In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  A single row of seats ran down the right side of the plane’s interior. On the left, a small photo of the Dalai Lama was taped to the fuselage. Gendun watched closely while three Caucasian men demonstrated how to fasten a seat belt. As the plane’s propellers revved, they drew the curtains. Then, returning from the front cabin after takeoff, they opened them and passed out paper cups containing a cold brown drink. “What is this, rum?” Gendun asked the Tibetan interpreter in the group. The translator spoke to one of the white men in an unfamiliar language. “This is a foreign drink,” he momentarily announced to his compatriots. “It is called Coca-Cola.” After sipping Coca-Cola, the passengers were each given a tray of food. Grappling with roast beef sandwiches, pickles, salt and pepper shakers, a few of the Tibetans, wondering if it too was some strange new food, unwrapped the small bars of soap beside their plates and ate them as well. Following dinner, they relaxed for the first time since their journey had begun two days before. In typical Khampa style, they left the odd chairs and, indifferent to their surroundings, sat cross-legged on the floor. A pair of ivory dice materialized and a raucous session of shö, Tibet’s most popular game of chance, was shortly underway, each player shouting at the top of his lungs as his turn came to hurl the dice down. After a brief fuel stop late in the night the men eventually went to sleep, waking the next morning to behold a brilliant expanse of sunlit water shimmering below—their first sight of an ocean.

  After a day in the air, the small plane landed. An army transport backed directly up to the steps in its rear and drove the Tibetans off. The climate was cool and a heavy rain pummeled the roof. Finding a small hole in the canvas, Gendun pried it larger and bending down, was able to look outside. Orientals, holding umbrellas against the downpour, walked past stores with Chinese characters on their signs. Gendun assumed that he was in Taiwan. The truck passed through a checkpoint in a wire fence and then stopped by two small buildings hidden behind a thick stand of trees. Inside, the Tibetans were shown to a row of cots in a barren room in which they were to spend the next twenty-eight days, forbidden, when outside, to go beyond the immediate surroundings.

  The men soon realized that they were quartered in a remote corner of a vast military base—not in Taiwan, but on Okinawa, as was subsequently revealed. One day the man with the pipe spoke to them through their interpreter. He said that they had been waiting for a second group of Tibetans. It now appeared that the entire contingent had been apprehended by India’s IB while crossing the Pakistan border. As a result, they were to proceed alone. “Each of your backgrounds has been closely checked to ensure that you are not a Chinese spy,” he stated. “You are going to receive new names in my language and from now on you must respond only to them.” To the Tibetans’ great amusement, they were forthwith dubbed Doug, Bob, Willy, Jack, Rocky, Martin and Lee, confirming what many of them had already surmised, to wit, that the Communists’ worst enemy had finally seen fit to become the Tibetans’ best friend—a distant country called America.

  Once more the gray airplane, its curtains, fastened, rose noisily into the sky. An odd comradeship between the white men and their charges had developed. While the Tibetans gambled on the floor, drank Coca-Cola, shouted and laughed, the Westerners, clearly taken by their unrestrained spirits, walked up and down the wide aisle, periodically placing their hands in prayer before the Dalai Lama’s photo and grinning broadly. Though they repeatedly order their passengers to go to sleep—going so far as to hustle them into their seats and turn the overhead lights out—the Khampas, accustomed to taking orders only from their own tribal chieftains, persisted in returning to the floor to gamble in the dark. In the morning a large island appeared in the sea below. After they landed, the men rested for a day, in the course of which the American with the pipe insisted on having his picture taken with Gendun. They got back on board and the aircraft took off, flying through a second night until, looking out toward sunset the following day, Gendun noticed a long coastline below, with a large city sprawled across low-lying hills in its midst. As they crossed a range of dun-colored mountains, he saw the lights of another great city, among which the plane soon landed. Once more army trucks were waiting. This time, though, the temperature was extremely cold. After driving upward for three hours, a rest stop was taken by the side of the road. Stepping from the trucks, the Tibetans were astonished to see towering, snow-covered peaks under a brilliant starry sky. The mountains looked so familiar that for a moment some thought that they had returned to Tibet. Others, after five weeks in tight quarters, ran wildly through the fresh-fallen snow oblivious of their wet sneakers and were only boarded once more with a good deal of effort by their escorts. Three hours farther into the mountains, they passed a checkpoint in a barbed-wire fence and drove up a long valley. At its end stood a cluster of single-story buildings. Inside one each man was assigned a bed, beside which stood a small table neatly stacked with pencil, pad and towels. The barracks was bare and immaculate, but Gendun found a single telltale item which had eluded the keepers, an old pencil, its eraser end covered by toothmarks. In Tibet, when writing, it was the normal procedure to hold one’s pen between the teeth while using both hands to fold the paper into lines. The toothmarks convinced Gendun that Tibetans had been there before. From then on he was sure that he was in America.

  The second island in the sea had been Hawaii; the city on the coastline, San Francisco; the one landed at, Denver; the mountain base the Tibetans had been taken to, Camp Hale, eighteen miles north of Leadville, Colorado. Used during the World War II for high-altitude combat training, Camp Hale had been redesigned for the creation of a clandestine Tibetan army under the direct administration of the CIA.

  The decision to train Tibetans in the United States was made little more than a month after the March uprising. On April 21, 1959, three weeks after the Dalai Lama’s escape, General Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, field commander of the National Volunteer Defense Army, confronted with overwhelming Chinese forces, gave orders for his Lhoka-based headquarters to be abandoned. While guerrillas continued to function in separate units throughout Lhoka, the NVDA’s chief officers sought refuge in the NEFA, Gompo Tashi himself suffering from debilitating wounds. Proceeding to Darjeeling, he met with the organization’s leader, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup, and together with their advisers, the two men laid plans for the next stage of the NVDA’s fight, which, now that China stood in outright possession of Tibet, was to be based on a substantially closer involvement with the CIA.

  To date, the CIA’s training of Khampas had been limited. On Guam and Okinawa (the agency’s forward station for monitoring its Tibetan operation), recruits had received four months of instruction, after which, armed with a tommy gun, a radio and poison, to be self-administered in the event of capture, they were flown from Bangkok and dropped by parachute into Tibet to organize cells. While only pons or tribal chieftains and their sons had been used, the new project, begun in May 1959, called for the instruction of five groups totaling almost 500 men, selected both for their physical stature and to represent each district in Tibet’s three provinces. As in the past, once training was complete, they were to be dropped into their native regions to organize a resistance that eventually would be linked to the broad body of NVDA troops, who hoped to relocate to a new base somewhere on Tibet’s borders.

  The utmost secrecy shrouded the operation. The Tibetans were never told that they were in the United States. Thus, if any man was captured, American involvement could not be proved. Meanwhile, training a covert army of Asians in the middle of the Rocky Mountains warranted the greatest care. By mid-July 1959, the CIA had planted a front page story in the Denver Post reporting that atomic testing—though not bomb detonation—was to be conducted at Camp Hale. The vast area of 14,000-foot peaks and valleys covered by the camp was henceforth strictly off bounds to the civilian population. People who were near Peterson Air Force Base, outside of Colorado Springs, when a subsequent group of Tibetans was flown out, found themselves deta
ined. Up to forty-seven at a time were held at gunpoint behind army roadblocks until mysterious buses, their windows painted black, had passed by. When news of unidentified Orientals in Colorado reached the New York Times, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara personally had the story suppressed. As a final resort, soldiers guarding the most sensitive areas of the base—as well as the Tibetans themselves—were given explicit instructions to shoot to kill anyone found within the perimeters.

  Gendun’s group was the fourth to arrive at Camp Hale. On their first day the men were issued black combat boots and green army fatigues. After breakfast, they were taken on a tour of the camp’s immediate area, which consisted of ten buildings near the bank of a small river. All around, heavily forested mountains screened off the outside world, but even within the camp restrictions were imposed. Their barracks, the dining hall, the classrooms and a large room with odd-looking tables called “pool” and “Ping-Pong” were the only areas Tibetans were permitted in. They were told as much at their first lecture given by a large instructor in combat fatigues. Informing the group that training would last for six months, the American concluded by asking two questions: “Will you jump from an airplane? If so, raise your hands.” Pleased with the response, he smiled and said, “Who wants to fight the Chinese?”

  Camp Hale’s curriculum covered a wide variety of topics. Addressed by their English names, stamped on plastic panels pinned to visored caps, the Tibetans were taught weaponry, survival techniques, radio operations, coding, how to organize an underground network, make letter drops and chart contact points. Morning classes began with a twenty-six-letter, ten-number code used in wireless transmission, map reading, and compass work. One-of-a-kind equipment had been manufactured by the CIA specially for the Tibetans’ use, including radios no larger than a hand yet powerful enough to transmit clearly over vast distances. M-1 rifles, mortars, bazookas and silencers were among the weapons employed. The men were taught parachuting, rock climbing and river crossing and went through exercises in which deer had to be killed and butchered on the run, the meat eaten raw for a week, while instructors (often pursuing with live ammunition) hunted their pupils. They were also introduced to the more refined arts of espionage. Gendun was told that on being sent into Tibet, he must spend days in hiding, observing the daily patterns of his parents and relatives to be certain, before making contact, that they were not working with, or being observed by the Chinese. He was then taught to establish resistance cells which would report regularly to him on Chinese troop movements. They were to be ready at all times for the signal to rise up in revolt as part of a coordinated effort across the whole country. He learned how to move by night through hostile territory, how to pass, disguised, through checkposts if forced to move by day, and if captured, how to resist interrogation. Holding to a fixed story for as long as possible, he was gradually to lead the Chinese to believe that he was breaking, choosing the most credible moment to stage a collapse, after which he would present them with the supposedly true account of his identity, itself also a fabrication, prepared long before.

  After a few months at Camp Hale, 125 more Tibetans arrived. A short while later Gendun completed his training and was chosen, among eighty of the most proficient men, to be dropped into Tibet. Though each man’s assignment was kept secret from the others, the Tibetans learned, through a bit of their own spying, that their group was only the latest strand in a web already woven around the entire countryside. One day, while sweeping a normally guarded staff building, a Tibetan trainee found himself alone. Looking behind the large white sheets that covered a wall in the main room, he discovered a detailed map of Tibet. All across it red pins marked the location of agents. Rummaging about further, he found prepacked parachute bags, with the names of his own group stenciled on them. Their contents included radios, lightweight pistols and silencers. A short while later, Gendun was taken under cover of darkness out of Camp Hale to embark on the long journey home. In the course of his stay, however, much had changed, altering not only the CIA-Tibetan link but the entire balance of power in Central Asia.

  At 5:00 a.m. on the morning of October 20, 1962, Chinese artillery opened fire on a small Indian border garrison guarding the Kameng Division of the NEFA. An hour later, 20,000 Chinese troops poured over the Thagla Ridge while 1,500 miles away a simultaneous attack in Ladakh was launched. The PLA pushed all the way to Bomdila in the east and captured 14,500 square miles of the Aksai Chin in the west before, on November 21, withdrawing to the original McMahon line separating India and Tibet in the NEFA. Only four months after the expiration of Panch Sheel, Nehru’s decade-long effort at amicable relations with the People’s Republic had abruptly collapsed, the victim of Chinese border claims and a plainly expansionist policy. New Delhi’s humiliating defeat forced him to admit that: “We have been living in a fool’s paradise of our own making”; whereafter he turned directly to the United States for support against future aggression.

  At the core of India’s belated effort to arm its northern border lay the formation, under CIA tutelage, of a new clandestine commando group, known as the Special Frontier Force and code-named Establishment 22, after its chief base. Raised on November 13, 1962, under the command of the Research and Analysis Wing of Indian Intelligence (RAW), the SFF was to be an entirely Tibetan force charged with the mission of guarding the world’s highest border. Though its existence was staunchly denied by the Tibetan government-in-exile, Indian sources portrayed its critical role in easing the difficult CIA-Khampa connection through Pakistan with a new, direct channel via New Delhi. According to the same sources, much of the NVDA’s activities were henceforth administered under 22’s auspices directly from the Indian capital. A special communications base was set up south of Calcutta in Orissa, from which, in an area free of dense radio traffic, weekly communication with the operatives in Tibet could easily be maintained.

  Returning to Asia, Gendun was taken off combat status and assigned, instead, to the staff of the Orissa center. Here, two large receivers, attached to special antennas able to pick up the most remote signals emanating from north of the Himalayas provided a steady stream of information. Recorded by Gendun and ten co-workers, the data were transmitted in numerical code by teletype to the NVDA’s headquarters in New Delhi. After a time, Gendun was transferred to work in New Delhi itself. There he decoded messages in the company of three other wireless men and two file clerks in an innocuous-looking one-story building, traveling to and from work each day, for eleven years, hidden under blankets in a station wagon. Each Monday night a joint meeting of senior officers in the NVDA, RAW and CIA representatives was convened, at which cyclostyled copies of the week’s transcripts from Tibet were analyzed and directives given. Concurrently the most visible of all efforts to fight for Tibet freedom took shape in the NVDA’s new forward base.

  In the middle of 1960, with CIA training well underway, leaders of Tibet’s resistance chose the 750-square-mile kingdom of Mustang as the best seat for re-forming their operations. Jutting at 15,000 feet, like an elevated wedge, into western Tibet, Mustang had been appended to Nepal as a vassal state since the early nineteenth century. Over a month’s trek from Katmandu, however, it was so isolated as to have no contact with the government of Nepal beyond paying an annual tax of little more than $100. The kingdom’s principal approach from the south lay through the needle-thin Kali Gandaki Gorge, the deepest gorge in the world (by virtue of its lying between two of the planet’s highest peaks, Annapurna and Dhaulagiri), and virtually impassable if defended. But Mustang’s chief value lay in its strategic proximity to the Xinjiang-Lhasa road. As one of Tibet’s two main arteries, the highway originated in Kham and ran along the entire northern scarp of the Himalayas through to the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh, from where it looped northwest into Xinjiang and the Sino-Soviet front beyond. Its dirt roadbed and single telegraph line united Chinese garrisons over 1,500 miles of sensitive border. Mustang also had the advantage of being one of the few remnant pockets of indigenous Tibe
tan culture. As such, it was home ground for the Khampas: both a haven from which to raid Chinese columns and nearby camps with impunity and a vital rear base for guerrillas still active in southern and eastern Tibet.

  Late in 1960, NVDA troops began arriving in Mustang. Though subsequently joined by guerrilla bands coming directly from Tibet, the project was spearheaded by men who had retreated from Lhoka with General Gompo Tashi. Collected from road gangs, they proceeded to Darjeeling and Gangtok, from where, organized in groups of forty, they proceeded westward, crossed secretly into the thick jungle of southern Nepal and trekking up through the alpine terrain of the Kali Gandaki Gorge, emerged finally onto the arid, windswept Tibetan Plateau, at Mustang’s border. Welcomed by the kingdom’s twenty-third monarch—whose fear of the nearby PLA exceeded only that of an independent army on his own ground—they established a network of interlocking bases. Some were forward tent camps manned by only a hundred to two hundred troops; others were supply depots built around preexistent towns and monasteries. Headquarters was placed to the rear, on Mustang’s southern rim, an hour and a half north of Jomosom, the last Nepalese town. In time, twenty-five buildings housing five departments—supply, transport, ammunition, intelligence and internal discipline—rose between a deep gorge and the foot of the heavily wooded Nilgiri Mountain. At their center stood the office of General Baba Yeshi—Mustang’s commander—a three-storied building surrounded by a wall with a parapet; a huge Tibetan mastiff was chained to the main gate, the flag of Tibet flew in its courtyard. Besides the locale, Tibetan ponies tethered hitching posts and Khampa troops clad in captured PLA jackets and bandoliers, all gave, as one veteran recalled, a “Wild West flavor” to the place. But it was precisely the dry, rocky environment that made creating the Mustang base extremely difficult in the beginning. Before sufficient supplies could be parachuted in, most of the initial 4,000 men were reduced to boiling their boots and saddles for food, with some, according to one account, carrying out raids across the border into Tibet, not to attack the Chinese, but to steal livestock for their own survival.