On March 15 Chinese troops appeared outside the Dalai Lama’s abode. His guards had to be kept from shooting. On the 17th, as the Tibetan leader met with his cabinet, two mortar shells exploded nearby. That fateful Tuesday the Dalai Lama fled. That night, in three groups, the leader, his immediate family, and senior advisers escaped. Tenzin Gyatso left disguised as a common soldier of the guard. In order to avoid attracting attention the group carried nothing with them. Over subsequent days between eight thousand and thirteen thousand citizens left Lhasa. On March 20 General Tan ordered open hostilities, stimulating the exodus. Only then did the Chinese command realize that the Dalai Lama had gone.

  The French explorer and scholar Michel Peissel describes these events as “one of the strangest and most ill-understood coups of recent times.” Under its top leader, Gen. Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, the NVDA offensive drove within miles of the capital, timed precisely to place a protective force near Lhasa just as the Dalai Lama left. Partisan units formed a rear guard behind the party throughout its trek to the Indian border region and also created a diversion northeast of Lhasa, confusing PLA searchers.

  On November 1, 1958, Gordon Gray sent a note to NSC executive secretary James Lay. It read, “If, as a result of the new social experiment in Communist China, there should be some sort of revolt, is our policy clear as to what course of action we would follow?”

  In fact Washington had anticipated only limited potential from the Tibetan rebellion, as indeed from any operations against the People’s Republic of China. That spring the administration pointedly rejected a Nationalist Chinese proposal for a paramilitary effort parallel to Project Circus. A secret survey of the possibilities for uprisings done for Eisenhower in the summer of 1959 by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs J. Graham Parsons made this clear. Regarding Tibet the survey predicted that

  if the Tibetans are able to maintain their resistance movement in the face of large scale Chinese Communist suppression efforts, other border area minorities might be emboldened to carry out dissident activities. However, the Chinese Communists probably have the capability of preventing prolonged rebellion, except in the most isolated areas, and of containing it.

  At the same time peasant uprisings in central China were deemed unlikely. Further, the survey judged the Nationalists greatly exaggerated their ability to intervene on the mainland, though the State Department believed it “by no means suicidal” of Jiang Jieshi to contemplate such raids.

  Despite limited possibilities, the 5412 Group considered Gordon Gray’s question in secret deliberations. Classified memoranda from Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower dated January 22 and March 3, 1959, concerned Tibet. The president’s staff secretary reported from CIA and State intelligence reports that “the Tibetan uprisings apparently have resulted in a considerable loss of prestige for Communist China in India.”

  India’s opinion was crucial since Nehru had turned aside the Dalai Lama’s request for political asylum three years earlier. In July 1958 the Chinese again made issue with the Indians over the use of Kalimpong as a center of resistance. But by then Nehru too had chosen sides, and he rejected the Chinese charge. In New Delhi parliamentary debates ignited by the Dalai Lama’s journey, the prime minister went out of his way to defend Tibetans living at Kalimpong, denying the village was a “command center” of the NVDA effort.

  One exchange in a debate on April 2, 1959, is especially revealing. After Nehru talked about Kalimpong, the member Nath Pai asked, “What is the Home Ministry doing about it? It seems to be absolutely ineffective.”

  Nehru replied, “The Home Ministry or the External Affairs Ministry are not at all worried about the situation.”

  Member Hem Barua then asked incredulously, “They allow the spies to [conduct] espionage?”

  “Absolutely yes,” said Nehru.

  In another debate Nehru explained that India’s first news of the events at Lhasa had been a message from the consul general on March 10, which had arrived the next day. But the New Delhi journal Statesman reported in its issue of March 2, before anything had happened in Lhasa, that there would be a coup and that the Dalai Lama would flee that city on March 17.

  American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker kept Washington apprised, but the best information came from the CIA. During this period Gen. Charles Cabell or Desmond FitzGerald was on the phone with Gordon Gray almost daily. On March 17 the president learned the Chinese had ordered an all-out attack and that the Khampa had captured a sizable PLA outpost a week earlier. On March 23 Dulles informed Eisenhower that the Dalai Lama had left Lhasa on the 17th, and the CIA compared his travel route to its appreciation of the centers of rebel armed strength.

  The CIA furnished an American-trained Tibetan radio operator with an agency RS-1 radio to the Dalai Lama’s party—or, more precisely, when agent Athar Norbu learned the Dalai Lama was on the move, he left NVDA headquarters with a small guard force, joining the ruler’s group. Athar set up repeated airdrops of supplies (crucial since the Dalai Lama had left Lhasa with nothing), enabled the party to communicate with nearby NVDA units (CIA officer John Knaus maintains the Tibetan agents were in communication only with CIA headquarters), and provided daily reports to the CIA beginning March 25. Branch chief John Hart tracked developments at headquarters, helpful since the Circus task force had just been taken over by Roger McCarthy, who had still to get up to speed.

  The Dalai Lama wrinkled his nose at the heavily armed tribesmen surrounding him. Armaments were a distasteful necessity. He especially frowned at one guerrilla, his own cook, who carried a bazooka and enthusiastically sought out a target, at one point loosing several shells at a fancied Chinese military position. Tibet’s leader watched his cook reload, so awkwardly the man surely would have been killed in a real fight. As the party neared India, the CIA radio operators passed on the Dalai Lama’s request for asylum. The message reached Washington in the dead of night on a Saturday, March 28. FitzGerald immediately ordered it forwarded to New Delhi.

  Also along for the Dalai Lama’s ride were Tibetan filmmakers whose material the CIA later assembled into a motion picture, including footage of airdrops from C-130s, supply containers falling in the snow, scenes of the escape and the trek, and other suitable footage. Fletcher Prouty thought the movie an impressive piece of CIA propaganda.

  On April 1, just as the Dalai Lama’s party entered India, Eisenhower in Washington learned, “We have informed Embassy New Delhi we think the US should take no action with respect to Tibetan refugees which would diminish the effect the revolt appears to be having in India.”

  A message from the Tibetans, received on April 2, contained an important plea: “You must help us as soon as possible and send us weapons for 30,000 men by airplane.” The message sparked action in Washington. The National Security Council, which had not discussed Tibet since June 20, 1957, suddenly met on the subject in March, twice in April, and again in June 1959. A thirteen-page classified CIA report, a letter from Allen Dulles to the president, and a cable reporting the Dalai Lama’s views to the White House appeared before the NSC meeting on April 23. Dulles’s letter concerned the Dalai Lama’s determination to resist the Chinese. Meanwhile, on April 21, field commander Gompo Tashi ordered the NVDA to abandon positions in the Lhoka district defended to permit the Dalai Lama’s escape.

  One of the CIA’s few admissions on covert operations before a congressional committee came during this period, when Director Dulles could contribute to the propaganda offensive on Tibet. Appearing at a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late April, Dulles spoke of the Dalai Lama’s escape, in the course of that discussion revealing that the CIA had known of his progress from its communicators and had forwarded his request for asylum to Nehru. The CIA director also averred that the agency remained in close contact with the Dalai Lama’s two brothers. Dulles admitted the Chinese were attacking and were victorious, and he compared the Tibetan people to the Hungarians of 1956.

  Tibetan sources maintain that the Eisenhower administration made important decisions in May 1959. This correlates with available records. Gordon Gray showed Ike a CIA proposal to move Project Circus to a higher intensity even before the Dalai Lama left his country. On April 25 White House aide Andrew Goodpaster asked Director Dulles for data the president could examine at leisure. The same day Dulles got the CIA to revise the paper on Tibetan operations he had sent over a couple of days earlier. The paper—the guts of which remain classified—concludes by observing that the Tibetan resistance, heavily engaged, had little food or ammunition left. The CIA director briefed the NSC a few days after.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff weighed in when officials met on May 8 to work out details of the stepped-up Tibet program. The Chiefs too wanted “affirmative and positive action in support of the Tibetan people.” Aid to refugees went on the agenda. Now, however, the State Department began dragging its feet, warning of adverse consequences if America established herself as protector of the Dalai Lama. Even refugee assistance, the diplomats felt, could be given only if it remained covert. On June 4, when the NSC again pored over the dilemmas of Tibet, the split between the military and diplomats came into the open. By then intense Chinese attacks south of Lhasa were pushing Gompo Tashi’s troops back.

  Allen Dulles reported on May 7 that arms shipments were being prepared, but their dispatch was hindered by a dearth of data on the locations of Tibetan units. Suddenly, on May 12 and 14, U-2 missions flew over the country, the first since the early planning for Project Circus. The vast majority of the CIA supply flights to Tibet took place over a ten-month period beginning in May 1959, though the agency never succeeded in making all the missions it programmed. Bissell’s U-2s took more pictures on September 3, 4, and 9. Ten days later a C-118 inserted an agent team that found the Chinese in complete control of their area and had to trek down to India. Three more teams followed and successfully met up with the NVDA. Supply drops by C-118 in October and November deposited hundreds of rifles plus ammunition and heavy weapons. Another U-2 mission took place in November. The C-130 flights began in December, instantly doubling weapons deliveries and increasing ammunition supplies manyfold. Air force Maj. Harry C. Aderholt devised techniques to increase C-130 payloads by almost half a dozen tons, enriching supply loads even more. The high point occurred in early January 1960 when, on two different nights, no fewer than seven American planes attempted to deliver their loads. Gompo Tashi harnessed hundreds of mules to carry away the supplies. In all the United States parachuted four hundred tons of equipment to the Tibetans.

  Expansion of the CIA program brought the training of Tibetans to the United States. Five groups totaling nearly seven hundred trainees were planned (though not achieved). Tibetans flew into Peterson Field, six miles east of Colorado Springs, and moved by buses with blacked-out windows to a site at Camp Hale, situated at an altitude above ten thousand feet, about the closest the CIA could come to the rarefied air of Tibet. Partisans arrived on Globemaster transports. They were never told they were in the United States, though at least one group, taken to the CIA’s training facility The Farm, and to Quantico for classroom work, were perfectly aware of where they were.

  Used in World War II to train the Ninety-ninth Ski Battalion, which furnished some personnel the OSS then sent to Norway, as well as mountain troops who served in Italy and Alaska, Camp Hale had been dismantled by the few hundred German prisoners also kept there. What was left the army used for winter maneuvers until 1956. It seemed an ideal location for a CIA facility. Tom Fosmire became top trainer, seconded by a staff of about a dozen who included several more veterans of the Indonesian adventure and at least one Balt. Tony Poe, soon to become notorious in Laos, taught weapons. John Knaus, an operational analyst for the DO, had spent several years detached to the United States Information Agency (another example of the connections between CIA’s black and USIA’s grey propaganda). He would later take over the Project Circus task force.

  To discourage curiosity a cover story that unspecified “atomic tests” (though not explosions) would be conducted at the reopened base was provided to the Denver Post and appeared on July 16, 1959. Local utility companies were asked to give a day’s notice before sending linemen to service poles in the vicinity. Finally, guards were ordered to shoot to kill if they encountered unauthorized persons.

  While training proceeded, the Dalai Lama took his cause to the United Nations, where no Tibetan discussion had occurred in nine years. Ireland and Malaya offered a resolution condemning China for genocide. Despite its secret paramilitary support for the Tibetans, the United States wished to stay in the background. Secretary of State Christian Herter asked UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to lay low. Meeting with the Dalai Lama in India, diplomat Winthrop Brown as much as told him that Washington preferred he not bring up the sovereignty issue in any UN debate but rather concentrate on China’s human rights record. Washington did not permit the Dalai Lama to enter the country.

  The rate at which the diplomatic initiative gained momentum surprised the State Department. Herter feared the UN resolution on genocide would fail and that the defeat would be a serious setback. He opposed “a resolution recognizing [Tibet’s] independence or sovereignty,” instead suggesting “a slap on the wrist” for the Chinese. Secretary Herter told Lodge he had informed a British diplomat that “all we wanted to do was to have this thing come in as mild a resolution as possible.” American interests were not identical to those of the Tibetans. Washington’s espousal of self-determination around the globe did not extend to the CIA’s allies in its anti-Chinese secret war.

  The UN General Assembly passed a resolution in October 1959 expressing concern that human rights were being suppressed in Tibet. The vote was 45 to 9, with 26 abstentions, among them the British. The Soviet bloc voted solidly against the resolution. There was not a word about independence or sovereignty, the primary aims of the Tibetans.

  Fighting continued unabated inside Tibet. In Lhasa alone during 1959, according to PLA documents, 87,000 people died. That year, the Tibetan year of the Earth Pig, the PLA tried once and for all to cut the trails into Tibet from Kalimpong. The Chinese began a two-and-a-half-year pacification effort. Toward the end of 1959 a few hundred Soviet advisers were reported in Tibet for the first time.

  Dwight Eisenhower visited India late in 1959 but found it inexpedient to meet the Dalai Lama. Before the trip C. D. Jackson, a friend of Allen Dulles as well as Ike, sought to intervene after speaking to a case officer, but the CIA director dissuaded him. Des FitzGerald bore the brunt of Dulles’s anger at what he fancied was unauthorized action by some agency cowboy. A few Khampa actually went to New Delhi hoping to deliver a letter to Eisenhower, but all requests were rebuffed. Ike, however, did accept certain gifts sent through CIA channels by Tibetan leader Gompo Tashi: a Khampa knife, charm box, articles of clothing. Tashi added a letter pleading for help, ending on this note:

  We Tibetans have determined to fight to the last against the Chinese Communists with full weapons of modern warfare as there is no alternative left to us except to fight. We see no other Powers other than the United States which is [sic] capable of giving us help in every respects [sic] to free Tibet from the domination of Red China. The situation has become very serious like a patient about to die. Under the circumstances as stated above, with a heavy heart, we appeal to your Excellency to impart necessary instructions about the best possible course for us to follow.

  Americans acknowledged the gifts orally, but because Tashi had not used “channels considered by the Embassy to give him official status,” no other reply was deemed necessary. Eisenhower preserved his deniability. The following year Washington again discouraged the Dalai Lama’s request to come to America.

  Secret plans proceeded despite this refusal to associate with the Tibetans. Before his NSC meeting on February 4, 1960, the president met with a group including Gordon Gray, Herter, Allen Dulles, Cabell, and Desmond FitzGerald. Director Dulles described recent supply deliveries but also Chinese success in finding the better-armed, less mobile rebels. Dulles asked Eisenhower to approve continuation of Circus. Ike wondered if Tibetan resistance simply increased repression. Des FitzGerald countered that no brutality could be greater than what the Han were already doing. Secretary of State Herter added that the project certainly harassed Beijing. Ike okayed another push.

  But Beijing pushed back. Already on the offensive, Chinese troops launched new attacks within weeks of Eisenhower’s decision. The heavier weapons the CIA had supplied the Tibetans paradoxically made them somewhat less mobile, and the Chinese had more of the territory already under control. Tibetan bands were caught in several places. In one fight the PLA claimed to have killed eight hundred of an NVDA force of several thousand. By late spring two CIA teams with the partisans had to flee to India, and four CIA radio teams were wiped out. Only six of almost twenty CIA-trained agents survived. Just then another event in the intelligence world brought a complete halt to U.S. air support. On May 1, 1960, the Russians shot down a CIA U-2 plane deep inside the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower ordered a halt to all intrusions into Communist airspace. That included the C-130 flights into Tibet.

  One estimate is that the CIA equipped fourteen thousand “soldiers of the fortress of the faith,” almost all the active male population still fighting in the high Himalayas. Supplying the NVDA without aircraft seemed impossible, but the agency attacked the task efficiently. The project needed new tactics, proposed by Gyalo Thondup, who saw the promise of the ancient principality of Mustang, between Tibet and Nepal, as a base from which Tibetans could radiate into the countryside as small bands, not large units. Des FitzGerald surmised that aircraft could still be useful if they did not enter China. At an Interpol conference that summer, Dick Bissell’s chief of operations, Richard Helms, cleared the concept with Indian intelligence. The liaison was required because some Tibetans were now to train in India. Meanwhile the International Jurists Commission set up by the UN released its conclusion that China had indeed attempted genocide in Tibet, giving the CIA program added momentum.