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

Peissel, “one single proclamation, and all Tibet would undoubtedly have stood up and faced the Chinese.” The Khampas couldn’t help but suspect that the Dalai Lama himself had gone over to the Chinese side, while the Chinese suspected the opposite, that he was a secret supporter of the resistance. The leading Chinese official, Tan Guansan, dropped unsubtle hints abouthow they would address this. “When you have a piece of fly-blown meat,” he said as the tension between the PLA and the Tibetans grew, “you have to get rid of the meat before you exterminate the flies.” The Dalai Lama took it to mean that if he were killed, the rebellion would disappear.
    Athar and Lhotse spent two days in hiding before venturing out to begin their mission. They disguised themselves as religious pilgrims, who could be seen in every town and hamlet throughout Tibet with their rosaries, their lips reciting a mantra, and their faces lined with exhaustion after months of traveling. The pair developed a technique: Lhotse would observe PLA locations through binoculars while Athar slipped a gun beneath his robe and walked into a local town to buy food. Athar’s instructions were clear: “If I was recognized by the Chinese army, then I was supposed to begin shooting, while Lhotse would hit the main road and escape.” They scouted the countryside, reporting on Chinese troop strengths and radar systems—and guiding CIA planes to their drop zones. “We’d send a message ahead saying there was going to be twenty-six bundles, or whatever, and how many mules they’d need to move the stuff,” explains John Greaney, the deputy head of the Tibetan Task Force at the agency. Athar and Lhotse hiked to the target, built bonfires with dried yak dung, and watched as parachutes bloomed and the boxes of 2.36-inch bazookas, British Lee-Enfield rifles, grenades, and .30-caliber light machine guns came drifting down from 30,000 feet.
    Finally, a year after he was dropped back into Tibet, Athar was able to arrange a meeting with Phala, the Dalai Lama’s Lord Chamberlain, a tall aristocrat nicknamed “the keeper of the secrets.” Athar was unaware that he was the latest in a line of rebels who’d come to Lhasa on the same mission. Emissary after emissary had made his way to the Norbulingka to ask the Dalai Lama for hisblessing. But the Lord Chamberlain had turned them down, one by one.
    Athar and the aristocratic minister met in the fragrant grounds of the Norbulingka, accompanied by a guerrilla leader named Gompo Tashi. But as soon as Athar revealed that he was working with the CIA, the mood changed. The Lord Chamberlain nervously remarked that they shouldn’t be meeting at the summer palace, that Lhasa was filled with spies and Chinese sympathizers who would love nothing more than to connect the Dalai Lama with the rebels. “The Chinese were watching my every move,” the Lord Chamberlain later said. The cabinet members were “terrified” of the Chinese, and it was well known that Mao and his lieutenants were obsessed with the idea of foreign imperialists working to split Tibet from the motherland. If word got out that the Dalai Lama was talking to the Americans, the consequences would be dire. Athar was astonished to hear that he couldn’t even meet with the Dalai Lama to relay his request.
    (Phala remembered the meeting differently. In his version, he told the two guerrillas the Dalai Lama knew all about the rebels and their links to America’s spy agency. Not only that, His Holiness asked Athar and Lhotse to report to the Lord Chamberlain about their future operations. If Phala’s account is correct, the Dalai Lama knew about the guerrillas’ plans almost from the beginning.)
    Deeply disappointed, Athar had to send a message back to Washington saying he’d been unable to gauge His Holiness’s true feelings about the rebellion. A second meeting with the Lord Chamberlain was equally frustrating. The veil that had separated His Holiness from