5

The Fight for Tibet


1959–1984

THE GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE that Tempa found in the summer of 1974 was an odd mix of innovation, bureaucracy and the hierarchic vestiges of the Ganden Phodrang of Tibet, the religious rule formed under the Fifth Dalai Lama in 1642. Recognized by no one save its own people—all of whom refused to accept Indian citizenship—Dharamsala’s powers were circumscribed, its resources scant; yet the government’s poverty surprised even Tempa. Its offices operated in a clutter of semi-audible phone lines, secondhand typewriters and formal portraits of the Dalai Lama, and the living quarters for the then 141 Secretariat workers, cramped together on the hillside around Gangchen Kyishong, were barely functional. The building in which Tempa lived had no heat or running water; his room, which he shared with another young man, lay in complete disrepair. Each day a shower of old Indian newspapers, mud patches and beaten-tin cans fell from the rotting walls onto his narrow cot, so worn that its wicker body sank beneath his weight to touch the concrete floor. Meals were taken in the spartan Secretariat mess and came out of Tempa’s salary which, hovering around fifty dollars a month, provided for only the barest essentials.

The Information Office was the most political of Dharamsala’s departments. To promote Tibet’s cause it consulted closely with the four offices established abroad as well as the large bureau in New Delhi. It maintained a listening room to monitor Radio Lhasa’s daily broadcasts and screened recently escaped refugees for the latest information on China’s occupation —a job to which Tempa was assigned. At the same time, he was put in charge of answering the inquiries addressed to Gangchen Kyishong from around the world. He also cut clippings on political, scientific and cultural developments for translation in She Ja or Knowledge, a current affairs magazine published to keep the refugee community informed of global events. Meanwhile, as his first weeks passed, Tempa acquainted himself with the structure of the exile government.

At the head of government stood the Dalai Lama and his Cabinet, the Kashag. Below them, six major departments and two subdepartments (to which those of Health and General Audit were added in the early eighties) were divided among the ministers. Here the resemblance to Tibet’s former government ended. Just up the hill, behind Tempa’s own quarters, were the homes and office of the seventeen-member Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies, the body of elected representatives who, in exile, acted as a parliament. Unlike the Tsongdu, Tibet’s old National Assembly, the deputies were popularly elected to three-year terms—three men and one woman from each province, a cleric from each of the four religious sects, including one for Bon, Tibet’s indigenous religion, and an additional final member appointed by the Dalai Lama for distinguished service in art, science or literature. Their most important task was shared with the Cabinet; together they comprised the Tibetan National Working Committee, the highest policy-making organ of the government. They also conducted the Annual General Meeting, in which each department head was publicly questioned on his section’s performance during the past year. Although the deputies’ ability to redress Tibet’s plight directly was limited by the constraints of refugee life, the Dalai Lama believed that engaging in a democratic experiment in itself constituted an essential ingredient in his nation’s struggle. “Just to criticize China was not sufficient,” he explained. “We had to have a definite alternative of our own. So for this reason we created a representative government and to do this, we discussed and prepared a draft constitution.”

In framing the constitution, the Dalai Lama adopted a blend of socialist guidelines, to ensure the equal distribution of wealth, and democratic procedures for conducting representative government. He also drew heavily on his own personal beliefs. “From a very young age I always felt how all-important the people are,” he related. “Therefore, any ideology that stands for the benefit of the poor, the downtrodden, the lowest people, I feel is sacred. The very thought of democracy, though I couldn’t put it in words, was with me in Tibet. Now, theoretically, Marxism also stands for the majority—the working class. This touches me, yet there is something wrong with its implementation in the present Communist states. Their excessively rigid atmosphere actually spoils the value of human life. On the other hand, while freedom is necessary, one must have an equal economic opportunity with which to exercise it. So it seems portions of both systems are needed.”

On March 10, 1963, the fourth anniversary of the Lhasa uprising, the constitution was promulgated, carefully labeled as a “draft” pending approval by the six million majority in Tibet. In exile, save for a few noble families and Khampa chieftains, who thought that their power would be eroded, the majority of the refugees greeted the document as a momentous, if puzzling, step into the modern world. Among its seventy-seven articles, provisions were made to balance the immense powers of the executive branch, in the person of the Dalai Lama, with a strong legislature and supreme court. Renouncing war “as an instrument of offensive policy,” it declared the fundamental rights of all Tibetans to include those of universal suffrage, equality before the law, life, liberty and property, as well as freedom of religion, speech and assembly. Fulfilling socialist ideals, state ownership of the land was provided for as well as a prohibition against the amassing of wealth and the means of production “to the common detriment.” Once passed by popular referendum, the exile government set about supplying the constitution, as best it could, with a representative framework, one, however, which had already been in place for three years.

Impatient to begin Tibet’s experiment in democracy, the Dalai Lama pushed through the refugees’ first elections as early as the summer of 1960—only months after his arrival in Dharamsala and more than a year before the constitution’s outline was even announced in the autumn of 1961. The election had been an extremely informal affair. Most Tibetans had never imagined participating in government, much less heard of voting; politics had been the business of monks and noblemen for centuries. As a result, there were no candidates. Assembled in their various road camps, people simply wrote on slips of paper the names of those they respected most. The sole requirement was to vote for a representative from one’s own region or, in the case of the clergy, one’s sect. Naturally, all of the thirteen men whose names appeared most frequently were either important lamas, aristocrats or tribal chieftains from Kham and Amdo. By September 1960, they had joined the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala to begin an undertaking as peculiar in its way as their election.

Unfamiliar with administrative procedure, the first group of people’s deputies decided that, rather than oversee policy, they should gain experience by working in the various government departments as deputy directors. The second assembly of representatives, elected in 1963, continued in the same capacity. Those who were not reelected easily found new jobs with the understaffed administration. It was not until the third group of deputies was sent to Dharamsala in May 1966 that the government’s legislature and administration were finally separated, it having developed that, once trained, the deputies’ participation in the bureaucracy necessarily compromised their ability to regulate it.

Despite the improvement, the electoral process itself continued to be run by the administration. In 1963, the second elections saw the introduction of election committees, ballot boxes and female representatives (to comply with the constitutional article ensuring equality of the sexes). In 1966, the third elections included actual candidates, mounted by the election committee at Dharamsala and not by political parties as campaigning, in exile, was considered a potentially destabilizing activity. It was not until 1975 that the fifth Commission of People’s Deputies finally instituted a two-tier vote whereby candidates could be popularly chosen in primary elections. However, even after fifteen years of refining the electoral process, many people—particularly older Tibetans—still found the concept of a popular vote obscure. As Lodi Gyari, chairman of the seventh assembly of deputies, noted, “A lot of people go into the election tent and just pray to His Holiness. ‘I don’t know any of these candidates, but please let me choose the right one to help the Dalai Lama and the people.’ Then they close their eyes, put their finger down and ask the election officer, ‘Would you see whose name is here.’ When they hear it they reply, ‘Oh, it’s so-and-so. I’ll vote for him.’ ”

Resistance, not to representative government, but to its fundamental prerequisite, that of individuals declaring themselves as candidates, also hampered acceptance of democratic procedure. “If I go and ask someone to vote for me,” continued Lodi Gyari, “it would be considered an act of great shamelessness. It’s very funny, you find this in many Oriental cultures, but we are raised to always say, ‘I am very unable and uneducated.’ If someone does not behave like this, it’s considered a clear indication that he has personal motives and is not out for the common good.” As a result, some deputies found themselves elected against their will, unaware even that the committee in Dharamsala had nominated them as candidates until they were summoned to be sworn in. On the opposite end of the spectrum, even those willingly elected were subject to disqualification by either the Dalai Lama or the National Working Committee, who could judge them unfit to hold office.

The issue of how much authority the Dalai Lama should command lay at the very heart of the struggle to create a genuine democracy. The Dalai Lama had used the constitution to weaken his position, ironically against the wishes of his own people. In its final draft, Article 36, section (e), provided, “in the highest interests of the state,” for the Dalai Lama’s impeachment by a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly in consultation with the Supreme Court. Resistance was such that over 150 representatives had gathered in Dharamsala to refuse to approve the constitution unless the clause was deleted. “Of course this was my idea,” the Dalai Lama related. “If we were to have a true democracy there had to be provisions whereby the Dalai Lama’s powers could also be changed. But at the time people complained, mainly, I think, out of an emotional feeling and also because it was something new and difficult to understand. I had to convince them that it was absolutely necessary not just for the present but for the future of all the Tibetan people. This point was one of the most important issues of the early sixties.”

“After working in the government for some time, I could see that just holding elections does not create a democracy,” observed Tempa Tsering. “Even in office, many of the deputies were very apathetic. They were more comfortable with the idea of an all-powerful executive than they were with a free legislature. So for this reason, I believe, democracy has yet to take hold. It’s only among the younger generation that people have a real understanding of the democratic spirit.” In the Tibetan Youth Congress, Tempa found a truly contemporary political climate. Becoming acquainted with its leaders, who, though they still lacked an office, all lived in Dharamsala, he realized that they, not the government, represented the vanguard of the Dalai Lama’s aspirations for a politically open society.

From its start, the Youth Congress had captured the commanding role in the Tibetans’ political life. Dedicated to struggling for the independence of Tibet, it had been created by four young men, all from upper-class backgrounds and most educated in the best British-based schools in India.

“In 1970 things were still pretty bleak in Dharamsala,” recalled Jamyang Norbu, a Youth Congress convener, describing the organization’s birth. “There were no Westerners, only the Peace Corps people who came around at Christmastime to sing carols. Among the Tibetans there were a lot of idealistic youth. It was very bohemian, not intentionally, but just because the life was so hard. Each night five or six people would crush into your room to sleep. No one had any money, so nobody gave a damn. Whatever you got, you would just spend in a few days. A group of us used to get together and drink barley beer and, if we could afford it, rum. Then we’d always start talking about Tibet. It was a bit sentimental, I suppose. We’d say, ‘So what are we going to do? What is our dream?’ Then someone would declare, ‘One of these days I’m going to get across that pass with my tank and see the Potala.’ That sort of talk. After a while we’d make tea on a kerosene stove, but we never had enough glasses or spoons, so we’d always have to stir it with a toothbrush.”

Enough late-night talks produced a consensus. Not only were young Tibetans in exile not in touch with one another; many felt that the refugee government had continued, despite its efforts at reform, in the lesser traditions of its predecessor in Lhasa. “There was too much mediocrity. It had become the fashion to play it safe,” continued Norbu. “It’s always the same old story. The people with conviction and talent stayed behind and fought in Tibet to the last, and a lot of second-level people, bureaucrats, made it out. In India, the whole establishment always kept quiet. It was not particularly the Indian government who clamped down on them, but their own selves. No one was pushing.”

To unite exile youth in a more aggressive struggle for Tibetan freedom, the group decided to hold a small conference. Once informed, the Dalai Lama offered to cover the meeting’s cost on the condition that it be expanded to include representatives of the younger generation from among all the refugees. “His Holiness didn’t impose any terms on us. He just took a very sympathetic, laissez-faire attitude of ‘Let it grow and let’s see what these kids can do.’ Everyone was thrilled,” said Norbu.

A month later, on October 7, 1970, 300 young Tibetans sat before a pennant-lined table outside Conium House, a large green map of Tibet draped behind them. At the conclusion of the national anthem, the Dalai Lama, flanked by his two tutors and the Cabinet, rose to give the opening address. There followed a week-long debate, unlike anything that had taken place before, either in exile or in Tibet. “No one had anticipated how outspoken the proceedings would be,” related Norbu. “People asked the Cabinet point-blank about the past. How could the Chinese get into our country just like that? Why didn’t the army put up a good fight? What really happened at Chamdo when it fell? Then there were very probing questions about favoritism in the present administration and misuse of funds. One of the ministers was really shivering. The tablecloth wasn’t long enough, and you could see the folds in his Tibetan chuba trembling. So because of all this our relationship with the government started right off on a little note of tension.”

With the Tibetan Youth Congress officially inaugurated midway through the conference, the role of loyal opposition was effectively filled in the exile community. Yet it was an odd situation. Heavily dependent on the younger, better-educated English-speaking refugees, the government counted almost 40 percent of its employees among the Congress, a figure which grew to 75 percent by 1984. An awkward combination of the establishment and its chief critics was thus created. When Youth Congress members in the government criticized bureaucratic errors and corruption, the Cabinet saw disloyalty in its ranks and reacted by attempting to undermine the TYC Central Executive Committee, or Centrex. “Centrex repeatedly made clear to the Kashag that we always considered them the rightful government of Tibet,” said Jamyang Norbu. “Our loyalty was beyond question. But just because of this, we maintained, the Congress was not obliged to behave in a servile way or agree with all their decisions. When we challenged the Cabinet we felt that we were acting out of idealism, but they only saw us as a threat to their power.”

Two years after the founding of the Youth Congress, in July 1972, a second popular organization called Struggle for the Restoration of Tibet’s Rightful Independence was inaugurated in Dharamsala. Its leadership, though, was given over to the Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies, who primarily employed it to collect the refugees’ voluntary tax, consisting of up to 2% of their monthly wages, and accounting for almost a third of the exile government’s revenue. Simultaneously, trouble between the Cabinet and the Youth Congress continued to grow, climaxing in the Tibetans’ first real test of democracy, produced by a dramatic confrontation during the spring of 1977.

The engagement evolved from a chain of events beginning on March 10, 1977, the eighteenth anniversary of the Lhasa uprising, celebrated that year, among other gatherings, by a TYC-organized demonstration at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi. There had been many Tibetan demonstrations at the embassy previously, some of them violent. This time, plans were drawn up to break into the compound and disrupt it. The Intelligence Bureau or IB, India’s internal secret service, however, got word of the arrangements. Early on the morning of the tenth, as hundreds of demonstrators massed near Majna-ka-Tilla, the Tibetan refugee camp on the banks of the Jumna River in Old Delhi, police cordoned off the area. The few hundred Tibetans who managed to get through were all subsequently arrested after a pitched battle at the embassy. They were released without being charged, but not before the protest had been joined by a thousand more refugees. Putting their gathering to a new purpose, the demonstrators decided to hold a hunger strike calling for the implementation of the United Nations’ three resolutions on Tibet. A Coordinating Committee for the newly formed Tibetan People’s Freedom Movement was created and a large tent, equipped with beds for the strikers to rest on and a medical unit to monitor their condition, erected across from the UN Information Office near the Lodi Gardens. From eighty-three volunteers three teams were selected, their members to fill in one at a time as each person died. The strike, it was decided, would only be called off if the United Nations agreed to once more take up the question of Tibet. “We put the fear of God into them,” recalled Norbu. “We called in the volunteers one at a time and said, ‘This is for keeps. We are going to live, but you will die. It’s going to be very difficult. You’ll be lying there starving to death and we won’t be paying any attention to you. We’ll be laughing and talking. So you better pull out now.’ That reduced the numbers right away. Finally, we came up with three guerrillas, a woman and three other men for the first group. Then we put them all under the charge of a real tough character, an ex-guerrilla who didn’t give a damn about death. This was our insurance to guarantee that no one would weaken their will with false sympathies.”

The strike started at 10:00 a.m. on March 20, 1977. Within a few days the Tibetans received more press and television coverage than at any other time since the Dalai Lama’s arrival eighteen years before. There could not have been a more opportune moment. India was in the midst of elections following Indira Gandhi’s twenty-month-long emergency. Within a week, the Janata Party was voted into power on a dramatic wave of popular libertarian sentiment. The coincidence was astonishing. The Janata leaders, who had been relegated to the opposition for decades, were the same men who had championed Tibet’s cause most vociferously. Now, given power, they were finally in a position to recognize the exile government, and at the very time when the Tibetans, encouraged by widespread support for the strikers throughout the diaspora, had mustered their most unified political effort to date.

Recognizing the moment’s potential, Lodi Gyari (then president of the Youth Congress) decided to speak directly to the Janata Party leaders, many of whom he knew. With the dual pressure of their past commitments to Tibet and the hunger strike—whose massive publicity was clearly detrimental on the eve of their inauguration—he hoped to obtain formal pledges of support for Tibetan independence. Without notifying the Cabinet in Dharamsala, who undoubtedly would have suppressed the plan, Gyari, joined by Jamyang Norbu and a heavy monk nicknamed Gosey or the “Blond Lama” (from his skin being slightly yellow), went immediately to Janata Party headquarters. “ ‘How the hell are we going to get in?’ I asked Lodi,” recalled Norbu. “They were choosing the Prime Minister and the building was packed with people and press. Besides, we looked a mess. I had come down from Dharamsala in a hurry with just a toothbrush. I was wearing shorts, a blue jean shirt and flip-flop sandals. Lodi was in his white Indian pajamas with his briefcase and then we had this portly monk. But the three of us just got a taxi and drove over anyway.”

When they arrived, the young men pushed ahead of the journalists and managed to catch the attention of the secretary of J. P. Narayan, the Janata Party’s most respected elder statesman and kingmaker. The secretary, however, promptly denied them permission for a meeting. “ ‘Just tell J.P. we’re Tibetans. He’s never refused a Tibetan.’ That was Lodi’s line,” said Norbu. “I told him, ‘Lodi, all your bullshit is not going to get us anywhere this time.’ But the next minute the secretary came out and said, ‘Gentlemen, please come this way.’ Then all the reporters started bawling, ‘How come these low characters are getting in?’ and we just walked through.”

Offering Narayan a white scarf, Lodi Gyari congratulated him on the Janata Party’s victory and appealed for support for the hunger strike. Narayan instantly agreed. Furthermore, he promised to secure the backing of Morarji Desai, the Prime Minister-to-be. Somewhat stunned by their success, the three left a few minutes later. Over the next days an unprecedented series of letters and politicians about to be appointed to the new cabinet arrived at the tent. One and all pledged to back Tibet’s cause: the first time that the refugees’ struggle had been publicly condoned by their host country. In exchange for its unique gesture, the Janata Party secured the cessation of the hunger strike and the fast was broken on its tenth day as Acharya Kripalani offered orange juice to the seven Tibetans. Elated, Gyari and Norbu returned to Dharamsala, in the wake of the strikers’ tumultuous welcome, bringing with them the Janata Party letters to present to the Cabinet.

The result was chaos. Preempted by the youth in contacting the new Indian government, the Kashag condemned the entire affair. It accused the strikers of recklessly endangering all the refugees’ efforts, there being no way of knowing what, once in office, the government’s final stand on the Tibetan issue would be. To repair the damage, the Cabinet demanded the resignation of the leaders of the Tibetan People’s Freedom Movement, whose key members also headed the Youth Congress. For days Dharamsala was filled with angry crowds denouncing the government. Both the Cabinet ministers and the people’s deputies (who, it was assumed, were in collusion with the Kashag) were accosted in public, few of the refugees comprehending why they had turned against the triumph. Finally, to defuse the crisis, the Coordinating Committee of the Tibetan People’s Freedom Movement disbanded and, as an act of protest, the four founding members of the Youth Congress resigned from its Central Executive Committee. Not long after its inauguration, the Janata Party reneged on all of its promises, preferring, like its predecessor governments, to keep the Tibetans from impeding a still-hoped-for peaceful coexistence with China.

The limits of political freedom in exile had been vividly drawn by the confrontation. Yet, as evidence of democracy’s strength, within a few years all of the youth leaders were not only back in politics but working in the very posts they had previously attacked—as a Cabinet minister, as directors of the Information Office and of the Drama Society, and, in Lodi Gyari’s case, Chairman of the Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies. Meanwhile, the Youth Congress received new leadership, at the head of which stood Tempa Tsering. Not long after his arrival in Dharamsala, Tempa had found his name put up among thirty other candidates for election to Centrex. On the basis of his reputation as general secretary of the Byllakuppe branch, he was voted in 1974 to be the Congress’s treasurer. Four years later, he was elected to be an adviser to Centrex, among the highest posts in the Congress and one of the most powerful positions in exile society. Under Tempa the Congress initiated a new militant course of action. Its leaders decided, in strict secrecy, that the time had come to employ terrorism in the fight for Tibet. Though the idea had been discussed for years, its adoption now seemed inevitable, made so not just by the failed attempt to win public backing from India’s new government, but by the outcome of a clandestine martial struggle already underway since 1959.

EARLY IN 1961, the leader of Gendun Thargay’s 500-man road gang called him aside for a private talk. “You’ve been chosen to go for training,” said the foreman. “You’ll need an X ray and a photograph of yourself.” Obtaining the two items in Tezpur, Gendun returned to the camp a few days later and was introduced to another young man, who, like himself, was also from Kham, tall and ruggedly built. “Tell your friends that you are going to work in Darjeeling,” said the foreman. “From now on, whatever happens you are sworn to secrecy.” Vowing to neither ask questions nor divulge what had already occurred, the two men received packets of money, an address in Darjeeling and a six-digit number which, presented at their destination, would gain them access. Uncertain as to the type of training they were to receive, they departed, all the while fearful of capture by IB agents who, searching for Chinese spies among the refugees, had banned unapproved travel by Tibetans. On the train the next day, though, Gendun noticed two other men, like him and his partner strikingly robust and undoubtedly from eastern Tibet. When they exited one stop before Darjeeling, Gendun hurriedly followed and on a hunch sought their aid. Inquiring whether they knew of a good restaurant in the vicinity, he received a subdued assent and was guided to a small cafe. There, after a brief meal, a truck arrived. Without a word concerning the apparently shared mission, the men instructed their companions to lie on the truck’s floor. When it eventually stopped, Gendun looked out at the exact address he had sought in Darjeeling. Presenting his number at the door, he was ushered in, and henceforth permitted to leave only for short walks or an occasional meal. Though the people who ran the house never so much as mentioned their work, in the interim, Gendun clearly realized that he had come under the auspices of Chushi Gangdruk, Tibet’s still-active guerrilla resistance.

After three weeks in Darjeeling, Gendun Thargay was told to store away his few belongings. Given money, he was then released to the nearby market to purchase a single pair of sneakers. Returning to the house, he waited through the day with four other men—all from Kham and Amdo—his only remaining possession a tung-wa or cloth bundle worn around the neck, containing red protection cords and barley grains blessed by the State Oracle. At five o’clock, Lhamo Tsering, a high-ranking officer in Chushi Gangdruk, arrived with a document in hand. He instructed the men either to leave or to sign the paper, which, as a recruitment form for the National Volunteer Defense Army, bound them to obey to the death any order given by a superior. All five signed and at six o’clock sharp under cover of darkness, a canvas-roofed jeep picked them up at the bottom of the hillside street on which the house stood. At a second stop, six more men crammed into the jeep, compelling Gendun to hang out the back as it drove south from Darjeeling, heading directly, it seemed, for the border of East Pakistan.

“You don’t have to think about what’s under you—mud, water or shit,” said the man in charge three hours later. “When we arrive in a minute, do only what I say, just like in war.” Pulling onto the shoulder of the road, the jeep stopped and the men were ordered to sprint in silence across an open field. They started running, but a pair of headlights appeared, followed by the leader’s abrupt command to drop. The car passed and they ran again. The bank of a wide river loomed in the darkness. Arriving, they regrouped and for the next few hours wandered back and forth along the shoreline until, plainly lost, their leader asked a member of the company who spoke Hindi to enter a nearby village and cautiously inquire whether or not it lay in Pakistan. A half hour later the man returned surrounded by a mob of angry villagers carrying sticks and rifles. Outnumbered, the luckless Tibetans were promptly hustled to a nearby police station where, they were convinced, a jail cell would be waiting. On entering, however, they were surprised to witness the commanding officer dismiss the villagers and once they had gone offer a cordial reception. He then explained that not only were they in Pakistan but that the special agent whose presence they had fruitlessly sought on the riverbank had already alerted authorities throughout the region to look for their group. A short while later the contact showed up in a Pakistani army truck. The Tibetans were put inside, driven to a small house and left for the remainder of the night.

Early the next morning, at the first hint of dawn, Gendun was roused from sleep and ordered to run to an adjacent building. From here he watched the rest of his group race over, one at a time, followed by the agent, who was clearly concerned that there be no further sighting by local people. Given food and blankets to sit on, the Tibetans spent the day indoors waiting for nightfall when the army truck once more picked them up. Driven into a forest, they were placed in groups of threes and told to sprint again. Across a clearing lay a railroad track. On it stood a solitary car. As he ran, Gendun glimpsed a station farther down the line. Reaching the car, he paused to look at it more closely, but was quickly pulled inside by a squad of Pakistani soldiers armed with submachine guns. Escorted to a locked compartment, the metal blinds of its windows firmly shut, he soon heard a train arrive, couple with the car and begin pulling it in what he judged to be a southerly direction. One day later, the sounds of a large terminal became audible. Unhooked, the car jolted loose from the train and was drawn some distance away. The door of Gendun’s compartment then flew back and a Pakistani soldier gestured for him to follow. Outside the train, the Tibetans were rushed into a waiting troop truck, which, led by a military jeep, exited the station and drove swiftly through a large city—Dacca, as Gendun learned years later. On the outskirts of the city, the truck halted before a lone building standing at the far end of an airstrip. Within a few minutes, a gray unmarked two-propeller craft landed and taxied directly over. Though some of the Khampas had seen Chinese planes from below as they flew bombing missions over Kham, none had glimpsed a namdu or “skyboat” at close quarters. An even greater surprise followed, however, when a small door near the tail of the plane opened, a ladder descended and out stepped a tall, sharp-featured white man smoking a pipe.

A single row of seats ran down the right side of the plane’s interior. On the left, a small photo of the Dalai Lama was taped to the fuselage. Gendun watched closely while three Caucasian men demonstrated how to fasten a seat belt. As the plane’s propellers revved, they drew the curtains. Then, returning from the front cabin after takeoff, they opened them and passed out paper cups containing a cold brown drink. “What is this, rum?” Gendun asked the Tibetan interpreter in the group. The translator spoke to one of the white men in an unfamiliar language. “This is a foreign drink,” he momentarily announced to his compatriots. “It is called Coca-Cola.” After sipping Coca-Cola, the passengers were each given a tray of food. Grappling with roast beef sandwiches, pickles, salt and pepper shakers, a few of the Tibetans, wondering if it too was some strange new food, unwrapped the small bars of soap beside their plates and ate them as well. Following dinner, they relaxed for the first time since their journey had begun two days before. In typical Khampa style, they left the odd chairs and, indifferent to their surroundings, sat cross-legged on the floor. A pair of ivory dice materialized and a raucous session of shö, Tibet’s most popular game of chance, was shortly underway, each player shouting at the top of his lungs as his turn came to hurl the dice down. After a brief fuel stop late in the night the men eventually went to sleep, waking the next morning to behold a brilliant expanse of sunlit water shimmering below—their first sight of an ocean.

After a day in the air, the small plane landed. An army transport backed directly up to the steps in its rear and drove the Tibetans off. The climate was cool and a heavy rain pummeled the roof. Finding a small hole in the canvas, Gendun pried it larger and bending down, was able to look outside. Orientals, holding umbrellas against the downpour, walked past stores with Chinese characters on their signs. Gendun assumed that he was in Taiwan. The truck passed through a checkpoint in a wire fence and then stopped by two small buildings hidden behind a thick stand of trees. Inside, the Tibetans were shown to a row of cots in a barren room in which they were to spend the next twenty-eight days, forbidden, when outside, to go beyond the immediate surroundings.

The men soon realized that they were quartered in a remote corner of a vast military base—not in Taiwan, but on Okinawa, as was subsequently revealed. One day the man with the pipe spoke to them through their interpreter. He said that they had been waiting for a second group of Tibetans. It now appeared that the entire contingent had been apprehended by India’s IB while crossing the Pakistan border. As a result, they were to proceed alone. “Each of your backgrounds has been closely checked to ensure that you are not a Chinese spy,” he stated. “You are going to receive new names in my language and from now on you must respond only to them.” To the Tibetans’ great amusement, they were forthwith dubbed Doug, Bob, Willy, Jack, Rocky, Martin and Lee, confirming what many of them had already surmised, to wit, that the Communists’ worst enemy had finally seen fit to become the Tibetans’ best friend—a distant country called America.

Once more the gray airplane, its curtains, fastened, rose noisily into the sky. An odd comradeship between the white men and their charges had developed. While the Tibetans gambled on the floor, drank Coca-Cola, shouted and laughed, the Westerners, clearly taken by their unrestrained spirits, walked up and down the wide aisle, periodically placing their hands in prayer before the Dalai Lama’s photo and grinning broadly. Though they repeatedly order their passengers to go to sleep—going so far as to hustle them into their seats and turn the overhead lights out—the Khampas, accustomed to taking orders only from their own tribal chieftains, persisted in returning to the floor to gamble in the dark. In the morning a large island appeared in the sea below. After they landed, the men rested for a day, in the course of which the American with the pipe insisted on having his picture taken with Gendun. They got back on board and the aircraft took off, flying through a second night until, looking out toward sunset the following day, Gendun noticed a long coastline below, with a large city sprawled across low-lying hills in its midst. As they crossed a range of dun-colored mountains, he saw the lights of another great city, among which the plane soon landed. Once more army trucks were waiting. This time, though, the temperature was extremely cold. After driving upward for three hours, a rest stop was taken by the side of the road. Stepping from the trucks, the Tibetans were astonished to see towering, snow-covered peaks under a brilliant starry sky. The mountains looked so familiar that for a moment some thought that they had returned to Tibet. Others, after five weeks in tight quarters, ran wildly through the fresh-fallen snow oblivious of their wet sneakers and were only boarded once more with a good deal of effort by their escorts. Three hours farther into the mountains, they passed a checkpoint in a barbed-wire fence and drove up a long valley. At its end stood a cluster of single-story buildings. Inside one each man was assigned a bed, beside which stood a small table neatly stacked with pencil, pad and towels. The barracks was bare and immaculate, but Gendun found a single telltale item which had eluded the keepers, an old pencil, its eraser end covered by toothmarks. In Tibet, when writing, it was the normal procedure to hold one’s pen between the teeth while using both hands to fold the paper into lines. The toothmarks convinced Gendun that Tibetans had been there before. From then on he was sure that he was in America.

The second island in the sea had been Hawaii; the city on the coastline, San Francisco; the one landed at, Denver; the mountain base the Tibetans had been taken to, Camp Hale, eighteen miles north of Leadville, Colorado. Used during the World War II for high-altitude combat training, Camp Hale had been redesigned for the creation of a clandestine Tibetan army under the direct administration of the CIA.

The decision to train Tibetans in the United States was made little more than a month after the March uprising. On April 21, 1959, three weeks after the Dalai Lama’s escape, General Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, field commander of the National Volunteer Defense Army, confronted with overwhelming Chinese forces, gave orders for his Lhoka-based headquarters to be abandoned. While guerrillas continued to function in separate units throughout Lhoka, the NVDA’s chief officers sought refuge in the NEFA, Gompo Tashi himself suffering from debilitating wounds. Proceeding to Darjeeling, he met with the organization’s leader, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup, and together with their advisers, the two men laid plans for the next stage of the NVDA’s fight, which, now that China stood in outright possession of Tibet, was to be based on a substantially closer involvement with the CIA.

To date, the CIA’s training of Khampas had been limited. On Guam and Okinawa (the agency’s forward station for monitoring its Tibetan operation), recruits had received four months of instruction, after which, armed with a tommy gun, a radio and poison, to be self-administered in the event of capture, they were flown from Bangkok and dropped by parachute into Tibet to organize cells. While only pons or tribal chieftains and their sons had been used, the new project, begun in May 1959, called for the instruction of five groups totaling almost 500 men, selected both for their physical stature and to represent each district in Tibet’s three provinces. As in the past, once training was complete, they were to be dropped into their native regions to organize a resistance that eventually would be linked to the broad body of NVDA troops, who hoped to relocate to a new base somewhere on Tibet’s borders.

The utmost secrecy shrouded the operation. The Tibetans were never told that they were in the United States. Thus, if any man was captured, American involvement could not be proved. Meanwhile, training a covert army of Asians in the middle of the Rocky Mountains warranted the greatest care. By mid-July 1959, the CIA had planted a front page story in the Denver Post reporting that atomic testing—though not bomb detonation—was to be conducted at Camp Hale. The vast area of 14,000-foot peaks and valleys covered by the camp was henceforth strictly off bounds to the civilian population. People who were near Peterson Air Force Base, outside of Colorado Springs, when a subsequent group of Tibetans was flown out, found themselves detained. Up to forty-seven at a time were held at gunpoint behind army roadblocks until mysterious buses, their windows painted black, had passed by. When news of unidentified Orientals in Colorado reached the New York Times, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara personally had the story suppressed. As a final resort, soldiers guarding the most sensitive areas of the base—as well as the Tibetans themselves—were given explicit instructions to shoot to kill anyone found within the perimeters.

Gendun’s group was the fourth to arrive at Camp Hale. On their first day the men were issued black combat boots and green army fatigues. After breakfast, they were taken on a tour of the camp’s immediate area, which consisted of ten buildings near the bank of a small river. All around, heavily forested mountains screened off the outside world, but even within the camp restrictions were imposed. Their barracks, the dining hall, the classrooms and a large room with odd-looking tables called “pool” and “Ping-Pong” were the only areas Tibetans were permitted in. They were told as much at their first lecture given by a large instructor in combat fatigues. Informing the group that training would last for six months, the American concluded by asking two questions: “Will you jump from an airplane? If so, raise your hands.” Pleased with the response, he smiled and said, “Who wants to fight the Chinese?”

Camp Hale’s curriculum covered a wide variety of topics. Addressed by their English names, stamped on plastic panels pinned to visored caps, the Tibetans were taught weaponry, survival techniques, radio operations, coding, how to organize an underground network, make letter drops and chart contact points. Morning classes began with a twenty-six-letter, ten-number code used in wireless transmission, map reading, and compass work. One-of-a-kind equipment had been manufactured by the CIA specially for the Tibetans’ use, including radios no larger than a hand yet powerful enough to transmit clearly over vast distances. M-1 rifles, mortars, bazookas and silencers were among the weapons employed. The men were taught parachuting, rock climbing and river crossing and went through exercises in which deer had to be killed and butchered on the run, the meat eaten raw for a week, while instructors (often pursuing with live ammunition) hunted their pupils. They were also introduced to the more refined arts of espionage. Gendun was told that on being sent into Tibet, he must spend days in hiding, observing the daily patterns of his parents and relatives to be certain, before making contact, that they were not working with, or being observed by the Chinese. He was then taught to establish resistance cells which would report regularly to him on Chinese troop movements. They were to be ready at all times for the signal to rise up in revolt as part of a coordinated effort across the whole country. He learned how to move by night through hostile territory, how to pass, disguised, through checkposts if forced to move by day, and if captured, how to resist interrogation. Holding to a fixed story for as long as possible, he was gradually to lead the Chinese to believe that he was breaking, choosing the most credible moment to stage a collapse, after which he would present them with the supposedly true account of his identity, itself also a fabrication, prepared long before.

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.

Early in 1974 the various pressures combined to destroy Mustang. In a November 1973 meeting in Peking, Mao Zedong personally threatened King Birendra of Nepal with direct action unless he shut down the Tibetan guerrilla base. Complying, Birendra declared all of northwestern Nepal a restricted zone and began flooding the area with 10,000 troops of the Royal Army, police and Gurkhas, summoned from duty abroad with UN peacekeeping forces. Given the single narrow track, carved into the sheer western face of the Kali Gandaki Gorge, leading north from Pokhara to Jomosom, it was a phenomenal exercise just to reach Mustang. Yet even though they outnumbered the Khampas two to one, the Nepalese, once in place, still had only a small hope of victory. After a decade and a half the Tibetans’ knowledge of the terrain was unsurpassable, their stores capable of supporting them for up to two years. Accordingly, Nepal secretly coordinated plans with China for a PLA drive on the Khampas’ northern flank should they attempt a retreat into Tibet.

While the military geared up for a fight, the Nepalese government took its first political step in March 1974. Sending emissaries to General Wangdu, Katmandu offered a trade-off: almost half a million dollars in “rehabilitation” aid and the rights to land and buildings already developed in exchange for a full surrender and disbanding of the various camps. When the Khampas refused, Nepal attempted to force their hand. On April 19, Lhamo Tsering, the NVDA’s chief officer in New Delhi, was arrested in Pokhara while en route to Mustang. He was then held hostage to force a surrender. It was, however, a tentative move. Because the Nepalese were frightened that any greater show of force would provoke the Khampas (who were a week’s trek away) to descend and, as one observer put it, “massacre everyone,” Lhamo Tsering was only placed under house arrest. In addition, he was able to smuggle a message north, ordering that under no condition should the Mustang base yield to Nepalese demands. Nepal reluctantly completed positioning its troops and called for the Tibetans to agree to five-point surrender terms by July 30 or face expulsion. As the situation rapidly escalated to a confrontation, the Dalai Lama himself intervened. Tape-recording a twenty-minute message in which he requested the NVDA to disarm peacefully, he dispatched the Minister of Dharamsala’s Security Department, P. T. Takla, to Katmandu. Once there, Takla requested Nepal to free Lhamo Tsering and permit both him and the guerrilla leader to bring the tape to General Wangdu and his officers. Acceding in part to the proposal, the Nepalese allowed Takla to pick up Lhamo Tsering in Pokhara. From there the two flew in a helicopter to the Stol airstrip in Jomosom. Across from the strip stood a one-story Nepalese army post, around which thousands of troops were now massed. While Lhamo Tsering was held in a nearby building, Takla rode an hour and a half north to the NVDA command, where, apprised of his mission, a large coterie of Khampa officers was waiting.

The scene that followed was tragic. P. T. Takla began his appeal for surrender by saying that the Nepalese had Lhamo Tsering in Jomosom; if the guerrillas wished him released they would have to disarm. After two decades of waging a forlorn guerrilla war against the largest nation on earth, the Khampa commanders greeted this line of reasoning as laughable. They joked that Takla had brought good, not bad news, as that very night they would raid the post and free their comrade. Only then did Takla play the Dalai Lama’s tape. There was immediate and anguished disorder. Pachen, head of the internal discipline department and one of the most respected and impassioned leaders, rose to speak, “How can I surrender to the Nepalese when I have never surrendered to the Chinese?” he said. “I’ll never give them my weapon. But at the same time I cannot disobey my lama’s orders. We should all return to Tibet this minute and die there fighting rather than live in shame.” Wangdu, though, in concert with other senior officers, decided to obey the Dalai Lama’s orders and surrender. A few days later Pachen slit his own throat. Two other officers followed his lead, preferring to take their own lives rather than accede to the contradictory terms of their failure.

As the Dalai Lama’s message traveled from camp to camp, played over loudspeakers, columns of pack animals laden with weapons began heading south. Nonetheless, once apprised of the Khampas’ decision, Nepal reneged on its promise of a trade-off. Entering Mustang, it launched a “search and seizure” operation. All those guerrillas who had voluntarily disarmed were apprehended and marched into Jomosom while their land and property were confiscated. Word of the duplicity swiftly passed to General Wangdu.

With an escort of forty select troops and the guerrillas’ documents, Wangdu fled. Riding west, he leapfrogged back and forth between Nepal and Tibet, attempting an end run for the Indian border 200 miles away. The PLA was already waiting for him. Over the course of a fortnight Chinese attacks twice pushed the Khampas into Nepal, while a Nepalese ambush sent them back to Tibet. And then, once more, treachery undermined the guerrillas. Early in the flight, during a night march, a mule carrying food was lost. General Wangdu sent two men to retrieve it, one of whom failed to return. Instead he went to Jomosom, and in an exchange for a reprieve reported the Tibetans’ escape route. Forty men of Baba Yeshi’s rival faction, already recruited by Nepal to guide its army into Mustang, were hurriedly put on Wangdu’s rear, while the Nepalese themselves set up a massive ambush twenty miles from the Indian border, at the guerrilla leader’s goal, a 17,800-foot pass in the Jumla District called Tinker.

Arriving at Tinker toward the end of August, Wangdu called a halt. Exhausted, his men dismounted and sat on a hillside within sight of a nearby PLA camp. When none volunteered to seek out forage and water for the horses, Wangdu personally led a party of five to reconnoiter up the track. In a short while, the general and his patrol disappeared into a small draw before the pass. A moment later those left behind heard a storm of rapid fire erupt from all directions. As they ran to their mounts, they beheld the advance group’s five ponies galloping, riderless, back toward them. Racing up to join the fight, they arrived just in time to see Wangdu gunned down while single-handedly charging Nepalese positions on an adjacent slope, the other men, save one, already dead. A fire fight then broke out, lasting the entire day and, according to one account, taking the lives of hundreds of Nepalese troops. Outnumbered, the Tibetans finally abandoned their horses and using ropes scaled the surrounding cliffs, outflanked the pass and escaped a few hours later over the border into the waiting arms of the Indian army.

A day after the fight at Tinker Pass, Baba Yeshi flew by helicopter from Katmandu to identify Wangdu’s body. Following the confirmation, an official ceremony was held in the Royal Palace. King Birendra himself distributed prizes, promotions and cash rewards to scores of Nepalese soldiers who had taken part in the destruction of Mustang. Under a large tent in the Thundikhel field, at the city’s center, Wangdu’s amulet, wristwatch, rings, rifle and tea bowl were displayed to crowds of curious Nepalese who queued up for days to see the guerrilla leader’s remains. Beside them were exhibited a vast assortment of binoculars, radios and light arms from Mustang’s various camps. At the south side of the field, just beyond the central post office, Lhamo Tsering and the six Khampa leaders who had heeded the Dalai Lama’s order to surrender sat in Katmandu’s central jail, wherre they languished for seven years until, in a 1981 amnesty granted by the King, they were finally set free. While the NVDA’s New Delhi office survived the guerrilla’s rout, its clandestine network in Tibet, painstakingly built up since the late 1950s, was now blown by the Nepalese, who forwarded Baba Yeshi’s disclosures to the Chinese. A quarter century after China’s invasion, the fight for Tibet seemed to have collapsed overnight in a tragic debacle.

But the Special Frontier Force remained. Informed that a secret regiment, independent of the guerrillas, was being created to fight for Tibetan independence, male refugees had flocked from road gangs to assembly points at train stations throughout the early sixties. Taken to Dehra Dun, the groups were ferried by army trucks to Establishment 22, 100 kilometers away at the Chakrata military base. Here they were inducted and put through six months of basic training. At first Americans conducted operations; then, after a disagreement over procedure, Indian officers took full charge. Regardless, below the highest ranks, an entirely Tibetan officer corps was developed, thus making 22—with a troop strength of 10,500—to all practical purposes a fully Tibetan army—the embryo, it was hoped, of the future army of a free Tibet.

The first—and standing—objective of the Special Frontier Force was to scout the inhospitable terrain on “the Roof of the World.” Not only could Tibetans survive in the cold with far greater facility than the Indian Jawan; they proved immune to altitude sickness no matter how many years they had lived on the subcontinent. With them India was able to develop a network of bases spanning its Himalayan territories from Ladakh to Assam. The Frontier Force’s second objective was less docile than guard duty. Having determined that an independent Tibet, serving along the lines of an Asian Switzerland, as a neutral buffer state, would afford the best protection against China, New Delhi secretly decided that, in the event of war, an attempt to wrest Tibet’s liberty could be made, 22 taking the lead. As such, the Frontier Force was trained not just to scout but also as high-altitude paratroops—commandos versed in the arts of ambush, demolition, survival and sabotage. Given the existence of numerous underground groups in Tibet, sustained by a virtually universal hatred of the Chinese, the men and women of 22 (two companies of female medics and communications specialists were enlisted to demonstrate Tibetan women’s willingness to fight for their country) were designated to be dropped behind Chinese lines. While India’s regular army would engage the Chinese head-on, the Tibetans would link up with the underground, raise pockets of resistance and disrupt the PLA’s flanks and rear.

War with China, though, was not forthcoming. Impatient for contact, entire companies of Tibetan commandos periodically disobeyed Indian orders and crossed the border in secret to attack PLA outposts. Restraining 22 became such a problem that all of its bases had to be relocated twenty miles behind the front, and Indian troops posted between the Tibetans and their homeland. Not until a decade after its founding did the SFF have a chance to prove itself in sanctioned action—as the spearhead of India’s assault, late in October 1971, in the Bangladesh war.

Wishing to assist East Pakistan in a bid for secession from its western twin, New Delhi settled on 22 as the perfect unit for the job. It was not a part of the regular army, and its shadowy existence and unique racial makeup provided perfect cover for a covert attack. Roughly 5,000 troops—half the force—were committed to the operation, an elite corps which opened the Bangladesh war with a surprise attack on a key Pakistani base. Labeled by the Indian press Mukti Bahini or Freedom Fighters, 22 went on to capture the city of Chittagong, Pakistan’s main forward position, earning a reputation in the upper echelons of India’s defense establishment as being among the country’s best troops. Thereafter, 22 returned to its bases. During the 1977 election that ended the Republic’s state of emergency, it received a new notoriety as Indira Gandhi’s “own force.” As was later revealed, the Congress Party leader planned to rely on its troops to suppress opposition party riots if they developed. She also kept an AN12 aircraft on constant alert at the SFF paratrooper base, Sarsawa, with instructions to fly her to Mauritius if her life was threatened. Following the Janata Party victory, 22’s prize anti-terrorist squad was posted to duty at Palam Airport in New Delhi. The rest of the Special Frontier Force, however, remained on its high-altitude bases helpless as before, unable to fulfill its ultimate mission.

THE GUERRILLAS’ DEMISE, combined with 22’s ineffectuality, reinforced the exile youths’ conviction that the fight for Tibet had devolved on them. “We realized that independence wouldn’t come on a plate,” said Tempa Tsering, describing the Youth Congress’s projected turn to terrorism. “It had to be fought for and won. In a fight, whether we would succeed or not was a different question. But at least we had to be prepared. If you aren’t ready, even if an opportunity arises, you can’t seize it.” In a series of meetings Tempa and the other members of Centrex discussed two potential scenarios, either of which, they believed, could serve as a suitable platform for regaining Tibet: war between China and India or the Soviet Union, or an internal collapse on the mainland itself, such as had occurred in 1911. The potential for the first existed almost daily, there having been numerous volatile incidents on both the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Indian borders. With Moscow tied to New Delhi against Peking and Islamabad in the current Central Asian power configuration, there was a direct link between the struggle of the two Communist giants, that of India and Pakistan and the question of Tibetan independence. The PRC’s collapse from internal division was equally plausible as China’s Communists were apparently helplessly bound to a cycle of devastating power struggles such as those that had erupted following the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Great Leap Forward and during the decade-long Cultural Revolution.

Late in 1977, the Youth Congress laid plans to develop a freedom-fighting wing. While encouraging all graduates of the Tibetan schools to enlist for a tour of duty in the Special Frontier Force, it resolved that an elite group of Congress militants should engage directly in terrorist activities against Chinese embassies and personnel abroad. Arrangements for their training, to be conducted under the guise of a mountaineering institute, were explored. “From the moment Yasir Arafat was invited to the UN and given a standing ovation, we had begun debating the use of terrorism,” said Tempa. “It was clear the world had come to this: you kill and commit destruction and you are listened to. You appeal for justice for your people and you are ignored. When we finally went ahead with the plans, though, it was only on a very selective basis. This type of action is contrary to the Tibetan character. So to begin with, we carefully sought to determine whether or not even the training itself would produce negative results among our young people.”

TYC instruction in guerrilla warfare, using wooden guns manufactured in settlement workshops, got underway by early 1978. Morning calisthenics programs were organized, bringing young men and women alike into the fields, wearing “Fight for Tibet” T-shirts. Carefully screened groups were given more sophisticated instruction for extended periods in the jungles surrounding the larger settlements. The Youth Congress also expanded its existing ties with the underground groups in Tibet, while publicly, at least, welcoming the possibility of non-binding support from Moscow, whose overtures to Tibetan exiles had increased since the mid-sixties. But the question of violence, outside the setting of an actual war, remained a delicate point for most Tibetans, putting a brake on the Congress’s efforts. As the Dalai Lama, whose leadership the Youth Congress charter swore to uphold, stated: “In theory violence and religious views can be combined, but only if a person’s motivation, as well as the result of his actions, are solely for the benefit of the majority of the people. Under these circumstances and if there is no other alternative, then it is permissible. Now, regarding Tibet, I believe that a militant attitude is helpful for maintaining morale among our youth, but a military movement itself is not feasible. It would be suicidal.”

By the late 1970s the Dalai Lama’s own plans for Tibetan independence had in many respects already ripened. Refugee society was thriving. Economically, culturally and politically—it had matured into a cohesive whole, precisely the situation he had hoped to create two decades earlier. No longer able to count on the exiles’ disintegration, Peking, he was confident, would soon be forced to terms. Convinced that success was near, the Dalai Lama set about reawakening international interest in Tibet through a series of trips across Asia and the West. Undertaken for religious purposes (hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist center having cropped up around the world during the 1970s), the trips were also guaranteed to affect China which, since the early 1960s had been demonstrably sensitive to international opinion on the legitimacy of its occupation. And as the liberalization following Mao Zedong’s death took root and developed novel Chinese initiatives in foreign affairs, Dharamsala became—if as yet for no concrete reason—newly optimistic.

Tempa’s beliefs also underwent change. In 1978, after four years in the Information Office, he was promoted to the post of deputy secretary. Three years later, in the spring of 1981, he suddenly received word to report for duty at Thekchen Chöling, the Dalai Lama’s residence. The chief secretary of the foreign wing of the Dalai Lama’s private office had to leave his post temporarily and Tempa had been chosen to fill it. “When I first heard this news I was worried that I was too inexperienced to work in such a high position. I didn’t have the confidence,” said Tempa. “But then I considered carefully. For my whole life my only hope has been to one day go back to an independent Tibet. This is the one thing for which I’ve struggled. Naturally, the closer you are to His Holiness, the better you’d feel. But whatever I’m doing I know I am serving him and my people. So in this respect I decided it doesn’t make very much difference, and I could take the change in a normal way. But about my inexperience, I was quite concerned.”

Within the year Tempa was wholly absorbed in being one of the Dalai Lama’s closest assistants. Placed in charge of all correspondence between the private office and non-Tibetan world, he also translated each afternoon at the Dalai Lama’s regular round of audiences with foreigners, while overseeing numerous projects with the government’s Foreign Offices. At the age of 32 he looked back from his new position on his time in India. Recalling the death of his younger sister in the mountains above Bhutan, his second sister’s demise from dysentery at Missamari and his mother’s death in the tent by the road camp at Bawarna, he recognized how much his own survival, as well as that of the nation, had been the product of the Dalai Lama’s peaceful efforts at reconstruction. Traveling with the Tibetan leader through Asia, Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and the United States, Tempa, and through him many of his colleagues in the Youth Congress, became convinced that Tibet’s unique hope lay not where the guerrillas had failed, but in the strength of the traditional society, now rebuilt and entering the world at large.