The Dalai Lama and the CIA
Shortly after the 1949 victory of Maoist forces against the U.S.-
backed dictator Chiang Kai-shek, the revolution came to Tibet. The
ruling class of Tibet--a feudal class of aristocrats and monks--
alternated wildly between passivity and resistance.
Starting in 1957, sections of their class participated in a series of
armed anti-communist actions--attempting to stop the deepening
revolutionary changes in Tibet. Lamaist propagandists, including the
Dalai Lama himself, ****tray these actions as a noble, home-grown
resistance to foreign domination.
The truth is this: from its beginning within Tibet in the 1950s to the
armed feudalist uprising of 1959, to the armed exile-based guerrilla
movement of the 1960s--this "struggle" was organized, financed,
trained, armed, led, and finally dispersed by the CIA.
In the old days, the Dalai Lama was a figurehead of an oppressive
feudal order. In exile, he became the figurehead of a Tibetan CIA-
backed, anticommunist armed movement headed by his brother, Gyalo
Thondup--similar to so many "contra" (counterrevolutionary) armies the
CIA has created to wage covert wars.
"Many of the arms were brought in from abroad. The rebels' base south
of the Tsangpo river on a number of occasions received airdropped
supplies from the Chiang Kai-shek bands and radio stations were set up
by agents sent by the imperialists and the Chiang Kai-shek bands for
their intrigues."
The revolutionary news agency Xinhua, March 1959
"Nobody, either in committed or uncommitted countries, would be taken
in by the communist allegation that... the rebellion was sup****ted by
`imperialists, the Chiang Kai-shek bands and foreign reactionaries.'
"
The Economist 1959
"There is nothing at all coming in from the outside."
Thubten Norbu, the Dalai Lama's
brother, interviewed in
U.S. News and World Re****t, 1959
In the early 1950s, the U.S. invaded Korea and threatened to invade
revolutionary China itself. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) worked day and night to gather reactionary forces into its spy
networks and to develop covert teams that could wage secret war
against the new people's power in China.
In April 1949 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson cabled his
Ambassador in New Delhi that the U.S. rulers would like to see
"Tibetan military capacity [to] resist quietly strengthened." Tibet
historian A. Tom Grunfeld writes: "In the summer of 1950 instructions
were given to the Office of Policy Coordination, the bureaucratic arm
officially in charge of covert operations, to `initiate psychological
warfare and paramilitary operations against the Chinese Communist
regime.' "
Top feudal forces around the Dalai Lama offered themselves as eager
agents--first to the reactionary Kuomintang (KMT) forces led by Chiang
Kai-shek on Taiwan and soon to the U.S. directly. The Dalai Lama's two
older brothers, the "incarnated lama" Thubten Jigme Norbu and Gyalo
Thondup, emerged as key Tibetan CIA agents.
Grunfeld writes, "George Patterson...was intimately involved as a
translator and go-between in these negotiations. He re****ted that in
1953 Thubten Norbu contacted the CIA and was told to take his case to
the KMT (from whom he was already receiving covert aid). Patterson
also recalled an encounter two years later between Ragpa Pangdatsang
and representatives from the Indian and American governments. At this
time the United States was supposed to have suggested a ten-year plan
of revolt, the aim of which was the eventual overthrow of China's
control in Tibet.... John F. Avedon, whose recent book can be
considered the `official' version of the Dalai Lama view of history,
contends that Gyalo Thondup made an agreement with the CIA as early as
1951. It was initially an intelligence-gathering arrangement upgraded
to guerrilla warfare in 1956. Within a short space of time the United
States had eclipsed the KMT as the rebel's prime source of military
aid." Grunfeld adds that in opening these arrangements with the U.S.
imperialists, Thubten Norbu carried "a letter authorizing him to
negotiate on behalf of the Dalai Lama." In 1958, the CIA started using
air bases in Bangkok, Thailand to airdrop guns and ammunition into the
ethnic-Tibetan regions of Kham.
Grunfeld writes: "It was Gyalo Thondup who arranged the first CIA
training missions, picking six Tibetans for that purpose." A secret
CIA training camp was soon set up for Tibetan agents at Camp Hale,
high in the Colorado Rockies.
Tibetan Plots--Made in the USA
The CIA intrigues encouraged an armed uprising in March 1959, as
feudal forces tried to expel the revolutionary army from Tibet.
Grunfeld writes: "Despite cries of innocence on the part of the Dalai
Lama, officials in Wa****ngton were planning for the events months
before that fateful March in 1959."
In March 1959, the feudal Tibetan forces were quickly defeated. The
Dalai Lama was whisked into exile in India by a covert CIA operation.
Grunfeld do***ents that CIA-trained agents in the Dalai Lama's caravan
laid out special airdrop targets in the snow to guide a U.S. military
C130 aircraft that had been specially modified to fly in the thin
Tibetan air. Halfway to India, a radio operator joined the Dalai
Lama's group so the whole operation could be directly monitored from
the CIA station in Dacca, East Pakistan.
The CIA immediately set up a Tibetan contra force among the exiles.
Ten Tibetan contra camps were set up in the tiny principality of
Mustang on the Nepal-China border. The CIA had three more C130s
modified for high altitude airdrops. Grunfeld writes: "This major
recruiting effort yielded 14,000 Tibetans and some additional tribal
people in the field, `entirely dependent on long-range trans****t and
infiltration,' and `armed, equipped and fed by the Agency [CIA].' "
In 1961 the Dalai Lama said: "the only weapons that the [lamaist]
rebels possess are those they've managed to capture from the Chinese."
Some re****ts say the Dalai Lama personally picked the contra field
commander in Mustang.
India's War Threats
At this time, the Indian government was preparing a border war with
revolutionary China, and their direct involvement in the Tibetan
contra army picked up. At a secret Indian base in Orissa, U.S. agents,
Indian officials and Tibetan contras met weekly to coordinate their
activities. The first Tibetan contra raid into China was staged in
late 1961, just before war broke out between India and China. Grunfeld
do***ents a CIA study from this period with detailed information on
how Tibet's unique weather might affect the use of aerial, chemical
and biological warfare.
Meanwhile, the top Tibetan clergy rented tens of thousands of Tibetan
refugees to the Indian government to build military roads in northern
India for the coming war against the Chinese revolution (see the
accompanying article for a description of these forced labor camps).
When war broke out between India and revolutionary China in 1962,
India's forces were quickly defeated by the People's Liberation Army.
While the Tibetan exiles were helping India attack China, powerful
revolutionary forces inside India were taking inspiration from the
Maoist revolution. Internationalist Indian revolutionaries took the
side of China. Soon, revolutionary communists led by Charu Mazumdar
formed a new Maoist vanguard party in India and in 1967 started a
great armed struggle among the peasants of Naxalbari--in the same
Darjeeling district where so many Tibetan feudals had entered India.
Raids and Spying from the Tibetan Contra Bases
*IP2*The Tibetan contra border raids continued through the '60s. The
CIA money that Gyalo Thondup received for these operations increased.
The CIA hoped these Tibetan contras could maintain networks of agents,
conduct sabotage, and generally harass the revolutionary forces.
*IP0*But, overall, this whole Tibetan contra operation was a failure.
As the revolution deepened in Tibet, the border was more and more
successfully sealed. Revolutionary militias of the People's Communes--
made up of former Tibetan serfs--joined the People's Liberation Army
in hunting down and killing these hated feudal saboteurs and spies.
Meanwhile, the people in Nepal increasingly demanded that these armed
camps be removed.
In the last known raid in 1969, a Tibetan contra raiding party was
completely wiped out by revolutionary forces. By the early 1970s, the
U.S. ruling class was tied down in Vietnam and was preparing to open
relations with the People's Republic of China. A corrupt, ineffectual,
armed Tibetan contra movement no longer suited U.S. imperialist plans.
The CIA simply cut the Tibetan contras loose.
This was a pattern of use-and-discard familiar to reactionaries among
the Kurds of Iran, the Hmong hill tribesmen of Indochina, the Misquito
Indians of eastern Nicaragua, and the Islamic fundamentalist forces
who fought in Afghanistan.
In 1975 the Dalai Lama ordered the remnants of the contra forces in
Nepal to lay down their arms. The Tibetan feudals were militarily and
politically defeated inside Tibet. When CIA funding dried up, the
Tibetan contras simply had no basis for continuing their guerrilla war
from exile.
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