Spring of 1961 brought the Americans a new president and an apparent change of heart. John F. Kennedy’s administration, at least initially, continued to support Tibetan resistance. The CIA dropped more arms and a seven-man team to the camps in Nepal. It turned out to be one of the most auspicious decisions in CIA history. The Mustang guerrillas proceeded to make a series of smashing raids along the nearby Sinkiang-Tibet Highway running through southwestern Tibet toward Lhasa. Eventually, the Chinese gave up completely on using that important route and built another road farther from the Mustang border.

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The real reward for the CIA, however, was an intelligence coup that occurred when 40 Tibetan horsemen overran a small Chinese convoy in what came to be called the ‘blue satchel raid.’ A veteran of the raid named Acho described what transpired: ‘The driver was shot in the eye, his brains splattered behind him and the truck came to a stop. The engine was still running. Then all of us fired at it. There was one woman, a very high-ranking officer, with a blue sack full of documents.’ When the CIA men in Washington opened it, they were stunned. The bloodstained, bullet-riddled cache of 1,500 documents contained the first hard evidence of the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, famine, and discontent within the PLA. John Kenneth Knaus said: ‘The Tibetan Document Raid was one of the greatest intelligence hauls in the history of the agency….So that was of great help as far as getting or maintaining support for these kinds of operations was concerned.’ There were at least three important courier satchels captured, which provided insight into policy decisions, order-of-battle information, and proposals being made by China to India. The Tibetans were happy to know that the Americans were so pleased with the blue satchel’s contents, although Acho, in a 2001 interview said, ‘We still don’t know what was in that bag.’

The satchel was by no means the last of it. In 1962 a Tibetan spy team located deep inside Chinese territory photographed Chinese military sites, made maps and located potential parachute drop zones, at the same time helping to inform the United States about China’s missile programs and efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After repeated attempts, Tibetan operatives managed to plant sensors that gave Washington its earliest clues of China’s first nuclear test at Lop Nor, north of Tibet, in 1964.

Meanwhile, however, China’s collectivization of Tibet was taking a grisly toll. Newly built roads and airfields had allowed the PLA to bury the country in troops and equipment. Ancient monasteries and temples were systematically destroyed; tens of thousands of civilians, including monks and nuns, were killed, raped, scalded and imprisoned. Famine rumbled across the ‘roof of the world.’ Altogether 1.2 million Tibetans died, either at the hands of the soldiers or from the Chinese starvation strategy. ‘We should have committed ourselves earlier,’ McCarthy said, ‘before the Chinese got those roads and airstrips built, and before they established their lines of communications so thoroughly.’

By the mid-’60s things began to deteriorate for the Tibetans. Now aware of the Mustang camps, of which there were four, India and Nepal were nervous about the incursions. The CIA program also had its American detractors. Kennedy’s ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, was, in his patrician manner, calling it ‘a particularly insane enterprise’ involving ‘dissident and deeply unhygienic tribesmen.’ The guerrillas were instructed to cease making armed incursions inside Tibet and to limit their operations to intelligence gathering. The Tibetans nodded and smiled, then continued raiding until the late 1960s. The CIA made its last arms drop in May 1965.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing within the Tibetan organization, beginning with the death of the 64-year-old Gompo Tashi in September 1964, following surgery to remove 10 pieces of shrapnel acquired from years of fighting. The Dalai Lama’s brother, Gyalo Thondup, and camp organizer Lhamo Tsering replaced Gompo Tashi with Bapa Yeshe, a reliable fighter of the old school. More akin to a feudal tribal chief than a contemporary guerrilla commander, however, Yeshe and a like-minded group generally kept things stirred up among the resistance camps. Camp Hale vets said he misappropriated funds and supplies. In Mustang province he terrorized the locals and stole from farmers. The Nepalese protested to India, and of course the Indians protested to the Dalai Lama, while the Chinese happily kept up the political pressure on both Nepal and India for letting the Tibetans stay there at all.

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