What happened next had less to do with Indonesia than the president’s desire to fine-tune his staff organization. Although angry about the Haik fiasco, Ike had had changes in the works for a long time. The CIA did act on some issues. Lyman Kirkpatrick and the new DDO, Bissell, instituted a broad reexamination of the DO mission. They abolished its internal inspection and review staff. In a February 16, 1959, memo Director Dulles maintained that his people took into account all available intelligence before starting a project, thus guarding against self-serving data. Dulles argued that the Hull Board had an exaggerated notion of DO autonomy. The last point is interesting in that one of its members, Jimmy Doolittle, had expressly advocated expanded operations a few years earlier. Dulles held out Bissell’s survey as a response to the Hull Board, asking the president to wait and see what came of this effort.

  By July Bissell had finished his inquiry, and in response Dulles made a few changes. Based on the survey’s observation that actions to overthrow governments required constant liaison with the White House and State Department, Dulles relocated approval authority at a higher level in the DO. Actions might also necessitate clandestine logistics, air support, and paramilitary efforts beyond the ken of an area division, so the survey advocated the use of a “task force” for such activities. A task force already existed within the Western Hemisphere Division for the Caribbean, but this arrangement the survey viewed as woefully inadequate.

  Bissell appointed an assistant DO just for the psychological warfare and paramilitary areas. The staffs for these activities were regrouped into an Operational Services unit. The work of the DO inspection staff he transferred to the CIA inspector general. Tracy Barnes returned from Germany to be the assistant DDO. John Bross, a friend of Bissell’s since prep school days, became special assistant for the reorganization. Bissell also inaugurated a formal DO planning staff he put under Edward Stanulis.

  The Hull Board withheld judgment. Later the CIA split up its old Near East and Africa Division, making the Africa branch a division in its own right, and the rump a reformed Near East and South Asia Division. In May 1960 the board nevertheless told President Eisenhower that ways could be found to organize the DO along more efficient lines.

  Ike’s watchdogs were dissatisfied with Dulles’s reforms. One man with a good view of this interplay, White House national security official Karl G. Harr, later recalled, “We used to say, ‘Well, Allen Dulles, he’s not a good administrator or a bad administrator, he’s innocent of administration.’ ”

  Executive control had become even more important. Rather than shrinking after the Korean War, the Directorate for Operations grew. On Dulles’s watch the DO added a thousand personnel slots plus an equal number of support staff in the directorate and elsewhere at CIA. The Cold War unit spent 54 percent of CIA’s money. By 1958 there were also seven thousand military personnel outside the agency whose jobs centered on assisting CIA activities worldwide.

  Such operations as Project Haik required close cooperation between the military and the agency, making the nature of their formal relationship an important issue. The Pentagon-CIA link ran through the 5412 Group, whose staff the CIA provided. One of the Hull Board proposals recommended enlarging the 5412 staff to include more people from State and the Pentagon.

  Everything depended on the 5412 Group.

  Gordon Gray made the 5412 Group his special concern. Having once hoped to become director of central intelligence, Gray had seen his chances expire with the end of Harry Truman’s administration, but he had returned. He made himself indispensable to Eisenhower and impressed Ike tremendously with his calm demeanor, efficiency, and discretion. In 1953 he took the political heat for the Oppenheimer security clearance cancellation. At the Office of Defense Mobilization, Gray had supervised the Gaither Report in 1957. When Robert Cutler, Ike’s special assistant for national security affairs, left the White House to return to his Boston bank, the president turned to Gray, a Democrat, to fill this important post. Thus Gordon Gray had suddenly catapulted over the DCI. Now he helped Eisenhower run the CIA.

  As the president’s special assistant (a post today known as the national security adviser), Gordon Gray became Ike’s voice on the 5412 Group, observing the CIA in action. Although Allen Dulles officially functioned only as adviser, Gray found that the Special Group exercised virtually no initiative, which left the field largely to the DCI. The special assistant openly raised his doubts at the December 1958 meeting.

  After Christmas Eisenhower met privately with Dulles and Gray, now studying the CIA–5412 Group relationship. Ike laid great stress on managing intelligence and clandestine operations, with the Hull Board and the 5412 Group reporting directly to him. The system had to work because its purpose was “to obviate any tendency for Congressional groups and their staffs to get into these activities.”

  Allen Dulles made appropriate conciliatory comments, but Gordon Gray demurred. The semi-annual covert operations review took place on January 15, 1959. Four days later Gray sent a memo of “random thoughts” to Allen Dulles, the secretary of state, and the Pentagon representative on 5412. Gray’s criticisms were not random at all. They included these issues: only four or five of the projects mentioned had been discussed by the 5412 Group within the preceding six months; a better sense of mission was necessary; “the criteria with respect to what matters shall come before the Group are ill-defined and fuzzy”; 5412 needed procedures to evaluate operations in addition to approving them; and, “I strongly believe that the President would expect some initiative” from the group.

  Eisenhower agreed. In an effort to deal with these problems, on December 26, 1958, the president had asked the group to have regular weekly meetings in place of the occasional ones that had been the rule. At one of Gray’s regular briefings to Eisenhower, on June 22, 1959, “the President . . . referred to one particular activity which he was disturbed about but said that he assumed it had been approved by the 5412 Group. I [Gray] reported that it had not been approved by the Group within the last eleven months.”

  Finally, relations between the Pentagon and CIA remained a point of controversy. The CIA actually dealt with three different parts of the Pentagon: International Security Affairs represented the secretary of defense; the Joint Chiefs of Staff provided military input, and Ike had made the chairman a 5412 Group member in 1957; direct coordination of execution, as well as military “cover” support, continued in the hands of an assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations. Since the Truman period this officer had been Marine Lt. Gen. Graves B. Erskine, in whom Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy had complete confidence. McElroy’s successor, Thomas S. Gates, Jr., in office from December 1959 and through the remainder of Ike’s presidency, had been a naval reserve officer off Iwo Jima in 1945. Graves Erskine had commanded the Third Marine Division there. Erskine had direct access to President Eisenhower when necessary. An officer on Erskine’s staff, air force Col. Fletcher Prouty, recounts that the copy of NSC-5412/2 filed with them contained the president’s handwritten notation that equipment delivered to the CIA be limited to that absolutely necessary for the specific covert operation approved.

  The Hull Board criticized many facets of Pentagon involvement and raised the possibility of a single focal point, preferably under the Joint Chiefs. Eisenhower retorted that this got the military into political matters. He resisted letting the 5412 Group into actual implementation. So, in effect, Ike ended by defending his existing arrangements for covert action.

  President Eisenhower continued wrestling with dilemmas of control versus security and plausible deniability. Ultimately he could not solve them, though failures like those in Syria and Indonesia must have spurred him, as did political pressure for congressional oversight. But the 5412 Group was not the answer—there was no one, really, to question covert operations. So long as the managers believed in the efficacy of Cold War activities, approvals would be easy no matter what the policy machinery. This unquestioning belief led to the most difficult paramilitary action yet mounted by the secret warriors, a partisan war on the high plains of Asia.

  10

  The War for the Roof of the World

  DES FITZGERALD’S ENTHUSIASM became vital to the next big campaign. Not only did this one involve many of the same secret warriors as the failed adventure in Indonesia, the project cut across the boundaries of the CIA’s own feudal baronies. The locale, Tibet, could be considered part of China or of the Indian subcontinent. In the DO’s division of the world, China belonged to FitzGerald’s barony, the Far East Division (FE), the subcontinent to the Near East Division (NE),* now under Jim Critchfield. A project in Tibet depended on logistics and training bases that FitzGerald ran, but the theater of activity could be reached overland, at least by the CIA, only from places where Critchfield held sway. This could have triggered tremendous infighting among the secret warriors. That it did not resulted partly from the affinity CIA barons developed for the Tibetans, partly from operational necessity, and also from new methods the CIA had put in place a couple of years earlier.

  In his efforts to cope with the global presence of Soviet spies and diplomats, Allen Dulles had earlier begun superimposing missions to counter the Russians on local CIA stations the world over. Soon he also added people to cover the added workload. Thus a station working for the FE Division, or for that matter NE, would also be responding to the Soviet Russia Division. In 1956 the CIA initiated a similar system to counter China where there were populations of overseas Chinese residents, and that included India. This routinized the special arrangements previously required for FE to carry out activity in the NE area. Jim Critchfield did not mind having some of his people act primarily in support of FE, and Des FitzGerald took full advantage.

  High in the Himalaya Mountains, Tibet had by turns been a theocracy or a Chinese vassal state, sometimes both at once. Through the first half of the twentieth century Tibet preserved its status as an independent nation largely due to its virtual inaccessibility. The Communist takeover in China included new efforts to subjugate Tibet. In this early period the CIA connection had already begun to figure—in fact the agency’s first death in the line of duty, a combat death if you will, was of Douglas S. Mackiernan, Jr., an officer under State Department cover who had operated equipment to detect Soviet atomic tests in Xinjiang.

  Late in 1949 Mackiernan began a journey into Tibet but perished at its border in April 1950. Given the fall of the Nationalists, U.S. desire to resist the Communists, and Tibetan appeals for aid, there is some question whether the trek originated as a sort of survey of military aid requirements. He never reached Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. A companion who survived, Frank Bessac, though apparently an agency contract officer, had no knowledge of their actual mission. Bessac eventually reached Calcutta where the CIA base chief, Frederick Latrash, debriefed him on meetings with the Tibetan religious ruler, the Dalai Lama.

  Signs in Lhasa were ominous. A sacred object, a gilded wooden dragon, began to drip water from its mouth. The People’s Liberation Army approached Yunnan in the summer of 1950, then Tibet. A belated effort to create an effective army with military aid from India never had time to succeed. In August the PLA Eighteenth Army defeated a tiny Tibetan force that was feudal in nature: a handful of ancient guns, the Dalai Lama’s personal guard, and armed monks and farmers. Briefly fleeing, the Dalai Lama agreed to a Chinese administration.

  After Tibet’s occupation by the lowland or “Han” Chinese, the first question for the Americans was how to learn anything at all about that mountain land. India provided some information at first, but with the advent of John Foster Dulles the Indians became less and less cooperative.

  Nestled in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas lies the village of Kalimpong. A dot on a map within the triangle formed by the junction of the borders of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan, Kalimpong remains virtually unknown to outsiders. Tourists coming to see the mountains visit the Nepalese capital Katmandu. If they venture near Kalimpong it is usually to see another Indian town, the tea center Darjeeling. Typically those who do reach the area are more interested in Tibet, for the village is a main point on the trail to Lhasa. After the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the CIA’s interest was rather more direct: as early as 1951 Latrash’s successor in Calcutta, Robert Linn, appeared in Kalimpong seeking to speak with Tibetans.

  In 1953 Chinese road surveyors in the province of Kham on the eastern Tibetan plateau began talking of reform. The Tibetan governor, Rapgya Pangdat-sang, could find no support in Lhasa, however. The Dalai Lama wished to avoid confrontation. A year later, when the Chinese began establishing cooperative farms, fighting began with the Khampa, fierce and skillful horsemen who became very effective partisans.

  In the spring of 1955, pretending to be a tourist, an American came to Kalimpong. Not what he seemed, he was an unnamed official of an unnamed U.S. agency. Perhaps Kalimpong was not what it seemed either. The village had become a focus of dispute between India and China. Beijing complained that Kalimpong served as a base for resistance to Communist rule in Tibet. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told his parliament as early as September 1953 that “a nest of spies” had taken root there. Agents came from every country, said the prime minister. “Sometimes I begin to doubt whether the greater part of the population of Kalimpong does not consist of foreign spies.”

  The American of 1955 could have been a diplomat or a spy. He is not further identified by the man who tells the story, George N. Patterson, a Scottish missionary who worked in eastern Tibet, spoke the language, wrote several books about the country, and resided in Kalimpong. One of a small group of Westerners who knew anything about Tibet, Patterson was enchanted with the country and was well known in Tibetan political circles, including those of the Dalai Lama. As Patterson tells it, the American came to him. Most probably a spy—John Turner, the CIA’s latest man in Calcutta, would have been the likely candidate. Turner had actually grown up in Darjeeling. He was quite familiar with the setup. Patterson acted as translator in several meetings over four days. This was not the first spy to try to reach the Tibetans through Patterson. The preceding year an Indian intelligence officer had appeared, asking for contacts willing to discuss anti-Chinese resistance.

  The Tibetan Rapgya Pandatsang, a moderate politician, had outlined his difficulties for Indian officials much as he now did for the CIA. The American, sympathetic, stressed problems of supplying equipment over the Himalayas, and said Indian cooperation would be essential. According to Patterson, the American went on to draw up a ten-year assistance program designed to overthrow the Chinese in Tibet after the first five. The American said a special U.S. agent would be sent who had no contact with the embassy but would handle Tibetan affairs.

  Tibet became one more situation where the secret warriors used local resistance movements to American advantage. This time there could be no question of the United States supporting democracy—Tibet had been a semi-feudal theocracy for centuries. Tibetans were quite happy with the Dalai Lama. The most that could be claimed for the U.S. action would be that it supported self-determination for Tibetans. Traditionally conservative, the Tibetans were both politically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese, of whom Communists were merely the latest political shading.

  The tragedy for Tibetan independence lay in the relative strengths of the Chinese Communists and Nationalists. Whereas Jiang Jieshi lacked the strength to be more than first among warlord equals, Mao Zedong’s movement, unified and determined to control every corner of China, triumphed. The new mandarins had a program, tremendous energy, and the People’s Liberation Army. There was ultimately no way to keep the lowlanders out of Tibet. And the Han had no use for a barter economy. Once the Han arrived, moreover, primitive Tibetans faced an enemy with modern implements of war.

  Tibet was scarcely prepared for modernization. The “roof of the world,” a land of monasteries—more than three thousand of them—nomads, and small towns, had long been ruled by a hierarchy of monks advised by a small commercial elite. Nothing less than the godhead, the incarnation of Buddha, chosen as a child by wise monks after tests, signs, and meditation, the Dalai Lama sat at the top. In this land, policy followed portent.

  Communist rule proved wrenching. Friction between the Chinese Communists and the Tibetan theocracy developed rapidly. The Chinese soon alienated Tibetans by establishing work “norms”; by attempts to place portions of Tibet within other provinces; and by their forcible mustering of several thousand Tibetan children for education in the lowlands as party cadres. Tibetan resistance was inevitable.

  A major Chinese difficulty in Tibet was an utter lack of infrastructure. There were no railroads, roads, or even airfields, a condition that precluded rapid economic development and also prohibited military operations using modern equipment. The Chinese set out to remedy this with massive construction efforts—roads to Lhasa across the ancient Tibetan provinces of Amdo and Kham. These represented tremendous engineering feats; the Kham road, for example, crossed fourteen mountain ranges and seven rivers, including the headwaters of the Mekong and Yangtze, at an average altitude of thirteen thousand feet. When the road reached Lhasa in 1954, the price of tea declined 30 percent while a box of matches, previously dear enough to command a whole sheep, fell to just two pounds of raw wool. Such effects were unwanted changes to Tibetans.

  Early in 1955 the Chinese arrested Lobsang Tsewong, an Amdo leader who spoke against the new inequities. When a unit of 200 PLA troops arrived to restore order in mountainous Golok, tribesmen disarmed them, cut off their noses, then sent them back as a warning. The Goloks joined forces with Dorji Pasang, a chieftain of more than 100,000 families, already fighting for several years. The PLA sent large detachments to eastern Tibet. One force of several regiments met the united Amdo rebels. Routed, the Chinese lost 7,000 or 8,000 troops.