Escape from the Land of Snows (9 page)

“
We pulled out our radio sets and sent a message saying we’d landed safely,” Athar said. Soon a reply came from the CIA’s
Tibetan Task Force. “Very happy to hear safely arrived. We are throwing a party to celebrate.”

Athar and Lhotse’s instructions from their CIA handlers were extensive. They were to meet with leaders of the resistance, who’d formed into a group called the Chushi Gangdrug (“Four Rivers, Six Ranges”—a reference to the land of Kham). The CIA wanted to assess the rebels’ strengths, their needs, and their popular support, and Athar and Lhotse were given the job of providing hard numbers. The CIA also asked them to relay back as much information on the PLA as they could find: on airfields, troop strengths, available infrastructure, and the occupation’s effect on the Tibetan economy. But most important, they were to meet with the Dalai Lama, draw out his true feelings on the resistance, and evaluate the threat to his life.

For centuries, Kham and Amdo had been estranged from Lhasa, the seat of Tibetan power. A Khampa army had even marched toward the capital in 1934, to sack it and free themselves of its pernicious influence once and for all, but the leaders had been betrayed before they got close to the city. Often, it seemed the only thing that bonded Tibetan to Tibetan was
tsampa
—the barley meal that everyone ate, regardless of class or region—and the presence of the Dalai Lama himself.

The blessing of His Holiness was absolutely necessary for any legitimate national resistance. “
A word from the Dalai Lama,” wrote the French explorer Michel Peissel, “one single proclamation, and all Tibet would undoubtedly have stood up and faced the Chinese.” The Khampas couldn’t help but suspect that the Dalai Lama himself had gone over to the Chinese side, while the Chinese suspected the opposite, that he was a secret supporter of the resistance. The leading Chinese official, Tan Guansan, dropped unsubtle hints about
how they would address this. “
When you have a piece of fly-blown meat,” he said as the tension between the PLA and the Tibetans grew, “you have to get rid of the meat before you exterminate the flies.” The Dalai Lama took it to mean that if he were killed, the rebellion would disappear.

Athar and Lhotse spent two days in hiding before venturing out to begin their mission. They disguised themselves as religious pilgrims, who could be seen in every town and hamlet throughout Tibet with their rosaries, their lips reciting a mantra, and their faces lined with exhaustion after months of traveling. The pair developed a technique: Lhotse would observe PLA locations through binoculars while Athar slipped a gun beneath his robe and walked into a local town to buy food. Athar’s instructions were clear: “
If I was recognized by the Chinese army, then I was supposed to begin shooting, while Lhotse would hit the main road and escape.” They scouted the countryside, reporting on Chinese troop strengths and radar systems—and guiding CIA planes to their drop zones. “
We’d send a message ahead saying there was going to be twenty-six bundles, or whatever, and how many mules they’d need to move the stuff,” explains John Greaney, the deputy head of the Tibetan Task Force at the agency. Athar and Lhotse hiked to the target, built bonfires with dried yak dung, and watched as parachutes bloomed and the boxes of 2.36-inch bazookas, British Lee-Enfield rifles, grenades, and .30-caliber light machine guns came drifting down from 30,000 feet.

Finally, a year after he was dropped back into Tibet, Athar was able to arrange a meeting with Phala, the Dalai Lama’s Lord Chamberlain, a tall aristocrat nicknamed “the keeper of the secrets.” Athar was unaware that he was the latest in a line of rebels who’d come to Lhasa on the same mission. Emissary after emissary had made his way to the Norbulingka to ask the Dalai Lama for his
blessing. But the Lord Chamberlain had turned them down, one by one.

Athar and the aristocratic minister met in the fragrant grounds of the Norbulingka, accompanied by a guerrilla leader named Gompo Tashi. But as soon as Athar revealed that he was working with the CIA, the mood changed. The Lord Chamberlain nervously remarked that they shouldn’t be meeting at the summer palace, that Lhasa was filled with spies and Chinese sympathizers who would love nothing more than to connect the Dalai Lama with the rebels. “The Chinese were watching my every move,” the Lord Chamberlain later said. The cabinet members were “terrified” of the Chinese, and it was well known that Mao and his lieutenants were obsessed with the idea of foreign imperialists working to split Tibet from the motherland. If word got out that the Dalai Lama was talking to the Americans, the consequences would be dire. Athar was astonished to hear that he couldn’t even meet with the Dalai Lama to relay his request.

(
Phala remembered the meeting differently. In his version, he told the two guerrillas the Dalai Lama knew all about the rebels and their links to America’s spy agency. Not only that, His Holiness asked Athar and Lhotse to report to the Lord Chamberlain about their future operations. If Phala’s account is correct, the Dalai Lama knew about the guerrillas’ plans almost from the beginning.)

Deeply disappointed, Athar had to send a message back to Washington saying he’d been unable to gauge His Holiness’s true feelings about the rebellion. A second meeting with the Lord Chamberlain was equally frustrating. The veil that had separated His Holiness from the rest of the world for centuries remained impenetrable. Meanwhile, the
Indian Express
in Bombay, which, unlike newspapers in New York and London, kept a watchful eye on developments in Lhasa, wrote in December 1958 about rumors that Peking was even thinking of deposing His Holiness
and replacing him with the second-most-powerful incarnate, the pro-Communist Panchen Lama. “
As things stand,” it said, “the Dalai Lama has no hope. Behind him stands his red shadow, the puppet Panchen Lama, whom the Communists will put in his place at the slightest sign of trouble.”

It was an excellent prediction.

Even schoolboys knew that Tibet had arrived at a critical moment. Choegyal, His Holiness’s younger brother, was a thirteen-year-old novice monk at the august Drepung Monastery (whose name means, literally, “pile of rice,” for its white buildings piled at the foot of Mount Gephel). The Dalai Lama’s family boasted sons of every temperament: Gyalo was remarkably tough and single-minded. The CIA agent Ken Knaus would later describe him as “
an unguided missile,” thrusting his arm straight out to denote the force of Gyalo’s personality. Norbu was a religious-minded former abbot who’d been driven into exile by the Chinese, and Lobsang was so “nervous and insecure” that he would later suffer catatonic spells. But Choegyal, at thirteen, was mischief personified. At his monastery, where he was a less than willing initiate, he would carry needle and thread in his pocket to sew together the robes of monks sitting in front of him. The Dalai Lama called him “
a constant source of delight and terror.”

At Drepung, before the New Year came, the gossip had been of rebellion. “
My classmates were all talking about resisting the Chinese,” said Choegyal. “We knew there was going to be a fight, and we were sure we’d win.” The tension was remarked on by everyone. During one of her weekly lunches with the isolated Dalai
Lama, his mother asked him one day about the rumors that the Chinese wished to do him harm. His Holiness laughed out loud.

“
What could happen?” he answered.

“They will kill you,” his mother replied.

“What good would that do them?” the Dalai Lama said to her. “And if they try to take me to China against my will, I won’t go.”

The answer didn’t comfort Diki Tsering. If the Chinese tried to take her son away, he wouldn’t have any choice in the matter.

At luncheon, she told her son, who couldn’t travel freely outside the gates of the Norbulingka, that Lhasa was slowly being transformed. Khampa warriors were flooding the city, confrontations between Tibetans and PLA troops were increasing, and the frustration of the crowds was growing palpable. Lhasa looked “more and more like a military camp” than the festive city they’d known when they first arrived there twenty years before.

Perhaps remembering the Thirteenth’s famous warning, the Dalai Lama responded disconsolately this time. One day, he said, the Chinese would take away everything that Tibetans held dear.

n March 1959, the Dalai Lama sat studying in the Norbulingka. Mönlam, the Great Prayer Festival, was under way, during which thousands of monks came to the capital for meditation and to engage in the byzantine politics of the monasteries. This year the festival would see the young Dalai Lama take his examinations, called the
Geshe Lharampa
, to become a Master of Metaphysics, the highest attainment for a Buddhist monk, a grueling all-day affair in which His Holiness would have to face three panels of scholars in
Pramana
(Logic),
Madhyamika
(the Middle Path), and
Prajraparamita
(the
Perfection of Wisdom), followed by an evening session in which the country’s most renowned teachers would test him in
Vinaya
(the canon of monastic discipline) and
Abhidharma
(Metaphysics). The nervous Dalai Lama was focused on only one thing: passing the test. To fail in any subject would be a humiliation.

Three miles away from the summer palace, Lhasa awaited. It was a dense, smoky city that quickly gave way to wild greenery and the odd, stunning palace. The English writer Perceval Landon caught its peculiar qualities at the turn of the twentieth century:

The city was meant to be in a lighthearted mood. Losar, the fifteen days of celebration marking the arrival of the Tibetan New Year, was approaching, and they were days that every Tibetan looked forward to all year. For weeks, monks had been shining the floors of their rooms by sweeping back and forth on rags tied to their feet. They’d hung newly laundered white curtains on their windows and cleaned every inch of their tiny quarters. In the city below, Tibetan mothers had been preparing special dough balls to be given out to friends and relatives. Inside were special ingredients that carried a message for the recipient: salt or rice was a good omen, chiles meant one talked too much, and bits of coal signified a black heart. Anything old, useless, or broken was gathered to be tossed out at
certain crossroads in the city; it was considered bad luck to carry such items into the New Year. Silver butter lamps were polished and placed before Buddhist shrines, one in each home, and these were themselves cleaned and restocked with bowls of fresh nuts and dates. Hearths were dashed with scalding hot water, brooms brought out. All the rituals of renewal dreaded by lazy children were carried out in households across Lhasa.