The CIA's secret war in Tibet

Staff Writer Paul Salopek (Chicago Tribune, reporting from Katmandu, Nepal, Jan. 26, 1997); Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

U.S. eagles are fun (wiki)

The first Americans Nawang Gayltsen ever saw had small, silver [Nazi-style] eagles pinned on their caps.

Mr. Gayltsen will never forget those eagles. They seemed auspicious, like totems of victory or success [or death from above]. Today, his face wrinkles into a sad smile remembering this.

The Americans came, he said, in a big turboprop plane, a gleaming machine that he and other awed Tibetans called a "sky ship." They wore sunglasses and baggy flight suits. They packed shiny [mass killing machines nicely called] automatic weapons on their hips. And speaking through an interpreter, they asked Gayltsen if he wanted to kill Chinese.

Wait, this is not what Hollywood told me.

"I told them I would be very happy to kill many Chinese," recalled the 63-year-old rug merchant, one of thousands of exiled Tibetans living in Nepal's picturesque Himalayan capital [Kathmandu].

"I was very young and strong then, very patriotic. I told them I would even be a suicide bomber."

The strangers, Air Force pilots working with the CIA, must have liked what they heard because on that hot day back in 1963, at a secret air base in India, they took Gayltsen and 40 other Tibetan recruits on the first airplane ride of their lives.

It was a journey that would stretch halfway around the world and into one of the murkiest chapters of the CIA's long history of covert activity in Asia: a secret war in Tibet.

[U.S.'s Secret War in Tibet]

Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, say Tibetan veterans such as Gaylsten and U.S. intelligence experts who corroborate their stories, the American government flew hundreds of eager Tibetan exiles to far-flung bases in Colorado (USA), Guam, and even Okinawa.

There they were trained as guerrillas against the Chinese troops who had invaded their remote [Mahayana] Buddhist kingdom in 1950.

The Tibetans, many recruited from the warrior Khamba tribe, were parachuted back into their homeland at night with submachine guns and neck [possibly heart-shaped] lockets with photos of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's [god-king] spiritual [and temporal] leader.

Some CIA trainees ended up commanding a Kiplingesque army of 2,000 [CIA assassins, the CIA euphemistically called] resistance fighters...

Their specialty was ambushing the People's Liberation Army from bases high in the cloudy mountains of Nepal [outside Tibet].

• [The USA loves war, and if you train with US, we'll teach all comers to kill and ruin people, too. Join the Empire. Come to the Dark Side, which we call the white side.]

Others dropped down through the moonlit skies of Central Asia [the Stans] never to be heard from again: At least 40 were presumed captured by the Chinese and [arrested or possibly] executed...

But what we do in Tibet stays in Tibet, right?

Today, this obscure U.S. Cold War skirmish in a high, lonely place many Americans associate with Shangri-La is a tale that both the CIA and the Dalai Lama's pacifist government-in-exile would prefer to forget. After all, China's grip on Tibet remains stronger than ever.

Yet at a time when the Dalai Lama's non-violent campaign for independence has captured the attention of Hollywood['s propaganda machine feeding the American public] -- where Walt Disney and Tri-Star are producing elegiac hymns to "lost Tibet" and Richard Gere and fellow actors champion the mountainous land's cause -- the Tibetan foot soldiers of that quixotic war are beginning to break their decades-old vow of silence to the CIA.

Most of the ex-guerrillas are grandfathers now. They run carpet factories in Katmandu or tend dusty farms [as forgotten exiles] in the foothills of western Nepal.

They admit that going public about their American connections is as much a sign of growing frustration with Tibet's languishing drive for freedom as it is a reckoning with mortality. For many, speaking out seemed a final act of resistance.

You work good with us! - Thank you, George.

"We are old, and we will be gone soon," explained Gaylsten, who says he was taught to blow up bridges by CIA instructors at Camp Hale, a now-abandoned U.S. Army base near Vail, Colorado.

"People should know that men died for this. These things are no longer secrets. They stopped being secrets when we lost."

Truth be told, little about the CIA's skullduggery in the Himalayas is a real secret anymore -- except maybe to the U.S. taxpayers who bankrolled it. More

• Dalai Lama's pro-CIA, anti-China brother dies in U.S. (Reuters, Sep 5, 2008) The Dalai Lama's brother, a Buddhist monk-turned-CIA "translator" who helped train pro-Tibetan murderers to become "resistance fighters" in an anti-Chinese guerrilla war in and around Tibet...
• Dalai Lama Escapes From Tibet: How and Why It Happened (Time, March 17, 2015) March 17, 1959: The Dalai Lama flees [Chinese-occupied] Tibet for asylum in India.