Free Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty

convoys and patrols. Charging into the mechanized Chinese ranks on horseback, bandoliers of bullets and grenades across their chests, they looked like throwbacks to another century. But they often prevailed in gruesome, all-out assaults. One leader, Gompo Tashi, remembered the Battle at the Nyimo River, in which an outnumbered force of Tibetans fought against thousands of PLA soldiers:
    As the buglers in our camp sounded the signal to attack, I led seventy horses on to the field. Galloping at full speed, we charged the enemy like wild animals, fighting them hand to hand. The Chinese were unable to resist the onslaught and withdrew to a nearby village.… We shot down everydoor and window in [the] houses and eventually had to burn them, as this was the only way to destroy the Chinese who were hiding inside.
    Escalation followed escalation. In southern Kham, a local revolt centered on Samphe-Lang, an important monastery in Changtreng. The grounds of the monastery were packed with 3,000 monks and families who’d been targeted by the PLA or displaced by the land reforms. A standoff ensued: the Khampas blocked up the river supplying the Chinese camp with fresh water, and the PLA dropped leaflets warning the rebels to surrender. And then one day out of a clear blue sky, a single plane emerged and dropped a ragged line of bombs on the monastery. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died.
    One of the men who silently carried these stories with him was named Lithang Athar Norbu, a calm, peaceful-looking young Khampa, just twenty-eight years old, who’d already passed through more personas than most Tibetan men would see in a lifetime: peasant boy, novice monk, assistant to a
shusor
(a businessman in monk’s robes who traveled the country buying supplies for his Buddhist clients), and rebel. The Khampas were stoics by temperament and circumstance; they led harsh lives where a bullet from an enemy clan or amebic dysentery might kill them at any moment. Many people from Amdo didn’t like to be seen crying even at the death of a child. But Athar had seen Tibetans slain by the Chinese; he’d heard the accounts of slaughtered monks, dying while PLA officers screamed that they’d been trying to civilize the Tibetans for five years but they were still animals. These stories were told over campfires on pitch-black Himalayan slopes, and the images of death and desecration had affected the young man deeply.
    “Many of our loved ones we had seen die,” Athar said. “Many in great agony. These are things you don’t forget.”
    The CIA had taken notice of the rebels as early as 1952, and as the resistance gathered force, the agency formed the Tibetan Task Force to harass and degrade the Chinese occupation. Back in Washington, a small team—often just five or six agents—was involved full-time in planning operations, supplying the rebels, and training Khampas in the latest insurgency tactics and weapons. As the uprising in Kham and Amdo intensified during 1957, an order arrived in the CIA’s Far East Bureau telling the agents there to find a small group of Tibetans for “external training as a pilot team that would infiltrate their homeland and assess the state of resistance.” Athar and five other Khampas were smuggled out of Tibet by the CIA, with help from Gyalo, the Dalai Lama’s brother. The operation was cloaked in secrecy. “Gyalo said, ‘You cannot tell even your parents, relatives, or friends where you are going,’ ” Athar remembered. They’d never seen an American before, or an airplane, or an ocean. They were jerked from a medieval countryside into the Cold War.
    After honing the recruits’ skills on Saipan, often called the “Island of the Dead” because of all the Japanese skeletons left there during World War II, the CIA secretly brought the insurgents to Camp Hale in Colorado, which, at 9,200 feet, was the closest thing to Tibet’s high plateau the U.S. Army could find. There the young rebels were given an