When Heaven Shed Blood
Details of the CIA's secret war in Tibet are only now leaking out, a tale of daring espionage, violence and finally betrayal.
By Melinda Liu
In 1958, the Dalai Lama was clinging to power in Tibet as Chinese communism closed in. That is when the religious leader says he first heard that the Central Intelligence Agency was stepping up its involvement in Tibet. The Dalai Lama's lord chamberlain introduced two CIA-trained Tibetan guerrillas and asked them to demonstrate their skills. The warriors pulled out a bazooka, fired it, then took 15 minutes to reload before they fired again. "I said, 'Will you shoot once and then ask the enemy to wait 15 minutes?' " the Dalai Lama recalls, chuckling. "Impossible." But his lord chamberlain was enthusiastic. Freedom fighters were already battling China's military, and they had direct radio communications with the CIA, said the aide. "They gave the impression that once arrived in India, great support would come from the United States," the Dalai Lama told NEWSWEEK, shaking his head.
"It's a sad, sad story."
For many Tibetans, it certainly is. Forty years ago the man they revere as their god-king mounted a horse and fled into exile in India, disguised as a simple bodyguard, exhausted and sick with dysentery. But the secret CIA war in Tibet—an operation code-named "ST CIRCUS"—was just beginning.
How the Dalai Lama's disciples were taken under the CIA's wing to wage covert war on the roof of the world is one of the most exotic episodes in the annals of Western intelligence.
Some intimate details are emerging only now, as retired spooks publish memoirs and graying guerrillas contemplate the violent karma of their past. Tibetan veterans still fondly recall training secretly in Colorado with Americans they knew as "Mr. Ken" or "Mr. Mac," then parachuting into Tibet out of the silver C-130s they called "sky ships." Their operations scored spectacular intelligence coups—including, NEWSWEEK has learned, early hints that China was developing the atomic bomb.
An in-house CIA study called the secret war in Tibet one of the agency's "most romantic programs of covert action." Yet
the Dalai Lama, a devout pacifist, broods over the dark side of this tale. The blood-spattered recollections remind him how Tibet, and he himself, was thrust into a high-stakes cold-war intrigue. "What began as a pure Tibetan resistance looked quite different when the CIA came in, making it easy for China to discredit it as 'Western imperialist activities'," he says. "And the U.S. help was very, very limited. So I'm still very critical of this episode."
The sad story, as the Dalai Lama calls it, began half a century ago. On and off, Tibet had been a vassal state to China in dynasties past, but since 1911 Tibetans had enjoyed de facto independence. They were jittery when victorious communist troops, carrying giant Mao Zedong portraits, marched peacefully into Lhasa to "liberate" the city in 1951.
Washington promised financial backing for the Dalai Lama, who considered fleeing to the United States, and aid for any resistance effort inside Tibet. "This was not some CIA black-bag operation," said Ken Knaus, who handled Tibet matters at the CIA from 1958 to 1965. "The initiative was coming from... the entire U.S. government." Page 1 of 6 Full article: http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/asia/ov0616_1.htm