Escape from the Land of Snows (8 page)

“
If you’ve ever been to where the Dalai Lama grew up, even today it’s quite a poor area,” notes Professor Gray Tuttle of Columbia University, who visited His Holiness’s hometown. “I imagine in the 1930s when he lived there, it was much like Appalachia at that time: dirt poor. Coming from there, he probably thought, ‘With communism, things could be a lot better for a lot more Tibetans.’ ”

Indeed, back in Lhasa, all things Chinese were fast becoming the subject of a minor fad. “
There is everywhere a keenness to imitate the Chinese,” wrote one observer, “to dress, to talk, behave and sing as the Chinese do.” Portraits of Mao were placed next to the Dalai Lama’s in the domestic shrines of smart Lhasa homes. Tibet’s aristocrats, who’d always looked to England or America for direction, now saw Peking as the new ideal.

When he finally met him, the Dalai Lama found Mao impressive in ways he hadn’t expected. He was physically strange: The Chairman’s dark skin was flawlessly smooth and covered with a
perfect sheen, and his hands were doll-like, as if carved from fine cherrywood. He wore ratty clothes, “
old and ruined,” shirts fraying at the cuff matched with scruffy jackets, so different from the Dalai Lama’s beautiful silk robes. And he had odd mannerisms. Mao spoke in slow, short sentences, and when he turned his head, it took him several seconds to complete the gesture, which gave the fifty-four-year-old leader an air of gravity. “
I felt as if I was in the presence of a strong magnetic force,” the Dalai Lama said. For His Holiness, coming from a court dominated by endless ritual, Mao’s off-the-cuff naturalness was electrifying.

Mao seemed remarkably flexible, announcing at one point that “
the pace of reform was dictated by the wishes of the Tibetan people themselves.” The Chinese leader flattered the Dalai Lama by declaring that Tibet had been great in past centuries and could be great again, with China’s help. The Dalai Lama chose to trust his own heart and believe in Mao’s good intentions. The robotic obedience, the weirdly mechanical nature of daily life in China unnerved him, but he felt it was a passing phase in a great human project.

But there was a jarring moment during the official visit. During one conversation, Mao leaned over to the Dalai Lama and said conversationally, “Of course, religion is poison.” The statement took the young Tibetan leader completely by surprise. “
How could he have misjudged me so?” he wondered. “How could he have thought that I was not religious to the core of my being?” And on the way back to Lhasa, the Dalai Lama was struck by the unreality of what he saw. Every Tibetan peasant and nomad told the Dalai Lama that the people were thriving under Mao’s rule, but their faces were twisted with grief and misery. Some cried as they told His Holiness how happy they were now. He sensed “a heavy air of foreboding” as he traveled home.

n 1954, everything began to change. In eastern Tibet, Mao began to implement the same “democratic reforms” he had forced on Chinese towns and villages: collectivization, forced reeducation along Communist lines, the de-emphasizing of religious faith, and the persecution of public enemies, meaning in this case the rich, the Buddhist clergy, and “rightists.” Large estates and farms were confiscated. Monks were forced to leave their monasteries and build roads or join the army. Children were taken away from their families and sent to China for schooling and Communist indoctrination.
Farmers were forced to attend meetings called
thamzins
, where enemies of the people—mostly the
Ngatsap
, wealthy traders, and
Ngadhak
, the rich and government officials—were paraded onto hastily built platforms in the center of town and beaten and spit upon until they confessed to their crimes. “
We could not even look up at the other people,” said Dorji Damdul (an alias), whose father was a village leader before the Communists came, “and we had to avoid passing by other people on the road, too. It was like we were not among the humans.” Wages were slashed, and workers were even encouraged to donate their labor “for the good of the Motherland.” The rhetoric of the early years changed. “
They would say, ‘We must bring development and become one,’ ” said one Kham monk. “ ‘We must unite. We have one enemy. That enemy is the United States of America. They are different from us. Their hair is yellow. Their eyes are white. Their noses are pointed. We have to unite and face them.’ ” The villagers who were hearing these speeches had never seen an American.

The eastern regions of Kham and Amdo were the first to feel the new, suffocating regime. Beginning in 1956, Khampa men and women began appearing in Lhasa with unsettling stories: The Chinese were implementing forced labor. The People’s Liberation Army had arrested a number of high lamas. And then: Monks were being tossed into pits and villagers were ordered to urinate on them, or doused in kerosene and set on fire, while the PLA soldiers mockingly called for them to ask Lord Buddha to intervene. “
The Chinese captured and took away many monks,” said one Buddhist initiate from the Ba region. “While they were being led away, the Chinese plucked dry
bolo
plants [a thorny bush] and slapped the monks with them. Many died.” The bodies of seventy monks killed at a place called Dhungku Pang “
were brought on yaks and piled at the monastery’s cemetery.”

The Khampas found few city residents willing to listen. Lhasans were traditionally dismissive of their countrymen: Khampas were widely seen as the most ruthless bandits in Asia. Even the Dalai Lama had to admit that their “
most precious possession is a gun.” The pistols and swords threaded through the Khampas’ wide leather belts told you everything you needed to know about how they approached the world. “
You never heard the name mentioned without an undertone of fear and warning,” remembered Heinrich Harrer. Ironically, Lhasans looked on Khampas the way the Chinese looked on
them
: as barbarians.

One Khampa refugee recalled coming to the capital and telling people there that he’d witnessed the destruction of an important Kham monastery and the gruesome deaths of those inside. His listeners accused him of lying. They were his own relatives.

The Dalai Lama watched his eastern provinces rise up against the Chinese. Golok tribes and Khampa warriors attacked Chinese installations, emptied PLA arsenals of their weapons, and ambushed convoys and patrols. Charging into the mechanized Chinese ranks on horseback, bandoliers of bullets and grenades across their chests, they looked like throwbacks to another century. But they often prevailed in gruesome, all-out assaults. One leader, Gompo Tashi, remembered the Battle at the Nyimo River, in which an outnumbered force of Tibetans fought against thousands of PLA soldiers:

Escalation followed escalation. In southern Kham, a local revolt centered on Samphe-Lang, an important monastery in Changtreng. The grounds of the monastery were packed with 3,000 monks and families who’d been targeted by the PLA or displaced by the land reforms. A standoff ensued: the Khampas blocked up the river supplying the Chinese camp with fresh water, and the PLA dropped leaflets warning the rebels to surrender. And then one day out of a clear blue sky, a single plane emerged and dropped a ragged line of bombs on the monastery. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died.

One of the men who silently carried these stories with him was named Lithang Athar Norbu, a calm, peaceful-looking young Khampa, just twenty-eight years old, who’d already passed through more personas than most Tibetan men would see in a lifetime: peasant boy, novice monk, assistant to a
shusor
(a businessman in monk’s robes who traveled the country buying supplies for his Buddhist clients), and rebel. The Khampas were stoics by temperament and circumstance; they led harsh lives where a bullet from an enemy clan or amebic dysentery might kill them at any moment. Many people from Amdo didn’t like to be seen crying even at the death of a child. But Athar had seen Tibetans slain by the Chinese; he’d heard the accounts of slaughtered monks, dying while PLA officers screamed that they’d been trying to civilize the Tibetans for five years but they were still animals. These stories were told over campfires on pitch-black Himalayan slopes, and the images of death and desecration had affected the young man deeply.

“
Many of our loved ones we had seen die,” Athar said. “Many in great agony. These are things you don’t forget.”

The CIA had taken notice of the rebels as early as 1952, and as the resistance gathered force, the agency formed the Tibetan Task Force to harass and degrade the Chinese occupation. Back in Washington, a small team—often just five or six agents—was involved full-time in planning operations, supplying the rebels, and training Khampas in the latest insurgency tactics and weapons. As the uprising in Kham and Amdo intensified during 1957, an order arrived in the CIA’s Far East Bureau telling the agents there to find a small group of Tibetans for “external training as a pilot team that would infiltrate their homeland and assess the state of resistance.” Athar and five other Khampas were smuggled out of Tibet by the CIA, with help from Gyalo, the Dalai Lama’s brother. The operation was cloaked in secrecy. “
Gyalo said, ‘You cannot tell even your parents, relatives, or friends where you are going,’ ” Athar remembered. They’d never seen an American before, or an airplane, or an ocean. They were jerked from a medieval countryside into the Cold War.

After honing the recruits’ skills on Saipan, often called the “Island of the Dead” because of all the Japanese skeletons left there during World War II, the CIA secretly brought the insurgents to Camp Hale in Colorado, which, at 9,200 feet, was the closest thing to Tibet’s high plateau the U.S. Army could find. There the young rebels were given an accelerated course in the agency’s many specialties: radio signal plans, hand-to-hand combat, first aid, sabotage, and night maneuvers. They practiced encoding and decoding with the agency’s one-time pads, destroying the pages once a message was sent. They were handed compasses (they’d never seen one before) and told how to read a map. “
At one point, we had to take our radio sets on our backs and go into the forest,” Athar recalled. “Every day we had to practice sending telegrams about how Tibetans were fighting against the Chinese and the movements of PLA troops,
until we could do it without making a single mistake.” And they were introduced to the arsenal of the Cold War: 60mm and 57mm recoilless rifles, fragmentation explosives, incendiary grenades. They built booby traps and tossed Molotov cocktails at imaginary targets. They jumped out of planes. And, crucially, they learned to send Morse code messages via the rugged and waterproof RS-1 spy radio, used by agents from Prague to Saigon.

On October 20, 1957, after nine months away from their homeland, Athar and his compatriots prepared to reenter Tibet. Chanting the Buddhist mantra of purification,
Om Badzar Satwa Hung
, the Khampas boarded a black B-17 Flying Fortress in East Pakistan, all its markings carefully removed and its crew changed out for Czech and Polish expats. If the plane crashed or was shot down, there’d be nothing to trace it back to the CIA. The plane flew toward Tibet, the Khampas not even donning their oxygen masks until the altimeter read 18,000 feet, when their CIA trainer barked at them to put them on. When it was their turn, Athar and his partner, Lhotse, dropped into the moonlit night, above a spot chosen by the CIA’s cartographer from hand-drawn maps dating back to a 1904 British expedition. “
I could see the Tsangpo River gleaming in the dark beneath us,” Athar remembered. “I was so excited to be back in Tibet.” The pair landed close to the walls of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, a good omen. Each carried a British Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, a 9mm Sten machine gun, signal books, and “the L Tablet,” a lethal cyanide ampoule tucked into a box filled with sawdust. If the Chinese captured them, they were to clamp the tablet between their teeth so that they couldn’t betray the other guerrillas fanning out across Tibet.