Things got grimmer. In the spring of 1960, a seven-man team parachuted into Markam in eastern Tibet. Led by Yeshe Wangyal, son of a local chieftain, it hooked up with the force of Wangyal’s father, who had been killed some months before. The guerrillas landed on a light dusting of snow, considered a good omen by Tibetans. This time, however, the omen proved false. After arming the local resistance, they almost immediately came under attack and fought running battles against a steadily swelling PLA force until they were surrounded. The sole living survivor of that team today is a former medical student turned guerrilla named Bhusang, who remembered: ‘The whole mountainside was swarming with Chinese. We fought them nine times. During the battle, the Chinese shouted out to us, ‘Surrender! Surrender!’ We shouted back, ‘Eat sh-t!’…We really fought. It was intense, like a dream. It didn’t seem real. And then, at around 10 o’clock, I looked around and saw that two men from our team had taken their cyanide capsules. It was the end. I put the capsule in my mouth because later I might not have had time.’ Before he could bite down on the capsule, however, a blow from behind knocked him out cold. Bhusang spent the next 18 years in a Chinese prison, where he was tortured and starved until he revealed his training by the Americans and the identities of those taught with him.

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The Tibetans’ resistance efforts under CIA auspices, however valiant, now seemed more and more pointless. Forty-nine men had been dropped into Tibet. Twelve survived, two of whom were in Chinese prisons. With the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, it is clear that the area of operations could not even feed its own population, much less an additional guerrilla force. Compounding the situation was the Tibetans’ independent spirit, which often valued pure guts over strategic planning. Against the advice of their CIA mentors, the Tibetans often insisted upon hurling full frontal attacks at the massive Chinese forces.

One of the biggest problems for the resistance was that the CIA could not provide tactical radio equipment, which would allow them to coordinate their forces. While the CIA feared the Tibetans would not observe proper communications security, there were other obstacles. The PRC 10 radios ate batteries by the dozen. Given the choice of being dropped batteries or weapons, Tibetans chose the latter.

The effort to sustain a large guerrilla force had been a painful failure. From a purely logistical standpoint, however, the drops into hostile Tibetan territory had been a brilliant success. ‘The earlier drops, perhaps the first 10 or 15, were very successful in that the morale of the Tibetan trainees and the Chushi Gandrug went sky high,’ McCarthy said in retrospect. ‘The next 20 or so gave the resistance much of what they needed to maintain their winning ways over the PLA; the drops to the Pembar area brought false hope, and thus I call them sadly futile.’

Given the nasty beating the resistance was now taking, the time had come to move its base out of reach of the Chinese. In the summer of 1960 the Tibetan operations base was relocated to Mustang province, a moonscapelike scrap of Nepalese real estate jutting into Tibet. From there the resistance planned, with CIA help, to send 2,100 fighters in groups of 300 into occupied Tibet. One of Gompo Tashi’s lieutenants, an ex-monk named Bapa Gen Yeshe, ran the operation, and he easily collected the first 300 guerrillas for Mustang. Rightfully nervous about such numbers while it secretly staged operations in Nepal without consent, the CIA demanded the highest level of security.

Security, however, was not the average Tibetan’s strong point; articles began to appear in the newspapers about the more than 2,000 Tibetans flocking into the camp — over three times the original number planned — to be fed, housed and kept occupied. Upset by the security breach, and heeding Eisenhower’s proscription against conducting provocative airdrops in the wake of the 1960 U-2 spy plane incident, the CIA withdrew support. That made for a horribly bitter winter situation in the Mustang camps. Some Tibetans froze to death. Others ate their shoes and animal hides to survive. Eventually, however, money was provided for food, and Tibetan hopes at Mustang remained high.

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