In Exile From the Land of Snows (25 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the airdrops came almost forty graduates of Camp Hale. From them, the National Volunteer Defense Army received a badly needed education in modern combat. They brought M-1’s and Springfields, heavy 80-millimeter recoilless guns and 2-inch mortars as well as solar batteries to run hidden radio hookups, scramblers for coding messages, machine-gun silencers, “death pills” and miniature cameras for espionage. Under their instruction, khaki uniforms were adopted and daily life became more regimented with a 5:00 a.m. rising followed by calisthenics, singing of the Tibetan national anthem, farming, survival training and maneuvers in the
hills. Their presence gave Tibet its first substantial military hope since the height of the revolt in 1958.

Resuscitated, the NVDA struck out east, north and west from Mustang’s high plateau. An average raid consisted of a few dozen men penetrating Tibet for up to a month, ambushing a PLA convoy and then retreating. The country was so wild that, given a reasonable troop parity, the guerrillas were guaranteed success whenever they attacked. Some forays, though, were luckier than others. In 1966 a small party sent to disrupt transport along the Xinjiang-Lhasa road annihilated a Chinese convoy. It was not until the battle was over that the guerrillas discovered the head of the PLA’s western command in Tibet and his entire staff among the corpses. The party had been traveling with all of their records, which now proved a treasure trove, not just for the Tibetans but for the CIA as well. Through these, invaluable information on the recently begun Cultural Revolution was obtained as well as a remarkable document revealing that by China’s own count some 87,000 Tibetans had been killed in the 1959 revolt, an event which Peking had continued to portray as only a minor disturbance.

Mustang’s greatest achievement lay in its espionage network. Within a short time the NVDA had succeeded in establishing underground links throughout Tibet, not only the scope but the quality of information retrieved making the operation immensely profitable. Though the Chinese were suspicious of all Tibetans, the regional CCP was compelled to employ a number of minority cadres for administrative tasks. Among these were many “sleepers,” Tibetans who appeared to be collaborators but in reality were, as they slowly ascended the local hierarchy, supplying the NVDA with information. NVDA couriers, traveling from place to place by night collected information from agents and were responsible for documenting not only China’s massive military buildup along the Himalayas but also the critical shifting of the PRC’s principal nuclear base from Lop Nor in Xinjiang to Nagchuka, 165 miles north of Lhasa.

For all of its advantages Mustang proved to have one critical flaw. It was too remote from the main theater of Chinese operations—“an isolated army in an isolated territory,” as one guerrilla described the second stage of Tibetan resistance. In addition, Khampa fighters, raised for millennia as cavalry, were now denied the use of their mounts. Due to the difficulty of retreating up the treacherous passes which enclosed the plateau, only sixty Tibetan ponies were kept for the entire corps. Retreat itself inflicted the highest number of casualties. The wounded were generally left to die, Mustang’s headquarters, much less its front-line camps, had little medicine and no surgical equipment. Nevertheless, in time, age, not battle, caused the greatest loss of life. “It was pathetic,” recalled one of the younger
guerrillas, a TYC recruit who was sent to Mustang to replace men entering their forties and fifties. “People didn’t die from bullets, but just by walking to a fight and back. Once they knew a raid was on, the Chinese would send patrols to cut off its retreat. The PLA were fresh and our men had been literally jogging night after night. So the old-timers would give out. They’d take a whole tin of coffee, mix it together with water and soup in their bowls and drink it. That kept them going. But after doing this kind of thing two or three times, their hearts would just pop.”

As the 1970s began, a combination of external and internal pressures placed Mustang’s continued existence in jeopardy. Following Henry Kissinger’s secret flight to Peking, paving the way, in July of 1971, for a U.S.-Chinese rapprochement, the CIA suddenly cut off support to the Tibetan guerrillas. With the Special Frontier Force grown into a mature unit, India had no need to maintain on its own the previous level of aid. Even worse, Nepal, no longer fearful, as it had been in the early 1960s, of a Chinese attack, now wished to counter New Delhi’s influence in the region by furthering ties with Peking. Hence, in 1972 Katmandu, which had feigned ignorance of the Khampas’ presence for twelve years, took the first step toward expelling them by launching a propaganda attack accusing the Tibetans of banditry, rape, and murder.

Internal disarray as well plagued the National Volunteer Defense Army. In 1969 Gyalo Thondup, acting on long-standing complaints of younger CIA-educated officers, had withdrawn General Baba Yeshi as commander, replacing him with a nephew of the late Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, the sole survivor of the first group of Tibetans to be trained by the United States, General Gyato Wangdu. Baba Yeshi went peacefully at first, journeying to Dharamsala where he was offered as reparation the prestigious post of Chief of Security, holding a rank equivalent to that of deputy Cabinet minister. He declined the position, however, and within a short time was back in Mustang. Rallying almost two hundred of his tribesmen, Baba Yeshi broke from the NVDA, publicly accused Gyalo Thondup of misappropriating funds and occupied a guerrilla camp called Mamang east of Mustang from which he openly attacked the main body of soldiers, now, in effect, a rival faction. In return, General Wangdu laid siege to the splinter group’s holdout, until Katmandu, apprised of the internecine strife, compelled Baba Yeshi to present himself at the capital. Three months of personal negotiations, led by Nepal’s Home Secretary, followed. At their climax Baba Yeshi, according to one witness, burst into tears, pleaded for protection and then, in exchange for a grant of political asylum, gave the Nepalese a detailed account of the NVDA’s troop strength, supplies, weaponry and positions.

By then, the trouble had already spread to the Tibetan communities in India. Prominent leaders in thirteen settlements, populated mainly by refugees from Kham and Amdo, sided with Baba Yeshi in the dispute, believing that his dismissal by Gyalo Thondup had been the result of a concerted effort on the part of the primarily Central Tibetan government in Dharamsala to disenfranchise them.

In large part the opening of a regional fault line—always Tibet’s greatest internal threat—resulted from Kuomintang agitation. From the Tibetans’ earliest days in exile, KMT agents had attempted to win a faction of the refugees to their own cause. Their greatest success had been with some of the easterners in the so-called 13 camps, who, though they had no pro-Taiwanese sympathies, were happy to accept large financial contributions as an alternative to Dharamsala’s support. Exploiting the NVDA split, the KMT now sought to draw the 13 group further from Dharamsala and closer to itself by successfully fueling separatist sentiment. After a failed attempt at redress in Dharamsala, the 13 group’s relations with the exile administration soured and some of its members ceased to submit the one rupee a month contribution given by most refugees to their government.