In Exile From the Land of Snows (24 page)

“You don’t have to think about what’s under you—mud, water or shit,” said the man in charge three hours later. “When we arrive in a minute, do only what I say, just like in war.” Pulling onto the shoulder of the road, the jeep stopped and the men were ordered to sprint in silence across an open field. They started running, but a pair of headlights appeared, followed by the leader’s abrupt command to drop. The car passed and they ran again. The bank of a wide river loomed in the darkness. Arriving, they regrouped and for the next few hours wandered back and forth along the shoreline until, plainly lost, their leader asked a member of the company who spoke Hindi to enter a nearby village and cautiously inquire whether or not it lay in Pakistan. A half hour later the man returned surrounded by a mob of angry villagers carrying sticks and rifles. Outnumbered, the luckless Tibetans were promptly hustled to a nearby police station where, they were convinced, a jail cell would be waiting. On entering, however, they were surprised to witness the commanding officer dismiss the villagers and once they had gone offer a cordial reception. He then explained that not only were they in Pakistan but that the special agent whose
presence they had fruitlessly sought on the riverbank had already alerted authorities throughout the region to look for their group. A short while later the contact showed up in a Pakistani army truck. The Tibetans were put inside, driven to a small house and left for the remainder of the night.

Early the next morning, at the first hint of dawn, Gendun was roused from sleep and ordered to run to an adjacent building. From here he watched the rest of his group race over, one at a time, followed by the agent, who was clearly concerned that there be no further sighting by local people. Given food and blankets to sit on, the Tibetans spent the day indoors waiting for nightfall when the army truck once more picked them up. Driven into a forest, they were placed in groups of threes and told to sprint again. Across a clearing lay a railroad track. On it stood a solitary car. As he ran, Gendun glimpsed a station farther down the line. Reaching the car, he paused to look at it more closely, but was quickly pulled inside by a squad of Pakistani soldiers armed with submachine guns. Escorted to a locked compartment, the metal blinds of its windows firmly shut, he soon heard a train arrive, couple with the car and begin pulling it in what he judged to be a southerly direction. One day later, the sounds of a large terminal became audible. Unhooked, the car jolted loose from the train and was drawn some distance away. The door of Gendun’s compartment then flew back and a Pakistani soldier gestured for him to follow. Outside the train, the Tibetans were rushed into a waiting troop truck, which, led by a military jeep, exited the station and drove swiftly through a large city—Dacca, as Gendun learned years later. On the outskirts of the city, the truck halted before a lone building standing at the far end of an airstrip. Within a few minutes, a gray unmarked two-propeller craft landed and taxied directly over. Though some of the Khampas had seen Chinese planes from below as they flew bombing missions over Kham, none had glimpsed a
namdu
or “skyboat” at close quarters. An even greater surprise followed, however, when a small door near the tail of the plane opened, a ladder descended and out stepped a tall, sharp-featured white man smoking a pipe.

A single row of seats ran down the right side of the plane’s interior. On the left, a small photo of the Dalai Lama was taped to the fuselage. Gendun watched closely while three Caucasian men demonstrated how to fasten a seat belt. As the plane’s propellers revved, they drew the curtains. Then, returning from the front cabin after takeoff, they opened them and passed out paper cups containing a cold brown drink. “What is this, rum?” Gendun asked the Tibetan interpreter in the group. The translator spoke to one of the white men in an unfamiliar language. “This is a foreign drink,” he momentarily announced to his compatriots. “It is called Coca-Cola.”
After sipping Coca-Cola, the passengers were each given a tray of food. Grappling with roast beef sandwiches, pickles, salt and pepper shakers, a few of the Tibetans, wondering if it too was some strange new food, unwrapped the small bars of soap beside their plates and ate them as well. Following dinner, they relaxed for the first time since their journey had begun two days before. In typical Khampa style, they left the odd chairs and, indifferent to their surroundings, sat cross-legged on the floor. A pair of ivory dice materialized and a raucous session of
shö
, Tibet’s most popular game of chance, was shortly underway, each player shouting at the top of his lungs as his turn came to hurl the dice down. After a brief fuel stop late in the night the men eventually went to sleep, waking the next morning to behold a brilliant expanse of sunlit water shimmering below—their first sight of an ocean.

After a day in the air, the small plane landed. An army transport backed directly up to the steps in its rear and drove the Tibetans off. The climate was cool and a heavy rain pummeled the roof. Finding a small hole in the canvas, Gendun pried it larger and bending down, was able to look outside. Orientals, holding umbrellas against the downpour, walked past stores with Chinese characters on their signs. Gendun assumed that he was in Taiwan. The truck passed through a checkpoint in a wire fence and then stopped by two small buildings hidden behind a thick stand of trees. Inside, the Tibetans were shown to a row of cots in a barren room in which they were to spend the next twenty-eight days, forbidden, when outside, to go beyond the immediate surroundings.

The men soon realized that they were quartered in a remote corner of a vast military base—not in Taiwan, but on Okinawa, as was subsequently revealed. One day the man with the pipe spoke to them through their interpreter. He said that they had been waiting for a second group of Tibetans. It now appeared that the entire contingent had been apprehended by India’s IB while crossing the Pakistan border. As a result, they were to proceed alone. “Each of your backgrounds has been closely checked to ensure that you are not a Chinese spy,” he stated. “You are going to receive new names in my language and from now on you must respond only to them.” To the Tibetans’ great amusement, they were forthwith dubbed Doug, Bob, Willy, Jack, Rocky, Martin and Lee, confirming what many of them had already surmised, to wit, that the Communists’ worst enemy had finally seen fit to become the Tibetans’ best friend—a distant country called America.

Once more the gray airplane, its curtains, fastened, rose noisily into the sky. An odd comradeship between the white men and their charges had developed. While the Tibetans gambled on the floor, drank Coca-Cola,
shouted and laughed, the Westerners, clearly taken by their unrestrained spirits, walked up and down the wide aisle, periodically placing their hands in prayer before the Dalai Lama’s photo and grinning broadly. Though they repeatedly order their passengers to go to sleep—going so far as to hustle them into their seats and turn the overhead lights out—the Khampas, accustomed to taking orders only from their own tribal chieftains, persisted in returning to the floor to gamble in the dark. In the morning a large island appeared in the sea below. After they landed, the men rested for a day, in the course of which the American with the pipe insisted on having his picture taken with Gendun. They got back on board and the aircraft took off, flying through a second night until, looking out toward sunset the following day, Gendun noticed a long coastline below, with a large city sprawled across low-lying hills in its midst. As they crossed a range of dun-colored mountains, he saw the lights of another great city, among which the plane soon landed. Once more army trucks were waiting. This time, though, the temperature was extremely cold. After driving upward for three hours, a rest stop was taken by the side of the road. Stepping from the trucks, the Tibetans were astonished to see towering, snow-covered peaks under a brilliant starry sky. The mountains looked so familiar that for a moment some thought that they had returned to Tibet. Others, after five weeks in tight quarters, ran wildly through the fresh-fallen snow oblivious of their wet sneakers and were only boarded once more with a good deal of effort by their escorts. Three hours farther into the mountains, they passed a checkpoint in a barbed-wire fence and drove up a long valley. At its end stood a cluster of single-story buildings. Inside one each man was assigned a bed, beside which stood a small table neatly stacked with pencil, pad and towels. The barracks was bare and immaculate, but Gendun found a single telltale item which had eluded the keepers, an old pencil, its eraser end covered by toothmarks. In Tibet, when writing, it was the normal procedure to hold one’s pen between the teeth while using both hands to fold the paper into lines. The toothmarks convinced Gendun that Tibetans had been there before. From then on he was sure that he was in America.

The second island in the sea had been Hawaii; the city on the coastline, San Francisco; the one landed at, Denver; the mountain base the Tibetans had been taken to, Camp Hale, eighteen miles north of Leadville, Colorado. Used during the World War II for high-altitude combat training, Camp Hale had been redesigned for the creation of a clandestine Tibetan army under the direct administration of the CIA.

The decision to train Tibetans in the United States was made little
more than a month after the March uprising. On April 21, 1959, three weeks after the Dalai Lama’s escape, General Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, field commander of the National Volunteer Defense Army, confronted with overwhelming Chinese forces, gave orders for his Lhoka-based headquarters to be abandoned. While guerrillas continued to function in separate units throughout Lhoka, the NVDA’s chief officers sought refuge in the NEFA, Gompo Tashi himself suffering from debilitating wounds. Proceeding to Darjeeling, he met with the organization’s leader, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup, and together with their advisers, the two men laid plans for the next stage of the NVDA’s fight, which, now that China stood in outright possession of Tibet, was to be based on a substantially closer involvement with the CIA.

To date, the CIA’s training of Khampas had been limited. On Guam and Okinawa (the agency’s forward station for monitoring its Tibetan operation), recruits had received four months of instruction, after which, armed with a tommy gun, a radio and poison, to be self-administered in the event of capture, they were flown from Bangkok and dropped by parachute into Tibet to organize cells. While only
pons
or tribal chieftains and their sons had been used, the new project, begun in May 1959, called for the instruction of five groups totaling almost 500 men, selected both for their physical stature and to represent each district in Tibet’s three provinces. As in the past, once training was complete, they were to be dropped into their native regions to organize a resistance that eventually would be linked to the broad body of NVDA troops, who hoped to relocate to a new base somewhere on Tibet’s borders.

The utmost secrecy shrouded the operation. The Tibetans were never told that they were in the United States. Thus, if any man was captured, American involvement could not be proved. Meanwhile, training a covert army of Asians in the middle of the Rocky Mountains warranted the greatest care. By mid-July 1959, the CIA had planted a front page story in the Denver
Post
reporting that atomic testing—though not bomb detonation—was to be conducted at Camp Hale. The vast area of 14,000-foot peaks and valleys covered by the camp was henceforth strictly off bounds to the civilian population. People who were near Peterson Air Force Base, outside of Colorado Springs, when a subsequent group of Tibetans was flown out, found themselves detained. Up to forty-seven at a time were held at gunpoint behind army roadblocks until mysterious buses, their windows painted black, had passed by. When news of unidentified Orientals in Colorado reached the New York
Times
, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara personally had the story suppressed. As a final resort,
soldiers guarding the most sensitive areas of the base—as well as the Tibetans themselves—were given explicit instructions to shoot to kill anyone found within the perimeters.

Gendun’s group was the fourth to arrive at Camp Hale. On their first day the men were issued black combat boots and green army fatigues. After breakfast, they were taken on a tour of the camp’s immediate area, which consisted of ten buildings near the bank of a small river. All around, heavily forested mountains screened off the outside world, but even within the camp restrictions were imposed. Their barracks, the dining hall, the classrooms and a large room with odd-looking tables called “pool” and “Ping-Pong” were the only areas Tibetans were permitted in. They were told as much at their first lecture given by a large instructor in combat fatigues. Informing the group that training would last for six months, the American concluded by asking two questions: “Will you jump from an airplane? If so, raise your hands.” Pleased with the response, he smiled and said, “Who wants to fight the Chinese?”

Camp Hale’s curriculum covered a wide variety of topics. Addressed by their English names, stamped on plastic panels pinned to visored caps, the Tibetans were taught weaponry, survival techniques, radio operations, coding, how to organize an underground network, make letter drops and chart contact points. Morning classes began with a twenty-six-letter, ten-number code used in wireless transmission, map reading, and compass work. One-of-a-kind equipment had been manufactured by the CIA specially for the Tibetans’ use, including radios no larger than a hand yet powerful enough to transmit clearly over vast distances. M-1 rifles, mortars, bazookas and silencers were among the weapons employed. The men were taught parachuting, rock climbing and river crossing and went through exercises in which deer had to be killed and butchered on the run, the meat eaten raw for a week, while instructors (often pursuing with live ammunition) hunted their pupils. They were also introduced to the more refined arts of espionage. Gendun was told that on being sent into Tibet, he must spend days in hiding, observing the daily patterns of his parents and relatives to be certain, before making contact, that they were not working with, or being observed by the Chinese. He was then taught to establish resistance cells which would report regularly to him on Chinese troop movements. They were to be ready at all times for the signal to rise up in revolt as part of a coordinated effort across the whole country. He learned how to move by night through hostile territory, how to pass, disguised, through checkposts if forced to move by day, and if captured, how to resist interrogation. Holding to a fixed story for as long as possible, he was gradually to lead the Chinese to believe that he was breaking, choosing the
most credible moment to stage a collapse, after which he would present them with the supposedly true account of his identity, itself also a fabrication, prepared long before.