Half a century ago, the CIA organized a Tibetan guerrilla against China in a lost valley in Nepal. This is his story
I) Lo Manthang
The south wind appears, punctually, around midday, pushing the traveler's ascent through the Kali Gandaki gorge, the deepest in the world. It is a dry, hurtful wind and often loaded with dust, which forces even the hardened natives to cover their faces with a scarf when they walk with it facing them. The Kali Gandaki is a sacred river for the Hindus that crosses the Great Himalayas from north to south, between the eight thousand Annapurna, to the east, and the Dhaulagiri, to the west, draining two of the highest massifs on the planet. The route, opened for millions of years by the impetuous river and its seven tributaries, was one of the great commercial routes of this region that connects India with Tibet. For centuries, the salt from the Tibetan lakes, and the grain and spices from the Indian plains, crossed here in long caravans, guarded by the castles that dominate almost all the towns along the route and bear witness to a warlike and turbulent past. .
From Kagbeni onwards, beneath the seven-thousand-meter peaks of the Nilgiri and Tilicho, the great Himalayan summits that once seemed insurmountable are now left behind. In just a few hours of walking, one enters an arid, treeless world, dominated by towering ochre cliffs, a stark contrast to the alpine landscape with its abundant coniferous forests and rhododendrons of the previous days. The clouds and rain remain in the Himalayas, condemning the Tibetan rearguard to aridity. The human geography also changes abruptly; the Gurung architecture of the Nepalese hills (hills that can reach 3000 meters) and of the Thakala minority, a Tibeto-Nepali community, gives way to increasingly authentically Tibetan and Buddhist villages. Compact villages, with a bastion or fortified house and a monastery, surrounded by farmland that from above resembles a multicolored domino effect and smells of the incomparable fragrance of juniper wood, which fuels the kitchens. In these villages, firewood is stored on the roofs of the houses, along with grain laid out to dry, highlighting the value of the scarce wood available here.
The real climb begins in a village called Chele. It's perched on a rocky plateau known as the "Puerta "Mustang Pass," which, due to its narrowness, is reminiscent of the entrance to the Panshir Valley in Afghanistan. There begins the series of nine passes, ranging from 3800 to 4000 meters, which must be crossed over three or four more days on foot to reach our destination, Lo Manthang. From Chele onward, the traveler discovers that the stark, arid landscape that had so surprised him was, in reality, a paradise compared to what now lies before him. That aridity still allowed for two annual harvests: one of barley, used to make tsampa, the porridge of the essential Tibetan diet, and another of buckwheat. In that lowland, the best apples in Nepal are still harvested, along with excellent legumes and vegetables, cultivated in gardens arranged in hollows of the terrain, sheltered from the wind and carefully protected by stone walls. Above Chele, all of that disappears, or becomes rare; The meager land now yields only one harvest a year; beyond the town of Samar, the juniper trees also disappear, and the higher one climbs, the more desert-like and magnificent the landscape becomes. A Tibet in its purest form emerges, untouched by the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, with monasteries and castles largely intact.
The intensity of the light, the thin air due to the altitude, and the breathtaking beauty of this desert crowned by snow-capped peaks, with Dhaulagiri and Annapurna rising to the south and the Tibetan Plateau to the north, all contribute to the thrill of finally seeing the long-awaited citadel of Lo Manthang. From the Lo La Pass ("windy"), one can glimpse below an unusual walled city of five hectares, perched at 3800 meters on a plateau surrounded by farmland that slopes down from its origin in an ancient glacier. Its name means something like "southern plateau of aspiration." It is the capital, with 1600 inhabitants, of the "last forbidden kingdom of the Himalayas," as Kathmandu's tourist agencies proclaim, a kingdom of some 7000 people whose king, Jigme Palber Bista, formerly subject to the Nepalese monarchy, still retains local judicial power and certain servile privileges.
At the entrance to the town, a young lama dozes in the sun, lying in a meadow next to which a torrent passes. To the north of the city, just ten kilometers away, you can see the Chinese border, the Kora La pass, at 4600 meters high. Tibetans from China carrying herds of yaks descend from the pass, where there are no guards or controls, to sell their animals in the lowlands. At that moment, when the disorders of altitude, the joy of the sighting and the fatigue of a long journey on foot along paths and ravines that do not allow any traction other than that of animals seem to come together to recreate any type of hallucination, the unmistakable sound of an explosion engine.
The "Air Dynasty" helicopter appears like an unwelcome hallucination. It lands in a field, and a couple of tourists from Barcelona hurriedly disembark. After paying a Congo, the couple makes a fleeting 45-minute visit to the "last forbidden kingdom," which opened to tourism in 1991 and has since registered more than a thousand visitors a year, including around a dozen Spaniards in 2007. The sight of the helicopter and the express tourist couple is a harsh blow to the poetry of the place and a stark return to reality, reminding us that we were born too late.
Lo Manthang, the Kingdom of Lo ("Mustang," in the corrupted transformation of the name given to it by the English), was founded in 1380. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, its kings dominated trade between Tibet and India in this region of the Himalayas. For several centuries, the great historical enemy of the Kingdom of Lo was Jumla, another mountain kingdom in Nepal that is now an unremarkable district capital. Despite its Tibetan identity and geography, Lo allied itself with the Gorkha monarchy, which unified Nepal, in the Tibet-Nepalese War of the late 18th century, and thus became a tributary of Kathmandu. This explains why it belongs to Nepal today and not to Tibet in China, as would be its geographical position.
Only three or four Westerners, among them a Frenchman who summers on the Costa Brava called Michel Peissel and wrote an original book after his time here in 1964, visited Mustang in the 1991s and 2400s. The kingdom was officially closed until 1959 and at that time it was a remote and unknown territory that lived an autonomous and isolated life. Pójara, the main city in Nepal from which you access the kingdom, was not connected by road with Kathmandu until the sixties of the XNUMXth century, when the first hippies arrived, attracted by the placidity of its lake and the almost free local cannabis. . This isolation and the geographical accessibility to Tibet led the CIA to choose the kingdom of Mustang as a base of operations for the Tibetan guerrillas against China, after they were crushed and defeated in Tibet by the Chinese in the XNUMXs. For fourteen years, Mustang housed, unbeknownst to anyone, a secret Tibetan army of XNUMX men financed by the CIA with the tacit consent of the Dalai Lama who had fled Tibet in XNUMX and whose two older brothers, Takster Rimpoche and Gyalo Thondup, They were trusted men of the Agency and on its payroll since the early XNUMXs.
Today, the history of that army, an unusual chapter of the Cold War in Asia, is like the light of a candle that goes out. The average life expectancy is not very long in Tibet and Mustang. The protagonists and witnesses of that little-known and dramatic fight are dying. In China, the interested foreigner does not yet find adequate conditions to speak frankly about Tibet (or Xinjiang) with political leaders or academic experts. So, before the candle went out, we had to go to Mustang to recover the last fragments of oral history of the Tibetan resistance. But the chronicle of that secret Himalayan army is incomprehensible without reviewing its antecedents in Tibet in the 1950s and especially in Kham, the easternmost region of Tibet, where the armed resistance to the Chinese collapse was born.
II) Kham
In the 1950s, Tibetans were divided between those living in "political Tibet," the kingdom ruled by the Dalai Lama ("U Tsang," or Central Tibet, centered in Lhasa), and those living in "ethnographic Tibet," the vast eastern and northeastern areas between Central Tibet and the Chinese-populated regions. This "ethnographic Tibet" was as large as Central Tibet and was divided into two cultural and linguistic zones. One was "Kham," in the east, encompassing parts of the present-day Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, and the other was "Amdo," now administratively divided between the Chinese provinces of Qinhai and Gansu.
Politically, this "Greater Tibet," with its extraordinary tradition and culture, was, in the first half of the 20th century, an archaic, isolated, and highly inconsistent entity. Amdo and Kham were divided into small principalities, nominally under the authority of China (a China mired in dynastic bankruptcies, revolutions, foreign occupation, and civil war), but in reality administered on a day-to-day basis by traditional chieftains, completely autonomous and detached from the government in Lhasa, which had neither control nor jurisdiction over them.
The "political Tibet" of Lhasa and the Dalai Lama had remained trapped in its shell, untouched by the changing times. Tsering Shakya, the leading historian of modern Tibet, explains that this ancient society lacked a national consciousness (the Chinese disasters would later forge it) and had no answers for the impending earthquake.
China and Tibet have a 1500-year history of relations. The official Chinese position is that Tibet has "always" belonged to China, since the Yuan dynasty, when the Mongols conquered China and Tibet in the 16th century. XIII. The reality is that between the fall of the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty and the 17th century, the political relationship between China and Tibet was ambiguous and certainly did not include any kind of administrative control of the territory by China. Then, from the late 17th century onward, Tibet entered a turbulent period of religious disputes and political chaos that changed things and is at the origin of the modern dispute over Tibet's status. The Tibetan-Nepalese War of the late 18th century ushered in a period in which Tibet became a kind of Manchu (Qing) protectorate. Tibet then requested military aid from the Chinese emperor, who took advantage of the situation to establish an "amban," a Manchu term similar to what is understood as a governor. The Manchu "amban" had a status equal to that of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, as well as the right to oversee appointments, but Tibet maintained its own language, officials, laws, and army, and did not pay taxes to Beijing. This protectorate system included the stationing of Chinese troops. Regarding the acquiescence of the Tibetans to this status, it is illustrated by the fact that three "ambans" were killed by Tibetans between 1750 and 1905 (the number of Dalai Lamas allegedly poisoned by Tibetans at that time was no less), and that, as soon as the Chinese empire collapsed in 1911, the "amban" and his Chinese guards were expelled, putting an end to almost 200 years of Chinese authority.
The Chinese national aspiration to engulf Tibet, which Mao inherited, had been hatched in the late imperial era and the British had much to do with it. At the end of the century XIBy the 1904s, British influence had extended to the Himalayan states. In XNUMX, an English military expedition had arrived in Lhasa, adding a new foreign humiliation to China. It was this presence that changed the attitude of the Manchu court, which had not been interested in directly administering or integrating Tibet into its fold. The British led the Chinese to believe that if they did not dominate Tibet, foreigners would. Mao inherited this conviction. The resurgence of Maoist China and its fundamental national claim to recover China's greatness meant establishing, for the first time in Chinese history, effective administrative control over the whole of Tibet. This introduced dilemmas into Lhasa for which the Tibetan elite was not prepared.
The plan for the new China was relatively cautious: to occupy the ungoverned areas of Amdo and Kham, where authority was fragmented among local tribal and clan leaders and sporadic Chinese officials, and to gradually establish a "Tibet Autonomous Region" in the area controlled by the Lhasa government. Mao knew the history of relations between China and Tibet, and he knew he was treading on thin ice. That is why he urged patience and caution to his generals: "Tibet and Xinjiang are different," he said. "But while Xinjiang was already home to between 200.000 and 300.000 Chinese under the old regime, there weren't any in Tibet, so our troops will find themselves in a place where there were no Chinese in the past." Over time, all those good intentions sank into the framework of the haughty and ignorant Chinese arrogance of the time towards other cultures ("barbaric"), into the dramas and fanaticisms of the Chinese Revolution itself, into the atavistic blindness of the conservative Tibetan elite, and into the general context of the Cold War, in which the Tibetan cause was nothing more than a small piece played on a large world chessboard.
In October 1950, Chinese troops entered Amdo and Kham with virtually no resistance, and negotiations for the "reintegration of Tibet into the Motherland" then began. The Tibetan elite made unsuccessful attempts to gain the support of Western powers and India, but ultimately had no choice but to send a negotiating delegation to Beijing. For the aristocracy and the Tibetan monastic community, the important thing was to preserve their heritage and the traditional religious order, which the Chinese promised to respect. For ordinary people, as long as their lives, religion, and customs remained untouched, belonging to China or being "independent" was a completely abstract matter. The internal division and isolation of Tibet was not only physical (there were no roads, and reaching Lhasa from Kham was a three-month journey on horseback), but also political. Since 1928, the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Buddhist authority in Tibet, had been in exile in Amdo due to a dispute with the 13th Dalai Lama. This dispute made the Panchen Lama's followers, who were very powerful in Shigatse, Tibet's second-largest city, highly inclined to cooperate with the communists. They demanded that the Lhasa government restore the Panchen Lama's full authority over the Shigatse region, which he had held until the beginning of the century, a demand the communists opposed. From 1950 onward, the Panchen Lama's followers negotiated directly with Beijing behind the Lhasa government's back. This division perfectly served Chinese interests, which made good use of it. To further complicate matters, the Dalai Lama, whose authority could have compensated for many shortcomings, was, in 1951, a mere 15-year-old.
“On the eve of the Chinese communist invasion of October 1950, Tibet was, for all intents and purposes, an independent state,” says Tsering Shakya. That description, as well as the phrase, so popular among Western audiences, that “Tibet was an independent country that China invaded in 1950,” needs qualification because after the collapse of the Chinese empire, Tibet’s international status remained unresolved: China continued to consider it its territory, and no one, not even Britain and the United States, ever recognized any independence. At the same time, those powers, first Britain and then the United States, introduced their own point of ambiguity by dealing directly with the Tibetans, which the Tibetans interpreted as some kind of expectation.
In the international community, the organized, military arrival of the new China in Tibet, brimming with transformative aims, caused the same kind of perplexity and dilemmas. At the United Nations, questions arose about whether it could be considered an "invasion" and whether Tibet was an independent nation. If sovereignty is defined in relation to the outside world, Tibet had no external relations and lived in complete isolation. Among prominent Tibetans, fewer than a dozen had ever visited "abroad." The most basic things were unknown: what the UN, international law, or internal combustion engines were. The British Foreign Office considered Tibet's legal status "very unclear," and Nehru did not dispute its belonging to China. The Lhasa government itself referred to Tibet's historical relationship with China as that of "monk and patron," which acknowledged a certain protectorate. The best description of the era comes from the Foreign Minister of the new India, Bajpai; “Our government,” he said, “recognizes that Chinese influence and control over Tibet have fluctuated according to the strength of the regime in power. Weak Chinese governments lost almost all their influence over Tibet; strong ones regained it.” According to this law, control of Tibet by the burgeoning Maoist China was unavoidable, and the task at hand was to negotiate a relationship that was as minimally detrimental as possible to Tibetan identity.
In October 1951, the Tibetan government accepted annexation by China through the approval of the famous 17-point agreement with Beijing. For the first time in over a thousand years of recorded history, representatives of the Tibetan government expressed in writing their recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. The Tibetans signed and ratified it reluctantly. The agreement made no mention of "socialism" or "communism," but it guaranteed the continuity of the Tibetan system and the rule of the Dalai Lama, religious freedom, and the privileges of the local elite. Many saw it as a path to coexistence, even though that coexistence was forged on apprehension and within a general framework of imposition, following the entry of Chinese troops into the territory and the absence of other international support. Others rejected it, especially the more conservative sectors of the Tibetan elite. The lack of alternatives and the general atmosphere of coercion left very little room for maneuver for the Tibetans, who were grappling with a situation that overwhelmed them.
The problems began when the Chinese started introducing "reforms" in Kham, beginning in the mid-1950s. Their first measure was the confiscation of weapons and attempts to convert the nomads to a settled lifestyle. The subsequent "collectivization" sparked revolts in Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. The fight was not "for Tibet," but to defend one's village, monastery, family, and livestock, and against a foreign imposition that was disastrous and unacceptable from every perspective of local tradition and customary law.
When the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army entered the village of Dhunkhung in Nyarong County, Sichuan Province, Aten was 35 years old. Throughout his life, he had seen successive Chinese soldiers and officials come and go, almost always corrupt and plundering. "The Reds were the first Chinese soldiers I saw who didn't loot or assault the population. They were courteous and left the ranks to help the peasants with the harvest or other tasks—a welcome novelty." Aten was selected to attend courses at the University for Minorities in Chengdu, as part of the communist programs to create "national cadres." The teaching there, he explains, was primitive. The teachers' mentality was steeped in Han Chinese arrogance and a tendency to lecture those who came from "barbaric and backward" societies. The world was divided between an America that was a "paper tiger," and the USSR and China, which had liberated half the world and would soon triumph in the rest. Solor stupid and retarded people resisted communism.
“It was incredibly harsh. Even though we didn’t know the details, we Tibetans had heard about the United States’ role in World War II and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. What little we knew was enough to realize that the Chinese instructors treated us like complete idiots.” Some “reactionary” students were sent to break rocks, so most conformed to the discipline and stopped asking insolent questions in class. While Aten was at Chengdu University, reform was beginning throughout Kham, first with the confiscation of weapons, which for the Khampas were part of a man’s attire and identity, then with expropriations and collectivizations, which incomprehensibly destroyed the traditional order, not to mention the “fighting sessions” (thamzing) in which neighbors and relatives had to denounce each other, and in which monks and respectable members of the community were mistreated and even publicly murdered. When Aten returned to his village, life had completely changed.
“The Chinese had labeled my family as ‘serf owners’ and confiscated almost all of our property: my entire grain store, my livestock, my horses, and even my wives’ jewelry (Aten had two wives, which was common). Our family owned a large copper cauldron, big enough to make tea for two hundred people. We used it on special occasions, at parties, or when large groups of monks came to our house. They took that too. They even confiscated a quilt I had bought at the Chinese cooperative. Because the harvest had been poor, my family had had to borrow five sacks of grain from friends. When they confiscated everything, the Chinese told my wives that all our debts had been canceled and that they no longer had to pay anything to their creditors. Nevertheless, we paid them. We realized that all of this was just the beginning of our troubles.”
Shortly afterward, one night in 1958, Aten escaped from his village with a group of family, relatives, and friends. The group numbered sixty, including women and children, with only ten men armed with four rifles and meager ammunition. “We had heard that there was a larger guerrilla group in the higher regions and we were trying to make contact with them.” The “guerrilla” was something like a wandering Apache tribe of 1500 people, poorly armed and supplied, filled with women, the elderly, and children, who often lived by looting. Their attacks on Chinese forces were relentless: no prisoners were taken. Over time, the Chinese army’s relentless pursuit became increasingly unbearable. Aten’s group held out for two years, during which time his family and friends fell one by one. One night in 1959, the group was surrounded while they slept by a unit of Hui cavalry—Muslim Chinese—belonging to a warlord in Ningxia who had defected to the Reds. It was a formidable force, even for a people as hardened as the Khampas. And they fell upon them by surprise. That night, Aten lost all his family: his two wives and his only child, a young girl who died in his arms, whom he had to abandon with a bullet in her abdomen. He himself miraculously escaped with three bullets in his body, but still able to ride. Days later, Aten's party crossed the border into Nepal. Of its 1500 members, only 170 had survived. From the group in the Nyanrong district, only Aten, his cousin Dowong, and Dowong's son remained alive.
Aten's summary of his life is reminiscent of an American Indian chief evoking the collapse of the arrival of whites to his lands:
"Nyarong was a beautiful land, and our life there, though simple and hard, was happy. Then the Chinese came. At first with kind words and glittering silver, then with weapons and death. They took my fields, my animals, and my home. They looted and desecrated the temples and monasteries where I prayed. Like a plague, they wiped out my friends, relatives, the lamas, all those dear to me. On a frozen steppe covered by a light dusting of snow blown by the wind, I left behind the bullet-riddled corpses of my family and my only young daughter. I was forced to live in the mountains like a wild animal, moving by night and hiding by day, like a thief. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain were my constant companions. Now I am an old man; age has stolen all my strength, and fate has taken all that I loved."
From 1954 onward, a steady stream of Khampa refugees began arriving in Lhasa, fleeing the "reforms" in Khampa. They brought with them their weapons, their hatred of the Chinese, and experiences similar to those recounted by Aten. Their testimonies spread alarm in Lhasa, where the Chinese had not established a full-fledged occupation nor initiated "reforms." Between 1951 and 1959, not a single Tibetan aristocrat, nor a single monastery, lost their feudal privileges and serfdom. Mao's strategy was based on the conviction that the Dalai Lama had to be gradually won over to the cause of Chinese modernization, which would then draw the rest of the Tibetan elite along. Although many people in Lhasa considered the Khampas to be something akin to bandits; untamed and violent people who stole, and only half-believed in his warnings, his testimony about the excesses in Kham added to the inertia of the most conservative sectors, hopeful because of the ambiguity and secret contacts with the United States administration, by then already established in the cold war.
In that context, the military organization of the "Four Rivers and Six" was created in 1958 among the Khampa refugees in Lhasa. SierraThe "Chushi-Gangdruk" movement, focused on the fight against China, was primarily inspired by a wealthy merchant from Kham named Gompo Tashi, who rose to become a formidable general. Gompo Tashi was in contact with the Dalai Lama's older brothers, Takster Rinpoche and Gyalo Thondup, who were themselves CIA agents. The Korean War had begun in June 1950, and the Agency was interested in creating problems for China in Tibet.
Since 1951, the United States had expressed in a letter to the Dalai Lama's government its willingness to provide "material assistance" to Tibet, provided there were "signs of Tibetan resistance to aggression." The Dalai Lama's secretary, Phala, was aware of all CIA operations. He reported everything to the Dalai Lama, and at the same time, protected him to maintain the appearance that he knew nothing, always wisely preventing any direct contact with the Agency or with the United States that could compromise him. The popular uprising that erupted in Lhasa in March 1959 changed everything. The Dalai Lama, who since 1951 had held the bulk of the state treasury in Sikkim, then an Indian protectorate, and who until then had been conciliatory with the Chinese government, fled to India. John Regan, the first head of the agency's Tibetan department, says that the Dalai Lama "tacitly blessed" all the resistance and parallel activity managed by his brothers. Frank Holober, one of the organizers of the CIA's Tibetan department, explains what the Agency's assessment of the Dalai Lama was in the 1950s:
"There were many Buddhist countries in the world, and the Agency was counting on the Dalai Lama to be something of their main voice, to be recognized as a kind of Pope of Buddhism, spreading the anti-communist aspect of Buddhism far and wide. We were prepared to use our media outlets to help the Dalai Lama if he showed any initiative in this regard, but it turned out that he never did."
Even so, when the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in March 1959, at the age of 23, the CIA provided him with 200.000 Indian rupees. Declassified CIA documents show that until the 1,7s, Agency money continued to flow to him: $15.000 million annually for the Tibetan exile movement, including $1974 a month for himself until XNUMX.
The 1959 uprising marked the collapse of Mao's gradualist policies, whose power within the Communist Party was not always absolute. With the Dalai Lama denouncing the Seventeen Points Agreement, Beijing also abandoned it, effectively ending traditional Tibetan governance. The properties of large religious and secular landowners were confiscated, most monasteries were closed, and a new communist administration was established. Tibet's unique status as a theocratic entity within a communist state came to an end. Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein describes it thus: Buddhism was destroyed, and Tibetans were forced to abandon values and customs that were dear to them and at the heart of their cultural identity. The "class struggle" sessions and the constant barrage of propaganda against their beliefs and ridiculing them aimed at destroying the Tibetan way of life. From then until the end of the Cultural Revolution, the people of Tibet endured twenty terrible years, Goldstein explains. Tens of thousands of Tibetans died, perhaps hundreds of thousands, but not the 1,2 million frequently cited by Tibetan exile sources. The horror was undeniable, and its exaggerated figures do not diminish its essence in the slightest.
The "Four Rivers and Six" SierraOperation Kham was the first attempt to give a relatively organized and coordinated dimension to the resistance. It was not a CIA creation, but rather a result of Chinese "reform" in Kham, though the CIA did play a role and contribute to its development. Some 15.000 poorly armed Khampa fighters concentrated in the Lhoka region, south of Lhasa, near the border with India and Bhutan. Their intention was more to "liberate" Kham, their homeland, than "Tibet."
Since 1957, a year before the creation of the "Four Rivers and Six" SierraThe Dalai Lama's brothers had selected the first group of young Khampas to be trained by the CIA on the island of Saipan, north of Guam. One full moon night in October 1957, the mission began: a CIA "Flying Fortress," painted black and unmarked, took off from a base in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Piloted by a crew of Czechs and Poles, it flew over India without permission and dropped three of the six trained Khampas into Tibet. They carried cyanide capsules in their clothing to prevent them from being taken prisoner alive. Information about what was happening inside Tibet was very fragmented, and the paratroopers' mission, equipped with radios, was to clarify the situation and try to coordinate, as much as possible, the chaotic resistance groups that had taken to the mountains. A year later, in the autumn of 1958, the Agency carried out its first weapons drop in the Lhoka region for "Four Rivers and Six" SierraRifles, machine guns, mortars, bazookas, grenades? In total, there were about 40 weapons drops, but this aid did not prevent the crushing of the Khampa resistance. By April/May 1959, the Lhoka stronghold had been completely annihilated. Gompo Tashi crossed the Indian border in April, his body riddled with war wounds, leaving in Tibet only small, uncoordinated pockets of resistance. One of these had formed in Pemba, north of Lhasa. The CIA dropped 16 paratroopers there in the autumn of 1959, of whom only one, Dechen, survived.
In the area there were “thousands of resistance fighters,” Dechen explains. “They told us they would launch weapons and that in three or four months we could recapture Lhasa.” They launched 800 weapons, but, as in most of Central Tibet, the geography of Pemba is mountainous and steppe-like, without forests or any possibility of shelter. The Chinese first dropped leaflets in Tibetan urging surrender and telling people to ignore the “imperialists,” then they sent five planes, which hunted the guerrillas like rabbits. “There was nowhere to take refuge; we were in open country,” Dechen says. Thousands died, and several hundred were captured. From then on, the Chinese gained military control of the vast majority of Tibetan territory, control that, according to Chinese sources, was not consolidated until 1962.
III) «ST Circus»
After the guerrilla debacle in Tibet, it was Gompo Tashi, the main leader of the "Four Rivers and Six" movement, who emerged. SierraIt was [name omitted] who suggested to the CIA the idea of organizing a Khampa guerrilla stronghold in Mustang, in Nepalese territory, from which to harass the Chinese. Since the population of Mustang is Tibetan, the guerrillas, who were disguised as "Tibetan refugees," physically resembled the locals. The central government of Nepal, in Kathmandu, was very far away, and its reports about remote Mustang were rather fragmentary. The idea was quickly accepted by the CIA, which established a training camp for the Tibetan Khampas at Camp Hale, Colorado, one of the highest mountainous areas in the United States. The operation was given the code name "ST Circus."
“The conditions at Camp Hale were quite similar to those in Tibet,” explains Norbu Dorjee, one of the first khampas sent there for training and who later became a squad leader in Mustang. The camp consisted of several barracks and training areas. The entire compound in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains, was surrounded by the military under the pretext of conducting nuclear weapons tests. The local population had no idea that it was a CIA training camp for Tibetan guerrillas. Norbu Dorjee recalls that in the barrack that served as a school, there was a portrait of President Eisenhower with the following inscription: “To my Tibetan friends, I wish you the greatest success.” In total, 200 khampas, the most capable and resourceful, passed through Camp Hale. They were the “squad leaders” and “specialists” (communications, mapping, radio, explosives) of Mustang’s secret army.
The force was recruited from among the thousands of guerrillas who, like Aten, had crossed the border into India and Nepal, defeated but eager to continue the fight. A native of Kham's Gansi Song district, Tega, now 79, had participated in the rebellion of his village of XNUMX inhabitants, of whom only XNUMX survived. He had left behind his wife and children. His brother, an upper-class lama, had been shot by the Chinese. Cruzor the Indian border in 1959, after the Lhoka debacle.
“It was shortly after the Dalai Lama’s escape; we arrived in India in miserable conditions. At the border, we had to hand over our weapons to the Indian guards. We had nothing, and we started working on road construction in the state of Assam. It was hard work, a profession dominated by Tibetan refugees.” Organized by the Dalai Lama’s brothers, recruiters for the future Mustang army arrived and took them away.Mar"We walked from Western India to the border with Nepal, and from there, half by bus, half on foot, until we reached Mustang. It was a journey of many months," he explains.
Champa Naman, 65, came to Nepal at the age of 15 from Nagsam, Kham, with his entire family. I found him in MarPha, a picturesque Thakalo village in Lower Mustang, where he lives in a house that is almost a hut, with his wife and two daughters. "We escaped from Tibet through Mount Kailash, we took all our cattle, but the Chinese confiscated them. Once in India, they came to recruit me to go to Mustang," he recalls.
Norbu Phuntsok, another Khampa resident of Jomson (Mustang) who runs a souvenir shop, explains that his family did not directly suffer the repression. “My family was nomadic and poor, so I had nothing to fear from the Chinese, but my grandfather was a monk. We heard that lamas had been killed in Lhasa, and that made us decide to flee,” he says.
The first winter was very harsh; the CIA money and supplies were slow to arrive. The locals remember the arrival of unusually long mule caravans, "up to fifty or sixty mules," that came to Mustang from India laden with provisions for the khampas. "We lived in tents and makeshift wooden huts," Tega recalls. "The first task was to build the camps, prepare the crops, and organize the upkeep of the livestock. To go down to the villages, we had to ask permission from the group leaders," the old man says.
An army of 2400 khampas was concentrated in Mustang. The force was spread out along the Kali Gandaki Valley in small camps ("magar"), each with about one hundred guerrillas. For the sake of discretion, the camps were usually located a considerable distance from villages. The camps on the east bank of the river had their headquarters in the town of Kagbeni, in the lower part of the valley, while those on the west were coordinated from Ghami, at an altitude of 3500 meters. In caves near the border, the guerrillas stored weapons and supplies for the groups that went on missions into Tibetan territory. The guerrillas were ordered to stay away from populated areas. In general, the inhabitants of Mustang welcomed the khampas, despite their reputation as untamed bandits prone to violence.
“Our king sympathized with their cause; his son, the current king, married a Tibetan princess, and we supported their struggle because they were Buddhists, of our same religion,” explains Mr. Tharchin, a 67-year-old resident of Lo Manthang, who was 20 when the Khampas arrived. “Besides, the Khampas had good money and paid well. They had very good horses; all the horses and cattle were stolen in Tibet, and at that time they were a good resource for us,” says the resident. “The relationship with them was good,” Tharchin insists. The cases of marriages between Khampas and women from Mustang, almost all of them Kagbeni and Ghami, which occurred during the fourteen years of the guerrilla presence in Mustang, from 1960 to 1974, confirm this. However, the kingdom also experienced many unpleasant episodes because of the guerrillas. Residents of Lo Manthang cite cases of local women being raped by the khampas while gathering firewood or medicinal herbs in the mountains, and cite three cases of local traders who regularly crossed the border into Chinese Tibet, who were killed by the khampas on suspicion of espionage.
“They weren’t spies, just traders,” Tharchin recalls. “One, named Karma, was from Jomson, at the mouth of the valley, and traded wool across the border. The Khampas beat him to death; I saw his bloody corpse lying on top of the wool myself.” Another, named Namdug, took sheep and goats to Tibet and bought grain there. “They became suspicious of him and killed him.”
That all this was organized and financed by the United States was a well-kept secret. The Frenchman Peissel who traveled to Mustang in 1964 mentions his encounters with the Khampas in his book, but he did not know everything about CIA patronage.
"We never saw the Americans around here (they were never here), but we heard them," replies Mr. Tsering Karma, another veteran resident of Lo Manthang, who was a young man in the sixties, with a mischievous smile.
Tsering Karma remembers those clear, bright, full-moon nights when the guerrillas marked certain fields in the valley with large bonfires. After a few hours, the engines of CIA planes could be heard as they crossed the Himalayas to airdrop supplies. "There were rumors that their weapons came 'from abroad,' but for us, 'foreign' meant either India or Tibet; the world ended there," he explains.
Militarily, the Mustang guerrillas' main success was disrupting traffic on the Lhasa-Xinjiang highway, which passed very close to Mustang, along the border with Nepal. In late 1961, a commando of forty guerrillas ambushed a Chinese military truck on that road. They killed the three occupants—the driver, a woman, and an officer—set the vehicle on fire, and took a sack full of documents. These turned out to be secret military reports that provided months of work for CIA specialists. China was then a closed country, and the Agency had very little information. That sack illuminated a vast black hole regarding what was happening in the country. In fairly clear terms, the documents revealed the difficulties the "Great Leap Forward" was encountering in Tibet, Xinjiang, and other Chinese provinces. The CIA's China Analytical Department relied on that sack for quite some time, which contributed to the overall value of Operation ST Circus.
Norbu Dorjee's account and other sources indicate that there were no major offensive operations launched from Mustang. When asked about the results, the group leader said, "There was no invasion plan because the difference in forces was too great." He added, "We managed to make it very difficult for the Chinese to move around the area." Indeed, the Lhasa-Xinjiang road, which even today is an area plagued by bandits who rob gold prospectors, became impassable in the 1960s. But the Chinese built another road, somewhat further north, to cover the same route without being exposed to attacks. Most of the actions were mere skirmishes in which no more than twenty or thirty men participated. "We destroyed cars and trucks, gathered intelligence, and observed the Chinese movements," Norbu Dorjee explained. On one occasion, a group of nine guerrillas was caught in a snowstorm, surrounded by the Chinese, and wiped out. "Their bodies and weapons were captured by the Chinese," the group leader explains.
The CIA's involvement was militarily irrelevant, but it had great psychological significance because it confirmed for the Chinese the "imperialist" influence and origin of their conflicts in Tibet, whose roots were of a different nature and had many other components. The official Chinese narrative emphasized a siege mentality, the idea that peace in the region was disrupted by foreign intervention. In a way, this shielded them from criticism of their own absurdities and atrocities in Chinese policy toward Tibet during the 1960s and 70s.
For those in charge of the "ST Circus" at the CIA, the operation's objective wasn't Tibetan independence, but rather "creating problems for China." "The official idea was to keep the Chinese occupied. It was clear that they weren't going to war for Tibet, but the Tibetans believed they were fighting for Tibetan independence," Sam Halpern, one of the "ST Circus" operatives, explained to Tibetan filmmaker Tenzing Sonam in the 1990s. This idea was subject to the vicissitudes and shifts in international politics. India's reluctance toward the secret Himalayan army changed radically in 1962, when the brief border war between China and India led to an increase in Tibetan guerrilla activity in Delhi. In March 1965, the CIA issued a directive to the Khampas not to launch any further offensive attacks against the Chinese from Mustang, and to limit themselves to "intelligence operations," observing troop movements and gathering information.
“We weren’t very obedient to that directive,” Norbu Dorjee remarks ironically. “From then on, we didn’t always inform them of our offensive actions,” the group leader recalls with a smile.
At the beginning of 1969, the CIA announced to the guerrillas the conclusion of the operation. The change of administration in Washington already heralded changes in foreign policy, which in 1970 and 1972 led to the rapprochement between the United States and China, with which Washington managed to increase pressure against the USSR with the help of Mao. From that point of view, the Tibetan guerrillas were used for a cause that was played on a global board of relations and hostilities, in which they were completely insignificant pieces. Most of them today recognize this circumstance, but at the same time they do not consider their struggle useless.
“We were fighting for freedom and for our country; it wasn’t a waste of time,” says Tega, the 79-year-old former guerrilla fighter married to a woman from Mustang, who still bears the scar from the Chinese bullet that pierced his left arm. All sources confirm that the Chinese army never crossed the Nepalese border in retaliatory military actions, a truly astonishing fact, considering that the guerrillas were constantly violating that same border. China did, however, settle some scores with India, supplying weapons to guerrilla groups operating there. It provided arms and training to Naga and Mizo groups, which were seeking independence in northeastern India. The Mizo National Front and its armed wing were sustained from the 1970s until the early 1980s. Some leaders of the Naga National Council were in exile in Beijing during that time.
In Mustang, the Sino-American rapprochement sentenced the secret Himalayan army. Shortly before, in 1968, the head of the Mustang guerrilla, a lama named Bapa Yeshe, had fallen into disgrace with the CIA. It was suspected that Bapa Yeshe had simply appropriated most of the funds that the Agency gave him to pay his men. The Dalai Lama's brothers and the CIA then sent a new leader to Mustang, Gyato Wangdu, a charismatic and irreducible guerrilla who had been part of the first group of six khampas trained by the CIA in 1957. The rivalry between Gyato Wangdu and the corrupt Bapa Yeshe, put a dramatic note on the last stage of the secret Himalayan army. The residents of Mustang remember that the Khampa army was divided into two sides that maintained armed confrontations. In this context, in 1972 the King of Nepal Mahendra, a sympathizer of the Tibetan cause, who had visited Mustang and tolerated, closing his eyes, the Khampa presence there, died. His successor to the throne, Bihendra, approached China. Deprived of funds and divided into factions, the Himalayan army deepened its excesses to the point that the people of Mustang appealed to the government in Kathmandu to bring order to their remote kingdom. China was pressing in the same direction, while the CIA launched a whole series of programs and subsidies to resettle guerrillas who laid down their weapons in Pókhara and its surroundings.
In 1974, the Nepalese government sent troops to Mustang to disarm the guerrillas. The Dalai Lama intervened by sending a recorded message to the Khampa army in which he warned that the focus was going to be destroyed and that thousands of Tibetans residing in Nepal could suffer the wrath of the population if there were clashes with the royal Nepalese army:
"You have risked your lives for many years and fought for our cause. I know that the current situation will cause you great disappointment. However, we must try to achieve our goals by peaceful means."
That message, the first formulation of the Dalai Lama's current "middle way," was a direct consequence of the pro-China shift in American policy. It caused a great stir among the guerrillas, Tega recalls. "Everyone wanted to keep fighting, but we couldn't disobey the Dalai Lama, who was asking us to hand over our weapons to the Nepalese army." The King of Mustang himself went to the Khampa Headquarters with the same message, the residents of Lo Manhtang remember.
Some guerrillas committed suicide by jumping into a ravine. Tharchin, the veteran resident of Lo Manthang, remembers that one of them, called Kupche Panj, jumped into the void while crossing a bridge, dragging the two Nepalese soldiers who were tied up with him as he fell. Gyato Wangdu and 35 irreducibles decided to flee to India.
"Wangdu was an indomitable leader and did not want to surrender to the Nepalese army because he suspected he would be imprisoned, as had been other guerrillas who had previously surrendered their weapons," explains Wangel Lama, a former minister in the Tibetan government-in-exile and former member of the Tibetan Parliament in Dhramsala, who runs the "Annapurna Hotel" in Pokhara, where Gyato Wangdu used to stay when he passed through the city.
The guerrilla leader was intercepted by the Nepalese army, moving in helicopters, in the Jumla district, which he and his men were crossing on foot through the difficult Dolpo mountain passes, heading towards the western end of the Indo-Nepalese Himalayan border. In a clash a few hours from the Indian border, Wangdu and four of his men fell under the bullets of the Royal Army. The weapons collected from the Khampas were displayed in Tundikhel, the Marthe Nepalese army has in the center of Kathmandu. Wangdu's bullet-riddled body, with his sword and personal belongings, was displayed in Pokhara as a hunting trophy, recalls Madhav Sharma, a veteran journalist from that city. "The weapons displayed in Kathmandu were American, much more modern and better than those the Nepalese army itself had at that time," says the journalist.
In 1974, the CIA funded three refugee camps for Khampas who had laid down their weapons, two in Pókhara (Paljorling and Jambaling) and one in MarIn addition to the Annapurna Hotel, land was purchased, and the guerrillas and their families built the settlements. Today, these camps have a rather dilapidated and abandoned appearance. Of the 2400 volunteers in the secret Himalayan army, only about 500 remain alive. This group of elderly people bears the marks of their lives etched on their faces. Together with their families, they number around 1500. The money the CIA used to spend on the guerrilla movement is now used to support "Free Tibet" through "non-governmental" organizations affiliated with the agency, such as the National Endowment for Democracy. Former Cold War outlets like the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia maintain radio and television programs (via satellite) in the Tibetan language.
In 2004, the Dalai Lama, exiled in India since 1959, wrote the following, which can be considered an epitaph and tribute to the Khampa:
"In Kham, eastern Tibet, where the people preserved the ancient warrior qualities of their ancestors, groups of men banded together to oppose the Chinese by force. They fought on horseback, often equipped with antiquated weapons. In doing so, they expressed their loyalty and love for Tibet with indomitable courage. Although they were unsuccessful in their attempt to prevent the Chinese from dominating Tibet, they made it clear to the so-called People's Liberation Army what most Tibetans feel about its presence. While I believe that the Tibetan struggle can only be won in the long term and through peaceful means, I have always admired these freedom fighters for their unwavering courage and determination."
For the Chinese, the CIA's participation in the conflicts of that time in Tibet confirmed the official thesis that peace in the region was altered by imperialism and foreign interventionism. In this sense, the secret Himalayan army contributed to Maoist China's siege mentality and its loss of sight of the reality of Tibet's problems.
Article originally published in La Vanguardia and reproduced in Casa Asia Virtual with the permission of Rafael Poch and 
