CIA’s Secret War in Tibet

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Still, there were successes. Gompo Tashi later related to Roger McCarthy, CIA operations officer in charge of the Tibetan program at the time, details of a December 25 attack by 200 of his men: ‘The men attacked on the date set and fought the Chinese for 15 days, destroying more than 500 Chinese quarters and many vehicles….The Chinese Communist newspaper…reported that more than 550 Chinese soldiers had been killed ‘heroically’ in this battle. We lost 20 men and nine others wounded.’ Tashi added that 29 Tibetan volunteers leading 400 locals attacked another Chinese camp in the area. ‘That battle lasted 10 days,’ he recalled. ‘They inflicted heavy casualties on the Chinese….’ Then on January 24, 1959, ‘Another of our volunteer forces of 130 men attacked the Chinese in Tengchen and seized the fortress in Teng Dzong…. More than 4,000 people from the local area volunteered to join us….The destruction of the Chinese was systematic and about completed when unfortunately the skies cleared and the Chinese began bombing and machine-gunning us from their airplanes….We had not killed all of the Chinese but would have if we had better communications between our forces and if the weather had not cleared.’

Eighteen more guerrillas were dropped in September 1959 near Chagra Pembar, 200-plus miles northeast of Lhasa, to train a native force gathered in a tent city with their families and the livestock on which they depended. Eventually the force reached 35,000 Tibetans. This was a feudal culture whose tribes gathered in the same way they had for 1,000 years. Amid the bleating animals and the sea of blue smoke from cooking fires, at least two of the Tibetan teams radioed for more support.

The CIA made several arms drops soon afterward, this time providing M-1 Garand rifles, mortars, grenades, recoilless rifles and machine guns. Nor were they small drops. The first one consisted of 126 pallets of cargo, including 370 M-1 rifles with 192 rounds per rifle, four machine guns with 1,000 rounds each and two radio sets. A second similar drop came the next month, and a third 226-pallet drop during the next full moon provided 800 more rifles, 200 cases of ammo and 20 cases of grenades. On January 6, 1960, some 650 pallets landed with more arms, plus medicine and food. Clearly, after the Dalai Lama escaped, the agency was far less concerned about maintaining ‘plausible deniability’ regarding the arms support.

By now the massive, tumultuous Tibetan camp at Chagra Pembar was a real problem. Guerrillas cannot operate effectively with such encumbrances, and CIA coordinators tried frantically to convince the fighters to disperse into smaller units in order to operate more flexibly and present less of a target. Within a month, the inevitable happened. A veteran of Chagra Pembar, Dechen (surnames are not always used in Tibet) described the attack: ‘A Chinese plane came in the morning and dropped leaflets which told us to surrender and warned us not to listen to the ‘imperialist’ Americans. After that, every day, some fifteen jets came. They came in groups of five, in the morning, at midday and at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Each jet carried fifteen to twenty bombs. We were in the high plains so there was nowhere to hide. The five jets made quick rounds and killed animals and men.’ Thousands of men, women and children were killed, both at Chagra Pembar and at another gathering site called Nira Tsogeng. Artillery barrages topped off the aerial bombings. Only five of the Chagra Pembar parachutists survived; the rest died in the Chinese attacks or were hunted down later.

This disaster was even worse when the Chinese bombed the large encampment at Nira Tsogeng, where the CIA had dropped 430 pallets of weapons and other supplies to 4,000 Tibetan fighters. Saddled with their dependents and some 30,000 animals, the surviving resistance fled across the desolate plain of Ladakh, where most died for lack of water.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts

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