Escape from the Land of Snows (20 page)

As night fell, Soepa found himself trapped in the wrecked stable, unable to get up. There were dead and dying all around. Taking the machine gun slung across his back, he used it as a walking stick and made his way to the room next door, where survivors were trying to recover their wits. Then another round hit. “The roof
came down on top of me,” he remembered. “I was pinned down and it was only with great effort that I dug myself out.” His left leg was mangled by the falling timbers, and he couldn’t stand on it. Suddenly thirsty, Soepa began to crawl, looking for water.

There was none to be found. Gasping and bleeding, he lay on the floor of the shattered building and considered his predicament. “I can no longer fight,” he thought, “and now I have no chance to escape. If I am captured they will surely torture me.” He concluded that it was best to die, and so he stopped trying to find shelter from the bullets that came winging in from the Chinese positions and the procession of mortar and artillery shells. But after an hour, he’d been hit by nothing larger than pieces of mud. “Finally, I decided that a Chinese bullet was not going to kill me, so I took out my pistol and decided to shoot myself in the head.” But he changed his mind. In Buddhism, the ideal way of death is in water, which ensures that in one’s next incarnation, one will be granted a “clear and lucid mind.” The Buddhist suicide must consider his next stage in life, and the Norbulingka’s lake, where the Dalai Lama had nearly drowned twice in his life, offered the most advantageous method. Soepa holstered his pistol and began to crawl toward the water. The peaceful gardens of the summer palace were now a torn-up abattoir of dying animals and men, but the pond was still as it always was, its surface calm and coolly inviting. Soepa crawled to the edge and toppled in. He felt himself drift down until his boot touched the silt of the muddy bottom. The young official tried to stay there, suspended in the murky green water, his eyes open, but he felt himself rising up. Breaking the surface, Soepa took a breath and dove back down to the silt that sucked at the soles of his boots, but natural buoyancy kept popping him back to the surface.

His amulets were
too
powerful. “I just wouldn’t die,” he realized. Finally, Soepa let out a breath, took a large gulp of water,
and sank back down. He felt the bottom underneath his feet and grabbed the silt with his hands. But there were no plants to hold him. He began to ascend.

Thirty minutes later, he gave up and decided to live.

Some Tibetans took advantage of the chaos enveloping Lhasa to settle old scores. One of them was Ugyen, a young man in his mid-twenties, a member of the lowest class in Tibetan society, the
Ragyabas
, men and women who were doomed to perform duties left to outcasts: cleaning sewers, begging at weddings, and butchering dead bodies that were then fed to vultures at ceremonial sites. They were ruled by a hereditary lord, the Dhaye, who collected their earnings and had them lashed mercilessly with a split-end bamboo cane. “
I really can’t begin to count the number of times I was beaten,” Ugyen told the writer Patrick French. “You would usually be bleeding … and sometimes bits of flesh would come off on the bamboo.” Unable to escape their fate, the unclean
Ragyabas
weren’t considered fully human by other Lhasans much the way the Dalit class of India were considered untouchable. If there was one group of people who embodied the Communists’ charges against Tibetan society—that it was oppressive and feudal—it was Ugyen’s people.

When the bombing began, Ugyen watched the puffs of dust erupting from the walls of the Potala and decided this was his chance. “I thought, this is it, Lhasa is in revolt, and I am going to take my revenge on the Dhaye,” he said. Ugyen grabbed a knife and under the cover of night snuck to the lord’s home, where he planned to kill his master. But when he got to the address, Ugyen found the man had fled with his family. Many aristocrats knew that if the Chinese took over complete control of Tibet, they would
be the first targets of the PLA. Later Ugyen heard that the Dhaye was killed by a Chinese bomb as he made his way toward the Kyichu River. “I was very happy when I heard that news,” Ugyen remembered.

The young
Ragyaba
was left at loose ends. The very model of an oppressed proletariat, he should have been cheering the sound of explosions from the seat of Tibetan power, the Potala. But instead he did something the Chinese, had they even been aware of him, wouldn’t have understood: he joined the resistance. Ugyen was loyal to the Dalai Lama and convinced in his heart that the atheist Chinese would destroy the Dharma. And he was willing to lay down his life to prevent it happening. “The Communists wanted to take away our monasteries and temples,” he said. “They wanted to destroy our gods.” It was a sentiment that thousands of Tibetans identified with. What the Chinese failed to understand was that this was an uprising of Buddhists even more than it was one of Tibetans.

The war did change one fact of Ugyen’s existence. When he escaped Lhasa and joined up with the guerrillas in Nagchu, northern Tibet, he found that his status as a
Ragyaba
made no difference. “Nobody cared,” he remembered. The battle had erased, if only temporarily, the hereditary bonds of his family. He fought as a free citizen. More important to him, he fought as a man of faith.

s the Tibetan rebels fought and died, the Dalai Lama’s party was following the old trader’s routes south. They were now in some of the most desolate country on earth and saw few people as their horses and ponies clipped along the rock-strewn paths for hour after hour. The route would enable them, if they were intercepted, to veer toward the border of Bhutan. “If worse came to the worst, we would always have a line of retreat behind us,” the Dalai Lama said. Now that they had put a fair bit of distance between themselves and the PLA camps in Lhasa, their most
acute fear was of getting caught between Chinese squadrons moving up from their camps at Gyantse and Kongpo.

On March 20, the fugitives arrived in Drachima, where they found waiting a dozen mounted rebels led by the tall, imposing Khampa leader Ratuk Ngawang. His Holiness, “young and energetic” in Ngawang’s words, immediately struck up a conversation. “
He told me there was no need to feel upset by the various statements issued against our resistance fighters,” says Ngawang. “He told me that what we were doing was necessary and our hard work would not go as a waste.” The Khampa leader nodded, moved by this assurance. The Dalai Lama was finally revealing his true sentiments about the rebellion.

“Have you heard any news of Shudup Rimpoche?” the Dalai Lama asked, inquiring after a guru from Lithang Monastery, Ngawang’s “native place.” The Khampa, a man who’d killed scores of PLA soldiers and watched his own men die, attempted to speak but was overcome with emotion. “My eyes swelled with tears.” Shudup Rimpoche was his “root lama,” a figure close to his heart, and Ngawang knew he was trapped at Lithang.

“It was wrong of me to ask,” His Holiness said, gently. “I’m sorry.” He looked down at the rebel leader’s sword.

“How many Chinese have died from this dagger?” His Holiness asked.

“Two severely wounded Chinese had to be killed with it, Your Holiness. Purely out of mercy, to put them out of their pain.”

The Dalai Lama nodded. His eyes moved to the Khampa’s rifle. Seeing how intent he was on the gun, Ngawang unslung it and offered it to His Holiness.

The toy weapons and the soldiers the Dalai Lama had played with as a child were now suddenly quite real. His Holiness reached for the rifle.

“
Don’t play with your weapons so close to His Holiness!” the Lord Chamberlain shouted. “There might be an accident.”

“Don’t worry,” the Dalai Lama said calmly. “These men know how to handle them.”

At that moment, Athar and Lhotse were riding north to link up with the fugitives. They reached the Dalai Lama’s party on March 21 at Chongye Riwo Dechen, about a third of the way from Lhasa to the Indian border, carrying the RS-1 set, rifles, and another gift from the CIA—a small movie camera, which they would later use to shoot footage of the escape. They found the fugitives at a small monastery. Athar immediately requested an audience with His Holiness, but the Lord Chamberlain replied that the Dalai Lama needed to rest first. The guerrillas could see him the next morning. Now that the Dalai Lama’s break with the Chinese occupiers was out in the open, the tables had turned: it was the Lord Chamberlain who was eager to talk to the rebels and hear the CIA’s plans for Tibet. Athar told him about the rebels’ strengths and recounted some of their recent exploits. He also revealed for the first time that the Americans were air-dropping planeloads of weapons into Tibet and were training guerrillas at Camp Hale for reinsertion into the country. The Lord Chamberlain was delighted. The Tibetan government would need every ally it could find simply to have a chance at surviving. After the meeting, Athar dug out his CIA codebooks and began composing an urgent message to go out over the RS-1 radio.

In Washington, D.C., the members of the Tibetan Task Force were unaware that the Tibetans were in the midst of rising up. They had bits of information that suggested resentment against China was growing even in Lhasa, but no way of knowing that a rebellion had exploded and that His Holiness was on the run. The agents’
days were spent in bureacratic routines: planning drops, requesting airplanes from the CIA, drawing up budgets—“
like running an import/export firm,” says John Greaney. The deputy head had been tasked with the rather dull duty of translating Athar’s incoming messages in the early days of March: reports on PLA infrastructure, rebel morale, and troop numbers. It was vital, in its own way, but it had little of the “bang and burn” quotient that Greaney relished.

Every day, Greaney would trudge down to the agency’s postwar headquarters, a rat-infested set of temporary buildings by the lovely and placid Reflecting Pool, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Even though they were located at the heart of the city, the CIA huts were ugly, shoddily built, and manned with sleepy guards desperate to escape the boredom of their assignments. With Tibet thirteen hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, the messages from Athar invariably came in the middle of the night, which required Greaney—on the rare occasion an urgent bulletin arrived—to leave his young wife in bed in their Chevy Chase home, jump in his Ford station wagon, and travel through the deserted streets of Washington to the Sig (Signal) Center.

To translate Athar’s incoming messages—the cryptonym on the bulletins was “ST Budwood”—and send the agency’s own instructions, the CIA had a Mongolian monk, Geshe Wangye, stashed at a safe house not too far from the Reflecting Pool. The monk was dedicated to the mission but too recognizable for the agency’s liking. “Geshe would walk down the street in these saffron robes and an overcoat and a fedora,” Greaney says. “We tried to keep him off the streets as much as possible.” And the work was often tedious, translating messages loaded with lines such as “35 cases of guns and 2 of recoilless rifles and explosives.” With the monk the only Tibetan speaker in the room, it was also a bit unnerving. “I remember one time Des FitzGerald says to me, ‘How do I know what he’s putting
into those messages?’ ” Greaney remembers. “ ‘He could be telling them to kill each other for all we know.’ ” Greaney had nodded. The same thought had occurred to him. But over time, he’d come to trust the patient Geshe, who was deeply grateful for a chance to live in the United States and wouldn’t, Greaney felt, double-cross the men who were now trying to help his people.

Ever since Athar’s abortive attempt to reach the Dalai Lama and get his approval for the rebellion, the CIA, however, had been less than enamored of His Holiness. He “was such a pacifist,” in Greaney’s view, that he refused to endorse the freedom fighters, making the CIA’s efforts on their behalf almost moot. There was some feeling among the Task Force members that the Dalai Lama took nonviolence too seriously for his people’s good. They longed for a man of action—or at least someone who appreciated their efforts. “This was the hard thing for us to understand,” Greaney admits. “Here we are trying to help the guy resist the Chinese,
and he doesn’t like it at all.
”