By fall of 1957, Tibetans who had never seen a sky boat were jumping out of one in the cold light of a full moon over Tibet. One of the first jumpers, Athar Norbu, remembered: ‘We could see the Tsangpo River below us gleaming in the dark. There were no clouds. It was a clear night. Happiness surged through me…[as] we went rattling out of the plane.’ In Lhasa, Athar Norbu and a fellow guerrilla made contact with Gompo Tashi. This ultrasecret project was code-named ‘ST Circus.’ The CIA was now in the fight.

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In the summer of 1958, Gompo Tashi established new headquarters at Triguthang in southern Tibet, where thousands of men had gathered in a pan-Tibetan resistance force. In an effort to be more inclusive, they renamed their movement Tensung Dhanglang Magar (Voluntary Force for the Defense of Buddhism). Two CIA-trained Tibetans watched it all, radioing back to the United States. In July the CIA made its first arms drop into Tibet — mostly of untraceable old Lee-Enfield rifles. Agency veterans of ST Circus recalled the excitement and romance at receiving messages from their protégés 15,000 miles away in a near-mythical place few Americans could locate on a globe. Even CIA Director Allen Dulles, searching for Tibet on a world map, poked around near Hungary before one of his officers politely enlightened him. Quoting a fellow CIA officer, John Kenneth Knaus, a former CIA operations officer who worked with Tibetan resistance from 1959 to 1965, admitted, ‘There was something so special’ about Tibet — including the ‘Shangri-La factor.’ Beyond that, the CIA officers involved — self-dubbed ‘the Old Guys Tibetan Club’ — admit today with a chuckle that they felt fortunate to be involved in a ‘good operation’ rather than the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba.

Thrilled by the success of the two radio operators in central Tibet, the CIA built a top-secret facility at Camp Hale, Colo., former home of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. The Tibetans loved Camp Hale’s 10,000-foot Rocky Mountain peaks, alpine air and dense forests — reminiscent of home — and called the camp Dhumra, or ‘the Garden.’ Life at Camp Hale was Spartan, the training rigid and thorough. When the Tibetans got on the plane for their return flight homeward, each team carried the same things — its personal weapons, wireless sets and a cyanide capsule strapped onto each man’s left wrist.

The Camp Hale Tibetans believed they were being trained to regain Tibetan independence. Interpreter Thinley Paljor recalled: ‘In our games room we had a picture of [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, signed by him, ‘To my fellow Tibetan friends, from Eisenhower.’ So we thought the president himself was giving us support.’ Some of their trainers came to feel that way as well, with unusually strong bonds formed between many CIA men and the Tibetans.

Back in Tibet the resistance’s furious campaign was paying off. Freedom fighters were effectively in control of significant chunks of the mountain kingdom. Encouraged, the agency made a second arms drop to Gompo Tashi’s men, then two more resupply drops in 1958.

In Lhasa, however, the delicate veneer of coexistence between Tibet’s young god king, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and the Communist occupiers was stripping away. Certain incidents had made obvious, even to the public, the Chinese plans for the Dalai Lama’s elimination, and a multitude of Lhasa’s populace surrounded his residence to protect him. How the Dalai Lama ever escaped through this throng is a mystery, but on March 17, 1959, resistance fighters smuggled him out of his residence, the Potala, and through guerrilla-held territory. They were joined by two CIA-trained Tibetans in escorting him to the Indian border.

Two days later, still unaware of the Dalai Lama’s escape, the Chinese lobbed shells toward his vacated palace, and at 2 a.m. on March 20 they began shelling the city. Enraged when they learned of the Dalai Lama’s escape, the Chinese executed Lhasa civilians in reprisal. Exact numbers are unknown, but the bodies were reportedly stacked like cordwood in the streets. The Chushi Gandrug forces in eastern Tibet were quickly outgunned, outnumbered and, thanks to aircraft and improved Chinese radio communications, relentlessly pursued by beefed-up PLA forces. In the face of such an onslaught, Gompo Tashi and what was left of his force joined the exodus of Tibetans streaming across the Himalayas, following their exiled leader. After the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, the number of Tibetan teams secretly flown into Camp Hale grew. Eventually, 259 Tibetans would be trained there.

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