Can we thus evaluate the armed rebellion in some regions of the "Wild West of China" and later in Tibet (1959 in Lhasa) as a popular uprising and liberation struggle? In any case, the historian Grunfeld had strong doubts. The rebel leaders claimed that most of the people were opposed to the presence of the Han Chinese. Yet some of them admitted that many poor Tibetans were happy to see the Hans. In any case, we must ask about the reality of the free will of the rank and file, when the leaders of the rebellion were feudal masters. A wealthy rebel leader, for example, admitted having provided 46 of his "staff" including the necessary weapons and horses for the good cause, followed by reinforcements and food e.g. hundreds of pack horses and mules. The servile subjects of the feudal masters possibly had no more free will than the aforementioned horses and mules. Grunfeld estimates that a majority of the small upper class, possibly 70 percent, sympathised with the rebels. However, it is impossible to say how much support they received from the normal people, if at all any. The (mainly very fanciful!) figures provided by the Tibetan exiles ranged from a total of 35,000 to 300,000 Tibetans who supported the rebellion.
The political-ideological background attributed to the rebels who were mainly presented as "freedom fighters" in the West even appears questionable to French when he writes: "... the Chushi Gangdrug, an organisation now often depicted as a symbol of militant Tibetan nationalism, was at its inception a movement for the preservation of religion. Its military badge carried the legend 'Guardians of Religion in the Land of Snows.'" The organisation, which today still operates a website from Swiss exile, itself explains the symbolism of its flag: it shows two crossed swords on a yellow background. "Yellow stands for Buddhism (sic!), and we wanted to protect Buddhism(!) from the Communist Chinese. One of the swords is burning and symbolises wisdom. The sword of the wisdom of the Manjushree that can destroy the roots of ignorance. The second sword stands for fearlessness." It was not for nothing that the heading of an interview with the "Dalai Lama's brother," in the American newspaper USNWR read "'Holy War' in Tibet".
French cites a Chushi Gangdrug veteran and former monk named Raduk Ngawang who, in 1958, took part in an attack on the PLA and gives us a small insight into the understanding of Buddhism and the mentality of the insurgents when he acknowledges: "As a Buddhist, the invocation of om mani padme hum comes to my lips when I kill an insect, but I didn't feel sad during that battle. I was happy. The Red Chinese had killed monks and destroyed monasteries [note: not true. Previous parts of the book show the PLA having incredible restraint and respect for Tibetan culture], so we killed them. I felt nothing when I saw them lying there dead. They had no religion."
In the context of the Cold War at the time and the western roll back strategy, all kinds of Communist haters were welcome allies, even if they were reactionary, fanatical, and unscrupulous. Thus, the battle of the Khampa gangs for their good old religion very quickly became a highly secret, because illegal and illegitimate, killing on behalf of the CIA and US interests in eastern Asia. When describing the following events, we again do not want to follow any "Chinese propaganda" but rather focus on "western" sources and sources from Tibetan exiles. Some valuable information may still be marked as classified and top secret and lying around in US archives but a lot of other information is now generally available and has been published by authors from within the US services or even directly from "Buddha warriors" themselves. All of these sources agree that, from very early on, the CIA provided military training for the Khampa fighters, equipped them, supported them logistically and controlled them from a safe distance. That the Dalai Lama's brothers played a key role from the outset. That the "Tibetan struggle for liberation" was at no time "peaceful" or "non-violent" but rather extremely violent, brutal and unscrupulous. And finally that the Dalai Lama lied to the public for decades about the backers and backgrounds of this struggle.
The February 2004 issue of the American newspaper Military History contained an informative article about the "largely unknown struggle" that "got support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sponsored secret training camps and made arms and equipment drops." The text entitled CIA's Secret War in Tibet from the pen of a certain Joe Bageant was published online on 12 th June 2006.
The article later explains how, in spring 1957, a CIA aircraft flew six Tibetans from Gompo Tashi's group via Bangkok and Okinawa to the island of Saipan in the western Pacific, where they received military training for six months. The leader of this first group (and a later head of the terrorist base in Mustang) was Gompo Tashi's nephew, Wangdu Gyatotsang, who had grown up in the Lithang monastery and is described as "hot tempered from childhood." He was so violent that he became a murderer even before his career as a terrorist began. In the small town of Menling he shot a bodyguard of the local tribal chief, who had rudely asked him to take off his hat. However, he avoided punishment on "account of his family connections."
As a further internet article also divulges, the Dalai Lama's brother Norbu (Taktse Rinpoche) joined the group in Okinawa and fled with them in their C-118 to Saipan. This small volcanic island, which is under US control and belongs to the Mariana islands, was used by the CIA at the time for training anti-Communist espionage, sabotage, torture, and terror specialists from several Asian countries. Alongside Tibetans, Kuomintang Chinese, Koreans and Thais, also Laotians and Vietnamese were trained there for the outbreaking war in Indochina. The CIA agents who were instructing the Tibetan fighters were thus, in part, identical to the soldiers, warhorses, and murderers who would soon be pursuing their criminal activities in Laos or Vietnam. For example, Anthony A. "Tony Poe" Poshepny, who later achieved notoriety in Laos, also spent four years "working" with the Khampa rebels.
In Laos, he became a brutal "jungle warlord," who collected the ears of killed "enemies" (he paid his Hmong child soldiers for this...) and enclosed them with his written success reports to his superiors. He also arranged for severed heads to be dropped over "enemy territory" or skewered on sticks and displayed in the region. The half-crazy film figure of Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in Coppola's Apocalypse Now, was based on him.
The training programme in Saipan included weapon techniques, guerilla tactics, espionage and the use of codes and radios. "We lived only to kill the Chinese," one of the pious warriors said. A later commander of the Chushi Gangdrug, Gyato Wangdu, asked the CIA official Roger McCarthy about a portable atom bomb that he could use in Tibet. He was not given one but the CIA appreciated Wangdu's enthusiastic participation in the explosives training just as much as his ability to handle rocket-powered grenades and grenade launchers. However, there were major difficulties when the Tibetans were to estimate or measure distances, record, or code messages, learn the Morse alphabet etc. Most of them were illiterate and had no previous knowledge. A Tibetan teacher was also needed to teach them initially in their own language, as they could only speak their local dialect and even this with what linguists call a "restricted code."
Towards the end of 1957 the fully-trained CIA Tibetans were dropped from US aeroplanes over their homeplace, where they made contact with Gompo Tashi. The highly secret undertaking was given the code name "ST Circus." Now the CIA was directly involved. When the rebel group, whose name initially referred only to Kham and Amdo, was renamed in summer 1958 to Tensung Dhanglang Magar (Volunteer Armed Forces for Defending Buddhism), this was done under the watchful eyes of two CIA Tibetans, who continually reported to the USA via radio. The first weapons were dropped in July. These were primarily old Lee Enfield guns, whose origin could not be traced back to the US.
The described US intervention took place without the approval of the kashag and Dalai Lama. However, on the Chushi Gangdrug website Khampa rebels complained that the American Foreign Ministry initially demanded "a formal request from the Tibetan government" to authorise the supply of weapons to the insurgents. "General Gompo Tashi" asked Phala, the Dalai Lama's Upper Chamberlain, "for support" and warned that his "troops" would otherwise "run out of ammunition." In 1958, the "Tibetan government" was also asked via "radio messages" to submit "an official request for support" to the USA. "Despite this, and for reasons known only to the government, they ignored all attempts at contact. The guerrillas' situation was becoming critical and the Eisenhower administration gave the CIA the order to start with the support measures. Aeroplanes were to drop material over the region of the freedom fighters. Volunteers were also to be trained. The first, long-awaited supply flights were launched in August 1958, without the authorisation of the Tibetan government."
The Americans did therefore not particularly care about any "sovereignty of the Tibetan government" nor the well-being of the Tibetans; they were even less interested in historical, legal and ethical questions. The Military History article notes that only a few US citizens would have been able to find Tibet on a world map and that even CIA boss Allen Dulles initially looked for Tibet near to Hungary, before one of his agents politely "enlightened" him. However, that did not prevent the US Secret Service from setting up a top-secret training camp for anti-Communist Tibetan fighters in Camp Hale, Colorado, formerly the home of the 10 th Mountain Division of the US army. The "teams" who were then dropped over western China were all equipped with weapons, radios and a potassium cyanide capsule attached to their left wrist. Initial successes by the Buddha warriors encouraged the Agency to launch three more parachute drops of weapons and ammunition in 1958.
-Albert Ettinger, Battleground Tibet: History, Background, and Perspectives of an International Conflict (2018) Pgs. 181-185
EPUB of the book from Annaâs Archive
Prolewiki upload of the full book
