The Secret War Over Tibet
II, John B. Roberts
The Secret War Over T I 13'n' 5 John 5. Roberts The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, doesn't want his secrets revealed. He has given his blessing to a new Hollywood film,...
...The American Spectator December 1997 The Tibetan operation meant that the CIA could depend less on British intelligence to develop an understanding of China...
...That is where Gyalo Thondup's CIA control officer and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker awaited the Dalai Lama's arrival...
...Some OSS officers were old China hands, and had fought alongside Mao Tse-tung's forces against the Japanese...
...He had no illusions that the Chinese would be beaten...
...Some delegations sought an accommodation with China, on terms that would maintain some autonomy for Tibet...
...Galbraith was adamant...
...The backbone of the rebellion had been smashed...
...Some of the Tibetan aid groups were CIA-created fronts...
...Today China is entrenched in Tibet, newly triumphant in Hong Kong, and reasserting its sovereignty over Taiwan...
...However, a drastic step like recall is usually a single incident...
...There they were trained in the basic doctrines of guerrilla warfare, tactical small-arms use, explosives, and the tradecraft of underground resistance movements...
...Pretending he didn't know whether the U.S...
...The beginning of the end came in March,1959, when a general uprising known in intelligence annals as the "Tibetan Rebellion" broke out...
...The secret archives include a shameful episode involving Clinton's favorite presidency, the Kennedy administration, and Democratic icon John Kenneth Galbraith...
...Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency were unusually helpful in the research for this article, although it reports events that are still classified today...
...The name Chushi Gangdruk means "Four Rivers, Six Ranges," and describes the Tibetan homeland of Tashi's fighters...
...Bud Hughes] leaves me no choice (Correspondence, TAS, October 1997...
...From Thailand, C-13o aircraft flew men and supplies over Indian airspace for parachute drops into Chinese-occupied Tibet...
...Embassy in India gives a sense of this difficulty: "Info Contel 91 July 31 and Embtel 44o (rptd Cal unnumbered) Aug 1 suggests unreliable intermediaries figured critically in failure effort persuade DL leave Yatung...
...A veteran of "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, America's clandestine predecessor to the CIA, Dulles gained field experience during World War II as the OSS hustled to organize U.S...
...Political action...
...Stopping the Communist conquest of Tibet was attractive to the U.S., but not if it would alienate Chiang Kai-shek, who opposed Tibetan independence...
...He sent his superiors a memo that claimed there were plenty of surplus guns stashed in Europe...
...Throughout the entire Tibetan airdrop operation, Ropka never lost a single airplane...
...Within a few years Richard Nixon would make his historic trek to China, heralding rapprochement between Washington and Peking...
...By the late 1950's the CIA had plenty of assets inside Tibet...
...CIA cabled U.S...
...A secret cable from November 15, 1951, reports the U.S...
...Again, the Dakota aircraft transported willing novices from base camps in Nepal to Colorado for training, and Aderholt's clandestine air force planes parachuted trained men and supplies back into Tibet...
...Although he has remained in his brother's shadow, Thondup's role in Tibet's fight for freedom is unsurpassed...
...The grammatical solecism in a New York Times headline ("25 Million Pounds of Beef Is Recalled"), gleefully displayed in October's Current Wisdom, may not be that at all...
...JOHN B. ROBERTS II is a television producer and freelance journalist...
...A delegation speaking in the name of the Dalai Lama asked for support for Tibet's independence, and inquired whether the U.S...
...As a bonus, compatible guns meant Tibetan rebels could use captured Chinese ammunition...
...But I consider any infringement on my own, private, personal hedonistic pursuits to be a gross violation of my fundamental liberties...
...Sam Cummings, now an internationally known arms dealer, was then a young weapons expert in CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence...
...The Dalai Lama was told that while American planes couldn't fly into Lhasa to take him into exile, the U.S...
...By late April, Galbraith had arrived in New Delhi...
...The 1960 elections brought a change of administrations...
...You should cancel his subscription...
...Soon after learning about the CIA program, Galbraith met with President Kennedy over breakfast to express his reservations...
...5 ut by far the most important CIA asset was an agent named Gyalo Thondup, elder brother to the Dalai Lama...
...By then, many years had passed since he ushered the young Sam Cummings into Allen Dulles's office, and put into motion the arming of CIA's secretwarriors in Tibet American diplomacy was shifting...
...In view of this delicate balancing act, the U.S...
...Hong Kong, we used to call it our window on China...
...Thanks to Thondup's liaison with the CIA, the Chinese were prevented from capturing the Dalai Lama...
...Cummings was persuasive, and soon found himself on a clandestine mission in Europe...
...Prime Minister Nehru's relations with the neighboring Chinese were complex, but they were certain to be badly strained if China interpreted the overflights as tacit Indian support for the secret war...
...Thondup's case officer spent a career in the CIA...
...I went in to Ambassador Galbraith and told him we needed an exception, but he (Continued on page 85) 35 Roberts/Tibet (Continuedfrompage33) wouldn't approve a drop...
...I've sort of trained myself to forget about the operational detail," he explains...
...Cut off and surrounded, between six and eight thousand Tibetans were annihilated by the Chinese in a massacre that has been shrouded in secrecy for more than thirty years...
...For almost fifty years, the record of Dulles's clandestine operation has remained buried in the government's secret archives...
...JOHN F. RICHARDSON Bordentown, New Jersey Husked When I composed my tongue-in-cheek letter claiming that liberals subscribe to TAS just to cancel and create the appearance that there is a break in the conservative ranks, I did not intend to get into a "point-counterpoint" situation...
...They were wrong when they stopped to fight a pitched battle with the Chinese...
...America's support for Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalists on Formosa complicated matters...
...The case officer wants to make it clear that he knew the covert war would have ended, sooner or later...
...With no accommodation possible, the Dalai Lama took up the standing American offer of help in getting out of Tibet...
...The take was very good," says the former case officer...
...Efforts to resist the Chinese alone would have been futile...
...SAL MARINELLO Maplewood, New Jersey The American Spectator December r 9 97 85...
...In the summer 011950, skirmishing at border posts broke out between China and Tibet...
...Soon Tibetan resistance armies like the Chushi Gangdruk, a force of freedom fighters headed by Andruk Gonpo Tashi, were in the field...
...In response to the U-2 incident, and India's growing qualms, Eisenhower ordered risky CIA overflights stopped...
...The memo noted that new plans were being developed for Tibet's resistance...
...Many factors fueled the uprising, including unthinkable Chinese barbarities, communal land policies, and the crowding of refugees into the capital city of Lhasa...
...Paramilitary...
...Air Force Major Larry Ropka, said to be "CIA's finest aerial infiltration planner," handled the operation...
...Just as the Nicaraguan contras later relied on base camps in neighboring Honduras, the Tibetans used Nepal as a staging ground...
...Nowhere, perhaps, was the Dalai Lama's progress more anxiously tracked than at the U.S...
...Bob Kerrey still doesn't get it after two years he never will...
...They were valued mainly for their utility in harassing the Chinese—and for the intelligence, including captured documents, they could provide to CIA...
...Owing largely to the Vietnam war era television images of self-immolating Buddhist monks, many Americans mistakenly believe that all Buddhists practice non-violence and passive resistance...
...spying and sabotage operations...
...A few weeks later, the young analyst was summoned to meet with Dulles...
...To analysts at CIA headquarters, Communist China was at first enigmatic, puzzling, labyrinthine...
...After reading TAS for the last two years, especially the last two years, this husker liberal considers TAS "the enemy...
...With its major force wiped out, the CIA operation was reduced to minor cross-border raids and harassment of the Chinese occupation forces...
...aid to the Tibetan freedom fighters...
...The mountain flying, unaided by radar and modem instrument navigational systems, was hazardous even in good conditions...
...From the beginning, Galbraith opposed U.S...
...Diplomatic considerations made it even more complicated...
...What neither film portrays are facts about the true adventures—and tragedy—of Tibetan freedom fighters that have remained secret for decades...
...But one thing was clear from the beginning...
...The retired case officer believes that the new CIA director, John McCone, had President Kennedy's authorization to carry out the airdrop as an exception to the rule, provided that Galbraith agreed...
...To cloak their origin, 32 December 1997 • The American Spectator guns had to be compatible with Chinese military stocks...
...Richard Helms, who would later be CIA directorwhen the Tibet war ground to an end, ushered the 24-year-old Cummings into Dulles's office...
...Captured Chinese documents estimated that as many as 85,000 Tibetans had been killed in the fighting...
...Weapons were a problem...
...Because the route involved overflights of India, there was always a risk that a plane would go down in Indian territory...
...While the State Department temporized about how much aid to give the Dalai Lama before he left Tibet, Dulles began to explore arming and training the Tibetan resistance...
...In both cases, when the freedom fighters were at their moment of greatest peril, the Kennedy administration chose to abandon them...
...The U.S...
...It went against everything we trained them to do...
...By early 1951, Tibet's emissaries had made contact with American diplomats in neighboring India...
...Gyalo Thondup was a good agent," says the retired CIA officer who met clandestinely with the Dalai Lama's brother to plan the exodus from Tibet...
...However the response to my letter from the fine, upstanding liberal from the great state of Nebraska [Mr...
...In response, the Chinese shelled the crowd with artillery...
...Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent top-secret cables to embassies in Ceylon, Thailand, and India, instructing ambassadors to sound out the prospects for asylum for the Dalai Lama...
...Perhaps they were motivated by the desire to prevent Hollywood's propagation of revisionist histories about what really happened in Tibet...
...to push for Tibetan independence at the U.N...
...Communications had to be relayed by messenger over mountain passes...
...That's not how you end it...
...Indeed, this sort of cranial instability is a sort of taxonomic marker for the modem, allegedly (but not really) liberty-loving conservative, as opposed to his libertarian counterpart, whose head remains steady when the question turns to matters of individual liberty...
...Using this fighting as a pretext, China invaded Tibet with more than 8o,000 troops...
...The amount of beef cited would simply define an understood collective noun, thus: "A shipment (of lot) of beef, amounting to 25 million pounds, is recalled...
...You don't leave a guy in the middle of a pitched battle," he says evenly...
...A fitting of a headline into an always limited space demands often heroic economy of words...
...Although its numbers were small compared to the divisions of the People's Liberation Army, the CIA regarded them as an effective fighting force...
...and Tibet...
...Some 30,000 Tibetans flocked to the gates of the Dalai Lama's palace to protect him...
...Oki Correspondence (Continuedfrompage 12) it was the perennial one: Learn to admire me as I have learned to admire myself...
...A memo from Dulles to the White House summarized the Agency's view of its guerrillas: The Tibetans, particularly the Khambas, Goloks, and other tribes of East Tibet, are a fierce, brave and warlike people...
...What bothered him was the betrayal...
...President Kennedy nominated John Kenneth Galbraith to replace Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador to India...
...would do all it could to aid him in fleeing Tibet...
...But few expected the remaining Tibetan freedom fighters to win independence...
...Cummings had been in Europe shortly after World War II, and had seen stockpiles of Nazi arms himself...
...Bunker took this double-talk to mean that while India did not oppose aid to Tibet's guerrillas, neither would it risk offending China through apparent complicity in the CIA operation...
...One of the best-kept secrets of the Tibetan War is Ambassador Galbraith's role in the abandonment of an army of Tibetan guerrillas caught in a pitched battle...
...Sending written notes the Chinese might intercept was risky...
...When they succeeded, the recruits came mainly from Eastern Tibet, tribal peoples known as the Khambas...
...Tibet's army was tiny and poorly equipped...
...Tibet changed the intelligence outlook...
...And in another Hollywood Tibetan epic, based on the memoirs of German mountaineer Heinrich Harmer, actor Brad Pitt re-enacts a spiritual odyssey with the Dalai Lama in Tibet's remote and mysterious mountain kingdom...
...Acheson wanted U.S...
...His office received a routine copy of the Defense Department report, and he knew immediately that it was wrong...
...If this constituent of Sen...
...My view was it wouldn't hurt a damned bit to do one more drop...
...CIA-trained Chushi Gangdruk fighters were strategically deployed along a southern route leading from Lhasa across the Himalayas to India...
...Others were legitimate organizations that had been penetrated by CIA agents, who eagerly pushed the Tibetan human rights cause...
...It is hard to imagine today, in an age of satellites and the Internet, how remote Tibet was in the fifties...
...The more immediate problem was how to support Tibet's resistance war...
...The message Acheson referred to in his cable confirmed America's standing offer to the Dalai Lama: "our original position—full aid and assistance to you when you come out...
...Like Communist China, the Nationalists also viewed Tibet as a historic part of the Chinese empire...
...It was a shell of its former self when it was officially canceled in 1968 under Richard Helms...
...Accompanied by a Hollywood cinematographer named Leo Lippe, and under the flimsy pretext of needing Nazi weapons for use as props in a series of war movies, he spent 1951 and 1952 moving around Europe purchasing old Nazi arms for the CIA...
...CIA Director Dulles articulated the policy that it was better to emphasize the human rights issues, instead of sovereignty, and the CIA paid for Tibetan delegations to travel to Geneva to press their case before international organizations...
...34 December 1997 The American Spectator To be precise, Washington had only five more days to wait for the Dalai Lama's safe emergence in India...
...Or perhaps this is one of those rare occasions when the Central Intelligence Agency decides to take some well-deserved credit for one of its successes by revealing tidbits from its secret history...
...He was vital not only to CIA paramilitary operations in Tibet, but to the Dalai Lama's safe flight into exile...
...could not afford to create a diplomatic incident by losing a planeload of covert weapons in India...
...31 After Mao Tse-tung and the Peoples Liberation Army pushed the Nationalist Chinese off the mainland in the late 1940's, Peking turned its attention to consolidating its territory...
...government...
...The British protested American operations in their "sphere of influence," which to Britain meant half the world...
...These included agents, paramilitary troops, and commanders...
...While special operations Air Force planes stood by to parachute ammunition and supplies to the Tibetan freedom fighters, Galbraith refused to give permission for the CIA to resupply its covert Tibetan army...
...By March's end the wait was over...
...The clandestine radio broadcasts, once relayed to Washington, were then retransmitted to the CIA Station in New Delhi...
...In Tibet, as in Cuba, only air support and airdrops of supplies could help trapped men fight their way out of desperate situations...
...OSS specialized in behindthe-lines support to resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe, parachuting agents, supplies, and officers deep behind enemy lines...
...But the sparks that ignited the tinder were rumors that China was about to kidnap the Dalai Lama...
...He acknowledges that the guerrillas themselves were partly to blame for the disaster, which went against all known tactical sense...
...A month of fighting between the Chinese and Tibetan resistance in the south near the Dalai Lama's route into exile had virtually decimated the guerrillas...
...But in May of that same year, a U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Soviet airspace...
...The scale of Dulles's covert war dwarfed William Casey and President Reagan's aid to Nicaragua's contras, but both programs had their roots in the experience that former OSS officers Allen Dulles and Bill Casey shared running World War II's clandestine liberation wars behind enemy lines...
...was dropping arms into Tibet, the Indian foreign minister cautioned that India would shoot down mysterious aircraft over its territory, presuming them to be Chinese...
...They didn't know who could be trusted to safely and accurately convey messages, and who might be a Chinese agent...
...Coded radio messages were broadcast from Tibet's peaks to CIA listening posts on Okinawa, and then relayed to Washington, where Dulles anxiously monitored the day-by-day movements during the two-week-long trek...
...In the late fifties and early sixties, Nehru was becoming increasingly cooperative with the Soviet Union, and a breach with China might have furthered India's pro-Soviet tilt...
...The event occurred on the eve of a major summit, and proved a huge diplomatic embarrassment for the United States...
...Under the Eisenhower administration, Dulles got permission to train the recruits in OSS-type sabotage techniques, demolition, and The American Spectator • December 1997 33 most importantly, code-and-cipher work for radio operators...
...He was smart, articulate...
...The Dalai Lama's trek lasted from mid-March until the beginning of April...
...THAYER SMITH, M.D...
...When he discusses the Tibetan operation, he is still careful to shelter confidences...
...Somewhere there is a needy individual who really could use that copy of TAS...
...OSS veterans like Dulles had the mindset and experience to run guerrilla operations behind Chinese lines...
...Pockets of resistance were short on food, supplies, and hope...
...Guerrillas frequently captured Chinese documents that shed light on Chinese policy and helped resolve internal disputes wracking the intelligence community...
...In both cases the Eisenhower administration originally launched the covert programs to train freedom fighters to resist Communist domination...
...The resupply line to Tibet started in Okinawa, the closest secure transshipment point the CIA could use in moving the clandestine arms purchases...
...Their orders were to prevent any Chinese pursuit, blocking key passes along the southern route, and fighting to hold them as long as necessary while the Dalai Lama and his entourage made their way to safety on horseback...
...Tibet needed allies, it needed to buy time, and most of all it needed arms...
...The CIA trainees were then flown back to base camps in Nepal, and infiltrated back into Tibet...
...In the early 1950's, there were no secure channels of communication between the U.S...
...A top secret telegram from Secretary of State Acheson to the U.S...
...military attaches across Europe, asking them to report back on inventories of captured Nazi arms...
...During World War II, the British secret services eagerly tutored fledgling American OSS agents in the finer points of spywork...
...On April 1, with confirmation that the Dalai Lama was safely out of Tibet, CIA Director Dulles sent a memo to President Eisenhower summarizing the Tibetan operation...
...US shld make at least one final effort by letter or oral messages to encourage DL to resist in ways best known to Tib Govt....Although it may not be feasible, DL might for example make pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Tib from one of which he might escape southward to Ind...
...It was a combination of running the guerrilla warfare, which we knew was pinpricks, and the intelligence, because until then the main source was the British in Hong Kong," he says, dredging up ancient intelligence rivalries...
...When Israel invaded Lebanon and seized PLO warehouses full of Soviet-supplied weapons, the CIA rapidly transported the captured arms to Nicaragua's freedom fighters...
...Intelligence...
...In due course, India's foreign minister met with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to complain, in carefully couched diplomatic language, about CIA resupply flights over Indian airspace...
...A series of spy scandals in the fifties involving Burgess, McLean, and Phil-by — British diplomats and intelligence officers doubling for the KGB—further strained relations...
...You don't talk very much about specific operational details, or even specific operations, for anyone who's alive...
...Cummings found plenty of surplus German Mausers and other weapons for Dulles's secret armies...
...During the entire trip through the remote mountains of Tibet, CIA-trained radio operators sent daily progress reports to Allen Dulles...
...would shoulder the costs of the Dalai Lama and several hundred followers in exile...
...This is the true story of how the Tibetan operation began in glory, and ended in shame...
...support for arms and ammunition...
...Galbraith's first glimpse into the CIA operations came in the spring of '61, when he was still in Washington preparing to take over the post in New Delhi...
...nside Tibet, the fighting continued despite the logistical complications...
...A secret cable from 1951 reveals that Washington encouraged the Dalai Lama to "remain in [a] country near Tibet for purpose of mounting resistance to Chinese Communists within Tibet...
...In both the guerrillas depended on U.S...
...Colonel Harry "Heinie" Aderholt's air commandos, an elite Air Force unit tasked with supporting the CIA's special missions since the Korean War, was tapped for the job...
...But thanks to the willingness of a handful of former diplomats, military special operations personnel, and intelligence officials, the real story of America's secret war in Tibet can now be told...
...Eager Tibetans were flown from the refugee camps in Dakota transport airplanes with blacked-out windows halfway across the world to Camp Hale, an army training base taken over by the CIA near Leadville, Colorado...
...I assume the point of contention is that a plural subject calls for a plural, not singular, verb...
...The White House had already cut off overflights, but this group was surrounded and an air-drop was the only way...
...It took Dulles and the CIA months to find any effective resistance forces left inside Tibet...
...Still others sought diplomatic support for Tibet's independence, and military weapons for armed resistance...
...This is valid if the recall of beef had occurred in stages, e.g., "In the last six months, 25 million pounds of beef have been recalled...
...But Tibetan Buddhism, as practiced by its monks and the people of Tibet, did not shy from violence...
...In late 1961, matters came to a head...
...Since I have no left-wing ideals, lofty or otherwise, I couldn't say...
...reply: "...suggestions for overt US provision of planes, arms, supplies and leadership are practically impossible and politically undesirable at this time...
...In Tibetan Buddhism there is honor in dying as these men did, however dishonorable the act of their abandonment by the United States...
...Covert aid required arms that could not be traced to the United States...
...In desperation, Tibet sent emissaries abroad to negotiate on three separate tracks...
...CHARLES PERRY Sylmar, California Where's the Beef...
...Of the six-to-eight thousand guerrillas trapped inside Tibet, at most a few hundred escaped massacre...
...Battle in defense of their religion and the Dalai Lama is looked upon as a means of achieving merit toward their next reincarnation...
...Now I can understand why people might disagree with certain things that appear in TAS, but to consider TAS the enemy is to be an extremist...
...As the CIA reported in its memo to Eisenhower many years ago, their heroic sacrifice is valuable karma, and will be rewarded in their new incarnation...
...But relations chilled early in the postwar era, when American diplomacy took a turn against British imperial claims, and American agents started spying in former British colonies...
...One would have to be either in the Clinton administration or a member of the welfare state to consider TAS the enemy...
...Based on Major Ropka's track record, there is little doubt that he could have handled the last Tibetan resupply mission without incident The CIA officer argued with Galbraith as tenaciously as he could, but was overruled...
...You know a guerrilla doesn't fight a set battle," he says, "but the Chinese trapped them, set a trap for them...
...Tibet's mountains meant the only practical way to get supplies to the freedom fighters was by air...
...The whole group was annihilated," says the ex-CIA official...
...Embassy in India...
...But in the early 1950's, the weapons Dulles needed were German...
...After he became CIA director in 1953, Allen Dulles oversaw the creation of an audacious covert program involving tens of thousands of Tibetan freedom fighters who fought courageously against China's People's Liberation Army in a decade-long struggle for independence...
...The parallels to the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco are eerie...
...On the diplomatic front, Gyalo Thondup and the Dalai Lama pressed the U.S...
...At the time of Tibet's invasion, Allen Dulles was CIA's Deputy Director of Plans, with responsibilities that included overseeing all CIA covert operations...
...I had to read the quoted headline several times before I could fathom your gripe...
...British and American intelligence have rarely gotten along...
...5ut before April was over, conditions for the resistance had deteriorated badly...
...He began a blitz of classified cables urging a halt to the CIA's Tibetan operation...
...Ropka had a reputation as a detail-sweating perfectionist...
...From Okinawa, Aderholt's planes shipped the arms to a forward operating base at Thailand...
...He has given his blessing to a new Hollywood film, Kundun, enshrining the officially sanctioned and sanitized history of his country's battle for independence against Communist China...
...As a result, it took months to relay oral messages back and forth to the Dalai Lama over the mountainous reaches of Tibet...
...Believe it unwise advise any Tibetan to receive this msg prior actual communication...
...Downey, California Steady, Now According to Joseph C. Brown, III (letter in "Oceans Away" section of October's Correspondence), "Law enforcement and the professionals who make it work get pilloried in the media constantly by liberals who view any infringement on their hedonistic pursuits as an insult to their lofty left-wing ideals...
...The CIA officer who handled Gyalo Thondup and the Tibetan resistance recalls what happened next...
...Precisely what Kennedy and McCone agreed to on Tibet is still classified...
...aid conditioned on the Dalai Lama's agreement to leave Tibet...
...and other world forums...
...During the decades of war-lordism that befell China in the twenties and thirties, German guns were widely used throughout the country...
...Thirty years later in Nicaragua, CIA planners faced the same challenge when they had to find Soviet weapons to supply the contras...
...The number of Tibetan freedom fighters had risen to the tens of thousands...
...The part that bothered me was leaving thousands behind, not hundreds like the Bay of Pigs...
...The crisis was a turning point for Tibetan diplomacy, which for eight years had sought an accommodation with China...
...When you're summing up the Tibetan operation," one of Gyalo Thondup's former case officers says, "there are three phases...
...Today, with our emphasis on Tibet's human rights situation, it may surprise many to think of the Buddhist kingdom seeking arms to fight China...
...A large force of Tibetan guerrillas, somewhere between six thousand and eight thousand men, were isolated inside Tibet and faced slaughter by the Chinese...
...In briefing the National Security Council on March 26, 1959, Dulles confidently predicted that "we have every reason to hope that the Dalai Lama will get out of Tibet fairly soon...
...Tibet's military resistance is dead, but its human rights campaign, launched as a CIA Cold War propaganda operation, endures...
...Careful now...
...Unfortunately, Joseph C. Brown, III is far from the first conservative to go wobbly in the head on the matter of defending liberty when the liberty defended is someone else's idea of a good time, rather than one's own...
...Somewhere east of Lhasa lie the bones of 6,000 slaughtered Tibetan freedom fighters, their death-struggle kept secret from the world for more than thirty-six years...
...The Tibetan emissaries wanted arms...
...For this reason, President Eisenhower reauthorized the covert program in February 1960...
...Where others saw diplomatic quandaries, CIA deputy director Allen Dulles recognized opportunity...
...Others explored the possibility of asylum and financial support for the Dalai Lama and his retinue...
...The American Spectator • December 1997 But don't expect the Clinton administration to declassify the Tibetan operation files anytime soon...
...But the CIA had little bureaucratic clout in the early days of its existence, and the Defense Department was unresponsive...
...Tibet's request was handled at the top levels of the U.S...
...Throughout the fifties Tibetan refugees trickled into neighboring Nepal, ripe for recruitment by the CIA...
...wanted the Dalai Lama to lead his country's resistance against the Chinese...
...It was critical that the U.S...
...American diplomats had little knowledge of the Dalai Lama's retinue...
...Many guerrillas wanted to flee into India...
...Although the case officer blames Galbraith for abandoning the guerrillas, given Kennedy's knowledge of Galbraith's views, the decision to vest final decision-making power in the ambassador was tantamount to withholding approval...
...supply flights go off without any hitches...
Vol. 30 • December 1997 • No. 12
