On Top of the World

Rarely has there been a remote land more freighted with meaning for the West than Tibet. Not only has it long been redolent of the utopian mythology of Shangri-La but since 1949 and the communist victory on the Chinese mainland, it has also become steeped in a different and more bitter mythos, one that has grown out of the reality of occupation; the flight of its leader, the Dalai Lama, to India; political repression; and the subsequent struggle of a valiant traditional people to maintain its cultural identity and regain some measure of autonomy, not to say independence.

This sad tale of conquest, misunderstanding, prevarication and loss has involved the United States, Britain, India and China as they tried to reconcile lofty principles about human rights, self-determination, religious freedom and independence with more practical imperatives of national self-interest. But like a dramatic narrative interrupted by lost parts of the story, Tibet’s tragic progress into the modern world has until recently been missing whole chapters. Outsiders knew little about the policy debates that went on among China’s leaders. And, we knew little more than the murky outlines of our own relationship with the Dalai Lama’s government in exile and its covert operations to thwart China’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet.

This gap in our knowledge meant that, whatever we may have thought about Beijing’s claim that Tibet was an inalienable part of “the sacred Chinese motherland,” it was difficult to appraise Tibetan resistance. Was it an independent mouse that roared by standing up alone against a colonial superpower? Or was it a creature of the Cold War that in some ways may have justified China’s allegations that it was fomented by a conspiracy of foreign imperialists and domestic reactionaries, justifying Beijing’s savage intervention and repressive rule?

This lacuna has begun to be filled in the last few years by a host of books that have helped draw back the curtain on what turns out to have been an elaborate ballet of big power choreography.

As Mao Tse-tung came to power in China in 1949, he dispatched Marshal Liu Bocheng and his longtime political commissar, Deng Xiaoping, to China’s Southwest Military Region “to liberate our compatriots in Tibet ... and bring that mountainous land of lamas back into the Chinese family,” a land which even Chiang Kai-shek viewed as part of a multiethnic China. But, having enjoyed almost complete independence from Chinese control since 1911 and having been accustomed to viewing itself as politically independent, culturally different, linguistically and ethnically distinct and geographically separate from China, the Tibetan government under the leadership of the teenage 14th Dalai Lama resisted, belatedly trying to break out of its traditional isolation to win international support for de facto, if not de jure, independence.

Tsering Shakya’s “The Dragon in the Land of Snows: The History of Modern Tibet Since 1947” and John Kenneth Knaus’ “Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival” are superbly well-researched and written books that show that Lhasa’s early resistance found virtually no outside supporters. A deep-seated wariness about antagonizing a rigid and intractable China had already begun to establish itself in the post-World War II world. Britain, which had given the Raj its independence in 1947 and was eager to recognize China, wanted no part of a complicated Tibetan imbroglio. (“Politically, I have no doubt at all that what we want to do is to create a situation which does not oblige us in practice to do anything about the Communist invasion of Tibet,” British U.N. representative Sir Gladwyn Jebb wrote in 1950.)

India, which under Jawaharlal Nehru was seeking to befriend the new “people’s republic” as an ally in its “nonaligned world” under the doctrine of Panch Sheel, or the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, also had no stomach for antagonizing revolutionary China. (Nehru suggested Mao might simply be occupying Tibet because of some errant information about “Anglo-American intrigues.”) And the United States, despite an effusion of Cold War rhetoric about democracy and opposition to “communist aggression” (“Every feasible effort should be made to hinder the Commie occupation,” trumpeted the State Department) was finally ambivalent about crossing India and overcommitting itself to a struggle in a remote and hostile territory. As the American ambassador to New Delhi, Loy Henderson, justly argued, “It would be unfair for the U.S. to take any action that might encourage them [the Tibetans] to resist because of a mistaken idea of help from the U.S.”

Ambivalence became a leitmotif in U.S. policy toward Tibet. Should the United States encourage the Dalai Lama to leave Tibet by offering asylum and monetary support, should it recognize Tibetan independence and take up the cause at the United Nations or should it openly provide military assistance to the Tibetan resistance? These were only a few of the questions that Washington wrestled with as the kaleidoscope of Cold War politics kept changing, beginning with Mao’s victory in China in 1949 and ending with Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1972. What resulted was a program of covert support in the 1950s and ‘60s for the Tibetan resistance that expressed our good intentions but accomplished little.

Thomas Laird, in his somewhat awkwardly told tale of escape across Tibet from Xinjiang by two alleged CIA operatives in 1950, “Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa,” explores the theme that U.S. aid was “[a]lways too little, too late, and was always driven primarily by American intelligence needs” rather than by the needs of Tibetans. As the Dalai Lama’s older brother Gyalo Thondup told Laird, U.S. aid “was just enough to make the Chinese mad,” but “there was never any serious intent to evict the Chinese from Tibet.” Despite its good intentions, U.S. assistance was, Laird claims, “ultimately the kiss of death for Tibet.”

Perhaps. This was certainly a sentiment shared by desperate Tibetans. Indeed, despite all the American efforts, only 49 CIA-trained Tibetans were ever airdropped back into their homeland, and only 12 survived. And even during the salad days of CIA involvement between 1957 and 1961, a total of no more than 250 tons of materiel was airlifted to Tibetan guerrillas.

In retrospect, one is left to wonder what the United States expected to accomplish besides some harassment of China. The history of this American harassment is the subject of Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison’s engaging and informative new book, “The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.” The authors chronicle the early efforts of the Dalai Lama’s two brothers, Gyalo Thondup and Thubten Norbu, to serve as Tibetan emissaries to the outside world as the People’s Liberation Army advanced. While Thubten Norbu worked with officials in the United States, Gyalo Thondup played an increasingly important role in India, beginning when the Dalai Lama first fled to the Indian border in 1950, pondered the idea of permanent exile and then finally decided to return to Lhasa with the hope that China’s promise of “peaceful liberation” might yet work out. In the years that followed, Gyalo Thondup became a tireless whirlwind of activity, secretly serving as a conduit of information to his brother, recruiting spies and paramilitary forces for the CIA and, finally, even negotiating with the Chinese.

As the Tibetan resistance in exile became more and more involved with the CIA, it was Gyalo Thondup who provided cover for his brother, affording the Dalai Lama a certain distance from the guerrilla resistance movement and giving him “plausible deniability.” This enabled him to honor nominally, at least, agreements of cooperation with Beijing and give them a chance, without overtly identifying with the resistance.

The spate of recent works on Tibet during the ‘50s and ‘60s reveals a scope of CIA involvement that was previously known in only a cursory way. Support grew, beginning with a group of exiled Khampa tribesmen, who were surreptitiously flown to Saipan for military training by the CIA in 1951 before being parachuted back into Tibet to link up with resistance forces. Ultimately, the CIA found itself running a military base for six years, training Tibetan commandos at Camp Hale in the mountains of Colorado before airlifting them back to the Himalayas, via a U.S. airbase in Thailand.

Adopting a policy of “strategic silence,” the United States said little about CIA involvement with the Tibetan struggle. But by the early ‘60s, it was training and supplying more than 1,000 exiles from the Kham and Amdo regions of Tibet for cross-border raids from the remote Nepali Kingdom of Mustang. Then, after China’s triumphant 1962 attack on India over disputed Himalayan territory--when Nehru’s vaunted policy of “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” (“Indians and Chinese are brothers!”) suddenly proved embarrassingly naive--a whole new joint Indian-CIA military training camp for Tibetan exiles hit its stride in an old Gurkha training camp in Chakrata, under the control of India’s intelligence chief, Bhola Nath Mullik.

It is true that this was all penny-ante stuff in the grand scheme of the Cold War. However, besides a full-scale invasion of China, it is hard to imagine an alternative to this “pin-prick war.” And, short of complete and abject Tibetan surrender, it is unlikely that China would have been any less repressive. Indeed, one of the themes that emerges from these books is the way in which fear of antagonizing a militant and threatening China often deterred, and even paralyzed, the world’s most powerful countries. (Nehru’s early posture of accommodation toward Beijing certainly comes to mind.)

What China’s leaders seem to have learned early on is that a refusal to compromise and a willingness to push things to the brink often triumphs over adversaries wary of full-blown conflict. Beijing’s message in Tibet was “We will do it our way--the devil take the hindmost.”

While Beijing has often succeeded by threatening to raise the stakes so high that no one wants to remain in the game, what its leaders have tended to miss are those far less costly opportunities for resolution in compromise. Indeed, it is hard to imagine why the “Tibetan problem” ever needed to spiral into such an “antagonistic contradiction,” to put it in Maoist parlance. After all, from Beijing’s perspective, what would have been lost by allowing Tibet greater autonomy and granting the Dalai Lama a substantial and dignified place of leadership in Lhasa?

But in Tibet as elsewhere, China allowed itself to become prisoner of a paranoia born of its historical sense of humiliation and distrust. And this paranoia has time and time again prevented nonantagonistic problem solving. As Shakya sagely notes, what has happened in Tibet has sadly had too little to do with Tibet itself and too much to do with China’s own political pathology. “The modalities of Chinese rule over Tibet,” he writes, “are not therefore governed so much by the internal situation in Tibet as by the more complex issues of ideology and power which confront the leadership of the Communist Party.”

There are two real insights that readers will take away from these books:

First, the Dalai Lama is an eminently reasonable and moderate man whom China’s leaders ignore to their country’s and Tibet’s great detriment. (Indeed, if one must have an adversary, it is hard to imagine someone more accommodating and thoughtful.)

Second, that the whole occupation of Tibet and the CIA’s secret involvement with Tibetan resistance turned out to be an agonizing waste of energy and blood.

It is true that the American, British and Indian leaders may have first vacillated and then done too little, too late to help the Dalai Lama’s cause. However, the real blame must be laid before China’s leaders. Their blind and belligerent insistence that Tibet return to “the Chinese Motherland” on their terms set Tibet and China on a fatefully antagonistic course. Far too many are still paying for this stubborn blindness.

But ironically, while many Tibetans have paid a high price for Mao’s vision of conflict resolution, the Chinese government has paid, and is still paying, an even higher one. For at the very time that its leaders yearn to find respect and legitimacy around the world, they are compelled to live with the millstone of Tibet hanging around their necks. And no amount of political propaganda, revelations about foreign interference or revisionist history can lift that ignominious burden. The only cure for this legacy of myopia and violent repression is a reappraisal of history and a reversal of policy.

The paradox is that even though no state has ever diplomatically recognized Tibet as independent, and even though the Dalai Lama and his followers are in exile and dispossessed of their country, he is still internationally recognized as a leader of great moderation and principle, the perfect person to soothe the tensions that have built up within Tibet. What is so self-defeating and frustrating about Beijing’s policies is that Communist Party leaders cannot see what an incomparable asset they have to help transform the mythology of this benighted land from that of an oppressed Shangri-La to one of true “peaceful liberation.”