Stephan Talty

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

  But the theory that the Chinese let the Dalai Lama leave Tibet doesn’t align with their behavior either before or after the escape. Mao and his lieutenants had been intent on co-opting, not eliminating, His Holiness. The minister of China’s United Front Work Department said in 1950 that “winning over the Dalai will be our greatest victory.” And during the Dalai Lama’s sojourn in India in 1956–57, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had charmed and threatened the young Tibetan leader into returning to his palace in Lhasa. The objective of the Chinese diplomatic approach during that crucial time was to get the Dalai Lama back to Tibet. And if the Tibetan leader’s death would inflame world opinion, as Mao suggested in his telegram, what would his exile and his ability to speak freely about the abuses inside Tibet do? The Chinese leader was a phenomenally gifted propagandist, and surely he knew how much damage His Holiness could do—and, as it turned out, did—once he was in India.

  Other sources contradict the telegram. After the escape, Mao met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and the subject of the Dalai Lama came up repeatedly. The discussion was brutally frank. Khrushchev called the Dalai Lama “a bourgeois figure” but then blasted Mao for letting him escape. “The events in Tibet are your fault,” he told the Chinese leader. “You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence [agencies] there and you should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama.” Mao shot back that Nehru was also blaming him for the incident and that “our mistake was not disarming the Dalai Lama right away.” (Presumably, he’s conflating the Tibetan leader with the Tibetan resistance.) Khrushchev was having none of it:

  As to the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet, if we had been in your place, we would not have let him escape. It would be better if he was in a coffin. And now he is in India, and perhaps will go to the USA. Is this to the advantage of the socialist countries?

  “This is impossible,” Mao fired back. “We could not arrest him then. We could not bar him from leaving, since the border is very extended, and he could cross it at any point.” Later on, the Chinese leader nastily accused Khrushchev of being a hypocrite, as the USSR’s bitterest enemies had escaped its borders. “I cannot understand what constitutes our mistake?” he said. “Kerensky [referring to Alexander Kerensky, a Russian politician who’d eluded capture by the Bolsheviks and ended up in Paris] and Trotsky also escaped from you.” The Trotsky affair had been a black mark on early Soviet history. Khrushchev conceded the point.

  The sense of what Mao was saying is clear: the Chinese did not want the Dalai Lama to escape, but the logistics of keeping him in Lhasa were daunting and his eventual escape took them by surprise. The best evidence tells us there was not a Chinese plot to get him to India.

  Sixteen

  MEETING A POET

  he escape left trails of turbulence in its wake. The Chinese followed the Dalai Lama toward the border, pushing south into territory formerly held by the rebels and overwhelming the small bands of resistance fighters there. Many Khampa warriors crossed the border, handed their weapons to the Indian officials, and went to live in the tents provided to the exiles. When their leader, Gompo Tashi, crossed over on April 28, the broad-based rebellion was over. All that was left were small rebel forces in Kham and in southern Tibet who now relied on hit-and-run tactics to harass the Chinese.

  George Patterson looked on the destruction of the Khampa rebellion with despair. He couldn’t forget Tibet. On June 20, two months after the escape, he finally met with the man whom God had, in a way, led him to. “I have heard many things concerning Khamba Gyau [the Bearded Khampa],” His Holiness told him, “and of the great help you have been to Tibet. But even more than in the past you must help us now, in whatever way you can.”

  But after the heady days of March 1959, Patterson felt that the issue of Tibet, which had blazed forth during the Dalai Lama’s escape, had disappeared from the world’s consciousness. He grew depressed. “I had lived for years with a daily expectation that an unknown but divinely prepared set of circumstances was waiting for me, out of which I would learn something new about God,” he wrote. He had also expected to help save Tibet. Neither had transpired. In his disappointment, Patterson fixed on a new, radical plan—to slip back into the Chinese-held territories and film an actual Khampa attack on PLA troops, and then broadcast it to the world. He wanted to prove that the Khampas, given the right support, could challenge PLA control of Tibet and that “they were a far worthier ally for the West than either Korea or Vietnam,” the latter of which by the early 1960s was sucking in American troops and matériel at an alarming rate.

  In May 1964, Patterson and his documentary team took seventeen days to reach the remote Mustang region in neighboring Nepal, where a group of guerrillas based their raids into Tibet. The CIA, which was supporting the Mustang guerrillas with food and weapons, heard about his mission and sent orders that the documentary team be stopped at all costs. Patterson was back in a familiar role: annoying a great power. The last thing the CIA wanted was advertisements about its covert aid to a mortal Chinese enemy. But Patterson, as usual, outwitted the authorities. Hiking to altitudes of 20,000 feet, he and his team arrived on a mountain slope as the Khampas prepared to attack a convoy of four PLA trucks on the valley road below. When the rebels opened up, Patterson filmed the deadly encounter—in which all the PLA soldiers were killed and a Khampa seriously wounded—and then dashed for the Nepalese border, plunging “suicidally down that vertical moving mountainside in a long, sliding, striding dash for the narrow valley beneath.” He and his crew smuggled the sixty cans of film out through the 20,000-foot Khojang Pass, back into Nepal. There they walked into a firestorm: the king of Nepal sacked several cabinet members when he heard about the mission, the CIA cut off funding to the Tibetan guerrillas (a ban that lasted six months), and Patterson was placed under house arrest while authorities scrambled to find—and presumably burn—the film he’d brought back from Tibet. But he’d been expecting that, and the film was smuggled out successfully. The thirty-minute Raid into Tibet debuted two years later, “caused a sensation on British television,” and was syndicated to forty countries.

  Patterson had failed to save Tibet. But he’d transformed the role of the Tibetophile, that collection of melancholy dilettantes and serious ethnographers who’d looked to the Land of Snows for another vision of life. He’d helped create the idea of the Tibet activist, the men and women in San Francisco or London who today devote their lives to actual Tibetans, instead of lamas on carpets.

  Back in Washington, the Tibetan Task Force celebrated the escape. “We were overjoyed in our little unit,” says John Greaney. The reaction from the State Department, as expected, was less positive—the Task Force members got the distinct impression that the diplomats there would have preferred the status quo. But for the CIA, it was, as Ken Knaus called it, “a great coup.” “If you had to plan an operation to go into Tibet and rescue him,” John Greaney clarifies, “that would have been an extremely difficult thing. It would have entailed an invasion of Chinese sovereignty.”

  After the escape, the Task Force turned its attention to the remaining bands of Mustang guerrillas. But the resistance faced horrible problems—the difficulty of dropping enough food to supply the men was so great that some of the Mustang force had to boil their own shoes and eat the soft leather. And the bands of guerrillas inside the country often brought their families along on the campaigns, making them more vulnerable and far less mobile. When Richard Nixon began planning his diplomatic breakthrough with China, the message from the White House to the CIA was clear: end the Tibetan aid. The Americans knew—either because Mao told them or they could read tea leaves—that a rapprochement could never occur when the U.S. government was supporting the rebels. By 1971, the CIA had cut its lifeline to the guerrillas.

  They did so honorably. They alotted 10,000 rupees for every one of the 1,500 fighters left in the Mustang region, to rehabilitate the rebels, buy them land, and open businesses in India. But the Khampas were
devastated by the pullout. “They were incredibly disappointed in the whole outcome of things,” says Knaus. “And understandably so. I’m sure there were those who had great expectations of us and our power.”

  One of those left distraught by the endgame in Tibet, and the efforts at dialogue by His Holiness, was Athar, the CIA-trained guerrilla who’d done so much to help him escape. Living in an Indian refugee camp near the end of his life, he was “cantankerous,” angry at how things had turned out. “Peace, peace, what is this talk of peace?” he wanted to know. “Are the Chinese peaceful? I want to kill them.” The guerrillas had expected to return to Tibet in triumph. When the Mustang rebels finally laid down their arms for good in 1974, several fighters committed suicide rather than give up their weapons.

  Back in Lhasa, one Sera monk who’d joined the rebels was sentenced to ten years in prison, the “earth hell,” as he calls it, for what he did during the uprising. Like so many of the survivors, he is not sorry for having taken up arms against the Chinese. “I have no regret regarding what I did,” he says, pausing to add, “though I mounted up more demerits in my karmic account. The Chinese came to Tibet to capture our land and destroy the Dharma.”

  Palden Gyatso, a monk from Drepung who was arrested and spent thirty-three years in Chinese prisons and labor camps, would go on to write perhaps the most affecting memoir of the Chinese occupation. He would become, in a way, the Solzhenitsyn of Tibet. He wrote at the end of his memoir, Fire Under the Snow:

  Oppressors will always deny they are oppressors. All I can do is bear witness and set down what I saw and heard and what the strange journey of my life has been. Suffering is written now in the valleys and mountains of Tibet. Every village and monastery in the Land of Snows has its own stories of the cruelty inflicted on our people. And that suffering will go on until the day Tibet is free.

  Yonten, the sixteen-year-old protester who had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, was taken to the Ngachen labor camp. His first day there, a Chinese official gave a speech, in which he called the Tibetans “barbaric cannibals” and “exploiters of the common people.” Around Yonten were the men and women who’d played such a large part in the uprising: monks, lamas, the women who’d marched through Lhasa, daring the PLA to shoot them. The faces of the people that he’d remembered from that morning of March 10 when the uprising began, vivid with daring, now looked shell-shocked. The prisoners spent their days carrying rocks, drilling, and setting TNT charges as they helped build a dam as part of a huge hydroelectric project. When the sounds of explosions died off, the voices from the loudspeakers strategically placed around the camp could be heard talking about the motherland and sacrifice.

  “I suffered a lot of pain, torture and was so terrified,” he remembers. Prisoners were forced to compete against one another to see who could do the most work. Rockslides buried several Tibetan workers under tons of stone, and falling boulders came tumbling down the slopes into the work parties. Many prisoners were lost in a twilight of depression. “On the way to the toilet, we saw each other’s pale faces and limbs and wondered whether there was any drop of blood left in our body,” Yonten said. The Tibetans suffered the same fate as dissidents sent away during the Cultural Revolution: beatings, starvation, “reeducation sessions,” torture (including being hung by their hair), forced confessions.

  Four years into his sentence, Yonten learned that his father had died years earlier in a hard labor camp at Kansu, in China. “Many prisoners died from extreme hardship and starvation,” he was told by a cook who’d been at Kansu. “Your father was among the first group of prisoners to die.” Soon after, he was told that his older sister had also perished in another far-flung prison.

  After his capture, Soepa, the Norbulingka official who’d returned to deliver the Dalai Lama’s letter, lay in a hospital, his damaged leg slowly growing infected. He began to dream of a returning army of Khampas and monks and Tibetan soldiers swinging into view through his window, back to smash the PLA and free the prisoners. “I mused that, for the moment, we had lost,” he said. “But since the rest of our forces were on the other side of the river, I hoped they would be supported by international assistance, including India, and come back.” Sometimes he would lift his head and look out his window, which faced the Kyichu River, to see if he could spot the troops arriving en masse. His neck began to cramp from his constant vigil. He wasn’t the only one waiting for a miraculous return. In southern Tibet, a young Tibetan recalls the effect that a plane passing over his village during this period would have on the local people. “We used to bow down at once,” the young man wrote, “and pray that it was His Holiness returning to us.”

  The Chinese began to interrogate Soepa. He recognized one of them. Soepa had regarded him as a rare Chinese friend, but now he realized the man had probably been a spy, assigned to report on his activities for the last five years.

  Soepa told his interrogators that he hadn’t done anything during the rebellion. He claimed to be a low-level servant in the Norbulingka, “in charge of the tea,” and that he’d stayed at the summer palace only because he’d been unable to escape before the shooting began. The questioners asked about His Holiness’s escape, but Soepa said he knew nothing at all about the matter. “If you don’t cooperate,” his interrogators threatened, “it will be easy to finish you off with a single shot.” One of the officials unholstered his pistol and laid it on the table.

  Soepa looked at the gun. He’d lost his fear of death inside the Norbulingka, when it had eluded him despite a dogged pursuit. He left the gun where it was.

  “You can kill me if you want to,” he told them, “but I have nothing to say.”

  Soepa was taken to the Jiuquan labor camp. He soon saw a number of his fellow fighters begin to disintegrate under the harsh conditions—forced labor, constant interrogations, and thamzins in which prisoners were goaded into beating their fellow convicts. After one grueling session, Soepa found the Dalai Lama’s personal physician on the veranda of the prison. He’d been thrashed so badly that he was unable to remove his bloody shirt, which was now rubbing against his open wounds and causing him fresh pain. Soepa tried to help him, but the man’s torso had swollen so much from the beating that it was impossible. Finally, the younger man simply tore off the shirt. He could now see the doctor’s back, “blue, black and reddish-brown from beating … it looked as if it would burst there and then.”

  Food was often scarce or inedible in the camps and prisons. Of the 76 men transported to Jiuquan with Soepa, only 22 lived. “All but one of the others, 53 men, died of starvation,” he says. A military doctor captured by the Chinese remembers that he and the other Tibetan prisoners would scavenge for dried human excrement to eat, hoping a few nutrients remained. “We ate little balls of excrement as if we were eating those little pastry balls we make for the New Year,” he says. “We chose Chinese shit rather than Tibetan shit because the Chinese were fed better!”

  Prisoners began to break down, including one former cabinet minister who’d secretly asked Soepa if he thought escape was possible. When Soepa replied that the Chinese had at least three layers of security around the prison, the minister looked despondent—he’d been hoping to make it as far as the Kyichu River, where he could drown himself and begin an auspicious reincarnation. The man later cut himself in the head with a broken bottle and was led away by guards, screaming, “The Communist Party is lying!”

  Soepa was sent from Lhasa to a Chinese prison. The day of his departure he remembered as the worst in his life. His family, hearing of his transfer, came to see him off. The Chinese warned the prisoners against saying anything remotely controversial to the visitors, so Soepa barely spoke to his loved ones. His mother “could not utter a single word and cried, holding my hand tightly in hers.” The next morning, the prisoners were loaded into a line of idling Japanese-made trucks, painted oddly bright colors against the dun-colored winter hills. Thirty men and two guards went into each vehicle. “We were allowed neither to
talk nor to look about,” Soepa remembered. “As we left, my mind turned completely blank.”

  At the prison they were taken to, Soepa met a famous Tibetan intellectual, who told him that imprisonment had caused a change in the thinking among many rebels. They were now “openly accepting their roles in the uprising with the hopes of being pardoned.” It was an alluring thought. Soepa gave in, telling the interrogators about his efforts in the battle for the Norbulingka, but withholding any information on his role in the escape. About that, he feigned complete ignorance. The Chinese questioner blew up at him, his face scarlet with anger, but Soepa insisted he didn’t know a single detail. His allegiance to the Dalai Lama remained, stronger even than his sense of self-preservation.

  The confession did no good. Soepa was transferred to a tougher prison, Chiu-chon, “a deserted and forlorn place with no other human habitations nearby.” Here he mixed with hard-core Chinese criminals, pimps, thieves, and murderers serving life sentences and was forbidden to talk to his fellow Tibetans. A high-ranking PLA officer, marked by a harelip, would make sudden inspections carrying a thin metal wire. Without warning, he’d lash out with the homemade whip, slicing it across the faces and backs of the prisoners, cutting flesh to ribbons.