Free Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty Page A

accelerated course in the agency’s many specialties: radio signal plans, hand-to-hand combat, first aid, sabotage, and night maneuvers. They practiced encoding and decoding with the agency’s one-time pads, destroying the pages once a message was sent. They were handed compasses (they’d never seen one before) and told how to read a map. “At one point, we had to take our radio sets on our backs and go into the forest,” Athar recalled. “Every day we had to practice sending telegrams about how Tibetans were fighting against the Chinese and the movements of PLA troops,until we could do it without making a single mistake.” And they were introduced to the arsenal of the Cold War: 60mm and 57mm recoilless rifles, fragmentation explosives, incendiary grenades. They built booby traps and tossed Molotov cocktails at imaginary targets. They jumped out of planes. And, crucially, they learned to send Morse code messages via the rugged and waterproof RS-1 spy radio, used by agents from Prague to Saigon.
    On October 20, 1957, after nine months away from their homeland, Athar and his compatriots prepared to reenter Tibet. Chanting the Buddhist mantra of purification,
Om Badzar Satwa Hung
, the Khampas boarded a black B-17 Flying Fortress in East Pakistan, all its markings carefully removed and its crew changed out for Czech and Polish expats. If the plane crashed or was shot down, there’d be nothing to trace it back to the CIA. The plane flew toward Tibet, the Khampas not even donning their oxygen masks until the altimeter read 18,000 feet, when their CIA trainer barked at them to put them on. When it was their turn, Athar and his partner, Lhotse, dropped into the moonlit night, above a spot chosen by the CIA’s cartographer from hand-drawn maps dating back to a 1904 British expedition. “I could see the Tsangpo River gleaming in the dark beneath us,” Athar remembered. “I was so excited to be back in Tibet.” The pair landed close to the walls of Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, a good omen. Each carried a British Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, a 9mm Sten machine gun, signal books, and “the L Tablet,” a lethal cyanide ampoule tucked into a box filled with sawdust. If the Chinese captured them, they were to clamp the tablet between their teeth so that they couldn’t betray the other guerrillas fanning out across Tibet.
    “We pulled out our radio sets and sent a message saying we’d landed safely,” Athar said. Soon a reply came from the CIA’sTibetan Task Force. “Very happy to hear safely arrived. We are throwing a party to celebrate.”
    Athar and Lhotse’s instructions from their CIA handlers were extensive. They were to meet with leaders of the resistance, who’d formed into a group called the Chushi Gangdrug (“Four Rivers, Six Ranges”—a reference to the land of Kham). The CIA wanted to assess the rebels’ strengths, their needs, and their popular support, and Athar and Lhotse were given the job of providing hard numbers. The CIA also asked them to relay back as much information on the PLA as they could find: on airfields, troop strengths, available infrastructure, and the occupation’s effect on the Tibetan economy. But most important, they were to meet with the Dalai Lama, draw out his true feelings on the resistance, and evaluate the threat to his life.
    For centuries, Kham and Amdo had been estranged from Lhasa, the seat of Tibetan power. A Khampa army had even marched toward the capital in 1934, to sack it and free themselves of its pernicious influence once and for all, but the leaders had been betrayed before they got close to the city. Often, it seemed the only thing that bonded Tibetan to Tibetan was
tsampa
—the barley meal that everyone ate, regardless of class or region—and the presence of the Dalai Lama himself.
    The blessing of His Holiness was absolutely necessary for any legitimate national resistance. “A word from the Dalai Lama,” wrote the French explorer Michel