COVERT ACTION IN HIGH ALTITUDES

• Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 05301267
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: March 16, 2022
• Document Release Date: March 29, 2016
• Case Number: F-2015-00852
• Publication Date: January 1, 1960

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Tibetan operations
COVERT ACTION IN HIGH ALTITUDES
"In 1950 the Chinese came to Kham." This was the opening sentence of what
became a familiar litany to American officers who worked with the Tibetans on one of
the more total and romantic programs of covert action undertaken by the Agency.
With this simple description, the pragmatic Tibetans would proceed to make their case
for American support in a common fight. The Tibetans told a story of how the Chinese
were systematically setting out to destroy their culture, particularly the religion around
which their lives were organized. Like frontiersmen, they asked for help, not in terms of
money or subsidies, but for arms and training so that they might fight their own fight.
The Tibetans' pleas fell on responsive ears within the U.S. Government. North
Korea had invaded South Korea in June of that year and the U.S. Government was still
smarting over the Chinese Communist takeover of the mainland the year before.
When the Dalai Lama sent emissaries from Yatung, his temporary capital just across
the Tibet-Sikkim border, they found willing negotiators within the American Embassy
in India. The 15-year-old Dalai Lama had decided to come to Yatung after his plea to
the United Nations in December 1950 had produced no helpful response. His advisors
had been concerned that if he stayed in Lhasa he might be captured and the central
figure of their civilization thereby be lost. The young ruler was faced with the decision
of whether to return to Lhasa and attempt to alleviate the lot of his people by working
with the Chinese, or to flee abroad where he and his ecclesiastical court might act as a
rallying point for the resistance effort then being organized in eastern Tibet.
In the spring of 1951, Mr. Loy Henderson, the American Ambassador to India,
began informal conversations with representatives of the Dalai Lama to explore the
terms of his possible refuge outside Tibet. A variety of Hollywood-like schemes for
flying or sneaking the Dalai Lama to safety outside Tibet were considered and
discarded. The American Government was interested in having the Dalai Lama
remove himself to a place such as Ceylon where he could rally his follow Buddhists
against the Chinese Communists. The terms of American support were outlined in a
"letter"* which Ambassador Henderson sent to the Dalai Lama on 17 September 1951.
The American Government pledged appropriate financial support to him, his family,
and a retinue of approximately 100 persons, "so long as mutually satisfactory purposes
are being served." The "letter" also said that the U.S. Government regarded resistance
to Communist encroachment in Tibet as a long-term problem and was prepared to
"support resistance now and in the future against Chinese aggression and to provide
such material [support] as may be feasible."
The Dalai Lama pondered over these offers and the situation of his people in
Tibet and eventually felt his duty lay in returning to Lhasa. In February 1952, his
elder brother Takster Rimpoche, who is also considered an incarnate lama in this
unique family, came to the United States to explain his brother's reasons for going
back to his traditional capital. Assistant Secretary Allison assured Takster that the
U.S. Government understood the reasons why the Dalai Lama felt he must return,
and he reaffirmed the assurances of support made by his predecessor, Dean Rusk.
American representatives candidly discussed with the Tibetans the bleak prospects
they saw for further approaches to the United Nations. The Department advised
This letter was not physically delivered to the Dalai Lama, but his representatives were permitted to
make notes. These they transmitted verbatim to their leader, who kept them for future reference.
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that�in view of the disappointing opposition they had found from such diverse
countries as the United Kingdom, the Chinese Nationalists, the USSR, and others�
the Tibetans had little to gain by pushing their case at the United Nations at
that time.
The Dalai Lama made his way back up the Chumbi Valley in July 1952, and the
U.S. promises of covert aid were shelved while the god-king attempted to reach an
accommodation with the Chinese. Under the agreement which Tibetan
representatives had signed under duress in the Dalai Lama's absence in 1951, the
Chinese extended their occupation throughout all of Tibet. Life under their rule
became increasingly harsh. Various efforts which the Dalai Lama made both to
mitigate this rule and to reform his own archaic government were frustrated by the
Chinese. By 1956 the Dalai Lama had despaired of his ability to provide effective
political rule to his country, and he considered withdrawal from all secular life. His two
brothers, Takster Rimpoche and Gyalo Thondup had traveled to Europe and the
United States making inconclusive contacts with various governments from whom
they sought aid. This early trip provided useful experience for Gyalo, who later took on
the role of a one-man foreign minister, espionage chief, and political advisor to the
Dalai Lama. He also served as a spiritual buffer for his brother, who always found it
difficult to reconcile his position as the prime exponent of Buddhist non-violence with
his political role as leader of his people's efforts to resist with force the Chinese invaders
who threatened both the Tibetan State and its religion. Gyalo was to fulfill these
diverse demands with great skill and integrity beginning in 1956 and continuing
through the present time. In 1956 he received a mixed reception in Washington. The
American Government, when it thought about the situation of Tibet (which was not
often), was divided on policy. There were those who felt that Dalai Lama should flee
to a neighboring Buddhist country and thereby provide a symbol of anti-Communism
to his fellow Buddhists. Others, mostly within the Agency, felt that he served a more
important purpose by remaining in Tibet as a rallying point for his own people. There
was also the issue of whether the U.S. Government should support independence or
autonomy for Tibet. Our allies, the United Kingdom, the Chinese Nationalists
(Chiang K'ai-shek and Mao Tse-tung could both agree on this issue), and India had
taken strong positions against recognition of Tibetan independence.
At this low ebb in Tibetan fortunes, a unique opportunity Resented itself for the
Dalai Lama to re-establish contact with the outside world where he could seek help for
his people's resistance movement. In December 1955, the Maharaj Kumar of Sikkim
was permitted by the Chinese to go to Lhasa to issue an invitation for the Dalai Lama
to attend the Buddha jayanti, the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of Buddha which
was to be celebrated in India in 1956, The Dalai Lama sent word back to the
Americans by way of the Sikkimese ruler that he was anxious to flee Tibet and was
considering seeking asylum in India if the Chinese permitted him to go there for the
Buddhist ceremony.
Various policy issues concerning asylum, the future role of the Dalai Lama, and
the future of Tibet were thrashed out at meetings between State and Agency officers
that summer. Contrary to expectations, the Chinese permitted the Dalai Lama to go to
India and he arrived in New Delhi in 1956. The U.S. Government again deferred to
the Dalai Lama's own judgment as to whether he should return to Tibet. His request
that President Eisenhower discuss the issue of Tibet and independence with Prime
Minister Nehru, who was visiting Washington that December, was not taken up. The
United States did agree to support the Dalai Lama should he decide that exile was the
only answer. He, however, decided again to return to Tibet, and he and his party left
from Sikkim in February 1957. The Agency, in the meantime, had made plans with his
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brother Gyalo* to train and dispatch six men as radio teams to work with the Tibet
resistance. The United States wanted a unilateral capability for determining how
much resistance activity existed in Tibet, in order that it might weigh further
commitments.
Political events in Lhasa caused the Agency's time schedule for building a
resistance organization inside Tibet to be scratched. On 10 March 1959 thousands of
Tibetans, apparently suspicious of Chinese intentions, surrounded the Dalai Lama's
palace in Lhasa and prevented him from going to a theatrical performance that the
Chinese authorities had invited him to attend at their military headquarters. During
the coming week, the break between the Chinese and the Tibetans worsened steadily,
and on the night of March 19th the Dalai Lama, dressed in the rough clothes of a
Khamba farmer, left his palace to begin a long and secret flight to asylum in India
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The political drama then being staved in central Tibet focused Chinese military
activity on the area.
the Agency had to shift to
longer-term plans. In May 1959, 20 more Tibetans were exfiltrated and brought to the
new training site which had been established in Colorado.
This training camp, known as -Dumra (garden spot)
by the Tibetans, was to operate for the next five years. During that time,
approximately 260 Tibetans were trained in this valley south of Leadville, where the
early Colorado mining pioneers had prospected and the U.S. Tenth Mountain
Division had trained during World War II.
Very soon after he arrived in India, the Dalai Lama indicated that he was
unwilling to accept the limited role of a prominent religious leader in exile that the
Indian Government wished him to accept. On 23 April he sent a message to the U.S.
Government reaffirming his determination to support the resistance of his people and
asking the United States to recognize his government and supply assistance to those
continuing the resistance. He restated this request in formal fashion in a scroll, written
in the traditional Tibetan script with full seals affixed, which he sent to President
Eisenhower. In this message, he asked that the United States make Tibetan
independence a prerequisite for Communist China's entry into the United Nations. At
the same time the Dalai Lama had sent Nehru a message requesting his intercession to
cause Peking to withdraw their forces from Tibet, free all imprisoned Tibetans, permit
an international force to supervise the Chinese withdrawal, and authorize the
International Red Cross to carry on medical and relief assistance. He proposed to make
these four points public at a press conference in June, despite Nehru's disapproval and
preference that he work quietly for Tibetan autonomy. The Dalai Lama, therefore,
anxiously awaited the United States response to see whether he could expect U.S.
support should his Indian host turn against him. He was extremely disappointed when
the United States replied orally with less than the full assurances that he desired. The
United States did reaffirm its willingness to back his case fully at the United Nations.
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These efforts culminated in the UN resolution of 21 October 1959 which deplored
Chinese Communist violations of human rights in Tibet as increasing world tensions
and embittering relations between peoples. While this resolution was certainly far less
than the declaration of Tibetan independence which the Dalai Lama wanted, the UN
action served to keep his case before the attention of the international community.
Plans were made for him to visit the United States the coming spring to dramatize his
case. Mr. Gross persuaded the National Council of Christians and Jews to call a
conference at which the Dalai Lama would be the principal guest and speaker. It was
to be held in the Peter Cooper Union in New York and was to be followed by a visit to
Washington where the Dalai Lama would have been unofficially received by the
President. The Dalai Lama, however, felt that it would be a bad precedent for him to
accept an unofficial invitation, and he therefore rejected the invitation. While strong
efforts were made to persuade him and his brother that it was a poor political
judgment to lose the advantage of the publicity which such a visit would have
produced, the Dalai Lama took the position that he could not prejudice his country's
future claims to independence in return for any short-term advantage.
The complementary paramilitary action designed to broaden the resistance which
would substantiate the Tibetans' political appeals also went into full gear that fall. A
series of air drops, begun in September 1959, continued through the following spring.
After 1 May 1960, when Francis Powers' U-2 was shot down over Russia, it
became increasingly difficult to obtain approvals of overflight missions anywhere,
particularly into an area so peripheral to U.S. strategic interests as Tibet. It was almost
another year before the Agency made another overflight of Tibet
1,800 Tibetans who were encamped in
the Mustang peninsula. These men, most of them Khambas from eastern Tibet, had
made their way from the Darjeeling region in early 1960 when they heard that a new
guerrilla army was forming in Nepal. We had talked to the Tibetans in terms of a few
hundred men for cross-border raids into Tibet, but more than 2,000 potential guerrillas
jammed into Indian trains or came by foot to enlist and to demand arms. While it was
supposed to be a secret operation word got around very quickly.
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Tibet
In the summer of 1961, the
Dalai Lama announced plans for a new constitution. The Agency had encouraged this
move by the Dalai Lama, and Ambassador Gross had drafted a preliminary document.
The Dalai Lama modified this document to fit his idiom and ideas which were
surprisingly liberal, particularly concerning his willingness to give up state lands and
subject himself to a form of recall. His scattered constituents debated and voted on this
constitution in refugee camps throughout India and Nepal for the following two years.
The only popularly expressed reservations were that the Dalai Lama had granted too
generous a constitution. The international community had been informed of this
constituent process by an article by Ambassador Gross which appeared in the October
edition of Foreign Affairs. By the time the UN again considered Tibet at its autumn
1961 session, the Tibetans had additional evidence to back their claim to political self-
determination. On 20 December the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution
renewing its call for the cessation of practices which deprived the Tibetan people of
their fundamental human rights and freedom, including their right to self-
determination. This was to be the height of UN support for Tibetan aspirations.
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For the first nine months of 1962 there was little movement on either the political
front at the UN or among the resistance forces sitting ibet border. In
June Headquarters officers met with the guerrilla leader nd made plans
for reconnaissance teams to begin operating north of the sangpo iver inside Tibet,
supported from guerrilla bases dispersed throughout the Mustang peninsula. In Delhi
Ambassador Galbraith continued to voice objections to these guerrilla operations on
the erounds that U.S. involvement would become public knowledge
In Washington Acting
Secretary Ball questioned the long-term utility of these operations, fearing that they
represented merely a pin prick rather than any serious harrassment to the Chinese.
Governor Harriman, then Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, defended their
utility as contributing to the claims of the Dalai Lama that he represented a viable
alternative in Tibet. He saw these paramilitary operations as complementary to the
political activity then being carried out within the Tibetan community as they
debated and ratified the Dalai Lama's new constitution.
Since
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1957, 133 Tibetans had been trained;
There were still some questions about the value
of becoming involved in such distant paramilitary adventures where U.S. control was
by necessity remote and dependent upon the foreign policy of another country. John
McCone, then Director of CIA, cited the problems that we had encountered in making
full use of the guerrillas at Mustang. He asked his fellow members of the Speical Group
why the United States created such assets if we couldn't ultimately control their use.
He also questioned what would happen in the event of a Sino-Indian rapprochement.
His colleagues agreed that the United States could probably do little to delay or
temper such rapprochement. No one, however, was willing to abandon the Mustang
forces or the greater U.S. involvement in the Sino-Indian confrontation.
By mid-November the Chinese were invading the northeast frontier in force, and
there was no question but that the United States would fully support both the Tibetan
resistance efforts that it had built
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the Agency also agreed to train at least an additional 125
agents at the Colorado training site. Gyalo immediately set off to recruit these men
and by early 1963 the Colorado training camp was in full gear.
the Special Group again touched on the subject of the
ultimate usefulness of this effort to the United States. They decided that nothing
should be started with this group unless we the U.S. Government intended to carry it
out
Accordingly, training
proceeded under the concept of building self-sufficient teams of three men each who
were to be sent back into areas across Tibet from Lhasa to the Golmo region on the
West China border. The agents were to resettle in these areas�assuming that they
found support among the population�and build local underground resistance units
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By June 1963 the 135 men who were at the Colorado training site had finished
their instruction and were ready for dispatch
IThe
trainees began returning to India in groups of 40 in late November 1963
On the political front, Gyalo took advantage of the new, more permissive Indian
attitude. At our urging he requested Indian permission to open a Tibet House which
would house a museum of Tibetan artifacts and a library. Gyalo utilized covert funds
provided by us to assemble an outstanding collection of Tibetan thankas, including
representative examples of these Tibetan religious wall hangings from each of the
historic five schools. He had to act quickly as the desperate refugees were selling
whatever they had been able to take out of Tibet, and these treasures were being
dispersed. He also assembled the world's largest collection of works in English and
Tibetan on Tibetan history and culture. Tibet House was finally opened in the spring
of 1964 when Indira Gandhi cut the ribbon on what has since become a major tourist
attraction in New Delhi. Our purpose of continuing to focus publicity on the Tibetans
as a unique and separate culture has been well served by Tibet House. Gyalo also
obtained Indian permission for the Tibetans to hold a convention in Benares in
January 1964 at which the new constitution was proclaimed. He, meanwhile, had
found himself severely hampered by the lack of young Tibetans who spoke English
and who were in any way familiar with governmental affairs in India, let alone the
United Nations. We accordingly worked out with him a "young Turk" program to
bring selected young Tibetans to the United States for nine months of education in
English, comparative government, and anthropology. The 20 graduates of this
specialized training all returned to India, where the Dalai Lama has used them as
administrators or sent them abroad again as foreign representatives.
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The Dalai Lama had continued to press ahead with his political plans. In April
1964 the tireless Gyalo Thondup had organized the Tibetan Chokhasum Party
(defense of religion by the three regions). This party, espousing the liberal principles
embodied in the constitution, was designed to encourage the efforts which the team
members were making to organize an underground inside Tibet. The party published a
newspaper which was circulated in the Tibetan refugee camps throughout India and
was smuggled by the underground teams into Tibet
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Finally in December of 1965
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Although the new 303 Committee at its 30 Sentember 1969 meeting
endorsed a proposal to continue assistance
including provision for a trimmed down Mustang force, it became apparent that the
Tibetan guerrillas at Mustang were a wasting force politically. In 1972 funds were
approved for resettling the several hundred guerrillas who still remained at Mustang.
Although these troops resisted dispersal, they eventually yielded and resettled either in
India or in small groups scattered throughout the Nepalese peninsula. The Nepalese
Government collected their arms and thus ended the saga of one of the world's highest
guerrilla forces.
The Offices of Tibet in New Delhi and New York have continued, although the
Department has recently asked that word be passed to the Tibetans that they would
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like to see the New York office closed. The Agency's subsidy to maintain the New York
office stopped in 1973. That was the same year in which the Agency stopped funding
the intelligence activities directed into Tibet. The Dalai Lama's headquarters at
Dharmsala has remained active�staffed by the 20 Agency-trained "young Turks.- In
June 1976 the Operations Advisory Group approved a final lump sum payment of the
annual subsidy to the Dalai Lama, ending a commitment made 25 years earlier.
The Tibetans now are completely on their own. In many ways they always were.
The United States, despite the best of will and intent, was hampered by the geopolitics
of the situation The
sparse population and barren plains of Tibet provided no fish for guerrillas to swim
with. The best the Dalai Lama and his still devoted exile constituents now can hope for
is to remain demonstrably cohesive so that the Chinese may find a sufficiently useful
symbol of legitimacy to permit their return. Time, however, is on the Chinese side, and
the U.S. d�nte with Peking means that the Tibetans must make any bargains on their
own rather than as part of some larger package. Neville Maxwell of the London Times,
who is the first Western journalist to visit Tibet in many years, currently reports that
the Dalai Lama's -ancient castle is at once magnificent and dead.- The Potala now is
a museum visited daily by the young citizens of Lhasa who have not known in their
lifetimes the god-king or the historic religion and culture he headed.
Weighed against the Tibetans' present bleak prospects, the 25 years of covert
action involving their cause seem not to have been worth the investment of lives,
money, efforts, and national prestige which it cost the Tibetans, and our
government. Weighed against the whole period and the future, the balance sheet looks
more reasonable.
For the Tibetans, the U.S. promises of covert support permitted the Dalai Lama
to test fully whatever remote possibility there may have been in the 1950s for
productive accommodation with the Chinese. Our support gave the Tibetan resistance
a chance in 1958 and 1959 to challenge the Chinese
Our assistance assured the Dalai
Lama and his followers the capability to attract international attention to their plight
and to their claim to represent an independent Tibet. Our supply undoubtedly
stiffened the will of the Indian government to be hospitable to the Tibetans. Without
Indian hospitality and tolerance of their political activities, the Tibetans would have
soon been scattered and absorbed without a trace in the mass scene of the sub-
continent. Today they are still a cohesive political unit with separate identity in India
and Nepal. They have a claim, albeit slender, in the future.
Our initial
primary objective of causing an economic drain on the struggling Chinese economy
and thereby placing a limit on Peking's military capabilities was unfulfilled. Our
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purposes in the 1950's and 1960's of demonstrating Peking's unacceptability for
membership in the international community were well served by our successful efforts
to publicize the Tibetan cause.
Finally, our involvement was right for the times and the ideal we professed. The
Tibetans never approached us as supplicants, but as fellow believers in similar
democratic values who were temporary victims of a common enemy. They asked for
the means to fight for their own cause, which they assumed was ours. Our willingness
to respond to this appeal was noted by those other nations who were then judging our
readiness to commit ourselves against our professions. It was an honorable operation.
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