Escape from the Land of Snows (14 page)

If Barber had one flaw, it was occasionally making things up. “Never check an exciting fact” was one of his maxims, borrowed from one of his boon companions, a foreign affairs editor. It would soon land him in notorious trouble.

As it happened, by 1959 Barber was a charter member of the same tiny brotherhood of Tibetophiles that claimed George Patterson. In 1950, the correspondent had traveled to Tibet overland by way of Nepal to get the truth about the Chinese invasion and had fallen in love with the people. “I’d been there at the beginning,” Barber would later write.

If Patterson was the holy fool, Barber was the celebrity. When it came to Tibet, his byline alone would signal that the Dalai Lama and his cause had graduated to the international stage.

That March, in Washington, D.C., a mid-level CIA agent named John Greaney was trying to change the course of Tibetan history without a single journalist knowing he existed. “
Publicity,” he notes, “was not one of our goals.” The amiable Greaney, a native Washingtonian with four children and a pregnant wife, was the deputy chief of an obscure five-man unit called the Tibetan Task Force, known to just a handful of people inside the agency. The men were in their late twenties and thirties and had all served in World War II, and each had come to the CIA mostly out of necessity rather than hard conviction. “In that era, you didn’t make plans, Uncle Sam made them for you,” Greaney says. “I went to the CIA because I really needed a job.” Greaney had started at the agency as a courier at the pay grade of PS3, or $1,700 a year, from which he worked his way up to what he called “the bang and burn side of things.”

Around the same time Greaney joined up, Ken Knaus was teaching political science at Stanford when he was called up to do a tour of duty in the suddenly hot Korean theater. The year 1951 was a terrible one for Americans in Korea; on January 4, Seoul was abandoned to the Communists, and the combined Chinese and North Korean forces were blitzing south in terrifying night
raids. Desperate to stay stateside, Knaus got to Washington a few days before he had to report for duty and began searching for a job that would keep him out of General Matthew Ridgway’s brutal Operation Ripper. “
I went over to the State Department,” he remembers, “and this very sniffy guy said, ‘
If
you get back, let us know.’ ” As a shaken Knaus left the office, the man’s secretary caught his eye. “That’s the lousiest thing I ever heard,” she whispered to him. Then she told him to head over to the CIA. The Cold War was in full swing. Strategists at the Defense Department had even selected a date that the Soviets were expected to invade Western Europe: July 1, 1952. Which meant the agency was hiring. When his interviewer at the CIA learned that Knaus was a former lieutenant in military intelligence and was fluent in Chinese, he murmured, “Oh,
do
come in.”

Few on the team came to the agency as a cause. But the man who directed the Tibetan Task Force, Desmond FitzGerald, was cut from a different cloth. “
Des was very handsome,” said one longtime friend, “with sparkling eyes, color in his cheeks. He could be very smooth, discussing the best restaurants in Paris.” FitzGerald came from a privileged background: family wealth, Harvard, a white-shoe law firm after the war. He had impeccable connections throughout the executive and foreign policy community in D.C. He wore safari suits custom-made at Abercrombie & Fitch and sprayed vermouth into his martinis with an atomizer. When it came to the Cold War, FitzGerald imbibed an almost Arthurian sense of honor. His name was apt: his dashing looks and romantic notions—and the hopeless depressions he suffered from—made him seem like a character out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though some believed he was a dabbler. The CIA agent E. Howard Hunt disparagingly called him “the Instant Enthusiast” for his habit of grasping hold of and then abandoning the latest fads for fighting Communists.

China was a specialty. FitzGerald had fought alongside Chinese troops in World War II and been part of the agency’s China Mission in 1954, where he’d seen his clandestine forces chewed up by a far more sophisticated effort directed out of Peking. In 1958 he took on the Far East brief. “Des told me he knew this territory,” recalled a colleague, talking about China. “He knew these bastards.” In a letter to his daughter, Frances, in 1954, FitzGerald summed up what many felt in watching Communist victories around the globe. It was a kind of creeping spiritual terror:

And so Tibet became his cause.

FitzGerald and his counterparts at State didn’t believe the Tibetans could eject the PLA from their country. The Chinese advantage in men and matériel was simply too overwhelming. They made this clear to the Khampas: the CIA trainers told the rebel Athar that the aim was to “disrupt Chinese rule,” not end it. What they hoped to do was establish a network of guerrilla cells around the country to harass the occupiers.

Late in 1955, President Eisenhower signed a confidential presidential order known as National Security Council Directive 5412/2. It directed the CIA, in part, to:

Tibet fell under 5412’s rubric. “
The Tibetans were people fighting the common enemy,” says Knaus. “We ended up falling in love with them.”

Knaus and John Greaney and their peers shared with FitzGerald an unalloyed love for their men. “They were the best people in the world,” Knaus says of the young Khampas. They were almost oddly perfect guerrillas: adaptable, keenly intelligent, and seemingly impervious to pain. They never snuck out of their barracks at Camp Hale to get drunk in the cowboy bars of nearby Leadville. They didn’t complain about long marches in the frigid Colorado air. They were funny and stoic.

The CIA did have to make adjustments. Their trainees had no concept of the twenty-four-hour clock; time in their villages was dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. There wasn’t a Tibetan word for “antenna,” so Greaney had to improvise a term—“sky-wire” (as planes became “sky-boats”). He was astonished at how quickly the men adapted. And they were as high-spirited as they were tough, constantly playing practical jokes on their trainers. But there was one exception. Around the office and training camp, the CIA men irreverently called His Holiness “the DL.” The Khampas never joined in. “
They were very reverent toward the Dalai Lama,” Knaus recalls. “They would clasp their hands and bow their heads whenever we said the name.” Athar, the rebel dropped back into Tibet to contact the resistance, called His Holiness “
the heartbeat of every Tibetan.”

“
Everybody wanted to be on the Task Force,” Greaney says,
“and that made all the difference in the world.” In talking with frustrated fellow agents working on other operations, such as the one that would become the Bay of Pigs invasion (“the Latinos were not enthused about it”), Greaney was relieved he was working with what he saw as the truehearted Tibetans. The CIA men chanted “Go Go Goloks!” when word came in that the Tibetan Goloks had risen up against the Chinese, and they pushed hard for men and matériel to back them. When the Task Force requested C-130s, the air force’s biggest plane at the time, for airdrops into Tibet, they got it. When they needed a training base in the mountains of Colorado, it was built in record time. At times, it seemed as if the notion of Tibet as the lost “foreign brother,” the same notion that had obsessed missionaries to the place in the sixteenth century, had taken hold in certain sectors in Washington.

Above all, it was a black-and-white mission in a gray decade. “
One of the most romantic programs of covert action undertaken by the Agency” is how one CIA document referred to it.

The Tibetan Task Force sometimes took on an air of unreality. Greaney remembers initial meetings at the Pentagon to obtain hardware for the mission. “When we told the generals we were operating in Tibet, their eyes popped out of their head,” he says. “Because they all remembered the movie [
Lost Horizon
].” Allen Dulles, the legendary head of the CIA under Eisenhower, was even less informed about the real Tibet. “We used to call him the Great White Case Officer,” says Greaney. Dulles, along with his brother John Foster, head of the State Department, was responsible for everything from deposing Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq to the mammoth anti-Soviet intelligence work inside the Iron Curtain.
When Greaney was called to update him on the Dalai Lama and the resistance, he felt honored. A few minutes into the briefing, however, Dulles interrupted him.

“So where
is
Tibet?” he asked.

Greaney looked at him blankly.

Dulles gestured toward a
National Geographic
map pinned above the office’s leather couch. Greaney followed the director over, and together they stepped onto the cushion. The agent then pointed out the relevant territory: the Himalayas, India, China, Tibet. “He joked about it,” Greaney remembers. “He wasn’t embarrassed that he didn’t know where the place was.”

For all the passion of those involved, in 1959 in Washington, D.C., the Dalai Lama’s plight did not rise to the level of a national priority. “Nobody wanted to go to war over Tibet,” acknowledged Frank Halpern, a CIA officer in the Far East division. “
It was a flea biting an elephant … fun and games.” The fight for Tibet was going to be a “pinprick war” in which America’s role would be disguised. But the diehards hoped for more. As early as 1947, the American chargé d’affaires in New Delhi wrote that “Tibet may … be regarded as a bulwark against the spread of Communism throughout Asia, or at least an island of conservatism in a sea of political turmoil.” Others wanted to turn the Dalai Lama from an obscure “god-king” into a global symbol—“the Pope of the Buddhists”—and from there to make him a resistance hero of the Cold War, especially among the hundreds of millions of Buddha’s followers in Asia. For that, they needed the Dalai Lama to be free of external controls and accessible to the world and its media. They needed him out of Tibet.

The rebels were occasionally naïve. “They couldn’t understand how we could limit our commitment to them,” Greaney says, “which is something that happens often in intelligence work.” One rebel leader, Gompo Tashi, asked for the Americans to send a weapon it was rumored they’d developed: a mirror whose rays would incinerate the Chinese in a burst of fire.
The Khampas, who
kept a photograph of Eisenhower (signed “To my fellow Tibetan friends”), even believed the U.S. Army might provide them with the atomic bomb.

The Tibetans couldn’t grasp their own crushing insignificance on the world stage. Like the citizens of many small nations threatened by huge powers, they believed in the rumors of foreign troops streaming in from the airport, in the single phone call from a European prime minister that would end the crisis in a matter of minutes, in the deus ex machina dressed in the uniform of a strapping American airman.

Even Athar fell victim to it. “
We really felt that the gods were with us,” he said. “Nobody could beat the Americans.” With U.S. support, he and the Khampas believed they would take back Tibet.

n Lhasa, March 17 dawned clear and warm. Lhasans were used to hearing the bells and the horns that normally rang out from the temples of the Potala just after dawn, calling the monks to prayer. They heard nothing that morning except the chatter of birds. The monks who normally worked the bell ropes were hurrying to the storage rooms of the Potala and other secret places where caches of old British rifles were waiting, or carrying boxes of ammunition to Drepung, Sera, and Ganden monasteries for distribution to the rebels.