by Ted Gup
Meanwhile, on November 25, 1949, Pegge Mackiernan received a cable from Fulton Freeman, the State Department’s acting deputy director, Office of Chinese Affairs. “I am happy to inform you,” Freeman began, “that word has been passed to us from the British Consul in Tihwa that Mr. Mackiernan is proceeding to India via Tibet and that he is expected to reach early in December.”
For Douglas Mackiernan the next four months were filled with tedium. Winter had set in and a part of each day he gathered brush and yak droppings to burn for warmth. He spent many hours reading and rereading the few books he had brought with him, among them Tolstoy’s War and Peace. When he could stand them no longer, they were sacrificed for toilet paper.
One afternoon, with the wind howling fifty miles an hour and the temperature twenty degrees below zero, the White Russians invited Mackiernan to join them for an outside shower. Mackiernan declined but watched in fascination. Undaunted, Zvonzov went first. He heated a cauldron of water, then cowered behind a tent flap as countrymen Leonid and Stephani hurriedly ladled warm water over him. Partly it was to stay clean, partly an effort to break the monotony.
During these long and dark winter days Mackiernan spent many hours in quiet contemplation. The grandeur and the cruelty of the icescape that surrounded him felt strangely familiar, at once threatening and comforting. In the dark of the yurt, with the winds howling outside, it was impossible not to think back on his father’s own saga of survival in a frozen wilderness. From earliest childhood, Mackiernan had heard the tale again and again, until it had become the defining parable of his youth.
Douglas S. Mackiernan, Sr., had run off at age sixteen to become a whaler out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He spent years at sea. Then in July 1903 he responded to a solicitation from a wealthy patron of exploration, William Ziegler, who dreamed of financing an expedition that would be the first to plant the American flag on the North Pole. A year earlier Ziegler had financed an aborted expedition to the pole. Now, with the blessing of the National Geographic Society, he was organizing yet another effort. His ship, the America, was a steam yacht, its flanks strengthened to resist ice floes.
The senior Mackiernan had signed on as a common seaman. Even if all had gone well, Ziegler’s plan was a bold one. The America was to go north as far as the ice would permit, then anchor and put its thirty-seven men ashore. A year later, in 1904, a resupply vessel was to arrive, replenishing the stores. Instead, the America was crushed in the ice of Teplitz Bay early in the winter of 1903. Its vital provisions and equipment were lost and the ship was reduced to kindling. A full year later the ice was so thick that no resupply vessel could reach them. Seaman Mackiernan and the others were stranded.
Huddling there in a yurt forty-six years later, Doug Mackiernan could remember his father telling him of the endless nights of an arctic winter, of fifty-mile-per-hour winds that burned his face, and especially of the night of January 5, 1905, when the temperature sank to sixty degrees below zero. Inside their tents of pongee silk, the lanterns and stoves created vapors that condensed on the interior. They formed icicles that would later melt into tiny rivulets and find their way into the sleeping bags and then freeze again. A half hour’s sleep constituted a full night’s slumber. For cooking and warmth, the senior Mackiernan and the others had mined twenty tons of coal from frozen clay and carried it on their backs down a steep and slippery slope.
Mackiernan’s father and the others stayed alive by eating polar bears—120 in all—as well as walruses and seals. Decades later Mackiernan would tell his wide-eyed son and namesake that he could still taste the leathery walrus meat. So tough was it that it reminded the expedition’s captain, Fiala, of chewing automobile tires. Desperate for variety in their diet, the men risked their lives to scale icy cliffs and stole the eggs of gulls and loons. The cold seeped through Mackiernan’s mittens as he tended the dog teams. It cut through his boots, searing his toes with a numbness that turned to frostbite. For weeks he was hobbled, unable to walk.
By day, one or another of the crew would stand as a lookout on a spit of frozen ice searching with binoculars for the promised rescue ship. Nearly every week a shout would go out that the resupply ship was in sight, but it would invariably be just another iceberg mistaken for a sail.
None of them would ever reach the North Pole, or even come close. A fireman, Sigurd Myhre, had died of disease and was buried on the summit of a bleak plateau, “the most northern tomb in the world,” Fiala would later reflect. These were the memories that Mackiernan’s father passed down to his son and which now came back to him here in the midst of his own frozen wasteland.
For the entire winter of 1904–5, Mackiernan and another man were alone in a remote camp, left with a team of five dogs, a rifle, a shotgun, and limited supplies. They passed that winter playing a marathon game of poker.
But in July 1905, when the men of the Ziegler expedition had come to believe that they might never again see their homes, a ship appeared against the frozen horizon. It was the Terra Nova, a rescue vessel whose mission was literally the dying wish of the expedition’s financier, Ziegler. The two-year ordeal was over in an instant.
On board, Mackiernan’s father rejoiced in a hot bath, read through two years of mail, and slept in a dry warm berth. In minutes he and the others were caught up on two years’ worth of world events that had passed them by—the war between Japan and Russia, the results of the international yacht race of 1903, and the usual litany of catastrophes that afflict the world. But the sweetest memory of all, his father recalled, was breaking free of the ice and feeling the rise and fall of the open sea once more, and with it the knowledge that home was not far off. That was forty-five years earlier.
But from such memories, the younger Mackiernan could draw comfort that his ordeal, too, would have a miraculous end, that he would have his own stack of mail awaiting him and feel again the embrace of his wife, Pegge, and the twins. His father had been at the mercy of others for salvation. Mackiernan was in control of his own fate. With each step toward the Tibetan border he was that much closer to being saved.
At CIA headquarters the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the nation also defined the Agency’s agenda. On January 21, 1950, State Department employee Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying that he had engaged in espionage for the Communists. Ten days later President Truman announced that he was proceeding with development of the hydrogen bomb. As the United States prepared for possible war with the Soviets, the CIA was expanding an already vigorous covert assault on Communism. This would include an ill-fated two-year attempt to overthrow the leftist government of Albania, as well as the creation of Radio Free Europe, a nettlesome embarrassment to Communist regimes. On February 9 Senator Joseph McCarthy announced his infamous list of 205 supposed Communists within the State Department, further putting pressure on the CIA in its counterintelligence role.
On the farthest edge of this ideological struggle stood Douglas Mackiernan. On January 30, 1950, Agency headquarters received a faint radio message from him. When conditions permitted, he said, he would be making his way across the Himalayas.
For Mackiernan two more months would pass at the frozen campsite. Finally, on March 20, 1950, he and his band said good-bye to the Kazakhs and commenced the final and most grueling leg of their journey, over the Himalayas, into Tibet, and eventually to India. From here on, Mackiernan and his men would be ever more exposed to the elements. At night Mackiernan would lie down in his sleeping bag, huddled against the back of a camel to shield him from the wind. At morning he and Bessac, the two Americans, could no longer assist in saddling the camels. Their fingers were too numb.
Mackiernan and his party would take turns riding the camels and then walking. Too much riding and they could freeze to death. Too much walking and they would collapse from exhaustion. Their diet, too, required a delicate balance. From the White Russians, more seasoned in the ways of survival, Mackiernan learned what to eat and what not to eat. Too much meat at such an altitu
de and he could find himself wooed into a nap from which he would not awake. Instead, he nibbled on bits of sugar, rice, raisins, a few bites of meat, and the ever-present biscuits he kept in his pants pocket.
It was all a matter of balance upon which his survival depended. At elevations of sixteen thousand feet or more, the air was so thin that the already taciturn Mackiernan rarely spoke at all, trying to conserve his breath. All conversation ended. In its place were hand signals and one- or two-word directives: “brush” or “dung” for fires, “snow” to be melted for water. By now, the ordeal of marching had become a mindless and silent routine, one foot in front of the other. Some days Mackiernan would lose sight in one eye or the other, the result of transient snow blindness.
Many of the horses had died from starvation. Others were useless, their hooves worn out. Knowing that the rest of the way there would be little grass to eat, Mackiernan had long before bartered for camels—not just any camels, but those that ate raw meat. Before making the purchase he tied up his prospective purchases and waited a day to see which camels consumed meat and which were dependent upon a diet of grass. Those camels that resisted meat Mackiernan promptly returned. Where he was bound, there would be no easy forage.
Though there was an abundance of game—wild horses, sheep, and yak—the elevation presented its own unique problems of consumption. At sixteen thousand feet Mackiernan found that water boiled at a decidedly lesser temperature. He could thrust his hand up to the elbow in furiously boiling water and remove it without a hint of scalding. One day Mackiernan shot a yak. The men salivated over the prospect of yak steaks. But after four hours in the boiling cauldron, the meat was still raw.
There were other problems too. A wild horse was spotted on a distant ridge and was brought down with a single shot. But almost instantly, vultures appeared overhead. By the time the men reached the animal, its carcass was nearly picked clean, its ribs rising out of the snow. After that, Mackiernan and his men shot only what they could reach quickly, then concealed their kill beneath a mound of grasses and stones until they had taken what they needed.
From morning to night the wind howled at fifty, even sixty miles an hour. It was a constant screaming sound, rising at times to a shrill whistle. In such cold, even the simplest manual tasks required superhuman resolve.
Mackiernan’s clothes had long since become tatters, which he, like the other men, repaired as best he could. But a bigger concern was how to protect their feet in the deep and frigid snowdrifts. After so many miles, the men had virtually walked out of the soles of their shoes. One day Mackiernan and Zvonzov spotted two yaks. Both men were thinking shoes and meat. Mackiernan let Zvonzov, the better shot of the two, have the honors.
From three hundred yards Zvonzov brought the beast down. Right through the heart. They scurried through the snow to the animal as it lay on its side. They swiftly cut away its hide for soles and began removing steaks. But having cleared one flank, they were unable to flip the creature over, and were forced to abandon it, only half consumed.
As March, then April wore on, Mackiernan and his men plotted a course for the Tibetan border. At each new campsite Mackiernan took out his radio and wired headquarters of his progress. He requested that Washington contact the Tibetan government and ask the then sixteen-year-old Dalai Lama to arrange that he and his men be granted safe passage across the border and that they be given an escort once they exited China. Washington sent back a confirmation. Couriers from the Dalai Lama would alert the border guards at all crossing points so that Mackiernan and his band would be welcomed.
By now, Mackiernan set a course by ancient cairns and stone outcroppings. Nomads had pointed the way through the major passes, bidding them to be on the lookout for piles of rocks that rose like pyramids. Beneath each mound were the remains of others who had died in this harsh land. The ground was frozen too solid to yield to a grave, and so the bodies were simply covered with rocks. In so bleak a land, devoid of roads or signs, each such grave became a reference point, named for the person who had died there. Mackiernan passed by the grave of Kalibet and later Kasbek, fascinated at the small measure of immortality granted them. Each death was both a confirmation that Mackiernan was headed in the right direction and a reminder of the risks inherent in such a landscape.
Thousands of miles away, in Washington, the landscape of the Cold War was taking shape. On April 25, 1950, President Truman signed one of the seminal documents of the decade, National Security Council Directive 68. The blueprint for the Cold War strategy, it called on the United States to step up its opposition to Communist expansion, to rearm itself, and to make covert operations an integral part of that opposition. The policy of containment was now the undisputed security objective of the era. The CIA had its marching orders.
But for Mackiernan it was not grand geopolitical issues that concerned him, but the ferocity of mountain winds and biting cold. The border had proved more elusive than he had imagined. Finally, at 11:00 A.M. on April 29, 1950, as he scanned the horizon to the southeast with his binoculars, he caught sight of a tiny Tibetan encampment and knew that he had at long last reached the border. It had taken seven months to cross twelve hundred miles of desert and mountain. A moment earlier he had been weary beyond words, his thirty-seven-year-old frame stooped with exhaustion. Now, suddenly, he felt renewed and exuberant.
Mackiernan and Bessac went ahead, leaving the others to tend the camels. In the harsh terrain it was an hour before the Tibetans caught sight of Mackiernan, who was now a quarter of a mile ahead of Bessac. He was waving a white flag. The Tibetans dispatched a girl to meet him. They grinned at each other, unable to find any words in common. The girl stuck out her tongue at Mackiernan, a friendly greeting in Tibet, then withdrew to a hilltop where she was met by a Tibetan who unlimbered a gun. Then the two Tibetans disappeared over the hillside. Mackiernan followed and observed a small group apparently reinforcing a makeshift fortification of rocks. Their guns appeared to be at the ready.
Mackiernan decided that it would be best to strike camp here, on the east side of a stream that meandered through the valley. He chose a place in sight of the Tibetans. There he built a small fire to show his peaceful intentions. He suspected that the Tibetans might be wary of his straggling caravan, fearing them to be Communists or bandits bent on rustling sheep. As Mackiernan, Zvonzov, and the other two Russians drove tent stakes into the hard ground, six more Tibetans on horseback appeared, approaching from the northwest.
Moments later shots rang out. Mackiernan and his men dropped to the ground for cover. Bullets were whizzing overhead. Zvonzov reached for the flap of the tent and ripped it free. He tied it to the end of his rifle as a white flag and waved it aloft. The gunfire stopped. No one had been hit. Mackiernan directed Bessac to approach the first group of Tibetans and offer them gifts of raisins, tobacco, and cloth. As Bessac approached, he held a white flag and was taken in by the Tibetans.
Mackiernan, meanwhile, was convinced he could persuade those who had fired on him that his party was not a threat. His plan was a simple one. He and the others would rise to their feet, hands held high above their heads. Slowly they would approach the Tibetans as a group. Zvonzov argued against the plan. He feared the Tibetans would simply open fire when they were most vulnerable. Mackiernan prevailed.
Slowly he and the three White Russians stood up, hands aloft. They walked in measured steps, closing the distance between their tent site and the Tibetans. As they walked, Zvonzov eyed a boulder to the right and resolved that if there was trouble he would dive for cover behind it.
Mackiernan was in the lead, gaining confidence as the Tibetans held their fire. His arms were raised. Behind him walked the two White Russians, Stephani and Leonid. Fewer than fifty yards now separated them from the Tibetan border guards. Just then two shots were fired. Mackiernan cried out, “Don’t shoot!” A third shot echoed across the valley. Mackiernan, Stephani, and Leonid lay in the snow. Vassily ran for the boulder. The air was thin and he ripped his sh
irt open as if it might give his lungs more air. A bullet smashed into his left knee. He tumbled into the snow and crawled toward the tent, his mind fixed on the machine gun and ammo that were there.
Moments later Bessac appeared, his hands tied behind his back, a prisoner of the Tibetans. Vassily, too, was taken prisoner. The six guards looted the campsite, encircled Vassily, and forced him to the ground. They demanded that he kowtow to them. Vassily pleaded for his life. Not long after, Bessac and Vassily, now hobbling and putting his weight on a stick, approached the place where Mackiernan, Stephani, and Leonid had fallen.
The wind was whipping at sixty miles an hour, the snow a blinding swirl. A half hour had passed since the shooting. Mackiernan was lying on his back, his legs crossed. Vassily looked at Mackiernan and thought to himself how peaceful he looked. Mackiernan even appeared to be smiling. It was a slightly ironic smile. Vassily was overcome with the strangest sense of envy.
Just then one of the border guards began to rifle through Mackiernan’s pockets. He withdrew a bursak, one of those biscuits Mackiernan was never without. He offered Vassily a piece. Vassily turned away in revulsion. Then the guard pressed the biscuit to Mackiernan’s teeth. The mouth fell wide open. Vassily was overcome with nausea. He turned and walked away. Mackiernan’s body was already stiffening. But there would be one more indignity Mackiernan and the others would endure. The guards decapitated Mackiernan, Stephani, and Leonid, and even one of the camels that had been felled by their volley.
Shortly thereafter, the guards realized that they had made a terrible mistake, that these men were neither Communists nor bandits. They unbound Bessac’s hands and attempted to put him at ease. Then Bessac and Vassily, in the company of the guards, began what was to be the last tedious march, to Lhasa and to freedom.
Five days after Mackiernan was killed, the two surviving members of his party encountered the Dalai Lama’s couriers who were to have delivered the message of safe conduct and who were to have been part of Mackiernan’s welcoming party. The couriers gave no explanation or excuse for their tardiness. It was small comfort that they offered Bessac the opportunity to execute the leader of the offending border guards. It was an offer he declined.