Stephan Talty

by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom

  “Have you heard any news of Shudup Rimpoche?” the Dalai Lama asked, inquiring after a guru from Lithang Monastery, Ngawang’s “native place.” The Khampa, a man who’d killed scores of PLA soldiers and watched his own men die, attempted to speak but was overcome with emotion. “My eyes swelled with tears.” Shudup Rimpoche was his “root lama,” a figure close to his heart, and Ngawang knew he was trapped at Lithang.

  “It was wrong of me to ask,” His Holiness said, gently. “I’m sorry.” He looked down at the rebel leader’s sword.

  “How many Chinese have died from this dagger?” His Holiness asked.

  “Two severely wounded Chinese had to be killed with it, Your Holiness. Purely out of mercy, to put them out of their pain.”

  The Dalai Lama nodded. His eyes moved to the Khampa’s rifle. Seeing how intent he was on the gun, Ngawang unslung it and offered it to His Holiness.

  The toy weapons and the soldiers the Dalai Lama had played with as a child were now suddenly quite real. His Holiness reached for the rifle.

  “Don’t play with your weapons so close to His Holiness!” the Lord Chamberlain shouted. “There might be an accident.”

  “Don’t worry,” the Dalai Lama said calmly. “These men know how to handle them.”

  At that moment, Athar and Lhotse were riding north to link up with the fugitives. They reached the Dalai Lama’s party on March 21 at Chongye Riwo Dechen, about a third of the way from Lhasa to the Indian border, carrying the RS-1 set, rifles, and another gift from the CIA—a small movie camera, which they would later use to shoot footage of the escape. They found the fugitives at a small monastery. Athar immediately requested an audience with His Holiness, but the Lord Chamberlain replied that the Dalai Lama needed to rest first. The guerrillas could see him the next morning. Now that the Dalai Lama’s break with the Chinese occupiers was out in the open, the tables had turned: it was the Lord Chamberlain who was eager to talk to the rebels and hear the CIA’s plans for Tibet. Athar told him about the rebels’ strengths and recounted some of their recent exploits. He also revealed for the first time that the Americans were air-dropping planeloads of weapons into Tibet and were training guerrillas at Camp Hale for reinsertion into the country. The Lord Chamberlain was delighted. The Tibetan government would need every ally it could find simply to have a chance at surviving. After the meeting, Athar dug out his CIA codebooks and began composing an urgent message to go out over the RS-1 radio.

  In Washington, D.C., the members of the Tibetan Task Force were unaware that the Tibetans were in the midst of rising up. They had bits of information that suggested resentment against China was growing even in Lhasa, but no way of knowing that a rebellion had exploded and that His Holiness was on the run. The agents’ days were spent in bureacratic routines: planning drops, requesting airplanes from the CIA, drawing up budgets—“like running an import/export firm,” says John Greaney. The deputy head had been tasked with the rather dull duty of translating Athar’s incoming messages in the early days of March: reports on PLA infrastructure, rebel morale, and troop numbers. It was vital, in its own way, but it had little of the “bang and burn” quotient that Greaney relished.

  Every day, Greaney would trudge down to the agency’s postwar headquarters, a rat-infested set of temporary buildings by the lovely and placid Reflecting Pool, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Even though they were located at the heart of the city, the CIA huts were ugly, shoddily built, and manned with sleepy guards desperate to escape the boredom of their assignments. With Tibet thirteen hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, the messages from Athar invariably came in the middle of the night, which required Greaney—on the rare occasion an urgent bulletin arrived—to leave his young wife in bed in their Chevy Chase home, jump in his Ford station wagon, and travel through the deserted streets of Washington to the Sig (Signal) Center.

  To translate Athar’s incoming messages—the cryptonym on the bulletins was “ST Budwood”—and send the agency’s own instructions, the CIA had a Mongolian monk, Geshe Wangye, stashed at a safe house not too far from the Reflecting Pool. The monk was dedicated to the mission but too recognizable for the agency’s liking. “Geshe would walk down the street in these saffron robes and an overcoat and a fedora,” Greaney says. “We tried to keep him off the streets as much as possible.” And the work was often tedious, translating messages loaded with lines such as “35 cases of guns and 2 of recoilless rifles and explosives.” With the monk the only Tibetan speaker in the room, it was also a bit unnerving. “I remember one time Des FitzGerald says to me, ‘How do I know what he’s putting into those messages?’ ” Greaney remembers. “ ‘He could be telling them to kill each other for all we know.’ ” Greaney had nodded. The same thought had occurred to him. But over time, he’d come to trust the patient Geshe, who was deeply grateful for a chance to live in the United States and wouldn’t, Greaney felt, double-cross the men who were now trying to help his people.

  Ever since Athar’s abortive attempt to reach the Dalai Lama and get his approval for the rebellion, the CIA, however, had been less than enamored of His Holiness. He “was such a pacifist,” in Greaney’s view, that he refused to endorse the freedom fighters, making the CIA’s efforts on their behalf almost moot. There was some feeling among the Task Force members that the Dalai Lama took nonviolence too seriously for his people’s good. They longed for a man of action—or at least someone who appreciated their efforts. “This was the hard thing for us to understand,” Greaney admits. “Here we are trying to help the guy resist the Chinese, and he doesn’t like it at all.”

  Still, there was no question in Washington that the young monk was the linchpin to the resistance. The goal of the Tibetan Task Force’s mission at that point was simple and Greaney knew it: “to protect the Dalai Lama and get him out.”

  But Athar’s messages in the middle of March had been as dull as dishwater. Tibet was seemingly asleep.

  Until the night of March 21. Some 7,600 miles away from Lhasa, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Greaney was deep in dreams when his phone rang. It was the CIA Sig Center. “They had an OpIm from Tibet,” he says. An “OpIm,” or “Operation Immediate,” was the agency’s second-most-urgent classification for incoming messages. Only “Flash” was higher. “And in all my years at the CIA,” Greaney added, “I never once saw a ‘Flash.’ ” The agent jumped into his Ford station wagon, backed it out of his driveway, and headed into the sleeping city, the radio tuned to his favorite country and western station, which was playing Red Foley’s hit “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” Twenty minutes later he arrived at the Sig Center, flashed his ID at a half-asleep guard, and grabbed a sheet filled with clusters of five numbers in purple-colored ink. Glancing at it, he hopped in his car and sped through the deserted streets to Wisconsin Avenue, where Geshe Wangye, the Mongolian monk and translator, was waiting.

  Wangye began to transpose the numbers into Tibetan and then from Tibetan into English. “He would sit there and scratch his head and say, ‘I think the boys were saying this, but they might have meant that.’ ” Greaney sat with him at the kitchen table, puzzling out the words as they appeared through the fog of coded language. He was nervous. This bulletin would be conveyed to the president of the United States in a few hours’ time and could conceivably hold the fate of the Dalai Lama and Tibet itself in its net of seemingly random numbers. “There was no verbatim to what they said,” Greaney acknowledges. “It was ‘What are they trying to say?’ It was by guess and by God that we got those messages done.”

  Athar’s message included details of the rebellion in Lhasa. The CIA was elated. The fact that the Dalai Lama had escaped the control of the Chinese would be an enormous boon to their efforts to delegitimize the Chinese occupation. Having the Dalai Lama in the south of the country gave their backing of the Tibetan resistance instant credibility. How the Dalai Lama went, so went Tibet.

  On March 22, Athar and Lhotse were ushered into the Dalai Lama’s presence. His Holiness
inspected the men who had been to America, looking at each piece of equipment and weapon they carried. “He particularly wanted to see the radio equipment,” Athar recalled, “but we said it was hidden in the mountains.” In fact, the set was nearby, but the CIA had told Athar not to show the RS-1 to anybody. The CIA operative then asked the Tibetan leader what his plans were for the immediate future, and His Holiness told him that he would lead the escape party to the stronghold of Lhuntse Dzong, renounce the Seventeen Point Agreement, and set up a provisional Tibetan government. “There … I should stay,” the Dalai Lama said, “and try to open peaceful negotiations with the Chinese.” It was obvious to Athar that His Holiness wanted to remain in Tibet and didn’t foresee crossing the border to India, a step that would perhaps lead to his permanent exile. When the Dalai Lama asked about the rebels and the CIA, Athar told him about Camp Hale and about the weapons that the agency had sent into Tibet on parachutes, and described the RS-1 radio that gave the rebels a direct link to Washington and the waiting ears of President Eisenhower. “You could see that he was very excited about this,” Athar remembered.

  Athar dashed off a message to the Tibetan Task Force, and the CIA quickly responded, saying they planned more airdrops for the Tibetan rebels in the near future, including one involving two planeloads of munitions with enough firepower to supply 2,000 soldiers. The planes were waiting at an airstrip in East Pakistan, and Athar radioed back that the arms should be dropped at Tsethang, close to the rebels’ headquarters. But the base would soon be overrun by Chinese battalions, forcing the drop to be canceled. The escape had reenergized the PLA onslaught against the guerrillas. The gloves had now come off in the battle for Tibet.

  His Holiness and his party left the Khampa leader Ratuk Ngawang and his rebels at Chongye Riwo Dechen. The men had safely guided them through their area of operations and were turning back to fight the PLA. His Holiness pulled the rangy leader aside and told him he and his men could accompany them south if they wanted to.

  “I told His Holiness that it was my duty to go back and lead the Tibetan fighters,” Ngawang explained. “I also said I had no regrets if I died fighting.”

  The Dalai Lama nodded. “But there’s no reason to sacrifice your life simply out of bravery,” he replied. “We will need men like you. Stay alive if it is at all possible.”

  His Holiness knew that Ngawang and his men would most likely die if they returned to fight the better-armed PLA, especially while the Chinese ramped up their efforts as news of his escape spread. He sadly gave Ngawang his blessing and the men bowed, then whipped their horses’ heads around and clattered down the trail heading north.

  As he watched them go, it was as if the legends and tales that His Holiness had studied as a child on the walls of the Potala were now happening in front of him, to men whom he’d touched and spoken with. He’d stepped out of a fable into the middle of a red-blooded war.

  The Dalai Lama’s escape had raised the temperature on the question of Tibet—for the Americans, who saw the Dalai Lama coming into their fold; for Peking, which saw foreign intrigues behind every move His Holiness was making; and for the Tibetans themselves, who had finally found a semblance of unity along the trail to India.

  For now it was a journey conducted in secret. That was about to change.

  Eleven

  “GODLESS REDS VS. A LIVING GOD”

  s the Dalai Lama made his way south, the Scottish reporter George Patterson sat in Kalimpong, India, awaiting his forthcoming expulsion from the country for his “misleading reports of the situation in Tibet.” But events were moving too fast for the Indians to make good on their threat. Nehru had previously denied to the Indian Parliament that there was “any large-scale violence” happening in Tibet, but it was clear that Lhasa was now in open warfare. Patterson was allowed to stay—perhaps because Nehru was embarrassed by opposition politicians demanding to know why he’d been “misleading the House” on the whole situation in Tibet—and he went right back to stirring things up, filing pieces about the revolt for the Daily Telegraph. Soon Patterson’s sources were telling him that Lhasa was in flames and that the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama were unknown. And, for once, Patterson wasn’t alone in reporting the spreading revolt. Reports of massive violence coming out of Tibet were seeping into the world’s major newspapers.

  The news of the Lhasa uprising broke in the West on March 21, as Athar linked up with the Dalai Lama a third of the way to India. The story hit the headlines of the English and American dailies and soon led the hourly radio bulletins and TV nightly news around the world (although the Soviet media declined to cover the story). The first take on the story in the West was a variation on the David and Goliath theme: “sword-swinging priests” were battling “Chinese soldiers with machine guns,” according to one newspaper. The Dalai Lama was portrayed as a “gentle mystic,” a bespectacled monk who loved to laugh, and who was now being forced to flee for his life across the wastes of southern Tibet.

  Reporters struggled to come to grips with Tibet as a real place and often failed. In the New York Daily News, under a headline that screamed “Godless Reds vs. A Living God in Tibet,” the first report opened:

  In the windswept highlands of Tibet—the Shangri-La of book and screen—the Marxist bosses of Communist China are fighting a force never envisaged in Marx’s rulebook—the fanatic soldier-priests of a smiling, 23-year-old living god. He wears spectacles, tells jokes and loves to take motion pictures and run them on his own projector. At the same time, he is a Buddhist scholar who debated a learned abbot on equal terms at the age of 14.

  But the outline of the longer struggle was also being drawn. “According to knowledgeable Tibetan sources,” London’s Daily Telegraph reported, “he is no religious exile fleeing to some safe retreat … but a God-king of a proud, angry and courageous people coming to demand moral recognition and help in the name of religion from those who profess to believe in it against the forces of materialism.”

  In the kitchen of his small apartment in New York City, where he’d come to push for American assistance to his homeland, the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, Norbu, was stirring soup on the stove. He was half-listening to a news program on the wireless when the announcer reported that fighting had broken out in Lhasa. “I forgot my soup now and listened eagerly,” remembered Norbu. “I stood there with my mind in a whirl. What I had most feared for many years had come about at last.”

  The broadcast brought back memories of his first encounter with the Chinese, when Communist cadres had spent seven months living, eating, and talking with Norbu, who was then an abbot at a monastery. The cadres had been assigned to convert him to Mao’s philosophy. He’d found them to be curious, oddly persistent people. “They kept talking, kept asking questions,” he remembered. “They kept saying Communists are good, Stalin is good, British and Americans no good.” His Chinese handlers asked him bizarre questions—how many pieces of underwear he owned, for example—and dug for the names of his friends and contacts, trying to suss out a picture of the monastic elite and how it functioned. But mostly they’d extolled the virtues of communism.

  Having escaped to America, Norbu now called up Tibetan friends in the city—in a city of obscure immigrants, Tibetans were among the rarest—and then at midnight rushed down to the street when he heard the newsboys calling out a special edition with the news of the escape on the front page. He bought every one he could find. “What was going to happen now?” he wondered, thinking particularly of his brother. Norbu felt he had, by virtue of those seven months of close contact, a special insight into the Chinese capacity for relentlessness that his gentle brother didn’t share. And he knew how much Peking wanted His Holiness. “The Chinese would clearly move heaven and earth to prevent his escape,” he thought to himself. He didn’t sleep the entire night.

  When the news of the Dalai Lama’s escape got out, a horde of twenty of the world’s top foreign correspondents gathered in Kalimpong and Darjeeling, the point of what was goi
ng to become a very large and unwieldly spear. For journalists, the escape was becoming one of the “stories of the century,” a career-altering happening much like the race for the South Pole and the conquest of Everest, in which getting the scoop became as much of a quest as Hillary’s climb. For foreign editors around the world, the story seemingly had everything: an exotic locale, a hazily understood potentate who was both “god” and “king” (at least to Western eyes), a villainous oppressor, a cliff-hanger ending still to be decided. The murky issue of Tibet now had a clear and compelling narrative and an immensely appealing character to humanize the cause.

  The escape of the Dalai Lama made Tibet a major international news story. Without him, the fighting there would have been relegated to the back pages and taken its place alongside Burma and Mongolia as another obscure Far Eastern controversy.

  But larger, darker anxieties also fed the appetite for news on His Holiness. Westerners saw in the Dalai Lama’s fate a mirror of their own possible futures. What was happening in Tibet had already happened in places such as Budapest and East Berlin, and there was a very real worry that it would happen in London and Paris and New York. The week the escape hit the headlines, stories ran in American newspapers with titles such as “An Inspiring Message from the Mayor of West Berlin: Never Let the Russians Think You’re Weak!” The Dalai Lama was, as odd as it sounds, a kind of doppelgänger for the West, a man culled from the pack who was on the run from the vicious and godless Communists. The old concept of the “foreign brother,” the Tibetan who shares the West’s values, was resurrected once again, in an atmosphere of paranoia about the West’s very survival.

  On March 22, a New York Times editorial blasted Peking: “This is a complete indictment of the Chinese Communist on the charge of genocide.… Complete absorption and extinction of the Tibetan race is being undertaken.” Protests erupted in Asian cities such as Bombay and even reached to New York, where Buddhists who considered His Holiness their leader took to the streets. Guards at the Bhutan border reported “panic-stricken Tibetans” almost unable to speak appearing at their border posts. Expats in India were told to sell all their belongings and to head to Delhi to fight for the Dalai Lama. In Bombay, demonstrators cried out for the world to resist China and pelted a portrait of Mao with eggs and tomatoes.