TOP SECRET-CIA: Keep Chinese Annoyed and Disturbed by Tibet (with script)

(In response to http://www.bullog.cn/blogs/DNA/archives/233549.aspx. )

The following script is provided "AS IS" with no express or implied warranty for accuracy.

This is where it came. Yeah. You can hear the cheers from one end to the other when their first message arrived in and the guys arrived said they were safe. Yeah. That was indeed a time for celebration. And it was, you know, it's a pretty incredible achievement to think of. Here you are, what, 50,000 miles away, message going like, guy sitting over there with hand cranking generators spinning the stuff out, we know the answer, getting the answers to our questions right away.


The two-man radio team made contact with the resistances in Lhasa. Here's the Dalai Lama's government and the occupying Chinese forces still maintained their uneasy alliance.

8 month later, in the summer of 1958, the resistance moved out of Lhasa and set up a military base in southern Tibet. The radio team went with them. More than 5000 men gathered here and a series of attacks was launched against Chinese. The two men radioed the success of the guerrilla campaign to the CIA, who then made the decision to step up its support.

They made the first arms drop to the resistance.

In late 1958, the CIA decided to train more Tibetans and a top secret training facility was created in the Colorado Rocky mountains.


This whole area here is Camp Hale, this whole area, up and down the valley here. That's the area which we trained the Tibetans. We thought the conditions up at the Camp Hale somewhat duplicated the conditions in Tibet, mountainous terrain, the temperatures and the climate.

The Tibetans were brought up here in buses. They were tracked into this area here which was all cordoned off this, from mountain to mountain, that was patrolled by military police. The training area consists of series of Quanson huts which the men lived. And we had a recreational area where we were able to give them some recreation, classrooms and so on so forth. And of course in connection with the training, we would make overnight trips up to the mountains, to teach them hit-and-run type tactics, guerrilla type tactics if you will.


Over the next 5 years, 259 Tibetans were to be trained in Camp Hale.

We love "the American thief". And Chinese always called Americans imperialist and enemy of the world. So it was obvious they really hated them. So we have great expectations when we went to America. We thought perhaps they would even give us an atom bomb to take back with us. That was our hope. Because we want to fight the Chinese. We were ready to die. That's all we can think of.


It was unique in the sense we were working directly with people who believe very much their own cause. And... that I think gave it a rather unique quality. It was a thing that certainly caused tremendous rapport.


I've just got.. hooked on to these people. They were great. And then I started to learn about their cause. And it seems to be something that I would like to let myself doing, certainly do with wholeheartedly.

We had this group and we trained them and people who did the training, of course, fell in love with them. From the emotional point of view, quite apart from national interest and pragmatic situation, we fell so strongly about Tibetans themselves , the Tibetan cause, that if we could roll the clock back, to the time when they were truly independent, ..., love to do that.


During the training period, we learned that the objective of our training was to gain our independence for the struggles of Tibetan. The idea was to follow us, go back to Tibet, someday and organize the resistance movement, organize, not in-and-out, so that we can pressurize the Chinese gradually, force them to leave our country. That was the main objective.

In our games room, we had a picture of Eisenhower, signed by Eisenhower : "To my fellow Tibetan friends, from Eisenhower". We know that, during Eisenhower 's period, So it was ah, we thought it was that even from Eisenhower himself is giving us support.



Although the trainee at Camp Hale believed they are being ready for the struggle to regain Tibet's independence, this was never an official American policy.

I think basically the whole idea was to keep the Chinese occupied somehow, keep them annoyed, keep them disturbed, nobody wanted to go to war over Tibet, ah.. , that's pretty clear. We did go to war over Korea. We did go to war over Indochina. We weren't gonna go to war over Tibet. And so, it was nuisance operation, basically nothing more. And I'll think that's the American point of view, it wasn't gonna cost of very much, either money or manpower. Anyway it was not our manpower, well, it was Tibetan manpower. And we will be willing to help Tibetans become a running sore and a nuisance ... to the Chinese.


I'd like to tell anybody Alan Luise was, in fact, he asked me to go up to the director's office and brief on him what was going on in Tibet. He says now : "Where is Tibet?" We stand up on the leather couch of his office and he has a national geographic world map up there. And he is pointing to Hungary and he think: Is that Tibet? And I said, "No sir, it's over here with the Himalayas and ...(chuckle...)

By Mar 1959, the situation in Tibet was coming to a hell. In Lhasa, news spread that the Dalai Lama has been invited to the local Chinese camp to attend a theatric show. He was to come alone, without his bodyguards. The people of Lhasa gathered outside Dalai Lama's Summer Palace, determined to protect him.

Meanwhile, the resistance was in control of large swath of southern Tibet. The CIA made a second arms drop.

Around that time, we received a letter from Lhasa, from Dalai Lama's Lord Chamberlain. The letter said that his holiness is ready to leave, and that if he didn't leave soon, the situation was becoming desperate. The two of us was told to come as soon as possible to a place near Lhasa and we were also instructed to send this information to American.

7 days after the Lhasa uprising, the Dalai Lama, disguise as a soldier, escaped from his palace. These pictures showed Dalai Lama and his entourage escorted by resistance fighters, making their way south into guerrilla held territory, where they hope to set up temporary headquarters. The radio team met up with the escape party.

About every 24 hours, they will send us a message giving us their location and we were able to take that material and then feed it into the intelligence bulletins we kept senior officials....