Who would lead
such a force? What was needed was a senior Indian military officer who could
win the confidence of the Tibetans, embracing their independent nature and
promoting a semblance of discipline without resort to a rigid military code.
And he would need to have a bent for the unconventional—something that was then
in short supply, as the trench mentality in the Himalayas had dramatically
proved. As the roster of available officers was scoured, one name caught their
eye: Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban, until recently the commander of the 26th
Artillery Brigade in Kashmir. He was in New Delhi after having just processed
his retirement papers. Forty-eight years old, he had been an artilleryman all
his career, first under the British colonial system and then with the Indian
Army after independence. Normally, this would have provided little room for
innovation, but Uban had spent much time with mountain units and was familiar
with fighting at high altitudes. And during a stint as an artillery instructor
for jungle warfare units, he had earned the nickname ‘Mad Sikh’ for his flair
and drive. That small detail was enough for the Ministry of Defence (MoD),
which flashed an urgent message summoning the Brigadier. On October 26, 1962,
Uban was sitting in the Raksha Mantri’s office. The situation on the border—and
the status of Krishna Menon and Gen B M Kaul—had already reached a critical
point. With China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still inside Indian
territory, Uban was given sketchy details of the proposed behind-the-lines
guerrilla missions. Working with the Tibetans would not be easy, warned Gen Kaul.
Disciplining them, he said, would be like taming wild tigers. As a sweetener,
the Brigadier was promised a second star in due course. Uban was hooked and he
grabbed the assignment without hesitation. Now that the guerrilla force had a
leader, there remained the job of signing on Tibetan volunteers. To help, the
Indians sent an emissary from the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to Darjeeling to
fetch His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup. After years
of attempting to court the Indian leadership—who were often sympathetic but
never committal—Gyalo relished the moment as he sat in front of a select group
of senior intelligence and military officials in the capital. Speaking in
theoretical terms, his hosts asked whether he could organise the needed
volunteers. Of course, replied Gyalo. When asked how many, he conjured a
robust, round figure. Five thousand, he said. Next came a key question. Would
Gyalo prefer that the IB or the MoD be involved? Based on his earlier contact
with IB Director Bhola Nath Mullick and his current cooperation with the US Central
Intelligence Agency (through Lhamo Tsering), the decision was easy. “Not MoD”
was his indirect answer. Despite India’s woes—and her newfound interest in the
Tibetans—most of Washington DC took little notice. For, half a world away in
the waters around Cuba, nuclear brinkmanship was being taken to the limit as
President Kennedy demanded a withdrawal of the USSR’s nuclear warhead-armed
ballistic missiles from that island. Not 28 October 28 did the world breathe a
sigh of relief when Moscow agreed to withdraw its weaponry. With that crisis
over, the Sino-Indian conflict belatedly leapfrogged to the top of Washington’s
foreign policy agenda. On December 13, the Kennedy Administration approved the
provision of training assistance to Uban’s projected tactical guerrilla force.
Gyalo’s task was not particularly complicated.
As with the Nepal-based Mustang contingent, he was partial toward recruiting
Khampas. Finding willing takers was no problem, as the patriotic call to duty—and
the chance for meaningful employment—held great appeal among the Tibetan refugee
population in India. With word quickly spreading, volunteers by the thousands
stepped forward over the ensuing weeks. Gyalo also sought four political leaders
who could act as the force’s indigenous officer cadre. Given his seniority,
ethnicity, and proven aptitude in Dharamsala over the previous two years, Jamba
Kalden was an easy first pick. By early November, an initial contingent of
Tibetans, led by Jamba Kalden, was dispatched to the hill-station of Dehra Dun.
Once popular with India’s royalties because of its mild climate, it later
served as a key British educational centre and military base. More recently, it
was host to the Indian Military Academy, a number of Regimental barracks, and
several prestigious boarding schools. Jamba Kalden had little time to
appreciate Dehra Dun’s climatic appeal. On hand to meet the Tibetans was Brig
Uban and a skeleton staff of officers on loan from the Indian Army (IA). While
a transit tent-camp was set up on the edge of town to process the 5,000
promised volunteers, on November 14 the Indian cadre and four political leaders
shifted 92km northwest to the village of Chakrata (now un Uttarkhand). Situated
along a ridge and surrounded by forest glades, Chakrata had been chosen for
good reason. Home to a thriving population of panthers and bears, it had once
boasted two training centres for a pair of Gurkha Regiments. Since 1960,
however, both Regiments had relocated to more favourable locations. With almost
no local residents and a set of vacant cantonments, Chakrata had both ready-made
facilities and the seclusion needed for the covert operations-related
activities. Brig Uban and his team settled in to await the arrival of the rest of
the 5,000 volunteers by the year’s end and began mapping out the process of moulding
them into effective guerrilla combatants. For B N Mullick, the Chakrata project
signalled a new sense of militancy regarding Tibet. This was communicated in
strong fashion on December 29 when Mullik—through Gyalo Thondup—told the Dalai
Lama that New Delhi had now adopted a covert policy of supporting the eventual
liberation of his homeland. Although the US government did not match this with
a similar pledge, the CIA wasted no time making good on its promise to help
with the various Tibetan paramilitary schemes.
As a start, Jim McElroy was dispatched to India
in early January 1963. He was escorted by IB liaison officers to the IA Paratroopers’
Training School at Agra, just a few kilometers from the breathtaking Taj Mahal.
Because aerial methods would be the likely method of supporting
behind-the-lines operations against the PLA, McElroy began an assessment of the
school’s parachute inventory to fully understand India’s air delivery
capabilities. He also started preliminary training of some Tibetan riggers
drawn from Chakrata. McElroy’s deployment paved the way for more substantial
assistance. Stepping forward as liaison in the process was 47-year-old Indian
statesman Biju Patnaik from Odisha. Everything about Patnaik, who stood over 2
metres tall, was larger-than-life. The son of a State Minister from Odisha, he
had courted adventure from a young age. At 16, he had bicycled across the
subcontinent on a whim. Six years later, he earned his private pilot’s licence
at the Delhi Flying Club. Joining the Royal Air Force at the advent of World
War-2, he earned accolades after evacuating stranded British families from
Burma. Other flights took him to the Soviet Union and Iran. Patnaik also made a
name for himself as an ardent nationalist. Following in his parents’ footsteps—both
of them were renowned patriots—he bristled under the British yoke. Sometimes
his resistance methods were unorthodox. Once while flying a colonial officer
from a remote post in India’s western desert region, he overheard the European
use a condescending tone while questioning his skills in the cockpit. Patnaik
landed the aircraft on a desolate stretch of parched earth and let the critical
Englishman walk. For actions like this, Patnaik ultimately served almost four
years in prison. He was released shortly before India’s independence and looked
for a way to convert his passion for flying into a business. Banding together
with some fellow pilots, he purchased a dozen ageing transport aircraft and
founded a Kolkata-based charter company. He dubbed the venture Kalinga Air
Lines, taking its name from an ancient kingdom in his native Odisha. Almost
immediately, Patnaik landed a risky contract. Revolutionaries in the Indonesian
archipelago were in the midst of their independence struggle, but because of a
tight Dutch blockade, they were finding it hard to smuggle in weapons and other
essentials. Along with several other foreign companies, Kalinga Air Lines began
charter flights on their behalf. It was Patnaik himself who evaded Dutch combat
aircraft to carry Muhammad Hatta (later Indonesia’s first Vice President) on a
diplomatic mission to drum up support in South Asia. It was also through
Kalinga Air Lines that Patnaik had his first brush with Tibet. By the mid-
1950s, he was looking to expand the airline through the acquisition of a French
medium-range transport, the Nord Noratlas. He intended to use this aircraft for
shuttles between Lhasa and Kolkata, having already purchased exclusive rights
to this route. Before the first flight, however, diplomatic ties between India
and China soured; Patnaik’s flight-plan for going to Lhasa was cancelled, and
the air route never opened. Other ventures were more successful. Patnaik
established a string of profitable industries across eastern India. And, like
his father, he entered the government bureaucracy and eventually rose to become
Chief Minister of Odisha. Patnaik was not the only one thinking along these
lines. On November 20, Mullick had notified PM Jawaharlal Nehru that he wanted
to quit his post as Director of the IB in order to focus on organising a
resistance movement in the event of China pushing further into Assam. Nehru refused
to accept his spy-master’s resignation and instead directed him toward Patnaik,
with the suggestion that they pool their talent. Meeting later that same afternoon,
Mullick and Patnaik became quick allies. Although their resistance plans took
on less urgency the next day, after Beijing announced a unilateral cease-fire,
Patnaik offered critical help in other arenas. Later that month, when the CIA
wanted to use its aircraft to quietly deliver three planeloads of supplies to
India as a sign of good faith, it was Patnaik who arranged for the discreet use
of the Charbatia airfield in Odisha. And in December 1962, after the CIA
notified New Delhi of its impending paramilitary support programme, he was the
one dispatched to Washington DC on behalf of Nehru and Mullick to negotiate
details of the assistance package. Upon
his arrival in the US capital, Patnaik’s primary point of contact was Robert
‘Moose’ Marrero. Thirty-two years old and of Puerto Rican ancestry, Marrero was
aptly nicknamed: like Patnaik, he stood over 2 metres tall and weighed 102kg.
He was also an aviator, having flown helicopters for the US Marines before
leaving military service in 1957 to join the CIA as an air operations
specialist.
While Patnaik was discussing these aviation
issues in Washington, the CIA’s Near East Division was forging ahead with
assistance for the Tibetans at Chakrata. Initially, the Pentagon also muscled
its way into the act and in February 1963 penned plans to send a 106-man US
Army Special Forces detachment that would offer overt, but hopefully
unpublicised training in guerrilla tactics and unconventional warfare. The CIA,
meanwhile, came up with a competing plan that involved no more than eight of
its advisers on a six-month temporary duty assignment. Significantly, the CIA
envisioned its officers living and messing alongside the Tibetans, minimising
the need for logistical support. Given India’s sensitivities and the unlikely prospect
of keeping an overt US military detachment unpublicised, the CIA scheme won.
Heading the CIA team would be 45-year-old Wayne Sanford. By now a Marine Colonel,
Sanford was still in London when the PLA attack against India materialised and
CIA paramilitary support for India was approved in principle in December 1962.
Early the following year, after the CIA received specific approval to send
eight advisers to Chakrata, Sanford was selected to oversee the effort. He
would do so from an office at the US Embassy in New Delhi while acting under
the official title of Special Assistant to Ambassador Galbraith. As this would
be an overt posting with the full knowledge of the Govt of India, both he and
the seven other paramilitary advisers would remain segregated from David Blee’s
CIA Station in New Delhi. Back in Washington, the rest of the team took shape.
Another former Marine, John Magerowski, was fast to grab a berth. So was Harry
Mustakos, who had worked with the Tibetans on Saipan in 1957 and served with
Sanford on Da Chen. Former smoke jumper and Intermountain Aviation (a CIA
proprietary) rigger Thomas ‘T. J.’ Thompson was to replace Jim McElroy at Agra.
Two other training officers were selected from the US, and a third was diverted
from an assignment in Turkey. The last slot went to former US Army Airborne
officer Charles ‘Ken’ Seifarth, who had been in South Vietnam conducting jump
classes for agents destined to infiltrate the communist North. At the outset,
there was little for Sanford to report. Waiting for their gear to arrive (they had
ordered plenty of cold-weather clothing), the team-members spent their first
days agreeing on a syllabus for the upcoming six months. One week later, their
supplies arrived, and six of the advisers left Sanford in New Delhi for the
chilled air of Chakrata. The last member, Thompson, alone went to Agra. Once
the CIA advisers arrived at the mountain training site, Brig Uban gave them a
fast tour. A ridgeline ran east to west, with Chakrata occupying the saddle in
the middle. Centred in the saddle was a polo field that fell off sharp to the
south for 600 metres, then less sharply for another 300 metres. North of the
field was a scattering of stone houses and shops, all remnants of the colonial
era and now home to a handful of hill-tribesmen who populated the village. To
the immediate west of the saddle was an old but sound-stone Anglican church.
Farther west were stone bungalows previously used by British officers and their
dependents. Most of the bungalows were similar, differing only in the number of
bedrooms. Each had 18-inch stone walls, narrow windows, fireplaces in each
room, stone floors, and a solarium facing south to trap the heat on cold days
and warm the rest of the drafty house. Each CIA adviser and IA officer took a
bungalow, with the largest going to Brig Uban. East of the saddle was a series
of stone barracks built by the British a century earlier and more recently used
by the two Gurkha Regiments. These were now holding the Tibetan recruits. There
was also a longer stone building once used as a hospital, a firing range, and a
walled cemetery overgrown by cedar. The epitaphs in the cemetery read like a
history of Chakrata’s harsh past. The oldest grave was for a British Corporal
killed in 1857 while blasting on the original construction. Different Regiments
were represented through the years, their soldiers the victims of either
sickness or various campaigns to expand or secure the borders. There was also a
gut-wrenching trio of headstones dated within one month of one another, all
children of a British Sergeant and his wife. Once fully settled, the CIA team
was introduced to its guerrilla students. By that time, the Chakrata project
had been given an official name. A decade earlier, Brig Uban had had a posting
in command of the 22 Mountain Regiment in Assam. Borrowing that number, he gave
his Tibetans the ambiguous title of ‘Establishment 22.’
In reviewing Establishment 22, the US
team-members were immediately struck by the age of the Tibetans. Although there
was a sprinkling of younger recruits, nearly half were older than 45; some were
even approaching 60. Jamba Kalden, the chief political leader, was practically
a child at 43. As had happened with the Mustang-based guerrillas, the older
generation, itching for a final swing against Han China, had used its seniority
to edge out younger candidates during the recruitment drive in the refugee
camps. With much material to cover, the CIA advisers reviewed what the Indian
staff had accomplished over the previous few months. Uban had initially focused
his efforts on instilling a modicum of discipline, which he feared might be an
impossible task. To his relief, this fear proved unfounded. The Tibetans
immediately controlled their propensity for drinking and gambling at his
behest; the Brig encouraged dancing and chanting as preferable substitutes to
fill their leisure time. He had also started a strict regimen of physical
exercise, including extended marches across the nearby hills. Because the
weather varied widely—snow blanketed the northern slopes, but the spring sun
was starting to bake the south—special care was taken to avoid pneumonia. In addition
to exercise, the IA officers had offered a sampling of tactical instruction.
But most of it, the CIA team found, reflected a conventional mindset. This combination—strict
exercise and a crash course in guerrilla tactics—continued through the first
week of May 1963. At that point, classes were put on temporary hold in order to
initiate airborne training. Plans called for nearly all members of
Establishment 22 to be qualified as paratroopers. This made tactical sense: if
the Tibetans were to operate behind enemy lines, the logical means of
infiltrating them to the other side of the Himalayas would be by parachute.
When told of the news, the Tibetans were extremely
enthusiastic about the prospect of jumping. There was a major problem, however.
Establishment 22 remained a secret not only from the general Indian public but
also from the bulk of India’s armed forces. The only airborne training
facilities in India were at Agra, where the CIA’s T J Thompson was discreetly
training a dozen Tibetan riggers. Because the Agra school ran jump-training for
the IA’s Independent Parachute Brigade, Thompson had been forced to keep the 12
well concealed. But doing the same for thousands of Tibetans would be
impossible; unless careful steps were taken, the project could be exposed. Part
of the CIA’s dilemma was solved by the season. The weather in the Indian
lowlands during May was starting to get oppressively hot, making the dusty Agra
drop-zones less than popular with the Parachute Brigade. Most of the Tibetan
jumps were intentionally scheduled around noon—the least popular time slot,
because the sun was directly overhead. The IB also arranged for the Tibetans to
use crude barracks in a distant corner of the air base, further reducing the
chance of an encounter with inquisitive IA paratroopers. As an added precaution,
a member of Brig Uban’s staff went to an insignia shop and placed an order for
cap badges. Each badge featured crossed Kukri blades with the number 12 above.
The reason: after independence from the British, the IA had inherited seven Regiments
of famed Gurkhas recruited from neighbouring Nepal. Along with four more Regiments
that transferred to the British Army, the Regiments were numbered sequentially,
with the last being the 11 Gorkha Rifles. On the assumption that most lowland
Indians would be unable to differentiate between the Asian features of a Gurkha
and those of a Tibetan, Establishment 22 was given the fictitious cover
designation ‘12 Gorkha Rifles’ for the duration of its stay at Agra. To oversee
the airborne phase of instruction, Ken Seifarth relocated to Agra. Five jumps
were planned for each candidate, including one performed at night. Because of
the limited size of the barracks at the air base, the Tibetans would rotate
down to the lowlands in 100-man cycles. With up to three jumps conducted each
day, the entire qualification process was expected to stretch through the
summer.
All was going according to plan until the
evening before the first contingent was scheduled to jump. At that point, a
message arrived reminding Brig Uban that the IA and the Indian Air Force (IAF) would
not accept liability for anyone older than 35 parachuting; in the event of
death or injury, the Govt of India would not pay compensation. This put Uban in
a major fix. It was vital for his staff to share training hazards with their
students, and he had assumed that his officers—none of whom were airborne
qualified—would jump alongside the Tibetans. But although they had all
completed the ground phase of instruction (which had intentionally been kept
simple, such as leaping off ledges into piles of hay), his men had been under
the impression that they would not have to jump from an aircraft. Their lack of
enthusiasm was now reinforced by the Govt of India’s denial of compensation.
When Uban asked for volunteers to accompany the guerrilla trainees, not a
single IA officer stepped forward. For Uban, it was now a question of retaining
the confidence of the Tibetans or relinquishing his command. Looking to get
special permission for government risk coverage, he phoned Mullick that
evening. The IB Director, however, was not at home. Taking what he considered
the only other option, Uban gathered his officers for an emergency session.
Although he had no prior parachute training, he told his men that he intended
to be the first one out of the lead aircraft. This challenge proved hard to
ignore. When the Brigadier again asked for volunteers, every officer stepped
forward. Uban now faced a new problem. With the first jump set for early the
next morning, he had a single evening to learn the basics. He summoned a pair
of CIA advisers to his room in Agra’s Clarkes Shiraz Hotel. Using the limited
resources at hand, they put the tea-table in the middle of the room and watched
as the Brigadier rolled uncomfortably across the floor. Imaging the likely
result of an actual jump, Seifarth spoke his mind. At 47 years old, he was a
generation older than his CIA teammates and just a year younger than Uban.
Drawing on the close rapport they had developed over the previous weeks, he
implored the Brigadier to reconsider. The next morning, May 11, a Fairchild C-119
Flying Boxcar crossed the skies over Agra. As the twin-tailed transport
aircraft came over the drop zone, Uban was the first out the door, Seifarth the
second. Landing without incident, the Brigadier belatedly received a return
call from Mullick. “Don't jump,” said Mullick. “Too late,” was the response. In
the weeks that followed, the rest of Establishment 22 clamoured for their
opportunity to leap from an aircraft. “Even cooks and drivers demanded to go,”
recalled Uban. Nobody was rejected for age or health reasons, including one
Tibetan who had lost an eye and another who was so small that he had to strap a
sandbag to his chest to deploy the chute properly. Nehru, meanwhile, was
receiving regular updates on the progress at Chakrata. During autumn, with the
deployment of the eight-man CIA team almost finished, he was invited to make an
inspection visit to the hill camp. The IB also passed a request asking the PM
to use the opportunity to address the guerrillas directly. Nehru was
sympathetic but cautious. The thought of the PM addressing Tibetan combatants
on Indian soil had the makings of a diplomatic disaster if word leaked. Afraid
of adverse publicity, he agreed to visit the camp but refused to give a speech.
Hearing this news, Uban had the men of Establishment 22 undergo a fast lesson
in parade drill. The effort paid off. Though stiff and formal when he arrived
on November 14, Nehru was visibly moved when he saw the Tibetans in formation.
And knowing that the PM was soft for roses, Uban presented him with a brilliant
red blossom plucked from a garden he had planted on the side of his stone
bungalow. Nehru buckled. Asking for a microphone, the PM poured forth some ad
hoc and heartfelt comments to the guerrillas. “He said that India backed them,”
said Uban, “and vowed they would one day return to an independent country.”
For the eight
Indians—six from the IAF, two from the IB—even a van ride had become an abject
lesson in the finer points of tradecraft. Sent to Washington in mid- March
1963, they were to be the cadre for the covert airlift cell conjured earlier by
Biju Patnaik and Bob Marrero. For the first two weeks, Marrero, who was playing
host, arranged for briefings at a row of CIA buildings near the Tidal Basin. By
the beginning of April, the venue was set to change. A van pulled up to their
Washington hotel in the dead of night, and the eight Indians plus Marrero piled
into the back. All the windows were sealed, and the Indians soon lost their
bearings as the vehicle drove for an hour. When they finally stopped, the rear
doors opened nearly flush against a second set of doors. Hurried through, they
took seats in another windowless cabin tucked inside the belly of an aircraft.
Landing at an undisclosed airfield—only years later would they learn that it
was inside Camp Peary—the Indians were taken to an isolated barracks. Over the
next month, a steady stream of nameless officers lectured on the full gamut of
intelligence and paramilitary topics. There were surreal touches throughout:
their meals were prepared by unseen cooks, and they would return to their rooms
to find clothes pressed by unseen launderers. The leader of the eight Indians,
Laloo Grewal, had a solid reputation as a pioneer within the IAF. A turbaned
Sikh, he had been commissioned as a fighter pilot in 1943 and flew over 100
sorties during World War-2 in the skies over Burma. Immediately after
independence in 1947, he was among the first transport pilots to arrive at the
combat zone when India and Pakistan came to blows over Kashmir. And in 1952, he
was in the first class of Indian aviators selected to head to the US for
transition training on the C-119 transport. When the call went out for a
dynamic IAF officer to manage a secret aviation unit under the auspices of the
IB and CIA, Grewal was the immediate choice. Following the training stint at
Peary, six of the students returned to New Delhi. The two most senior members,
Grewal included, remained for several additional weeks of specialised aviation
instruction. Marrero, meanwhile, made arrangements in May to head for India to
conduct the comprehensive aerial survey broached with Biju Patnaik in their
December 1962 meeting. Joining Marrero would be the same CIA air operations
officer who had been involved with the earliest drops into Tibet, Gar Thorsrud.
Much had happened to Thorsrud since his last involvement with Tibet. In the
spring of 1961, he was briefly involved in Latin America. Later that summer he
shifted to Phoenix, Arizona, and was named president of a new CIA front,
Intermountain Aviation. Among CIA air proprietaries, Intermountain was in the
forefront of innovation. With its main operational base at Marana Air Park near
Tucson, Arizona, the company specialised in developing new aerial delivery
techniques. It was Intermountain, for example, that worked at perfecting the
Fulton Skyhook, a recovery method that whisked agents from the ground using an
aircraft with a special yoke on its nose. Intermountain experts also
experimented with the Timberline parachute configuration (a resupply bundle
with extra-long suspension lines to allow the penetration of tall
jungle canopy) and the Ground Impact system (a parachute with a retainer ring
that did not blossom until the last moment, allowing for pinpoint drops on
pinnacle peaks). It was this eye for innovation that Thorsrud carried with him
to India. For three months, he and Marrero were escorted from the Himalayan
frontier to the school at Agra and to the Tibetan training site at Chakrata. Much
of their time was spent near the weathered airstrip at Charbatia, where they
were feted by the affable Patnaik. He offered use of Charbatia as the principal
site for a clandestine air-support operation and immediately secured funds from
the PM for reconstruction of the runway. Patnaik also donated steel furniture
from one of his factories, cleared out his Kalinga Air Lines offices to serve
as a makeshift officers' quarters, and even loaned two of his Kalinga Captains.
Returning to New Delhi after nearly three
months, the two CIA men were directed to a hotel room for a meeting with a
representative of the IB, T M Subramanian. Known for his Hindu piety and strict
vegetarian diet, Subramanian had been serving as the IB’s liaison officer at
Agra since November, where he had been paymaster for amenities offered to the
USAF crewmen rushing military gear to India. He was also one of the two
intelligence officers who had been trained at Camp Peary during April. In the
ensuing discussions between the CIA aviators and Subramanian, both sides spoke
in general terms about the best options for building India’s covert aviation capabilities.
In one area the US officers stood firm: the US would not assist with the
procurement of spare parts, either directly or indirectly, for the many
USSR-origin aircraft in the IAF’s inventory. A subject not discussed was which
US aircraft would be the backbone for the envisioned covert unit. Earlier in
the spring, this had been the subject of serious debate within the CIA. Wayne
Sanford, the senior paramilitary officer in New Delhi, had initially proposed
selection of the C-119. This made sense for several reasons. First, more than
50 C-119 airframes had been in the IAF’s inventory since 1952; it was therefore
well known to IAF pilots and mechanics. Second, beginning in November 1962, the
Indians had ordered special kits to add a single Orpheus J-39
jet-pack atop the centre-wing section of half their C-119 fleet. The added thrust from the
Orpheus, tested in the field over the previous months, allowed converted C-119s
to operate at high altitudes and fly heavy loads out of small fields. The US
pledged in May 1963 to send another 24 Flying Boxcars to India from reserve
USAF squadrons. Other CIA officials in Washington, however, were keen to
present the Indians with the C-46 Commando. A workhorse during World War-2, the
C-46 had proved its ability to surmount the Himalayas while flying the famed
‘Hump’ route between India and China. More important, other CIA operations in
Asia—primarily in Laos—were making use of the C-46, and the CIA had a number of
airframes readily available. There were drawbacks with the C-46, however. It
was notoriously difficult to handle. Moreover, the IAF did not operate the C-46
in its fleet, which meant that the pilots and mechanics would need a period of
transition. When CIA HQ sent over a USAF officer to sing the praises of the
C-46 in overly simplistic terms, Grewal cut the conversation short. Recalls
Sanford: “He flatly told the US officer that he had been around C-46s longer
than the American had been in the air force.” In the end, however, the Indians
could not protest CIA largesse too loudly. When Marrero and Thorsrud had their
meeting with Subramanian, selection of the C-46 was an unstated fait accompli.
The next day, Subramanian returned to the two CIA officers with a verbatim copy
of the hotel discussion. “Either he had a photographic memory,” said Thorsrud,
“or somebody was listening in and taking notes.” Both Americans signed the
aide-memoire as a working basis for cooperation.
As a final order of business, Marrero asked for
an audience with Mullick. With the Charbatia air base—now code-named Oak Tree 1—still
in the midst of reconstruction, the first aircraft deliveries would not take
place until early autumn. This did not dampen Marrero’s enthusiasm as he
recounted the list of possible cooperative ventures over the months ahead. The
aloof Mullick replied with an indifferent stare. “Bob, we will call you when we
need you.” Despite Mullick’s lack of warmth, efforts to create the covert air unit
went ahead on schedule. On September 7, 1963, the IB officially created the Aviation
Research Centre (ARC) as a front to coordinate aviation cooperation with the
CIA. Grewal was named the first ARC Operations Manager at the newly completed
Charbatia airfield. He was given full latitude to handpick his pilots, all of
whom would take leave from the military and belong—both administratively and
operationally—to the ARC for the period of their assignment. In New Delhi,
veteran IB officer Rameshwar Nath Kao took the helm as the first ARC Director.
A Kashmiri Brahmin like Nehru, 45-year-old Kao was a spy in the classic sense.
Tall and fair skinned, he was a dapper dresser with impeccable schooling; he
was a Persian scholar and spoke fluent Farsi. Dignified and sophisticated, he
had long impressed the officers at the CIA’s New Delhi station. “I had the
opportunity to drive with him from Kathmandu back to India,” recalled one CIA
official. “At each bridge we crossed, he would recount its technical
specifications in comparison to its ability to support the heaviest battle tank
in the PLA inventory.” To assist Kao and Grewal, the CIA dispatched Edward Rector
to Charbatia in the role of Air Operations Adviser. Qualified as a US Navy
dive-bomber pilot in 1940, Rector had joined Claire Chennault’s famed Flying
Tigers the following year. He would later score that unit’s first kill of an
Imperial Japanese aircraft and go on to become an ace. After switching to the
US Army Air Forces (later the USAF), he retired as a Colonel in January 1962.
Rector came to Oak Tree-1 with considerable Indian experience. During his
Flying Tigers days, he had transited the subcontinent. And in late 1962,
following his retirement from military service, he had gone to India on a
Pentagon contract to coordinate USAF C-130 flights carrying emergency
assistance to the frontlines during the war with China. Now serving with the
CIA, Rector was on hand for the initial four aircraft deliveries within a week
of ARC’s creation. First to arrive at Oak Tree-1 was a pair of C-46D Commandos;
inside each was a disassembled U-10 Helio Courier. A five-seat light aircraft,
the Helio Courier had already won praise for its short takeoff and landing
(STOL) ability in the paramilitary campaign the CIA was sponsoring in Laos.
Without exaggeration, it could operate from primitive runways no longer than a
soccer field. More aircraft deliveries followed, totalling eight C-46 transports and four Helio Couriers by early 1964. Under Rector’s watch, the CIA
arranged for the loan of some of the best pilots from its Air America roster to
act as instructors for the ARC crews. Heading the C-46 conversion team was Bill
Welk, a veteran of the Tibet overflights. For the Helio Courier, Air America
Captain James Rhyne was dispatched to Oak Tree-1 for a four-month tour. During
this same period, T J Thompson, who had been assisting with the Tibetans’ jump
training at Agra, began work on a major parachute facility—complete with
dehumidifiers, drying towers, and storage space at Charbatia. “By the time it
was finished,” said Thompson, “it was larger than the facilities used by the US
Army in Germany.” Under the tutelage of the Air America pilots, the ARC aircrew
contingent, including two Captains on a one-year loan from Kalinga Air Lines,
proved quick studies. By the close of 1963, transition training was nearly
complete. For a graduation exercise, a demonstration was planned at Charbatia
for January 2, 1964. Among the attendees would be Pandit Nehru himself.
Arriving on the assigned day, the PM took centre-seat in a rattan chair with a
parasol shading his head. On cue, a silver C-46 (ARC aircraft bore only small
tail numbers and Indian civil markings) materialised over Charbatia and dropped
bags of rice and a paratrooper. Then a Helio Courier roared in and came to a
stop in an impossibly small grassy patch in front of the reviewing stand. An
‘agent,’ hiding in nearby bushes with a bag of ‘documents,’ rushed aboard the
Helio. Showcasing its STOL ability, the aircraft shot upward from the grass and
over the stands. Pandit Nehru, at once impressed and confused, turned to the
ARC and CIA officials in attendance and asked: “What was that?”
While the CIA assistance at Chakrata and
Charbatia was transpiring under the auspices of the Near East Division, a
separate Tibet programme had been taking shape since December 1962 under the
Far East Division. This programme called for the training and infiltration of
at least 125 Tibetan agents. But whereas the Near East Division was giving
support to what were essentially Indian projects, the roles were reversed for
the Far East Division’s project—at least as it was originally conceived: the
Indians would provide some minor assistance, but the Far East Division would
call the shots. It was not long before the CIA saw the inherent weakness of
this arrangement. India, after all, would be party to the recruitment of
Tibetan agents on its soil and would likely be expected to provide rear bases
and staging areas. This greatly bothered the Special Group (as had been the
case with Uban’s Chakrata force), which was leery of authorising paramilitary
assistance to a project potentially subject to an Indian veto, especially if
New Delhi grew weary and withdrew its commitment following a future
rapprochement with Beijing. To allay the Special Group’s concerns, the CIA
worked safeguards into the Tibetan agent programme. Agent training would focus
on producing self-sufficient three-man radio teams that could infiltrate Tibet,
find support, and build a local underground that could feed and shelter them
for extended periods without having to rely on lines of supply from India. Just
as with Establishment 22, Gyalo Thondup was quick to buy into the programme and
went off to recruit. The CIA, meanwhile, reopened Camp Hale to handle the
expected influx. Scrambling to piece together an instructor staff, it found a
willing volunteer in Bruce Walker, the great-grandson of Methodist missionaries
in China. Walker’s moneyed parents were family friends of Frank Wisner, the
CIA’s influential Deputy Director for Plans between 1952 and 1958. Joining the
CIA with Wisner as his mentor, Walker spent his first four years in Latin
America before joining the Tibet Task Force in January 1960. Once there, he
proved adept at winning choice assignments. The CIA paid
for him to spend almost a year at the University of Washington’s newly organised
Tibet programme to learn that country’s language and history. In March 1962,
the CIA again sponsored him for language classes, this time at Sikkim’s Namgyal
Institute of Tibetology. In India, meanwhile, a search had
commenced for suitable translators. All but one of the previous Tibetans
serving in that role were unavailable. One of the new candidates, Wangchuk
Tsering, was the nephew of a former Trade Commissioner at Kalimpong. An English
student since 1956, he had been writing for the Tibetan Freedom Press in
Darjeeling when Gyalo made a recruitment pitch in December 1962. Along with 45
agent trainees, Wangchuk immediately left for New Delhi in a bus. Unlike the
earlier shadowy exfiltrations across the East Pakistan frontier, this time they
departed with Indian escorts from the capital’s Palam Airport.
After further negotiations, a breakthrough
finally came in September 1963. Still looking to draw New Delhi into a substantial
role, the CIA now had India’s agreement to open a Joint Operations Centre in
New Delhi that would direct the dispatch of agents into Tibet and monitor their
activities. The revised plan scrapped parachute insertions in favour of overland
infiltrations and called for about 20 singleton resident agents in Tibet, plus
(to sweeten its appeal to New Delhi) a pair of road-watch teams to report possible
Chinese Communist build-ups and another six border watch communications teams
to take up positions along the frontier. Radio reports from the agents and
teams would be received at a new communications centre to be built at Charbatia.
With the first group of 40 Hale graduates scheduled to return to India in
November, the secret struggle for Tibet was starting to simmer. The CIA and IB
held widely disparate views on Mustang, which was home to 2,030 Tibetan
irregulars as of early 1963. Less than half of them had been properly equipped
during the two previous CIA airdrops. Realising that the unarmed men were a
ball and chain on the rest, the CIA devised a plan to parachute weapons to an
additional 700 men sent to ten drop-zones inside Tibet. The purpose of this was
two-fold. First, it would force them to leave their Mustang sanctuary and take
up a string of positions inside their homeland. Second, it would go far toward
rectifying the disparity between armed and unarmed volunteers. When this plan
was taken to Mullick, his reaction was poor. Just as the Indians had balked at
aerial infiltration for the Hale agents, they preferred no Mustang drops by
Indian aircraft (ARC was close to formation at the time), for fear of provoking
China. When the CIA proposed that US aircraft do the job—but insisted on Indian
landing rights—New Delhi was again reticent. Frustrated, the CIA in the early
fall of 1963 hastily arranged for an airlift company to be established inside
Nepal. Allocated a pair of Bell 47G helicopters and two US rotary-wing pilots—one
of whom was released from Air America for the job—the Kathmandu-based entity,
called Air Ventures, theoretically could have solved the airdrop problem by choppering
supplies to collection points near Mustang. As it turned out, there was no need
for Air Ventures to fly any covert missions. By September, at the same time
agreement was reached on establishing a Joint Operations Centre in New Delhi,
the CIA and IB came up with a new plan for the unarmed men at Mustang to be
reassigned to Establishment 22 at Chakrata. It was also agreed that nonlethal
supplies for the armed portion of Mustang—which was estimated at no more than
835 guerrillas—would go overland through India and be coordinated through the
New Delhi Centre. In addition, some of the Hale graduates would go to Mustang
to assist with radio operations.
The Joint Operations Centre—-dubbed the Special
Centre--was formally established in November 1963. To house the site, IB
officers arranged to rent a modest villa in the F block of the posh Haus Khaz
residential neighborhood. On January 4, 1964, he was joined by a sharp Bombay
native nicknamed Rabi. A math major in college, Rabi had joined the police
force upon graduation but soon switched to the IB. He had been assigned to its
China Section and spent many years operating from remote outposts in Assam and
NEFA. Now chosen as the Indian representative to the Special Centre, he
internally transferred to the ARC. More than merely an airlift unit, the ARC
was now acting as a Section of the IB that would work alongside the CIA on
joint efforts with the Tibet agents and guerrillas at Mustang. One of the
Special Centre’s biggest challenges was keeping its New Delhi activities secret
from the Indian public. In the midst of residential housing, the presence of
foreign nationals—both the Tibetans and Knaus—was certain to draw attention. To
guard against this, Knaus (who normally came to the Centre three times a week)
was shielded in the back of a jeep until he was inside the garage. Similar
precautions were taken with the Tibetans, who were ferried between a dormitory
and the Centre in a blacked-out van. “We were not allowed to step outside,”
said one Tibetan officer, “until 1972.” in the spring of 1964, most of the 135
agent trainees had returned to India from the US. Two dozen were diverted to
Establishment 22 at Chakrata, and another eight manned the radio sets at
Charbatia and the Special Centre. The remainder—slightly more than 100—were
taken to a holding camp outside the village of Joelikote near the popular hill-station
of Nainital. Built close to the shores of a mountain lake and surrounded by
pine and oak forests, Joelikote once hosted Col Jim Corbett, the famed hunter
who tracked some of the most infamous man-eating tigers and leopards on record
(two were credited with killing more than 400 villagers apiece). As the agents
assembled at Joelikote—where Rabi promptly dubbed them “The Joelikote Boys”—they
were divided into radio teams, each designated by a letter of the alphabet. The
size of the teams varied, with some numbering as few as two agents and several
with as many as five; contrary to the previous year’s plan to dispatch lone
operatives, none would be going as singletons. As their main purpose would be
to radio back social, political, economic, and military information, the CIA
provided radios ranging from the durable RS-1 to the RS-48 (a high-speed-burst
model originally developed for use in Southeast Asia) and a sophisticated
miniature set with a burst capability and solar cells. The teams would also be
charged with gauging the extent of local resistance; when appropriate, they
were to spread propaganda and extend a network of sympathizers. Although they
were not to engage in sabotage or other attacks, the agents would carry pistols
(Canada-made Brownings to afford the US plausible deniability) for self-defence.
During April, the first wave of ten radio teams
began moving from Joelikote to launch sites along the border. Team A, comprising
two agents, took up a position in the Sikkimese capital of Gangtok. Team B,
also two men, filed into the famed colonial summer capital of Shimla. Just 80km
from Establishment 22 at Chakrata, Shimla had not changed much since the days
the British had ruled one-fifth of humankind from this small Himalayan
settlement. Three teams—D, V, and Z—were sent to Tuting, a NEFA backwater
already host to 2,000 Tibetan refugees. Two others—T and Y—crossed into
easternmost Nepal and established a camp outside the village of Walung. Another
two teams went to Mustang to provide Baba Yeshi’s guerrillas with improved
radio links to Charbatia. The tenth set of agents—two men known as Team
Q—headed into the Kingdom of Bhutan. The Bhutanese, though ethnic kin, harboured
mixed feelings toward the Tibetans. With only a small population of its own,
Bhutan had attempted to discourage further refugee arrivals after the first
influx of 3,000. Then in April 1964, the country’s Prime Minister was killed by
unknown assailants. Coincidentally, this happened at the same time Team Q was
crossing the border, sparking unfounded rumours that the Tibetans were
attempting to overthrow the Kingdom. As the rumours escalated into diplomatic
protests, the two agents were quietly withdrawn, and Bhutan was never again
contemplated as a launch site. Aside from the stillborn Team Q and the two
others at Mustang, the other seven teams had been briefed on targets before
departing Joelikote. These had been generated by the CIA and IB; Knaus had
access to the latest intelligence for this purpose, including satellite
imagery. He and Rabi then consulted with Kay-Kay, who endorsed the missions.
All involved testing the waters inside Tibet to determine whether an
underground could, or did, exist. During the same month the teams headed for
the border, Gyalo Thondup established a political party in India. Called Cho
Kha Sum (Defence of Religion by
the Three Regions, a reference to Kham, Amdo, and U Tsang), the Party
promoted the liberal ideals found in the Tibetan constitution that had been
promulgated by the Dalai Lama the previous spring. Part of Gyalo’s intent was
to develop a political consciousness among the Tibetan diaspora. But even more
important, the Party was designed to reinforce a message of non-communist
nationalism that the agent-teams would be taking to potential underground
members inside Tibet. Gyalo even arranged for a Party newsletter to be printed,
copies of which would be carried and distributed by the teams in their homeland.
Getting the agents to actually cross the frontier was a wholly different
matter. By early summer, three of the teams—in Sikkim, Shimla, and Walling—had
done little more than warm their launch sites. A second set of agents in
Walung, Team Y, had better luck. One of its members, a young Khampa going by
the call sign ‘Clyde,’ headed alone across the Nangpa Pass for a survey. He took
a feeder trail north for 50km and approached the Tibetan town of Tingri.
Located along the traditional route linking Kathmandu and Lhasa, Tingri was a
popular resting place for an assortment of pilgrims and traders; as a result,
Clyde’s Kham origins attracted little attention. Better still, Tingri was
surrounded by cave hermitages that offered good concealment. Returning to Walling
with this information, Clyde briefed his four teammates. Three—Robert, Dennie,
and team leader Reg--were fellow Khampas; the last—Grant—was from Amdo.
Following the same route used during the survey, the five arrived at the caves
and set up camp. Tingri, they discovered, was ripe for an underground.
Venturing into town to procure supplies, the team took volunteers back to its
redoubt for ad hoc leadership training. They debriefed the locals for items of
intelligence value and used their solar-powered burst radio to send two
messages a week back to Charbatia. Settling into a routine, they prepared to
wait out the approaching winter from the vantage of their cave. Good luck was
also experienced by the three teams operating from the border village of Tuting.
Team D, consisting of four Khampas, arrived at its launch site with one
Browning pistol apiece and a single survival rifle. Their target was the town
of Pemako, 80km to the northeast. Renowned among Tibetans as a ‘hidden heaven’
because of its mild weather and ring of surrounding mountains, this area had
been the destination of many Khampas fleeing the Chinese invasion in 1950. The
PLA, by contrast, had barely penetrated the vicinity because no roads could be
built due to the harsh topography and abundant precipitation. That same
rainfall made the trip for Team D a slog. Covering only part of the distance to
their target by late in the year, most of the agents were ready to return to
the relatively appealing creature comforts in Tuting. Just one member, Nolan,
chose to stay for the winter. Wishing him luck, his colleagues promised to meet
again in the spring of 1965. Much the same experience was recounted by the five
men of Team Z. Targeted toward Pemako, they conducted a series of shallow
forays to contact border villagers and collect data on PLA patrols. Finally
making a deeper infiltration near year’s end, they encountered some sympathisers
and the makings of an underground. By that time, most of the agents were eager
to return before the approaching winter. Just as with Team D, one of its
members, Chris, elected to stay through spring with his embryonic partisan
movement. The final group of agents from Turing, Team V, was targeted 80km west
toward the town of Meilling. Located along the banks of the River Brahmaputra,
this low-lying region featured high rainfall and lush forests. Many locals in
the area, though conversant in Tibetan, were animists, with their own unique
language and style of dress. Despite such ethnic differences, one of Team V’s
members, Stuart, had a number of relatives living in the vicinity. With their
assistance, the team was able to contact a loose underground of resisters.
Shielded by these sympathizers—who even helped them steal some PLA supplies
when their cache was exhausted—the five men of Team V radioed back their intent
to remain through the winter. Reviewing their progress in November 1964, Knaus,
Rabi, and Kay-Kay had some reason for cheer. Of the ten teams dispatched to
date, four had at least some of their members still inside Tibet. All four,
too, had identified sympathetic countrymen. Encouraged by these results, the
Special Centre representatives penned plans to launch a second round of nine
teams the following spring, when the mountain passes would be free of snow. Slowly,
the secret war for Tibet was shifting from simmer to low boil.
India's more
permissive attitude allowed for increasingly sensitive India-US joint intelligence
operations. Some efforts were in conjunction with the Republic of China (Taiwan), which was
one of the few nations that equaled even surpassed India and the US in its
seething opposition to Beijing. Taipei, for example, was allowed to station
Mandarin translators at Charbatia to monitor PRC radio traffic. RoC
intelligence officers were even permitted to open remote listening outposts
along the India-Tibetan frontier. This last effort was highly compartmentalised,
even within the CIA staff in India. Wayne Sanford, the CIA's paramilitary
officer in New Delhi, was shocked when Indian officials escorted him to one of
the border sites. He recalls: “Subramanian took me to the main listening post on
October 10 (1965] , which is the big Ten Ten holiday on Taiwan. The Chinese
commander saw me and asked if I had ever been on Da Chen island. I said, 'Yup.'
He then asked if I had been aboard a PT evacuation boat from Da Chen. I said,
'Yup.' We then got drunk together to catch up on old times.”
Some of the most
tangible India-US cooperation was in the expansion of the ARC fleet at
Charbatia. By 1964, a total of ten C-46 transports and four Helio STOL aircraft
had been delivered to the Indians. Late that year, they were augmented by two
more STOL airframes that were a unique adaptation of the Helio. Known as the
Twin Helio, these looked exactly like the single-engined version, but with two
propellers placed above and forward of the wings. Developed in 1960 with the
CIA’s war in Laos in mind, the Twin Helio's engines placement allowed for
unrestricted lateral visibility and reduced the possibility of propeller damage
from debris at primitive airstrips. Only five were ever built, with one
field-tested in Bolivia during the summer of 1964 and another handed over to
the CIA’s quasi-proprietary in Nepal, Air Ventures, in August. Of the aircraft
delivered to the ARC, several received further modifications in India. To
provide for an eavesdropping capability, CIA technicians in 1964 transformed
one of the C-46 airframes into an electronic intelligence (ELINT) platform.
This platform flew regular orbits along the Himalayas, recording Chinese
telecommunications signals from inside Tibet. For some of the nine remaining C-
6 transports, ARC became a testbed during 1966 for a unique adaptation. Much
like the jet-packs strapped to the C-119 Flying Boxcars during 1962, four 1,000-lb rocket
boosters were placed on the bottom of the C-46 fuselages to allow heavy loads
to be safely carried from some of India's highest airfields.
Ambassador Chester Bowles was no stranger to
the subcontinent—having served as Ambassador to India a decade earlier. He had
replaced Galbraith in the summer of 1963. The two differed in several important
ways. Galbraith, the consummate Kennedy insider, left India on a high note
after winning military assistance in New Delhi’s hour of need. Bowles, by
contrast, was a relative outsider (he reportedly made Kennedy ‘uncomfortable’)
who arrived just as the post-November 1962 honeymoon had run its course. The
two also differed in their attitude toward the CIA. Initially a die-hard
opponent of CIA activities on his diplomatic turf, Galbraith had reversed his
position during the 1962 war to become an open—if not outspoken—proponent of
the CIA’s activities in the subcontinent. Bowles, who inherited the CIA’s
cooperative ventures already in progress, was largely silent during his first
two years in New Delhi. Wayne Sanford, the CIA paramilitary officer who had
provided regular updates for Galbraith, had not even met Bowles for a briefing
by the summer of 1965. But with India-US tension gaining momentum, Bowles
became more conscious of the damage being done to bilateral intelligence
cooperation. In a bid to reverse the estrangement, he lent his support to a
September 1965 CIA proposal to provide the ARC with three C-130 transports, an
aircraft the IAF had been eyeing for five years. The offer came at a
particularly opportune time. At Charbatia, Ed Rector had finished his tour and
been replaced as Air Adviser by Moose Marrero, who had a long history of
contact with Biju Patnaik and the original ARC cadre. As it turned out, Marrero’s
past ties had only minimal effect. The C-130 deal encountered repeated delays,
largely because an irate India did not want to remain vulnerable to a fickle US
spare-parts pipeline. In a telling request, it even asked Marrero to vacate Oak
Tree-1 and relocate to an office at the US Embassy compound in New Delhi. Still
attempting damage control, the CIA in early 1966 offered a quiet continuation
of supplies for its paramilitary projects. As Washington had officially cut all
weapons shipments to India and Pakistan following the 1965 war, this was a
significant, albeit secret, exception. Four flights were scheduled, all to be
conducted by a CIA-operated B.727 transport staging between Okinawa and
Charbatia. India listened to the offer and consented. But in a reprise of
conditions imposed on the flights of 1962, the Govt of India insisted that the
flights into Oak Tree-1 be made at low-level to avoid radar—and to avoid any
resultant publicity from the resurgent anti-US chorus in New Delhi’s political
circles.
The ARC operation at Charbatia was not the only
CIA project encountering difficulties. Throughout 1964, IB Director Mullick had
been pushing for infiltration of all the Hale-trained agents to establish an
underground movement within Tibet. By the year’s end, the Special Centre saw
its limited inroads—elements of four teams operating inside their homeland—as a
glass half full. Mullick, by contrast, saw it as a glass half-empty. Whereas he
had once held excessive expectations of a Tibet-wide underground creating
untold headaches for China, he now saw the limitations of overland
infiltrations—especially by Khampa agents moving into areas where they did not
have family or clan support. By the beginning of 1965, Mullick lashed out,
claiming that the Tibetans were being coddled by the CIA. Part of the problem
was that Mullick himself was vulnerable and under pressure. In May 1964, an ailing
PM Nehru had died in his sleep, denying the 14-year spymaster his powerful
patron. That October, colleagues (and competitors) saw the chance to ease Mullick
out of the top intelligence slot. They succeeded, but only to a degree. Although
he gave up his hat as Director, he retained unofficial control over joint
paramilitary operations with the CIA. That position—which was officially titled
Director-General of Security in February 1965—answered directly to the PMO and
oversaw the ARC base at Charbatia, the Special Centre, Establishment 22, and operations
of the nuclear-powered sensor mission of Nanda Devi. With Mullick growing impatient,
the Special Centre readied its agents for a second season inside Tibet.
Arriving in late 1964 as the new CIA representative at the Centre was John
Gilhooley, the same Far East Division officer who had briefly worked at the
Tibet Task Force’s Washington office in 1960. The Indian and Tibetan officials
at the Centre warmed to their new US counterpart. “He was a free spirit, very
good-natured,” said Rabi.
Cordial personal ties aside, little could spare
Gilhooley from the dark news filtering in from Tibet. As soon as the snows
cleared in early 1965, members of Team D had departed Tuting and headed back
across the border to rendezvous with Nolan, the teammate they had left behind
for the winter. Only then did they discover that he had already died of exposure.
The remaining three agents returned to India and did not attempt another
infiltration. Much the same was encountered by Team Z. Departing Turing to
fetch Chris, they learned that he had been rounded up during a winter PLA
sweep. Radio intercepts monitored at Charbatia later revealed that Chris had
refused to answer questions during an interrogation and been executed. Team Z’s
bad luck did not stop there. Entering a village later that summer, the men were
sheltered in a hut by seemingly sympathetic locals. While they rested, however,
the residents alerted nearby PLA militiamen. As the PLA started firing at the
hut, the team broke through the rear planks and fled into the forest. One of
the agents, Tex, died from a bullet wound before reaching the Indian border.
Better longevity was experienced by the members of Team V, all five of whom had
successfully braved the winter near Menling. By the spring of 1965, four
elected to return to India, but Stuart, who had relatives in the area, stayed
and was given permission to lead his own group of agents, appropriately titled
Team VI. Two new members—Maurice and Terrence—were dispatched from Tuting for a
linkup. By that time, Stuart was living in his sister’s house north of the
Brahmaputra. During his regular crossings of the river, he used boats in order
to avoid PLA troops guarding the bridges. The new agents, however, chose the
bridge option, ran into a PLA checkpoint, and panicked. Drawing their
Brownings, they got into a brief firefight before being arrested. The PLA
quickly isolated Maurice and forced him to send a radio message back to India
claiming that he had arrived safely. This was a ploy used to good effect by the
Chinese, Soviets, and North Vietnamese; by capturing radiomen and forcing them
to continue sending messages, communist intelligence agencies duped the CIA and
allied services into sending more agents and supplies, with both deadly and
embarrassing results. In the case of North Vietnam, some turned agents
continued radio play for as long as a decade. The PLA was not as fortunate with
Maurice. On his first message back, the Tibetan included a simple but effective
duress code; he used his real name. This was repeated in two subsequent
transmissions, after which his handlers ceased contact for fear the PLA would
triangulate the signals coming from Charbatia and expose the base to the world
media. A warning was then flashed to Stuart, who was able to get back to
India. Team Y, the last of the 1964
teams still inside Tibet, had a similar experience. After successfully living
alongside sympathizers near Tingri through the winter, the five agents lobbied
the Special Centre in early 1965 for permission to rotate back to India.
Agreeing to replace them in phases, the Centre authorised two of the veterans—Robert
and Dennie—to make their way out to Walung. At that point, the Special Centre
was in for a rude surprise. Due to operational compartmentalisation, it was
unaware that Establishment 22 had started running its own fledgling
cross-border programme. Using Tibetan guerrillas from Chakrata, a pilot team
had been staged from Walung with a mandate to contact sympathisers near Tingri.
It came at a bad time. To great fanfare, China was preparing to inaugurate the
Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) that fall. After nine years of ruling Tibet
under the PCART, the name-change signified that Beijing deemed the Communist
Party organs in the region fully operational. To coincide, China began a more
forceful programme of suppression, purging Tibetan collaborators, establishing
communes, and increasing military patrols. Not only was the Establishment 22
team caught in one of these sweeps, but Robert and Dennie ran headlong into the
dragnet as well. Ditching their supplies, both agents veered deeper into the
hills as they evaded toward the Nangpa Pass on the Sino-Nepal border.
Unfortunately for the two, the Nangpa is notoriously treacherous through late
spring. Given its high elevation, it is not uncommon for entire caravans to be
wiped out from slow suffocation as piercing winds blast fine powdery snow into
the nose and mouth. Dennie ultimately reached Nepal; Robert did not. Back at
Tingri, the rest of Team Y faced the same PLA patrols. Two replacement agents
had already arrived by that time. In need of supplies, team leader Reg left
their cave retreat to procure food. Captured upon entering a village, he was
forced to lead the PLA back to the team’s redoubt. In the ensuing firefight,
all were killed except for the lone Amdo agent, Grant. A subsequent sweep rounded
up the dozens of sympathisers they had trained over the previous year.
The news was equally bleak for the new teams
launched in 1965. At Shimla, the two-man Team C endured a deadly comedy of
errors during its first infiltration attempt. Looking to cross a river swollen
by the spring thaw, agent Howard fell in and drowned. His partner, Irving,
spent the next three days looking for a better fording point, Cold and hungry,
he chanced upon an old woman and her son tending a flock. They led him to an
isolated sheep enclosure, then alerted the PLA militia. Irving was soon heading
for Lhasa in shackles. Another trio of agents, Team X, was deployed to
easternmost India and targeted against the town of Dzayul, renowned as an
entomologist’s dream because of its rare endemic butterflies. The CIA was
eyeing Dzayul because the surrounding forests supposedly hosted displaced
Burmese insurgents who could potentially be harnessed against the Chinese. Team
X, however, found nobody of interest and came back. More bizarre was the tale of
Team U. The five-man team staged from Towang, the same border town that had
factored into the Dalai Lama’s 1959 escape and the 1962 war. Three members
headed north from Towang toward Cona, where one of the agents had family. Upon
reaching their target, they were immediately reported by the agent’s own
brother. Arrested and bundled off to Lhasa, they were not mistreated but
instead were shown films of captured RoC agents, then photos of the captured
and killed members of Team Y. After less than a month of propaganda sessions,
all three were given some Chinese currency and escorted to the border. After a
final warning about ‘reactionary India,’ they were allowed to cross unmolested.
Sometimes the agents were their own worst enemy. The two members of Team F,
which staged from Walung to Tingri, constantly quarrelled with each other and
with local sympathisers. After the more argumentative of the pair was replaced
by a fresh agent, the two rushed to cache supplies for the coming winter. A
final pair of Tibetans, Team S, also reached Tingri during the second half of
1965. These two agents, Thad and Troy, had better rapport with the locals than
did their peers in Team F. So good was their rapport, in fact, that a local
sympathiser offered them shelter in his house until spring. It was with these
two Tingri teams in place that the Special Centre awaited its third season
during the 1966 thaw.
Although the Special Centre’s agent programme
had little to boast about, it looked positively dynamic compared with the paramilitary
army festering in Mustang. A big part of Mustang’s problem was that it was
being managed from afar without any direct oversight. The Special Centre had
assumed handling of the programme, but none of its officers had ever actually
visited Mustang. The closest they got was when CIA representative Ken Knaus
twice visited Pokhara in 1964 to meet Mustang officers, With no on-site
presence, the CIA and IB had to rely on infrequent reporting by the Tibetan
guerillas themselves. From what little was offered, it was readily apparent
that the by-product from Mustang was practically nil. For the taciturn Mullick,
disenchantment with Mustang was starting to run deep. By late 1964, he was
alternating between extremes—first insisting that the guerrillas be given a
major injection of air-dropped supplies, later throwing up his arms and
demanding that they all be brought down to India and merged with Establishment
22. In January 1965, the pendulum swung back—with a twist. Now Mullick was
proposing that Mustang be given two airdrops to equip its unarmed volunteers.
These weapons would be given on the condition that the guerrillas shift inside
Tibet to two operating locations. The first was astride the route between
Kathmandu and Lhasa. The second was along the G-219 border road running west
from Lhasa toward Xinjiang via the contested Ladakh region. The choice of these
two locations was understandable. In late 1961, China had offered to build for
Nepal an all-weather road linking Kathmandu and the Nepalese border Pass at
Kodari, one of the few areas on the Tibet frontier not closed by winter snows.
Work was continuing at a breakneck pace, with completion of the route expected
by 1966. India, not surprisingly, was concerned about the road’s military
applications; by putting a concentration of guerrillas astride the approach
from the Tibetan side, any PLA traffic could be halted. Similarly, a guerrilla
pocket along the Xinjiang road would complicate China’s efforts to reinforce
Ladakh. As before, Mullick was reluctant to use the ARC to perform the supply
drops. Knowing that the CIA would be equally reluctant to use its own assets—that
would defeat one of the main reasons for creating the ARC in the first place—he
offered two sweeteners. First, he promised that the US aircraft could stage
from Charbatia. Second, he would allow one ARC member to accompany the flights.
This revised proposal went back to Washington and was put before the members of
the 303 Committee (prior to June 1964, known as the Special Group); on April 9,
the Committee lent its approval to the airdrop and Mustang redeployment scheme.
Mullick, it turned out, was a moving target. As soon as he was informed of
Washington’s consent, he reneged on the offer to allow an ARC crew-member on
the flights. The CIA fired back, insisting that the Indian member was a
prerequisite for the missions to go ahead. To this, Mullick had a ready counter-offer:
he would provide a cover story if the flight encountered problems. As Mullick
ducked and weaved, Ambassador Bowles urged the CIA to accept the proposal.
Bowles was acutely aware that relations with New Delhi were already growing
prickly on other fronts, and they were not helped when the unpredictable
President Lyndon Johnson unceremoniously cancelled a summit that month with the
Indian PM. Just as he would later support the stillborn C- 130 deal, the Ambassador
felt that a compromise with Mullick was a way to keep at least intelligence
cooperation on a solid footing. The CIA agreed; the flights would proceed on an
all-American basis.
Now that the mission was moving forward, the CIA
had to decide on aircraft and crews. Looking over the alternatives, the CIA had
only limited options. One logical source of airlift assets was Air Ventures,
the Kathmandu-based company. Back in 1963, the CIA had helped establish the
company; two of the airline’s pilots were on loan from the CIA, and its lone
Twin Helio airframe had been obtained with approval. But once the airline began
operations, the CIA station in Nepal kept its distance; Air Ventures worked
almost exclusively for the US Agency for International Development and the
Peace Corps. Moreover, the Mustang guerrillas were being handled by New Delhi;
in the interest of compartmentalisation, the CIA Station in Kathmandu was kept
wholly segregated from the operation. Another logical source of air support was
the CIA’s considerable airlift presence in Southeast Asia. Heading that effort
was the proprietary Air America, as well as select private companies such as Bird
& Son, with which the CIA had special contracts. Both flew airdrops under
trying conditions as a matter of course. But because CIA paramilitary
operations in Laos and South Vietnam were escalating by the month, aircraft
were stretched thin; the CIA managers in those theatres, as a result, tightly
guarded their assets. There was also the untidy matter of the press getting
whiffs of the CIA’s air operations in Southeast Asia; should one of these
aircraft be downed in Tibet, a viable cover story would be that much harder to
concoct. By process of elimination, the assignment was sent all the way to Japan.
There the CIA operated aircraft under yet another of its air proprietaries,
Southern Air Transport (SAT). Unlike Air America, which frequented jungle
airstrips and braved anti-aircraft fire over places like Laos, SAT flew regular
routes into major international airports. Its cargo was sometimes classified,
but its method of operation was overt and conventional. In handing the task to
SAT, there was some reinventing of the wheel. Four kickers were diverted from
Laos and sent to Okinawa for a week of USAF instruction in high-altitude
missions, including time in a pressure chamber, turns on a centrifuge, and
classes on cold-weather survival. The rest of the crew came from the SAT roster
in Japan; none, with the exception of the primary radio operator, had been on
the earlier Tibet flights. Taking a page from the past, SAT decided that the
drop aircraft would come from its DC-6 fleet. This was the civilian version of
the C-118 that had performed the Tibet missions in 1958; the only difference
was a smaller cargo door in the rear. Because the smaller door meant that the
supply bundles would also need to be smaller, mechanics fitted the DC-6 with a
Y-shaped roller system to double the number of pallets loaded down the length
of its cabin; after the first row of cargo was kicked out the door, pallets
from the second row would be kicked. It was further decided to carry all the
supplies aboard a single plane, rather than fly two missions as originally
proposed by Mullick. In another refrain from the previous decade, SAT made a
perfunctory attempt at sterilizing its plane. External markings were painted
over, but the numbers quickly bled through the thin coat. Inside the aircraft,
most—but not all—references to SAT were removed. “The safety belts in the
cockpit still had the letters SAT stitched into the material,” noted auxiliary
radioman Henri Verbrugghen. Early on May 15, the DC-6 departed Okinawa and made
a refuelling stop at Takhli, Thailand. The CIA logisticians had packed the
cabin to capacity, leaving little room for the kickers. Based on requirements
generated by the Special Centre, most of the bundles were filled with
ammunition and pistols, plus a small number of M-1 carbines and solar-powered radios.
There was also a pair of inflatable rubber boats, to be used for crossing the
wide Brahmaputra during summer. Because of the large amount of supplies
involved, it was decided to make the drop inside Nepal and within a few kilometres
of Tangya rather than at the more distant Tibetan drop zones used during the
previous supply missions. Once at Oak Tree-1, the aircraft was taken into an
ARC hangar for servicing away from prying eyes. Wayne Sanford had arranged for
the provision of fuel and support for the crew. He had also requested the
Indians to temporarily suppress their radar coverage along the corridor into
Nepal during the final leg of the flight. For two days, the weather proved
uncooperative. Not until the night of May 17 was the full moon unfettered by
cloud cover. Not wasting the moment, the heavy DC-6 raced down the runway and
lifted slowly into the northern sky.
At Tangya, Baba Yeshi had gathered his officers
earlier in the week for a major speech. He was a master of delivery, his voice
rising and falling with emotion as he told his men that the CIA had decided to give
them enough weapons for the next fifteen years. A massive airdrop was to take
place in a valley just east of their position, he said, and each company would
be responsible for lifting its share off the drop zone. Although Baba Yeshi had
been informed of the quid pro quo conjured in New Delhi—weapons in exchange for
a shift to positions astride the roads in Tibet—this was not mentioned in his
speech. Not surprisingly, pulses began to race as word of the impending drop
flashed through the guerrilla ranks. With soaring expectations, the officers
hurriedly left Tangya to assemble the necessary teams of yaks, men, and mules.
As the DC-6 headed north at low altitude, Captain Eddie Sims sent regular
signals back to Oak Tree-1. After each one, Charbatia sent a return message
confirming that he should continue the mission. Sims, who was in charge of
senior pilots among all the Far East proprietaries, was held in particularly
high regard by the crew on this flight. This stemmed from his role in settling
a salary dispute shortly before departing Japan. As a cost-cutting measure, SAT
had deemed that none of the DC-6 crew members were eligible for the bonus money
regularly paid to Air America crews during paramilitary missions. After several
crewmen threatened to walk out, Sims successfully lobbied management to have
the extra pay reinstated. Crossing central Nepal, Sims took the aircraft up to
4,848 metrrs (16,000 feet). The rear door was then opened, allowing frigid air
to whip through the cabin. Sucking from oxygen bottles, two of the kickers
positioned themselves near the exit; the other two moved to the back of the
first row of bundles. Looking for one final contact with Oak Tree-1, Sims sent
his coded signal. The radioman listened for the customary response, but none
came. Again Sims sent the signal, but only static crackled over the set. After
several minutes of agonizing, Sims elected to proceed without the last
clearance. Ahead, a blazing letter signal lit the drop zone in a small
bowl-shaped valley. Dropping into a steep bank, the DC-6 came atop the signal
and then pulled up sharply. In the rear, the four kickers worked furiously to
get the loads out the small door. Only a fraction had been disgorged when they
had to halt to allow Sims to make a sharp turn and realign. It would take yet
another pass before the entire cabin was emptied. On the ground in Mustang, the
guerrillas spent the next day collecting bundles scattered across the drop zone,
in the next valley, and in the one after that. Several were never found, and
rumour had it that the two rubber boats were recovered by local residents and
taken to the Crown Prince at Lo Monthang. Even more harsh than the complaints
over the wide disbursement was the disgruntlement over the content of the
bundles. Taking Baba Yeshi at his word, those assembled at the drop zone had
expected a lavish amount of weapons, enough to fight for 15 years. Dozens of
yaks and mules had been organised in what was envisioned to be a major
logistical effort. “Just one plane came” lamented officer Gen Gyurme, “and it
delivered mostly bullets and pistols.” Disillusioned, the company commanders
took their allotments back to their respective camps and returned to their earlier
inactivity. Radio messages were placed to Baba Yeshi over the following months,
calling on him to make the shift inside Tibet, but all were answered with
delays and excuses. By the end of that calendar year, few cross-border forays
of any note had been staffed. As far as the US and Indian representatives at
the Special Centre were concerned, Mustang was living on borrowed time.
In March 1966, PM Indira Gandhi arrived in
Washington on her first official foreign trip. Exuding both tact and charm, she
earned Johnson’s strong support for a major food aid package in exchange for
market-oriented economic reforms. With the Washington summit a success surpassing
all expectations, India-US relations got back some of the luster lost during
the previous year’s Kashmir crisis. Sensing an opportunity, the CIA on April 22
asked the 303 Committee to approve a major US$18 million Tibetan paramilitary
package. Part of this was earmarked to maintain the Mustang force for a
three-year term. The package also included two C-130 aircraft as ELINT
platforms to augment the lone ARC C-46 flying in this role, as well as funding
for a 5,000-man increase in Establishment 22. Most remarkable was the argument
the CIA was using to justify its proposal. Moving beyond the lip-service paid
by Mullick in earlier years, the CIA claimed that the IB had drawn up plans in
1965 calling for the liberation of Tibet. Reading into this, the CIA suggested
that India might be willing to commit Establishment 22 to a second front in the
event circumstances in Vietnam sparked all-out hostilities between the US and
China. In making a linkage between Tibet and Vietnam, the CIA was being
politically astute. Rather than justifying the Tibetan operation solely on its
own merits, the CIA was now trying to loosely fix it to the coattails of
Indo-China policy—a topic that resonated at the top of the Johnson Administration
agenda. All this smacked of geo-political fantasy. If Mullick, just a few
months earlier, had baulked at making airdrops to Mustang, it was a good bet
that New Delhi would not willingly invite Beijing’s wrath by sponsoring a Tibet
front if the US and China went to war over Vietnam. Even Ambassador Bowles, an
ardent proponent of intelligence cooperation, quickly backpedaled on the
Vietnam link. There was a strong possibility that India would be willing to
commit its guerrilla forces against Tibet, he wrote in a secret cable on April
28, but only if Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, or maybe Burma were attacked by China.
There was another problem with the CIA’s April proposal. With few exceptions,
the projects it sought to maintain had been proved ineffectual. Confirming as
much was Bruce Walker, the former Camp Hale officer who had arrived that spring
to replace John Gilhooley as the new CIA representative at the Special Centre.
In many respects, Walker was presiding over a funeral. Making a token
appearance at Hauz Khas once a week, he had few remaining agents to oversee. “The
radio teams were experiencing major resistance from the population inside
Tibet,” he recalls. “We were being pushed back to the border.”
A good case in point was Team S. Agents Thad
and Troy had started out well, identifying a sympathetic Tingri farmer and
bivouacking at his house since the onset of snow the previous winter. Thad had gotten
particularly close to his host’s daughter; by early spring, her abdomen was
starting to show the swell of pregnancy. This sparked rumours among suspicious
neighbours, who reported the case to district officials. Alerted to the
possible presence of an outsider, a Tibetan bureaucrat arrived that May to
investigate. Quizzed about his daughter’s mysterious suitor, the farmer folded.
He brought Thad out from hiding, and they took the bureaucrat into their
confidence and begged him to keep the matter a secret. Feigning compliance, the
official bade them farewell—only to return that same night with a PLA squad.
Thad was captured immediately; Troy, concealed in a haystack, surrendered after
being prodded with a bayonet. Giving the PLA the slip, the farmer managed to
flee into the hills. Nearby was a cave inhabited by Team SI, which also
consisted of two agents who had spent the winter near Tingri. Linking up, the
three attempted to run south toward the Tibet-Sikkim border. Just short of the
frontier, the trio encountered a PLA patrol and was felled in a hail of
bullets. That left just one pair of agents still inside their homeland. Team F,
consisting of Taylor and Jerome, had occupied yet another Tingri cave since the
previous year. Even though they kept contact with the locals to a minimum, word
of suspicious movement in the hills eventually came to the attention of the
Chinese. On 2 November 1966, the PLA moved in for an arrest. The Tibetans held
them at bay with their pistols until they ran out of ammunition; both were
subsequently captured and placed in a Lhasa prison. As Team F’s radio fell
silent, the Special Centre was at an impasse. After three seasons, the folly of
attempting to infiltrate ‘black’ radio teams (that is, teams without proper
documentation or preparation to blend into the community) was evident. Earlier in
the year, this growing realisation had prompted the Centre to briefly flirt
with a new kind of mission. Four agents were brought to the Indian capital from
Joelikote and given instruction in the latest eavesdropping devices, with the
intention of forming a special wiretap team. For practice, they climbed
telephone poles around the Delhi cantonment area by night. In the end, the
wiretap agents never saw service. In late November, the Special Centre put team
infiltrations into Tibet on hold. Aside from a handful of Hale-trained Tibetans
used for translation tasks at Oak Tree-1, as well as the radio teams already
inside Nepal, Joelikote was closed, and the remaining agents reverted back to
refugee status. “I was saddened and embarrassed,” said Indian representative
Rabi, “to have been party to those young men getting killed.”
The Special Centre had also reached an impasse
with its other main concern, the paramilitary force at Mustang. Despite the May
1965 arms drop, Baba Yeshi and his men had resisted all calls to relocate
inside Tibet. Though frustrated, the CIA had continued financing the guerrillas
for the remainder of that year. This funding flowed along a simple but
effective underground railroad. Every month, a satchel of Indian Rupees would
be handed over by the CIA representative at Hauz Khas. From there, two Tibetans
and two Indian escorts would take the money to the Nepal frontier near Bhadwar.
Meeting them were a pair of well-paid cyclo-drivers also on the CIA’s payroll.
They hid the cash under false seats and pedaled across the border, where they
handed the money over to members of the Mustang force. The money would then go
to Pokhara, where foodstuffs and textiles were purchased at the local market
and shipped to the guerrillas via mule caravans. By the time of the 303
Committee’s April 1966 meeting, the CIA was still prepared to continue such
funding for another three years. In addition, the CIA had not ruled out more
arms drops in the future. The catch: Baba Yeshi had one final chance to move
his men inside Tibet. Perhaps sensing that his financiers had run out of
patience, the Mustang chieftain was jarred from complacency. Employing vintage
theatrics, he gathered his headquarters staff in late spring and announced that
he would personally lead a 400-man foray against the PLA. “We begged him not to
do anything rash,” said training officer Gen Gyurme. “Tears were flowing as he began
his march out of Kaisang.” Travelling north to Tangya, the chieftain and 30 of
his loyalists canvassed the nearby guerrilla camps for more participants.
Another 30 signed on, including one company commander. Though far short of the
promised 400, 60 armed Tibetans on horseback cut an impressive sight as they steered
their mounts toward the border. Once the posse reached the frontier, however,
the operation began to fall apart. A 15-man reconnaissance party was sent
forward to locate a suitable ambush site, and the rest of the guerrillas argued
for two days over whether Baba Yeshi should actually lead the raid across the
border. After his men pleaded with him to reconsider, the chieftain finally
relented in a flourish. Armed with information from the reconnaissance team, 35
Tibetans eventually remounted and galloped into Tibet. What ensued was a
defining moment for the guerrilla force. Apparently alerted to the upcoming
foray through their informant network, PLA soldiers were waiting in ambush.
Pinned in a valley, six Tibetans were shot dead, including the company
commander. In addition, eight horses were killed and seven rifles lost. In its
six years of existence, this was the greatest number of casualties suffered by
the project. As word of the failed foray filtered back to New Delhi, the
Special Centre finally acknowledged the limitations of Mustang. On the pretext
of not provoking a PLA cross-border strike into Nepal, the guerrillas were “enjoined
from offensive action which might invite Chinese retaliation.” Any activity in
their homeland, they were told, would be limited to passive intelligence
collection. The guerrilla leadership, never really enthusiastic about
conducting aggressive raids, offered no resistance to their restricted mandate.
By process of elimination, the only remaining Tibetan programme with a modicum
of promise was Establishment 22. Not only did this project have India’s strong
support, but it was the linchpin in the CIA’s April pitch to the 303 Committee
about a second front against China. Even before the Committee had time to
respond, the CIA was bringing in a new team of advisers to boost its level of
assistance to Chakrata. Replacing Wayne Sanford in the US Embassy was Woodson
‘Woody’ Johnson, a Colorado native who had served in a variety of intelligence
and paramilitary assignments since joining the CIA in 1951. Working up-country
alongside Establishment 22 was Zeke Zilaitis, the former Hale trainer with a
taste for rockets, and Ken Seifarth, the airborne specialist on his encore tour
with Brigadier Uban’s guerrillas.
Boosting its representation a step further, the
CIA that summer introduced 49-year-old Tucker Gougelmann as the senior adviser
for all paramilitary projects in India. By the time Gougelmann got his India
assignment in mid-1966, he had a full plate. Part of his time was devoted to
managing the mountaineering expeditions aimed at placing a nuclear-powered
sensor atop the Nanda Devi summit. Even more of Gougelmann’s time was spent
arranging assistance for the guerrillas at Chakrata. The Indians were eager to
double the number of Tibetans at Establishment 22 and were even calling for the
recruitment of Gurkhas into the unit. Reflecting bureaucratic creep, Director-General
of Security Mullick had come up with a new, more formal name for the outfit—the
Special Frontier Force, or SFF—and had given Uban an office in New Delhi. The
SFF had matured considerably since its humble start. One hundred twenty-two guerrillas
made up each of its Companies, with five or six Companies grouped into Battalions
commanded by Tibetan political leaders. Though expanding the size of the SFF
would be easy in one sense—with thousands of idle refugees eager for meaningful
employment—there were problems. Most of the training was being handled by Uban’s
seasoned cadre; aside from perfunctory oversight provided by Seifarth and
Zilaitis, the CIA was relegated to funding and bringing in the occasional
instructor from Camp Peary for brief specialist courses. One such instructor,
Henry ‘Hank’ Booth, was dispatched in 1967 to offer a class in sniping. The
six-week programme went well, with the Tibetans proving themselves able shots
with the 1903 Springfield rifle. For graduation, Uban held a small ceremony,
during which Booth awarded his students a copy of the 1944 US Army field manual
for snipers. What came next was a telling indictment of the relationship
between the Tibetans and their Indian hosts. Late that same evening, a fellow
CIA officer took Booth to a hill overlooking the SFF cantonment. Below were
lights burning bright at five separate camps. The Tibetans were in the process
of translating the field manual into Tibetan, with each camp doing a section of
the manual. Multiple copies were being made—including hand-drawn reproductions
of the diagrams—and exchanged by runners. By sunrise, as Booth departed for New
Delhi, each unit had a complete copy of the book, and the Indians moved in to
confiscate the manual.
Not helping the relationship between the
Indians and the Tibetans was the decision to add Gurkhas to their ranks. The
Indians saw this as a means of expanding the mandate and abilities of the force
beyond things Tibetan. The Tibetans, however, bristled at the ethnic dilution
of their unit. Brigadier Uban recognised the delicacy of juggling two different
cultures. “The Tibetans were more ferocious,” he reflected, “but the Gurkhas
were more disciplined.” Wayne Sanford, who had returned to India for another
CIA tour in New Delhi, was less generous in his assessment of the Gurkhas. “We
would kill off their leaders during training exercises,” he said. “The Tibetans
were natural fighters and would move the next best guy into the leader’s slot
and keep on operating; the Gurkhas were clueless without leadership.” To keep
peace within the force, a cap was set at no more than 100 Gurkhas. In addition,
the two ethnicities would not be mixed; the Gurkhas would be segregated into
their own ‘G Group’ at Chakrata. Though given the same paramilitary training as
in the previous SFF cycles, G Group was relegated primarily to base security
and administration. The Tibetan majority, meanwhile, was being rotated along
the Ladakh and NEFA borders in company-size elements. Several ARC air bases
were established specifically to support these SFF operations. In the
northeast, the ARC staged from a primitive airstrip at Doomdoomah in Assam. For
northwestern operations and airborne training, it used a larger air base built
at Sarsawa, 132km south of Chakrata. To feed the remote SFF outposts along the
border, the CIA had enlisted the
Kellogg Company to help develop a special tsampa loaded with vitamins and other
nutrients. Not only did this appeal to Tibetan tastes, but it allowed
for healthy daily rations to be concentrated in small packages that could be
airdropped from ARC aircraft.
Not all the SFF missions were within India’s
frontier. Back in 1964, an Establishment 22 team had staged a brief but deadly
foray from Nepal toward Tingri. In 1966, the force inherited the wiretap
mandate originally conjured for the special team selected from Joelikote. There
was good reason to target China’s phones. Nearly all the communications between
China and Tibet used over-ground lines supported by concrete or improvised
wooden poles. The CIA, moreover, had already started a successful wiretap
programme in southern China using agent teams staging from Laos. Placing the
taps posed serious challenges. The lines paralleled the roads built across
Tibet, most of which were a fair hike from the border. Once a tap was placed at
the top of a pole, a wire needed to run to a concealed cassette recorder.
Because the recording time on each cassette was limited, an agent had to remain
nearby to change tapes and then bring them back to India for CIA analysis. The
SFF proved up to the task. In a project code-named GEM1NI, it began
infiltrating from NEFA with recording gear during mid-1966. To supply the
guerrillas while they filled the tapes, an ARC C-46 was dispatched to an
airfield near Siliguri. Taking off during predawn hours, the aircraft would
overfly the Sikkimese corridor and be at the team’s position by daybreak.
Flying with the rear-door open, the kickers briefly took leave of their oxygen
bottles and shawls to push the cargo into the slipstream. On the way home, they
would hang a bag of soft drinks out the door in order to have chilled
refreshments by the time they returned to base. The results of GEMINI were
mixed. Although the SFF guerrillas were able to exfiltrate without loss of
life, the project was put on hold near the year’s end after a Kolkata-based
newspaper reported the mysterious flights over Sikkim. “We got miles of tapes,”
recalled New Delhi officer Angus Thuermer, “but much of it was useless, like
Chinese talking about their families back home.” Deputy Chief of Station Bill
Grimsley was more upbeat in his assessment: “One never knows where the intelligence
will lead in these matters.” The 303 Committee apparently agreed. On November
25, after repeated failed attempts during the first three quarters of the year,
the CIA put a small portion of its $18 million Tibet package before the Committee
for endorsement. It totaled just $650,000, most of it going to pay for Mustang.
This time, the policy makers offered their approval for the paramilitary
programme to proceed.
The Chinese,
however, were not taking notice. In mid-1966, Beijing had reached a turning point.
Its Great Leap campaign toward rapid industrialisation and full-scale
communism, launched by Chairman Mao with much fanfare late the previous decade,
had been such a failure that its third Five-Year Plan had to be delayed three
years. The country had also suffered a series of foreign policy setbacks,
including the annihilation of the Communist Party in Indonesia—which included
some of Chinass closest political allies in Asia—allowing an abortive September
1965 coup. And with Mao both ageing and ailing, there were questions about who
would succeed him. Reacting against all this, Mao formally proclaimed a Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in August 1966. In what was part ideological
purge, part power struggle, part policy dispute, Mao steered the nation toward
a destructive campaign of sophomoric Marxism and paranoid suspicion, ostensibly
to cleanse its rotten core. Leading the charge was disaffected youth gathered
into a mass organisation dubbed the Red Guard. These teenagers joined with the
PLA and attacked allegedly anti-Mao elements in the Communist Party, then hit
the party machine as a whole. Three months before the Cultural Revolution was
proclaimed, Red Guards had already started arriving in Lhasa from Beijing. As
the revolution’s goal was to wipe out divergent habits and cultures in order to
make all of Chinese society conform to a communist ideal, minorities were a
prime target. Tibetans, predictably, suffered tremendously. Thousands were
jailed by marauding Red Guard gangs. Monasteries were emptied, monks publicly
humiliated, scriptures burned, and priceless art treasures destroyed. Belatedly
realising that he had lost control, Mao in January 1967 attempted to soften his
rhetoric and asked the military to intervene. This had little effect in Tibet,
where the empowered Red Guard took on the PLA in street battles across Lhasa
through the spring and summer. As China descended into this orgy of violence,
India watched with understandable concern. With nobody in clear control of
Beijing (Mao was prone to prolonged absences from the Capital, apparently for
fear of his life), the Chinese were more dangerous neighbours than ever. Making
matters worse, they had successfully tested a nuclear-tipped medium-range
ballistic missile in October 1966. In years past, such conditions might have
made India’s covert Tibetan assets appear all the more relevant as both a
border force and a potential tool to exploit China’s turmoil. By the spring of
1967, however, New Delhi had irreversibly soured toward most of its joint
paramilitary projects. After all, the black radio teams inside Tibet had
already been cancelled, and the Mustang force hardly inspired confidence. The
Indians were also nervous about media revelations concerning the CIA. In March
1967, Ramparts, a liberal US magazine critical of the government, published an
expose on covert CIA support for various private organisations, including the
Asia Foundation (originally known as the Committee for a Free Asia). Because
numerous US educational and voluntary groups were active in India, this sparked
an anti-CIA furor in the Indian Parliament. Never openly embraced, the CIA now
had few advocates on the subcontinent. Mullick, who had chaperoned the Tibet
projects since the beginning of Indian involvement, had already given up his
seat as Director-General of Security in mid-1966. His replacement, Balbir
Singh, had an independent and forceful personality but only limited clout with
the PM. For her part, Mrs. Gandhi showed little appreciation for the CIA or its
assistance. “We became a tolerated annoyance,” summed up Woody Johnson. If any
tears were being shed at the CIA, they were of the crocodile variety. Back in
June 1966, the CIA Director’s slot had been filled by Richard Helms. Coming to
the office with extensive experience managing clandestine intelligence
collection, Helms was known to be highly skeptical of covert action like that
attempted in Tibet. However, he was being counselled otherwise by Des
FitzGerald, his deputy for operations and longtime proponent of activism in
Tibet. Unfortunately, FitzGerald dropped dead while playing tennis in July
1967. “When Des died,” said Near East chief James Critchfield, “the oomph for
the programme quickly dissipated.” Even before FitzGerald’s death, the CIA had
taken measured steps to disengage itself from Tibet. In the wake of the March
Ramparts revelations, President Johnson had approved a special committee headed
by Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach to study U0S relationships with
private organisations. Katzenbach’s findings, released later that month,
recommended against covert assistance to any American educational or private
voluntary organisation. Following this finding, the CIA terminated funding for
the third cycle of eight Tibetans undergoing training at Cornell University.
They were repatriated to Dharamsala in July, and no further students were
accepted. Though the agency contemplated a continuation of the programme on a
smaller scale at a foreign university, this never came to fruition. Other
changes came in rapid succession. In Washington, the Tibet desk, which had been
under the Far East Division’s China Branch ever since its establishment in
1956, was transferred to the Near East Division. John Rickard, one of four
brothers born to missionary parents in Burma (three of whom went to work for
the CIA), headed the desk during this period and changed his divisional
affiliation to reflect the shift. More than just semantics, the change
underscored the fact that the remaining Tibetan paramilitary assets, with rare
exception, would probably not be leaving Indian soil. Apart from a single representative
at the Special Centre, the Far East Division had been completely excised from
the Tibet programme. The CIA also reduced its links to the ARC. Although
attrition was starting to take a toll on the aircraft delivered during 1963 and
1964—the latest casualty, a Twin Helio, crashed in 1967—no replacements were
budgeted. More telling, after the CIA removed the C-130 from the limited
proposal passed by the 303 Committee the previous November, the Indians opted
in 1967 to add the USSR-supplied Antonov An-12B transport as the new
centerpiece for its ARC fleet. For the Tibetans, the biggest blow took place in
the spring of 1967. Ever since arriving on Indian soil, the CIA had secretly
channeled a stipend to the Dalai Lama and his entourage. Totaling $180,000 per
fiscal year, the money was appreciated but not critical. Most of it was
collected in the Charitable Trust of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which in turn
was used for investments, donations, and relief work. To their credit, the
Tibetans had worked hard to wean themselves off such handouts. “Financially
underpinning the Dalai Lama’s refugee programmes was no longer warranted, “
said Grimsley. Gyalo did not see it that way. Sullen, he made the assumption
that all money would soon be drying up. He was not wrong. Gyalo proved his
abilities in another CIA-supported venture. Because the Dalai Lama had long
desired the creation of a central Tibetan cultural institution, the CIA supplied
Gyalo with secret funds to assemble a collection of wall hangings—called
thankas— and other art treasures from all the major Tibetan Buddhist sects. A
plot of land was secured in the heart of New Delhi, and the Tibet
House—comprising a museum, library, and emporium—was officially opened in
October 1965 by the then Indian Minister of Education and the Dalai Lama. It
remains a major attraction to this day.
India-US
intelligence cooperation experienced major changes in structure and
personalities. In June 1968, David Blee departed as the New Delhi Station Chief
after more than six years in the post. Replacing him the following month was
John Waller, the Deputy Station Chief in India between 1955 and 1957. A
consummate blend of scholar and spy, Waller had spent the intervening years
pursuing his passion for Tibetan history. In 1967, he had published an
authoritative book on Sino-Indian relations, much of it devoted to Tibetan
issues. That same year, he had written an article for the Foreign Service Journal
about US diplomacy and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. He had also completed a draft
of a book about exploration in Tibet. Once in New Delhi, Waller had little time
to pursue his glorified research hobby. Within two months after his arrival, he
was confronted with a new counterpart organisation. Intentionally patterned
after the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (R & AW) was officially
unveilled on September 2. Both the foreign intelligence desk of the IB (now
downgraded to domestic activities) and the paramilitary projects of the
Director-General of Security would fall under R & AW’s control. Selected as
the first R & AW Secretary was R N Kao. Previously head of the ARC, the
debonair Kao had a long history of close cooperation with US officials. Despite
this warm past, Kao was faced with India-US relations that were again on a
downward spiral. In November, Richard Nixon won the US presidential election.
Like his predecessor Johnson, Nixon was fixated on bringing the unpopular war
in Vietnam to an end. Not only was South Asia far from Nixon's mind, but many
Indians recalled his pronounced slant toward Pakistan when he was Eisenhower's
Vice President. Behind the scenes, intelligence cooperation toward Tibet
remained only a shadow of its former self. Arriving in June 1968 as the new CIA
representative at the Special Centre was John Bellingham. Much like Bruce Walker had
presided over a funeral, Bellingham was there for the same extended wake. He
arrived at the Centre each Friday afternoon, but there was little for him to do
aside from delivering the monthly payments for Mustang. On two occasions during
Bellingham's watch, the Special Centre looked to break from its freefall. The
first concerned a programme to infiltrate singleton resident agents into Tibet. This had been
proposed back in 1967 as the long-range replacement for the cancelled radio
teams. There was a significant difference between the two: the teams had gone
in black; the resident singletons, by contrast, would merge directly into
society. The two programmes required different kinds of people. The teams had been composed of
men versed in paramilitary skills and expected to live in concealment under
rugged conditions. Singletons required the intelligence and wit to operate as
classic spies. Doing so was complicated by the Cultural Revolution; deep
paranoia and suspicion had taken root across Tibetan society.
Although finding a suitable singleton candidate
would be difficult, one possibility had been identified back in 1967. That
year, an uninvited visitor in his early thirties had arrived at Mustang. Amdo
Tsering claimed to be a Muslim from the Amdo city of Sining. He had fled his
hometown and supposedly escaped to Nepal via an extended trek through Xinjiang
and western Tibet. Incredulous, Baba Yeshi’s men sized up the interloper.
Because he looked Chinese and spoke some Xinjiang dialects, they began to
suspect that he was a plant dangled by Beijing. Gearing up for a rather
unpleasant interrogation, they suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of
a verbal flogging from the spirited Amdowa. Uncertain what to do, Mustang
flashed a message down to the Special Centre. Equally uncertain, the Centre
sent back orders for Amdo Tsering to be escorted to New Delhi. There he
languished for over a year; not until the spring of 1969 was it decided to use
him as the first in the proposed resident singleton programme. Code-named ‘Red
Stone,’ Amdo Tsering was given extensive training in secret writing techniques.
The CIA also forged a set of Chinese travel documents showing that he worked in
westernmost Tibet but was going to Xinjiang on holiday. Once in Xinjiang, he
was to head for Lop Nur and attempt to collect dirt samples. Lop Nur was the
location of China’s primary nuclear testing facility, and the dirt would be
analysed to determine levels of radioactivity. In September 1969, Red Stone
took a train to Siliguri. Escorting him was Tashi Choedak and the senior Indian
representative at the Special Centre. Heading north through Sikkim, they came
to the Tibetan frontier and watched Red Stone gallop across the border. The two
Special Centre representatives returned to New Delhi to await news of his
progress. They did not have to wait long. After just a couple of days, they
received word that a nervous Red Stone had attracted attention and been
arrested before boarding a bus at Shigatse, the town midway between Tingri and
Lhasa. The singleton programme subsequently went into remission.
The second project initiated by the Special
Centre was the activation of special refugee debriefing teams. For years, the
radio agents posted along the Tibet-Nepal frontier had been collecting
low-level information from pilgrims and traders. Building on this theme, in
late 1968 the Centre dispatched a five-man team to Kathmandu to debrief cross-border
travellers. The Nepalese capital was a fertile recruiting ground for several
reasons. First, Nepal was the only nation still allowed to maintain a Trade
Mission and Consulate General in Lhasa. Second, there was a substantial
community of ethnic Tibetans who had opted for Nepalese citizenship after 1959,
and China had decreed that these Nepalese passport holders were allowed to
visit their families or conduct business in Tibet once a year. In locating
sources, the Kathmandu debriefing team had competition from an unlikely source:
the Republic of China, or Taiwan. Until that time, Taipei had never had much
success recruiting a network of Tibetan supporters, mainly because the
Kuomintang firmly agreed with the PRC about China’s right to rule Lhasa.
Efforts to sign up agents from Kalimpong late the previous decade had fallen
flat. So, too, had a brief attempt to fund information-gathering forays by
Nepal-based Tibetans beginning in 1962. In 1968, Taipei tried again. This time,
it was looking to exploit the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. There were also
indications in February that the RoC leadership might be prepared to endorse
Lhasa’s independence, a shift that would have made its support more palatable
to Tibetan patriots. Late that year, Taipei dispatched a pair of Hiu Muslim
recruiters to Kathmandu in its latest bid to seek Tibetan sources. The
recruiters, both former residents of Kalimpong, dangled financial incentives
and the chance for scholarships on Taiwan. The Special Centre’s team, meanwhile,
sought volunteers through nationalistic appeals. “We only had a little money to
cover operational expenses,” said team leader Arnold, a former Hale translator
and Cornell graduate, “so we looked for good Buddhists who respected the Dalai
Lama.” By 1969, Arnold and his men were claiming some success. Despite numerous
attempts, they were never able to recruit a Tibetan staff member working at the
Nepalese Consulate in Lhasa. They were, however, able to network among dozens
of Nepalese passport holders returning from their annual leave in Tibet. The
team debriefed the travellers in Kathmandu and dispatched frequent reports to
the Special Centre via the mail or messengers.
Although the information from the Kathmandu team
was welcome, John Bellingham’s main focus was on managing the denouement of
Mustang. Earlier in 1969, India had made it apparent that her contingency plans
no longer involved any participation by Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal. The CIA
was of a similar mindset. When it came time for the 303 Committee to review
Tibet operations on September 30, it endorsed a provision to scale back Mustang
to a token force. The Tibetans learned of this pivotal decision indirectly. In
early October, Bellingham arrived at the Special Centre with the monthly funds for
Nepal. As was customary, Kay-Kay and Tashi Choedak came to witness the
transfer. Turning to the Indians as he left, the CIA representative offered a
comment in passing: “I guess this is one of the last.” Kay-Kay froze. “It was
my darkest moment,” he later said. No matter how poorly it had fared in the
field, the Tibetan leadership had looked on Mustang as the symbolic paramilitary
arm of its government-in-exile. A Royal Nepal Airlines flight took Kay-Kay and
two junior officers from the Special Centre to Pokhara, where they mounted
horses and went to bring the news directly to the guerrilla leadership. They
arrived at Kaisang in driving rains and found Wangdu in his office. After
explaining the decision, Kay-Kay paused for comments, but Wangdu offered only a
silent gaze. Reduced funding was only part of Mustang’s troubles. After
spending the summer and fall stewing at Pokhara, Baba Yeshi had enticed a
company of loyalists to move east to Nashang. Tempers were starting to flare
between the two factions, leading to the death of two Baba Yeshi followers and
five horses. Vowing to expel dissidents, Wangdu placed Baba Yeshi’s sympathetic
assistant, a hulking Andowa and Hale graduate named Abe, in detention. Abe, in
turn, got possession of a razor and committed suicide by slicing open the vein
in his neck. Incensed, Baba Yeshi retreated to a house in Kathmandu and began
plotting his revenge. In 1970, Lhamo Tsering returned to New Delhi after his
prolonged deployment to Nepal. Waiting for him at the Special Centre was John
Bellingham, who was anxious to finalise a formal demobilisation plan for
Mustang. Until that point, the CIA was still funding 2,100 guerrillas at a cost
of $500,000 a year. Pressed for time, Lhamo Tsering outlined a schedule whereby
the force would be cut by a third over each of the next three calendar years.
Without delay, Bellingham approved the scheme. Part of the demobilisation plan
involved a rehabilitation programme for the guerrillas, to ensure that they
would be able to support themselves. Members of the Special Centre were
immediately deployed to Kathmandu and Pokhara to oversee this programme. Their
purpose was to ensure that rehabilitation funds would be wisely invested in
self-generating enterprises. Although the demobilised guerrillas had few
marketable skills, existing Kathmandu-based projects funded by the Dalai Lama
and foreign aid groups demonstrated that Tibetan handicraft and carpet
factories were profitable ventures. Drawing on this precedent, the first third
of the rehabilitation funds was channelled into two carpet-weaving factories in
Pokhara. Part of the money was also used to break ground for a 30-room budget
hotel in the same town. With a third of the guerrillas dutifully filing out of
the mountains to take up employment at these sites, demobilisation appeared to
be progressing according to plan.
At Tangya, not everybody was embracing the
conversion to civilian life. Wangdu, for one, was game for alternative forms of
funding that would allow him to maintain some of his men under arms. In early
1971, he received word that interest was being expressed by an unexpected
source—the Soviet Union. This was not the first time Moscow had flirted with
the Tibetan resistance. In 1966, Soviet intelligence officers had approached
Gyalo in New Delhi with a proposal to assume support for Tibetan paramilitary
operations. During the course of eight meetings over the next three years, the
Soviets spoke fancifully of establishing a joint operation in Tashkent; from
there, they promised, Tibetan agents could be parachuted back to their
homeland. Intrigued but non-committal, Gyalo requested that Moscow, as a sign
of good faith, first raise the Tibet issue at the United Nations. Do not make
pre-conditions, the Soviets sniffed, and ultimately ceased contact. In 1970,
Moscow showed renewed interest in Tibet. This followed the USSR’s brief border
war with the PRC in 1969, prompting it to re-explore paramilitary options
against China in the event of renewed hostilities. Rather than approaching
Gyalo—who in any event had moved to Hong Kong and washed his hands of resistance
operations—this time Moscow looked toward Nepal. Leading the effort was Col
Anatoli Logonov, the Defense Attaché at the USSR Embassy in Kathmandu. Named a
Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944 while an armour commander, Logonov had already
been expelled from Canada for espionage activities and reprimanded by the
Nepalese government for bribing a military officer. Undaunted, the brash
Logonov approached the US Defense Attache, William Stites, at a diplomatic
function. Sauntering up to the American Colonel, he left little doubt about his
focus of interest. “What do you have on Tibet?” he asked. Stites was not amused
by the bold pitch; nor was he pleased to hear that the Colonel had invited his
assistant to dinner and asked the same question. Though he came up short with
the American officers, Logonov had better luck with the Tibetans themselves.
Cornering a Khampa shopkeeper in Kathmandu, he conveyed word that he sought
contact with the Mustang leadership. As news of this reached the Tibetans at the
Special Centre, Tashi Choedak quietly rushed to Nepal, linked up with Wangdu,
and rendezvoused with the Colonel in the Nepalese capital. Matching his direct
personality, Logonov’s house was functional and unsophisticated. “It had no
carpets,” said Tashi, “but plenty of Johnny Walker and a refrigerator stocked
with boiled cabbage.” Coming to the point, the Colonel asked for information on
the size of the Mustang force. Over the course of three subsequent meetings,
the Tibetans brought photograph albums (created for accounting purposes during
the phased demobilisation) that contained a portrait of each guerrilla still
under arms. Logonov took copies of the albums and promised to quiz Moscow about
assuming financing for the force. One month later, Logonov returned with an
answer. Although funding for Mustang was not feasible at that time, he offered
payment for specific items of information, such as the location of PLA border-posts
and the deployment of aircraft at Tibetan airfields. Accepting this limited
offer, the Tibetans prepared a sampling of information for the Colonel. In
return, Logonov paid the equivalent of $1,800. Convinced that this sum was
hardly worth the effort, Wangdu unilaterally terminated further contact.
During 1965, Moscow offered—and New Delhi
accepted—a pair of Mi-4 helicopters for the ARC. Ironically,
the CIA did not necessarily see Soviet inroads into the subcontinent as a bad
thing. By keeping the Soviets on-board in India, the CIA ensured that they were a
counterweight to the Chinese. Such realpolitik led to previously unthinkable
levels of cooperation regarding support to the ARC. With an ageing C-46 fleet
(We squeezed as much life from them as possible) and no C-130 ELINT platforms
forthcoming, the ARC inventory by 1967 was dominated by the Mi-4s and An-12Bs. Whereas
this transformation might have had the CIA howling in earlier years, the Agency
was now perfectly willing to assist the Indians with their new USSR-supplied
hardware. In 1968, for example, CIA technicians installed oxygen consoles in
the unpressurised An-12B cabins for use during SFF parachute training. Because this aircraft
had an extremely fast cruising speed—more than double that of the C-46—a CIA
airborne adviser was dispatched to India that spring to train an ARC cadre in
high-speed exit techniques. Two years later, CIA technicians were back in India
to modify an ARC An-12B with ELINT gear. CIA support for the SFF, meanwhile, was declining
fast. One of the last CIA-sanctioned operations took place in 1969, when four
SFF commandos were trained in the use of sophisticated impulse-probe wiretaps.
Buried underneath a telephone line, the tap transmitted conversations to a
solar- powered relay station established on a border mountaintop in NEFA, which
in turn relayed data to a rear base farther south. Although several taps were
installed successfully, two SFF members disappeared on a 1970 foray, and
further infiltrations were halted. By the following year, the PLA detected the
extent of the tampering and started rerouting its lines away from the border.
By early 1971,
direct CIA contact with the SFF was almost non-existent. the Govt of India was
quietly supporting scores of resistance fighters from East Pakistan. Playing a
major role in this was Maj Gen Uban (he had finally gotten his promised second
star), who was now considered one of India's most seasoned unconventional
warfare specialists on account of the nine years he had spent with the SFF.
Taking temporary leave of his Tibetans, he was placed in charge of
a guerrilla training programme for 10,000 East Pakistani—soon to be called
Bangladeshi—insurgents. Uban made room at Chakrata for a training site for the
Bangladeshis. By that time, the SFF had grown to 64 Tibetan Companies; most
were divided into eight Battalions of six Companies apiece, with the remainder
going into support units. Despite this increase, the force had not seen any
serious combat since its inception. Worse, Uban learned that seven Companies
were being misused for traffic control in Ladakh. Protesting this abuse of his
elite unit, Uban lobbied to incorporate his men into contingencies against East
Pakistan. By fall, the Indians were already well on their way to completing
plans for a major combined arms campaign—one of the largest since World War-2—to
liberate that territory. Though Uban made a strong case for the SFF's inclusion—his
men could act as guerrillas with plausible deniability, he argued—such a
decision would be controversial. Until that point, there had been an unwritten
rule that the SFF would not be used for anything other than its intended
purpose against China. There were also Tibetan attitudes to consider. Tibet,
noted several members of the force, had no quarrel with Pakistan. Rather, Tibet
had benefited from assistance offered by the East Pakistani authorities,
recalled ranking political leader Jamba Kalden. As word flashed to Dharamsala,
senior Tibetan officials were in a quandary. If they did not agree with Uban's
proposal, they feared that the Indians would see them as ungrateful; with CIA
support largely dissipated, they could ill afford to alienate their primary
benefactor. Although some in the Dalai Lama's inner circle felt that they
should demand a quid pro quo—participation against East Pakistan in exchange
for Indian recognition of their exiled government—the idea was not pushed.
Quietly, Dharamsala offered its approval. By late October, an ARC An-12B airlift began
shuttling nearly 3,000 Tibetans to the Indian border adjacent to East Pakistan's
Chittagong Hill tracts. To reinforce their deniable status, the guerrillas were
hurriedly given a shipment of Bulgaria-made AK-47 assault rifles. At the
border, they assembled at Demagiri. Normally a quiet frontier back-water,
Demagiri by that time was overflowing with refugees. As the Tibetans turned it
into a proper military encampment, they made plans to divide into three columns
and initiate operations. Their exact mission had been the subject of prior
debate. India's military staff had wanted them to perform surgical strikes,
such as destroying the key Kaptai Dam. Uban, in contrast, saw them doing
something more worthy, such as joining forces with his Chakrata-trained
Bangladeshi insurgents and seizing Chittagong port. This was vetoed by the top
brass because neither the SFF nor the Bangladeshis had integral heavy weapons
support. After further discussion, it was decided that the SFF would be charged
with staging guerrilla raids across the Chittagong Hill tracts, known for their
thick jungles, humid weather, and leech-infested marshes. This promised to be a
difficult mission for the mountain-faring Tibetans.
The hills held another, more deadly, challenge.
Based along the tracts was a Pakistani composite Brigade, including part of a Battalion
of elite commandos, the Special Service Group. Not only did this Brigade
threaten the flank of one of the IA Corps massing to move against Dhaka, but it
could conceivably open an escape route to nearby Burma. At the beginning of the
second week of November, the SFF began OP MOUNTAIN EAGLE. Taking leave of
Demagiri, the guerrillas used 19 canoes to shuttle across the Karnaphuli River
and steal into East Pakistan. Coming upon an outpost that night, the Tibetans
overran the position while the Pakistanis were eating. Boosted by their swift
victory, they made plans to hit the next post the following morning. Listening
over the radio, Maj Gen Uban was anxious. As he moved into Demagiri to
coordinate both the SFF and his Bangladeshi force, he had few qualms about the
Bangladeshis—they were native boys and could live off the land–but he knew that
the Tibetans were untested under battle conditions and careless in open march.
Very quickly, his fears were confirmed. On November 14, the lead element of
Tibetans came running back toward the Indian border. Dhondup Gyatotsang, Uban
learned, had been shot dead. The cousin of Mustang commander Wangdu and a Hale
graduate, Dhondup had been one of the most senior political leaders in the
force. Realising that he could lose momentum, Uban got on the radio and barked
at the Tibetans to resume their advance. “I told them not to come back until
the position was taken,” he said. The strong words had an effect. Reversing
course, the SFF split into small teams and curled behind the Pakistanis in
classic guerrilla fashion. Using both their Bulgarian assault rifles and native
knives, they smashed through the outpost. “After that,” remembers Uban,”they
were unstoppable.” By the time all-out war was officially declared early the
following month, the SFF had been inside East Pakistan for three weeks.
Multiple IA Corps blitzed from all directions on December 3, forcing Pakistani
capitulation within two weeks; Bangladesh’s independence would soon follow. At
the time of the ceasefire, the Tibetans were within 40km of Chittagong port and
had successfully pinned down the Pakistani Brigade in the border hills. Taking
leave of their normal anonymity, the SFF paraded through Chittagong to ecstatic
Bangladeshi masses. A total of 23 Indians and 45 Tibetans of the SFF would be
awarded for their gallantry; 580 Tibetans received cash bonuses. Their victory
had had a cost, however. Forty-nine Tibetans had paid with their lives for the
birth of a nation not their own.
Fallout from the
Bangladeshi operation was swift. The CIA lodged a protest against R & AW over
the use of Tibetans in OP MOUNTAIN EAGLE. Kao hardly lost any sleep over the
matter; with US financial and advisory support to the SFF all but evaporated,
the CIA's leverage was nil. Bolstering his indifference was the diplomatic
furore over deployment of the US Navy aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of
Bengal during the brief war. Although Washington claimed that the vessel was
there for the potential evacuation of US citizens from Dacca, New Delhi
suspected that it had been sent as a show of support for the Pakistanis.
Bilateral ties, never good during the Nixon Presidency, ebbed even lower. More
serious were the protests against OP MOUNTAIN EAGLE from within the Tibetan
refugee community. In this instance, it was Dharamsala that was under fire, not
R & AW. Facing mounting criticism for having approved the deployment, the
Dalai Lama made a secret journey to Chakrata on June 3, 1972. After three days
of blessings, most ill-feelings had wafted away. As this was taking place, John
Bellingham was approaching the end of his tour at the Special Centre. He had just
delivered the second installment of rehabilitation funds, which arrived in
Nepal without complication. With this money, two Pokhara carpet-weaving
factories had been established, and construction of a hotel in the same town
was progressing according to plan. Another carpet-weaving factory was operating in Kathmandu, as was a taxi and trucking company. By the summer of
1973, with one-third of the funds still to be distributed, the CIA opted not to
deploy a new representative to the Special Centre. Because Bellingham had
moved next door as the CIA's Chief of Station in Kathmandu, and because he was
already intimately familiar with the demobilisation programme, it was decided
to send him the Indian Rupees in a diplomatic pouch for direct handover to designated
Tibetans in Nepal. Although this violated the CIA's previous taboo against
involving the Kathmandu station, an exception was deemed suitable in this case,
given the humanitarian nature of the project. The money was well-spent. That
November, ex-guerrillas formally opened their Pokhara hotel, the Annapurna
Guest House. Bellingham and his wife were among its first patrons.
Harsh treatment was meted out to the Tibetan
agents captured by Chinese authorities. In prison for almost two decades—much of
it in solitary confinement—they were offered unexpected freedom in November
1978 as part of Beijing’s slight softening in policy toward Tibet. The years
had taken a toll. From Team S, agent Thad was still alive; his teammate Troy
had been executed for bad behaviour. From Team F, Taylor was released, but his
partner, Jerome, had died in detention from a prolonged illness. Team V1’s
Terrence had his freedom, but teammate Maurice had been executed for provoking
fights in jail. Irving, the agent from Team C turned in by the old lady and her
son, survived his incarceration. So did Choni Yeshi, the sole survivor of the
team parachuted into Amdo, and Bhusang, the only living member of the team
dropped at Markham in 1961. Two others remained in detention. Amdo Tsering, the
restive Muslim singleton who was supposed to collect dirt at Lop Nur, stayed
behind bars because of an unrepentant attitude. Grant, the lone survivor of
Team Y, was sickly and opted to stay in prison voluntarily. Not until 1996 did
both finally leave their cells.
Among the CIA advisers who served in India,
Harry Mustakos and T J Thompson, the latter would later become a world-renowned
parachute designer. In 1981, he returned to Charbatia on a CIA-sanctioned trip
to inspect the state of the ARC rigging facility he had helped establish two
decades earlier. “Not only was the facility in great shape,” he said, “but
there were still some of the Tibetan riggers I trained in 1963.” Among the
Indian veterans of the Tibet project, R & AW Secretary R N Kao rode Indira
Gandhi’s skirt to great influence. In the wake of the successful Bangladesh
operation, as well as the assistance R & AW lent Mrs Gandhi during her 1969
political struggles against party stalwarts, Kao was elevated to the additional
post of Cabinet Secretary (Security). When Gandhi briefly fell from power in
1977, her intelligence supremo was shunted aside, only to return as National
Security Adviser when she regained power three years later (B N Mullick was
then still functioning as the DGS). Although the Tibet operation was downgraded
during his watch and with his concurrence, Kao would later disingenuously lay blame
solely on the US. “The Tibetans were looking for somebody to hold their finger,”
he later commented, “and the Americans dropped them like a hot potato.” Laloo
Grewal, the first ARC Manager at Charbatia, went on to become Vice Chief of
Staff of the IAF. Maj Gen S.S. Uban retired as Inspector-General of the SFF in
January 1973. A deeply religious man, Uban delved into various esoteric beliefs.
More than anything, he became a devotee of Baba Onkarnath, a popular Bengali
mystic whose prophecies, say followers, are invariably accurate. During one
sitting with Onkarnath, Uban claims that his guru predicted the Bangladesh war
a year in advance. On another occasion, Uban was present when the seer was
asked whether Tibet would become free. Yes, said Onkarnath confidently, Tibet
would gain its independence. His audience, eager for details, pressed the
Bengali for details as to when liberation would take place. To this, the prophet
offered no insights. Among the Tibetan members of the CIA’s covert projects,
those assigned to the Special Centre in Hauz Khas continued working alongside
their Indian counterparts after the departure of John Bellingham. In 1975, they
attempted to deploy a singleton agent without US participation. Code-named ‘Yak,’
he was a native of Yatung (Yadong) near the Bhutan-India-China trijunction. On
three occasions over the next year, he was dispatched back to his hometown to collect
information from family-members. Suspected of embellishing his tales, Yak was
dropped from the Special Centre’s payroll. Apart from this brief flirtation
with running a bona fide agent, the Centre spent most of its time tasking and
debriefing Tibetan refugees going on pilgrimages or visiting family-members.
This continued until late 1992, at which time the Hauz Khas villa was closed
after almost three decades and Tibet operations began running out of R & AW
headquarters. Within the SFF, Jamba Kalden retired as its senior political
leader in 1977. Much had happened to his force since the Bangladesh operation.
Looking to patch over its earlier protests regarding OP MOUNTAIN EAGLE, the CIA
deployed two airborne advisers to Chakrata in the spring of 1975 to instruct
the Tibetans in jumping at high altitudes. Drop-zones in Ladakh, some as high
as 4,848 metres above sea level, were used for these exercises. Two years
later, one of the same advisers, Alex MacPherson, returned to India to test a
special high-altitude chute specially designed for SFF missions. Though exposed
to such expanded training, the SFF was seeing less action in the field. In
1974, the unit had been guarding the border near Nepal to stem an influx of
China-trained insurgents. Following Kathmandu’s suppression of Mustang,
however, it was feared that the SFF might stage reprisal forays against Nepal.
To prevent this, India pulled its Tibetan SFF combatants away from the border.
The following year, a second ruling prohibited the SFF from being posted within
10km of the India-Tibet frontier. This came after a series of unauthorised
incursions and cross-border shootings, including a four-hour firefight in
Ladakh during 1971 that resulted in two SFF fatalities.
By the late
1970s, the future of the SFF was no longer certain. With India-China tensions
easing somewhat, there was criticism that maintenance of a Tibetan combatant
force was an unnecessary expense. However, the SFF was soon given a new
mission: counter-terrorism. Because the Tibetans were foreigners, and therefore
did not have a direct stake in Indian communal politics, they were seen as an
ideal, objective counter-terrorist force. In 1977, R & AW Secretary Kao
deployed 500 SFF combatants to Sarsawa for possible action against rioters
during national elections. After the elections, which went off without major
incident, only 60 Tibetans were retained at Sarsawa for counter-terrorist
duties. Three years later, when Indira Gandhi (and Kao) returned to power, the
SFF’s war against terrorism received a major boost. On 1981, over 500 trainees,
mostly Gurkhas, were sent to Sarsawa for counter-terrorist instruction. Upon graduation,
they formed the SFF’s new Special Group (SG). Significantly, no Tibetans were
incorporated into this new group within the force. In 1982, the DGS launched
Project Sunray, under which it tasked a Colonel of the IA's 10 Para/Special
Forces to set up the SG with 250 officers and men—all Gurkhas and Indians—in
commando companies 55, 56 and 57. The SG was then housed in tents at the IAF’s Sarsawa
air base near Saharanpur. They underwent special counter-terror training in Israel for
over three weeks in 1983 in the recreated landscapes having busy streets, maze
of buildings and vehicles. This training came useful when the combatants of 56
Commando Company entered the Golden Temple at 10.30pm on June 6, 1984. The
Tibetan mainstream of the SFF, meanwhile, continued to see action closer to the
border. Companies from its eight Battalions under the control of the DGS
rotated along the entire frontier. In 1978, three additional Tibetan Battalions
were raised at Chakrata; under the operational control of the IA, these three Battalions
were posted to Ladakh, Sikkim, and Doomdoomah air base in Assam. Seventeen
members of the Ladakh-based Battallion were killed while fighting Pakistani
troops on the Siachen Glacier in 1986; as after the Bangladesh operation, there
were protests against Dharamsala for taking losses outside of the battle to
liberate the Tibetan homeland.
From Shadows To The Limelight
The SFF shot into the
limelight when Company Commander Nyima Tenzin, 51, of the 7 VIKAS Battalion,
attained martyrdom after stepping on an old mine (laid during the 1962 war),
while his subordinate, Tenzin Loden, 24, was critically injured in the same
explosion, and is currently undergoing treatment at the military hospital in
Ladakh.
Presently three VIKAS are each deployed in Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal
Pradesh, with more reinfoircements on the way to Ladakh as of now. Principal
mission of these Battalions is to act as the vanguard force that has been
tasked to occupy all the dominating heights throughout the northern, eastern
and southern portions (totalling less than 30) that are located not within the
India-controlled portions of real estate, but within the India-claimed portions
that hitherto were only subjected to periodic but seasonal patrolling by the IA
and ITBP.
Consequently,
for all intents and purposes, India has now pushed its controlled areas
(through 24/7 physical occupation) further eastwards out to a distance of
almost 5km (see the green line on the slide above), starting with the Chushul sector (the so-called pre-emptive
counter-occupation stratagem), just like the PLA had advanced westwards by
almost 8km from Finger-8 till Finger-4 in the northern bank of the Panggong Tso
Lake.
Future Roles & Missions
