Lama that was hand-carried from camp to camp in the dusty, lunar mountains
of northwestern Nepal. "Most of them gave up and were relocated to small
farms. A few committed suicide. Some tried to escape to India and were
ambushed by the Chinese and the Nepalis, who were embarrassed by the
operation." The final shots of the secret war, fired by Nepalese Ghurka
soldiers, killed the last U.S.-trained guerrilla leader at a remote
18,000-foot pass near the Indian border.

The CIA quietly paid to resettle the survivors. The Tibetans have eschewed
organized violence ever since. "Now all we do is wait, and the Chinese will
beat us at this too," said Lobsang, who noted that his grown daughter,
raised in Nepal, visited Tibet for the first time last year and felt "like
an alien."  Other aging veterans voice similar laments--less that their
past struggle, however brave, has sunk into oblivion, but that their future
is heading for the same fate. Nawang refuses to revisit his homeland
despite repeated Chinese offers of fence-mending. The capital he defended
on horseback 37 years ago now boasts more than 300 Chinese discos. "They
require us to register as `overseas Chinese,' to get in," said Nawang. He
said he is a Tibetan and will never be a Chinese. He said that he will
probably die in Katmandu.

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.