Stephan Talty

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

  The defeat of the rebels shattered some Tibetans’ belief in the powers of the Dalai Lama. His Holiness was, after all, supposed to be a superior being with miraculous powers. He and his protectors, it was said, could dispatch demons and ghosts, to say nothing of mere humans. How, then, had the Chinese beaten their protector and forced him to flee like a peasant? Some Lhasans took down their portraits of His Holiness and replaced them with images of Mao, who became a deity in certain Lhasa homes. “I remember some of my neighbors … wondering if the Dalai Lama was really the kind of powerful monk they had come to believe in,” said one Tibetan who fled to India, “or was he really just a myth?” But the events of March only strengthened the belief of other followers. Many felt that, even if the Dalai Lama had not by some divine act defeated the PLA and freed Tibet from occupation, his escape proved that he was capable of wondrous things. “He performed a miracle when he fled without letting the Chinese know,” asserts one monk. “It was impossible for him to leave the Norbulingka any other way.”

  Tibetans often comprehend the events of life in a multilayered way. Mahayana Buddhism posits that there is “ordinary perception” (thun mong pai snang ba) and “extraordinary perception” (thun mong ma yin), which reveals hidden truths about even the most mundane occurrences. The Dalai Lama’s escape, to some believers, was an occurrence that needed to be contemplated with thun mong ma yin. They believed, as one monk-artist later said, that the journey across the Himalayas was “part of a larger divine plan” that had not yet unfolded in its entirety, only the first act of a story with many acts. In this interpretation, the occupation and the PLA’s trampling of the rebels could be seen not as a defeat of Chenrizi but as a test of Tibetans’ ability to overcome their attachment to transitory things, a blow that would force them to fully embrace supreme detachment from the material world. Or it could be a way to spread Buddhism all over the world, as the Tibetan exodus sent lamas to every corner of the globe.

  For many Tibetans, the defeat was simply the beginning of a time when their lives would be, as one survivor put it, “broken beyond repair.”

  Thirteen

  LHUNTSE DZONG

  s the Dalai Lama and his compatriots hurried toward Lhuntse Dzong, the trail got more difficult. The fugitives were forced to cross a Himalayan pass every day, the lower ones covered in thick mud from the melting snows and the higher ones frozen in ice and snow. They were riding for ten or more hours a day, and they grew more and more exhausted as they traveled mile after mile across the wind-whipped plains. One stop they made, a village called E-Chhudhogang, was the subject of a Tibetan saying: “It is better to be born an animal in a place where there is grass and water than to be born in E-Chhudhogang.” At Sabo-La, they struggled up the pass and found the temperature dropping as they climbed. The soft life of the Norbulingka hadn’t prepared the tutors and the ministers for such a rugged trek. “I began to be deeply worried about some of my companions,” the Dalai Lama remembered.

  The escapees reached the rebel stronghold on March 27, ten days into the escape. There they rested their horses, weakened from the constant riding and the scarcity of food along the way. They bunked down for the night, with the Dalai Lama and his ministers eager to announce the formation of their temporary government headquarters.

  The next day, the Dalai Lama bent down to hear a faint broadcast on a battery-powered transistor radio the fugitives had brought with them. There he received the second shock of the escape. Before he could announce his rejection of the Seventeen Point Agreement, Peking nullified it. His Holiness listened as the faint voice of the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, announced that the uprising had “torn up” the agreement and that the Tibetan cabinet and all local government institutions had been dissolved, effective immediately. The Panchen Lama would now serve as chairman of the committee that nominally ruled the country. (The Dalai Lama’s letter to the young Panchen Lama, asking him to join up with his rival in exile, had never reached him.) Ngabö, the seductively brilliant aristocrat who’d gone over to the Chinese side, was named vice-chairman. For the second time in his life, the Dalai Lama learned of Tibet’s fate over the radio.

  Tibet had ceased to exist.

  Zhou Enlai then read out eighteen names of the key conspirators who’d kidnapped the Dalai Lama, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Khampa leaders, and the cabinet ministers who’d accompanied His Holiness on the escape. As the Tibetans bent down to hear the last of the message, the Chinese premier announced their punishment if they were caught by the PLA: life imprisonment, or death.

  The newly elevated Panchen Lama sent a cable to Mao on March 29. It was, by any measure, a shameful message:

  The crimes of the upper-strata reactionary clique show that they are traitors to the motherland, enemies of the Tibetan people and the dregs of the Tibetan nationality.… I shall spare no earnest effort to … smash all the shameless traitorous intrigues carried out by the upper-strata reactionary clique in Tibet with the support of the imperialists and the Chiang Kai-shek clique. Long live the great motherland! Long live the Chinese Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao Zedung, the great leader of all nationalities of our country!

  Ngabö spoke next, completing his betrayal of Tibet with an even more galling message. “We have deep affection for the People’s Liberation Army and oppose the imperialists and traitors,” he said. “The rebellion has not led to a split of the motherland. On the contrary, it has promoted the national unity of the country, thus bringing limitless light and happiness to the broad masses of the Tibetan people.”

  Even as the Dalai Lama digested the news, he received another blow. With Athar on the trail with the Dalai Lama, the CIA had begun searching for any evidence that the Chinese were pursuing the escape party. And they soon found it. “Through various intercepts, the CIA learned that Mao had put out alerts to ‘nail’ the Dalai Lama,” said Roger McCarthy, head of the Tibetan Task Force during the escape. The reports coming in to the Task Force indicated that the PLA was sending troops and planes after the Tibetans, and that Chinese troops were now gathering north of Bhutan, almost directly to the east of Lhuntse Dzong, and would soon start marching to cut off the Dalai Lama before he could reach India. “It wouldn’t have taken many bombs to wipe them out,” says CIA officer John Greaney. “The way the Chinese were operating at that point, I don’t believe the Dalai Lama would have survived, because the Chinese did not want him in the outside world as a symbol.”

  The rebels vowed to hold off any Chinese advance. When word came that His Holiness was fleeing toward India, a guerrilla leader told a group of Tibetan fighters that they had to form a rear guard: “We were told that we had to block mountain passes and bridges, and that we should fight as much as possible,” remembers one rebel. But the lightly armed guerrillas found themselves matched against PLA troops with mortars and air support, planes that unloaded “bombs and big bullets.” In one lethal encounter in which the rebels, armed only with swords, fought against PLA infantrymen with rifles and machine guns, the Tibetan ranks were decimated. The remainder of the unit turned and fled toward the Indian border.

  The Chinese announcement and the news of PLA advances toward Lhuntse Dzong meant that lingering at the rebel fort was no longer an option. The Dalai Lama would have to make for the Indian border, just sixty miles away, immediately. Time was now the enemy. The bulletins from Athar shortened considerably: the rebel could now only dash off the Dalai Lama’s current position in latitude and longitude, hand-crank the radio, insert the correct crystal for that day, and send the message off. Back in Washington, John Greaney would drive down to the Sig Center and receive the numbers, which he transposed onto a map of Tibet. He would then rush the new location to the Office of Current Intelligence, where in the early dawn hours the staff were preparing the president’s daily brief. Every day Eisenhower could track how many miles the Dalai Lama had made and survey the territory ahead, which he could see was difficult, with passes up to 19,000 feet. The escape had put Tibet at the h
ead of President Eisenhower’s Current Intelligence Bulletin. “Eisenhower was delighted, sticking pins in his map,” says the CIA’s Ken Knaus. CIA director Allen Dulles met with the president and gave him a message: “We have every reason to hope that the Dalai Lama will get out of Tibet soon.” But he almost spoke too soon.

  Early in the morning on the 28th, Athar was asleep inside the fortress at Lhuntse Dzong when he felt someone shaking him roughly by the shoulder. He opened his eyes: it was the Lord Chamberlain. The official hurriedly explained to him that reports had come in that the PLA was marching toward the area in numbers that would overwhelm the Khampa guards. They needed to leave for India, but they still didn’t have permission to cross the border. Without that offer of asylum from Nehru, any advancing Chinese troops could pin down the fugitives at the Indian border and kill or capture the Dalai Lama and his family. The Lord Chamberlain asked Athar to radio the Americans and ask them to request asylum from India.

  Athar immediately brought out the RS-1, checked the codebook, installed the correct crystal, and began typing out his message.

  In Washington, it was six o’clock Saturday evening. John Greaney was at home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, preparing to go out with his wife and three other couples for a rare night of socializing, when the phone rang. It was the CIA Sig Center. A message had come in from Athar. Luckily, the restaurant Greaney was going to that night, the Silver Fox, was near the CIA’s headquarters. Greaney and his wife drove into Washington, and the deputy chief picked up the coded message on the way to dinner, briefly scanning the contents as he left the CIA hut. He immediately knew something major had happened; instead of the single line with time, date, longitude and latitude, the sheet was filled with set after set of five numbers each, a torrent of coded prose compared with what he usually received. Greaney got back in his Ford station wagon and drove with his wife to the safe house where the Mongolian monk, Geshe Wangye, was waiting. Greaney left the purple-inked sheet for him to translate, then took his pregnant wife, impatient by this time, to meet their friends for cocktails and light gossip.

  All through dinner, Greaney wondered what message Athar had sent. None of the other men at the table was a CIA operative, let alone a member of the Tibetan Task Force, so he couldn’t talk shop with them. When the check arrived, he told the couples he had to meet a friend and dashed off to the safe house. “So I got there,” Greaney says, “and there’s this message that the Dalai Lama requests us to ask for asylum in India.” Greaney was taken aback. He knew the history well: the last time the Dalai Lama had been in India, Nehru had resisted offering asylum. Something drastic must have changed for the escape party to be tapping out this request from the rebel fortress.

  By now it was the early hours of Sunday morning. An asylum request from the Dalai Lama would, under normal circumstances, have required approval from the State Department. There the issue would be debated for hours, if not days or weeks. “State could have been the biggest hangup,” Greaney says. “There was no way we were going to get approval that night.” The agent called his boss, Roger McCarthy, who told him to wake up Des FitzGerald, the debonair head of the East Asia Task Force. Reached on the phone, FitzGerald didn’t hesitate. “Do it,” he instructed. He was telling Greaney to bypass State altogether and send the request directly to New Delhi. Greaney went back to the monk, and they began composing a message, sitting in the safe house’s dining room on the CIA’s rented furniture. Within an hour, they had the request prepared; and Greaney rushed back to the Sig Center, handed off the sheet with the coded language on it, and went home to his wife in Chevy Chase. When he walked through the door in the early hours of the morning, he found some of his dinner companions sipping cocktails in his living room. “I swear, today they’d think I was either a terrorist or a drug dealer,” he says. But, deep into their glasses of Cutty Sark, the other couples barely batted an eye.

  At four in the morning, the phone rang again. A message had been received back from New Delhi. “Somehow, in a matter of hours, they’d managed to reach Nehru,” Greaney remembers. “And he said, with these conditions, I’ll grant asylum. He even told the escape party where to enter India, through the North East Frontier.” Greaney and FitzGerald and the other Tibet hands at first had trouble believing the response. “I didn’t think Nehru wanted him there,” he explains. “We were shocked.”

  With the sun rising, Greaney again jumped in his Ford and made the trek to Wisconsin Avenue, where he and the monk bent over the kitchen table cobbling together one last message. At nine in the morning, he rushed back to the Sig Center, nodded at the sleepy guard, and handed over the code to be sent to Athar: The corridor to India is open. Proceed to the North East Frontier Agency.

  Greaney walked down the steps of the Sig Center, got into his car, his suit rumpled and his mind groggy, and went home, half-asleep, marveling at the vagaries of history. The fact that the request for asylum had arrived on a weekend had allowed the CIA to get it to Delhi and approved in record time.

  “If it hadn’t been a Saturday night,” Greaney says, “the Dalai Lama might still be in Tibet.”

  The escapees, now 350 strong, were ill-prepared for the trek to India. They had no money, first of all. They hadn’t been able to take any cash from the Potala funds, and they had no access to the monies sent ahead to India after the Chinese invasion. “We were paupers,” remembers Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother. “We had nothing except the clothes on our bodies.” All the fabulously rich Dalai Lama had to his name was a donkey, an extra set of clothes, and a few sackloads of Tibetan paper dollars, which would be almost worthless in India. Fortunately, the famous extravagance of the American intelligence system reached all the way to the trails of southern Tibet. In a message from John Greaney, Athar was instructed to give His Holiness’s party 200,000 rupees from the stocks of Indian currency the CIA had air-dropped into Tibet. The Dalai Lama would make his way to India on American cash.

  The event that the Dalai Lama had so looked forward to—the formation of an independent Tibetan government—now seemed anticlimactic. But it needed to be done; the Dalai Lama wanted to enter India as the head of a sovereign authority and not as a refugee. In front of 1,000 monks, soldiers, villagers, and ministers, His Holiness inaugurated the new government, which now had no country to administer. Then he quickly set off for India.

  The journey was increasingly miserable, and it had begun to take its toll on the Dalai Lama. Incessant riding had given the fugitives saddle sores, and there was so little shelter in the arid country that they had to sleep in cowsheds or tiny peasant huts. The feeling of being pursued was fraying their nerves. The Khampas reported that the PLA had crossed the Tsangpo in numbers and that another contingent of troops was moving from the south to cut off the escape party.

  There was another obstacle, or rather two. A pair of the highest passes on the route awaited them, both towering above 18,000 feet and cloaked in winter ice. Largo-La came first, and as the fugitives labored to the top of the pass, a snowstorm swept down on them. Choegyal struggled to climb the icy slope. The party’s eyebrows and mustaches froze and caked with ice; their hands and feet went numb with the first signs of frostbite. To keep warm, the escapees had to dismount from their ponies and push forward on foot, boots coming out of the fresh snow with a sucking sound, then plunging back into the swirling powder. If they’d stayed mounted on their horses, they would have frozen in their saddles. On the other side of Largo-La, they stopped for a quick meal of bread, hot water, and condensed milk to get their blood flowing again.

  As they pushed ahead, the weather began to deteriorate further. “We had difficulties,” His Holiness said. “High mountains … breathing difficulties. There was too much cold. Our hands and feet became frozen.” As the trail dipped and rose thousands of feet in altitude, blizzards alternated with sandstorms, heavy rain, and then dazzling sunlight. Avalanches pushed snowdrifts into their path. “Horses were unable to walk on the snow and even for humans it was difficu
lt,” remembered one soldier. Tibetans have a phrase for heavy snowfall—“the sky is broken.” As they got closer and closer to India, the heavens seemed permanently cracked.

  The next day, March 29, they faced Karpo-La, the last summit standing between them and India. As they climbed the slope, the sky darkened and snow and howling winds battered the escapees. Finally, the storm passed and the sun emerged from behind the clouds, nearly blinding them with its rays bouncing off the crystal white snow. Some of the party tied rags around their eyes to block the intense sunlight, while others used braids of their hair. They stopped on the slope to have their lunch when suddenly a dust storm came twisting through their little camp, blinding them again.

  And then the plane appeared.

  Like a mythical beast, everyone remembered it differently. Some remember a “biplane, flying low over the long line of the struggling caravan.” The military-obsessed Choegyal thought it was a Douglas DC-4 model, the Skymaster, which had become famous for its part in the Berlin airlift. Others thought it was a Chinese military plane. “If it was Chinese, as it probably was,” the Dalai Lama said, “there was a good chance that they now knew where we were.” But all agreed the unmarked plane appeared out of nowhere, droning down from a blue sky to sweep over the escape party. “We didn’t know whether it was Chinese or from another country,” Choegyal recounted. “But it flew directly overhead and couldn’t have failed to see us, hundreds of men and horses on the pure white snow.”

  Guards began to panic, jumping off their horses and struggling to get the machine guns off their backs. Suddenly, the Dalai Lama’s voice floated across the slope.

  “Be quiet,” he called. “Don’t move.”