Even today it is not yet possible to provide a detailed analysis of the Washington decision-making on Tibet. The records remain security-classified. Tibet remains “buried in the lore of the CIA as one of those successes that are not talked about,” according to Fletcher Prouty, who managed secret air missions for General Erskine’s Office of Special Operations. Evidence indicates a steady growth in CIA interest from the time of the Kalimpong meetings recounted by George Patterson. Former CIA officers recall that Sam Halpern, a Far East Division officer and executive assistant to the division chief, believed the impetus for the operation, quickly dubbed Project ST/Circus, came most strongly from John Foster Dulles, seconded by his undersecretary, Herbert Hoover, Jr. Halpern cites the intent as harassment of the Chinese Communists, not support for Tibetan independence. My own conversations with Halpern confirm this view.

  Thomas Parrott, who worked directly for the 5412 Group as its CIA-provided staff officer, adds that State merely recorded its nonopposition to the operation, whereupon Allen Dulles insisted upon an affirmative endorsement. That followed.

  In late 1956 the chief of FE/2, the China Branch of the Far East Division, designated a full-time DO desk officer for Tibet for the first time. That man, John Reagan, had worked in Japan with FitzGerald on China actions and before that had been a paramilitary veteran of Korea. Not long afterward the wealthy Tibetan trader and now resistance leader, Gompo Tashi, renewed contacts with the Americans and selected Tibetans for CIA training outside their country. The Tibetans joined up in February 1957.

  Headquarters emphasis on Tibet shifted slightly when John L. Hart took over FE/2. But it was Hart who planned for active operations. The Project Circus task force formed in July under Frank Holober, a key operative on Taiwan during projects against mainland China. Holober wrote the proposal the 5412 Group considered when starting the Tibetan project. The first cost estimate came to a mere $500,000 to set up a Tibetan unit. Approval by the 5412 Group still cannot be pinpointed. The outcome, however, can. Rebel leaders were told that the United States was considering a move in Tibet, but the decision depended upon what the CIA learned from initial scouts. Frank Wisner insisted that the first agents confine themselves to gathering intelligence. On August 21 a CIA U-2 spyplane took photos of Tibet for the first time.

  Continued reluctance to reveal CIA operations in Tibet undoubtedly relates to the later improvement of U.S. relations with the People’s Republic. Today it is thought indelicate to draw attention to an effort to stir up trouble for that nation. Refusal to open the record on Tibet is ironic given the many failures that pepper CIA’s paramilitary record, since the war for “the roof of the world” was among the more profitable operations, at least in intelligence terms. Despite CIA reticence, a fair description of the dimensions of the Tibet operation is possible.

  In 1956 the American Society for a Free Asia, the ostensibly private lobby group that, like its European counterpart, had been set up with CIA help, sponsored a U.S. lecture tour by Thubten Norbu, an ex-abbot and the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother. Norbu made more visits over the next few years to speak of the rebellion. That February simultaneous attacks occurred at several points in Tibet so widely separated that coordination seems to have been necessary. Chinese propaganda charges of American meddling in Tibet began around this time, and some observers put the initial U.S. air deliveries to this period—but as noted, accounts of CIA veterans date the inception later. Frank Holober recalls the agency as already having begun annual subsidies of $180,000 to Gyalo Thondup, but the money went for political, not paramilitary, action. At the time the Dalai Lama remained in India, still being wooed by Chinese officials to induce him to return to Lhasa. That return marked the occasion for the kickoff of Project Circus.

  At Kalimpong a number of young Tibetans were agitating for national resistance. John Hoskins came to the village and took the men Gompo Tashi had selected, eight, to be smuggled out through East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). John Reagan came to India to supervise. The Tibetans went by unmarked plane through Taiwan to Saipan. There they underwent a full round of CIA training. Roger McCarthy, one of the Saipan instructors, recalls that the CIA team had precious little time to prepare for the Tibetan recruits. Eli Popovich found the Tibetans a challenge—tough and strong, but an odd mixture of warrior and mystic. The Dalai Lama’s brother Norbu attended part of this training and impressed the agency’s Harry Mustakos with his concern for the lives of ants in a bathroom they were cleaning. The same Tibetans who agonized over ants would be fierce fighters and demand more sophisticated weaponry from the CIA. They won the hearts of agency people with their beguiling combination of simplicity, determination, and precision.

  A succession of Tibetan trainees followed the first group. Recruits often took a month to negotiate the trails, either to Kalimpong or to Assam and thence through India. The Pangda brothers had made a fortune using the trails during World War II, smuggling arms to Jiang. They had a well-established network, including a warehouse at Kalimpong, suddenly reopened. Recruits traveled to Calcutta by train, where the link was a contact address. CAT planes flew to Taiwan with refueling stops at Bangkok and Hong Kong. The planes’ blinds remained drawn.

  In camp, the recruits from Kham and Amdo were shown a new world of weapons and devices unknown in Tibet. The tribesmen were highly proficient soldiers, their cavalry universally feared by the PLA. Yet the Tibetan language had no word for “cavalry.” Skilled horsemen, the Tibetans had thirty different words for parts of a horse’s harness but none for the harness as a whole. The language had different words for specific species but none for “tree”; there were scores of terms for depths of trance or meditation but none for “sleep.” The new military objects Tibetans encountered led to the words “skyboat” for airplane and “skycloth” for parachute.

  Some recruits transcended their lack of experience with Western technology to become radio specialists. Men who hardly knew what electricity was learned to beam broadcasts, send Morse code, and encrypt messages. Others became weapons experts or air-ground coordinators who could mark drop zones for supply missions. The recruits were eventually divided into three groups: one to retrace its steps and become unit leaders with the partisans; one to remain as instructors and translators; and one selected for special missions and given further training. From early 1959 the CIA moved its program to the United States, to a newly opened facility at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado.

  The Tibet operation occurred within the larger framework of the secret war against China. In this conflict Taipei was an important CIA station with a broad range of activities, its centrality reemphasized after the Taiwan Straits crises of 1954–1955 and 1958. Jiang Jieshi still dreamed of returning to the mainland. The Nationalists infiltrated agents at a rate of one or two a month throughout the period. The CIA tried to keep Project Circus separate from its other China operations because Jiang also coveted Tibet. Thus, though the CIA had well-trained Nationalist aircrews, it could not touch them for Tibet airdrops. When a fresh CIA project was proposed to initiate resistance in Chinese provinces that might coordinate with the Tibetans, the initiative had to be rejected due to the enmity between Tibetans and Han Chinese.

  During the 1958 crisis, Rear Adm. Roland N. Smoot, commander of the U.S. military mission on Taiwan, observed the Nationalist training of special forces, some five thousand of them. Chiang Ching-kuo described an ambitious plan to land the troops along the mainland coast. While the Americans refused to help this effort, they did support boat or midget submarine landings of commando parties of a dozen to twenty men. Boat groups usually left from Quemoy, the submarines from Taiwan.

  The CIA station chief in Taiwan from early 1958 to June 1962, Ray Cline, became a close personal friend of Chiang Ching-kuo. They talked dozens of times about Nationalist units and agents on the mainland—about two hundred in all during these years. But Ralph McGehee, an officer in Cline’s station, has no recollection of a single exchange regarding Tibet operations. The accomplishments of agents, largely replaced in 1960 with overhead reconnaissance, paled next to the product of Nationalist pilots trained to fly U-2s under the military aid program. The photographic evidence came back to the CIA for interpretation. The station’s Tibetan involvement remained restricted to training even though that state was considered part of China. The Tibetan project went forward under the direct control of the CIA station in India.

  Although in its early years the rebellion remained confined to eastern Tibet, Chinese actions virtually ensured its spread. The reduction of the Litang monastery became a key provocation. In late February 1956, in the third week of Tibetan New Year celebrations, the PLA suddenly laid siege to the monastery. Litang—crowded with house monks, a couple thousand more in for the festivities, plus merchants and townspeople, about eight thousand people in all—put up stiff resistance. The Chinese besieged the place for sixty-four days, culminating in a strike by jet bombers, the first in the Tibetan war. The next day the PLA occupied Litang. Many were butchered. A few thousand escaped. Litang began a Chinese scorched-earth strategy designed to break the theocracy. Instead Tibetans united to resist them.

  For the Chinese Communists, the Tibet war was a struggle for control of roads. The roads were the substance as well as the symbol of Mao’s arrival. Throughout the provinces, posts defended the roads at twenty-mile intervals. Just manning these required forty thousand PLA troops plus half that number of militia. The roads determined the capabilities of the PLA. They quickly became the main target for the ten dzong ma mi, Tibet’s “soldiers of the fortress of the faith.” Raids increased in scale. Estimates in 1957 credited the main Tibetan force with eighty thousand partisans, with another ten thousand bandits or local tribesmen also arrayed against the Chinese.

  One of Chou Enlai’s promises to the Dalai Lama had been a withdrawal. A few party cadres pulled out, but many more Han specialists and farmers came to Tibet in a sort of colonization program. The PLA removed most soldiers from central Tibet, but instead of transporting them to China proper, the army reinforced in Kham and Amdo, to a level of more than 100,000. Soon the PLA had fourteen divisions fighting the partisans. The Chinese strengthened their supply system in 1957 by opening a major truck maintenance shop in Lhasa.

  Not even these measures stemmed partisan success, especially by the Khampa, who by 1958 claimed to have ejected the Han from all of southeastern Tibet. A partisan leader visiting Kalimpong claimed forty thousand PLA soldiers killed in battle. After September 1957 CIA radio teams provided direct communication. In central Tibet a partisan unit under Amdo Leshe, recipient of some of the earliest American airdrops, fought in the Lhoka district, guarding the pack trail down to Kalimpong, upon which the rebels depended for the bulk of their ammunition. Leshe had radio contact with Taiwan. The CIA-trained Tibetans were a couple of self-contained teams, one to link with Gompo Tashi, the other to a resistance area.

  Warfare brought cleavages to Tibetan society. Nonviolent Buddhist Tibetans had a moral problem in choosing war against the Han. The PLA helped resolve these qualms by bombing monasteries, beginning with Litang. Ultimately even the monks took sides. The Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most important religious leader, cast his lot with the Chinese. But most lamas took the rebel side. This was the case at the Drepung monastery, one of Tibet’s largest, which sheltered survivors after the Litang siege. At the Drepung, a monk remembers, “I saw the [rebel] weapons, guns and rifles, come in by night. Night after night.”

  At first the weapons were not from the CIA. Project Circus air operations, code name Barnum, initially ran on a shoestring, planned by “Gar” Thorsrud of FE Division air branch. The landing of the two agents Athar and Lhotse, with the first air mission on October 20, 1957, required a modified B-17 aircraft flown from Taiwan. Agency officer Roger McCarthy went along to mind them. Thorsrud, as he would also do in Project Haik, used expatriate Polish fliers brought out from Wiesbaden. A month later the CIA dropped three more agents into Tibet.

  These ad hoc procedures were insufficient for the long haul. The air force had abolished its ARC wings in 1956, with leftovers of the unit that had been at Clark airbase moved to Okinawa, where it became the innocuously titled 322nd Troop Carrier Squadron Medium (Special). This unit used a mix of aircraft including B-29s. Its super-spooky Detachment 1, which the CIA favored and financed, flew a rebuilt C-118 plus a couple of C-54s. Reconstruction using parts from many aircraft made them untraceable, and they were modified for long distance, high-altitude flight. The value of air force cooperation with the CIA is shown by the January 1958 agency commendation awarded to Col. Fletcher Prouty, air deputy at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations. For the first Tibet supply drop in July 1958, the agency replaced an air force crew with one from CAT. In a revealing cultural change once the flights began, clothing made of parachute material began to supplement scarce cotton in Tibet.

  Getting those cases of weapons into the Himalayas became easier with developments in aircraft technology. At the time of the Hungarian crisis President Eisenhower thought that nation was as inaccessible as Tibet. But in December 1956 the C-130 Hercules, produced by Lockheed, began flying for the U.S. Air Force, and more than anything else it made possible the expansion of the secret war. This remarkable airplane could make the extended flights (more than 2,400 miles from Bangkok) and still carry significant loads—up to 22 tons for a late-model C-130E, almost five times the payload of the C-118.

  Civil Air Transport did not own any of these aircraft and leased none before its March 1959 transformation into Air America. Its two hundred missions over the Chinese mainland before 1961 include ST/Barnum flights, but with B-17, C-54, or C-118 aircraft until late in the game. Such C-130s as flew in the Far East belonged to the air force, in fact to the spooky 322nd Squadron. General Erskine controlled them from the Pentagon. Deputy director Cabell of the CIA approached air force General Curtis LeMay to secure use of the aircraft, then borrowed them from Erskine for missions. More than a year passed in making the necessary preparations.

  Highly qualified crews were vital on Tibet flights. These had to be made at low altitude, ascending the Himalayas and then finding remote drop zones without benefit of radio navigation beacons, unreliable at these distances. Navigators used star fixes instead. Atmospheric conditions made late fall months optimal. Range considerations dictated routes entering China from Vietnam, or else staging through airfields in Thailand or East Pakistan. Emergency landings in India were possible but not to be counted on. A typical flight would carry palletized cargo for a drop and perhaps some Tibetans to be parachuted. Crews comprised the pilot, usually two copilots, a pair of navigators, a crew chief, and a CIA control party of four. At least a dozen former forest firefighters, “smoke jumpers” in the trade, joined the agency for the operation. Many called themselves the “Missoula Mafia,” for their Montana origins. Project Barnum included forty-four of these highly dangerous missions.

  The CIA’s ignominious failure in Indonesia became a perverse boon to the Tibet secret war. Stocks of weapons and equipment the agency had assembled were rendered superfluous—but became available to the Tibetan resistance, just now becoming a unified national movement. Their battle flag, first raised on June 16, 1958, appeared before a portrait of the Dalai Lama. The force would be known as the Tensung Tangla Magar, the National Volunteer Defense Army (NVDA). Its creation ushered in the most intense phase of the Tibetan war. Just a few weeks later Frank Holober traveled to India to meet secretly with the Tibetan agent Athar. The Khampa and the CIA were about to go for broke.

  Although the NVDA was a unified resistance army, opposition to the Han had yet to become universal. The fighters were still drawn mostly from Kham and Amdo. Resistance in central Tibet was largely held in check by one man—the Dalai Lama. The new phase of the secret war began with a struggle for the heart of that man.

  Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, embodied the spirit and wisdom of his people. According to tradition the Dalai Lama, as well as his colleague the Panchen Lama, are venerated as incarnations of the founder of lamaism in Tibet (in about 1400 C.E.).

  Tenzin Gyatso tried not to take sides. He worked with the Chinese to the extent necessary but several times refused to call out the Tibetan army to help the PLA. On the other hand the Dalai Lama denounced resistance, advising Tibetans not to get involved. Gyatso permitted the dismissal of his own cabinet in favor of officials more acceptable to the Han. The NVDA leadership knew the Dalai Lama must be enlisted for any effective national resistance, and by early 1959, many lamas also believed him a virtual prisoner in Lhasa. Tibetans wanted to save the Dalai Lama.

  Late in 1958 the NVDA began an offensive into central Tibet. Eschewing their usual marauding tactics, the partisans attacked Han garrisons. By December PLA posts within twenty-five miles of Lhasa were being raided. In late January or early February 1959 the PLA garrison at Tsetang, thirty miles from Lhasa, fell to the Tibetans. For the first time the NVDA had a presence close to the capital. The Chinese sought to make the Dalai Lama a hostage. They invited the Tibetan leader to a “dramatic presentation” at the compound of the PLA Military Area Command, headed by Gen. Tan Kuan-san. Senior advisers to the Dalai Lama, some secretly supporting the NVDA, interpreted this as a device to capture the political-religious leader. They urged him not to attend.

  The Dalai Lama made excuses not to go to the Chinese compound—then a crowd surrounded the Norbulinka palace where he was then staying. On March 10, 1959, thirty thousand Tibetans demonstrated, shouting that their religious leader must be protected. One Chinese collaborator in the street died, stoned to death. Over the following days tension mounted with mass demonstrations. The PLA garrison of perhaps forty thousand troops strengthened its fortifications around Lhasa. Tenzin Gyatso later wrote, “I felt as if I were standing between two volcanoes, each likely to erupt at any moment.”