It is appropriate on the fortieth anniversary of the Tibetan Revolt to take note of the basis for the extraordinary interest that the American people and their government have taken in this remote country. By March 10, 1959 the US Government had been involved in the affairs of Tibet for almost a decade. This relationship, which was to continue through 1974, carried commitments some of which were fulfilled and others from which our government walked away. The motivation for our involvement was mixed, and its legacy was one of both good will and disappointment. The accomplishments were similarly varied, ranging from dismal to those that had lasting value. The consequences of these actions taken over a period of twenty-five years a quarter of a century ago are s till with us today.

Prior to 1949, the US Government had taken only occasional and passing interest in Tibet. Since 1913 its Chinese suzerain had exercised no authority there, and the Tibetans had been managing their own affairs in splendid isolation under the benign eye of its friendly British India neighbor. Now a new and aggressive power was taking over in Beijing, capable of exercising full military and political control of an area it intended to reclaim as its own. Washington was forced to take a new inventory of what its policy concerning Tibet should be. Weighing the threat of contributing to the further dismemberment of China and the enormous logistical and political problems involved in providing effective support to the Tibetans against a genuine desire to help a staunchly anti-Communist country, the State Department temporized. It thereby avoided the domestic dilemma of appearing to be hastening the demise of the Nationalists' hold over mainland China when the Truman administration and especially Secretary of State Acheson were already under attack for "losing China." In New Delhi, closer to the scene, the embassy was more concerned about the threat of a Communist occupied Tibet. It warned that "if we make no effort to demonstrate a friendly interest in Tibet until a Communist-dominated regime consolidates its hold on China, the impression will be created among the Tibetans that we were moved only by a desire to contain Communism and not to develop cordial relations with the Tibetan people." The Embassy was right. Almost fifty years later both the Dalai Lama and his elder brother told me that they felt the United States had used the Tibet as a pawn in the Cold War and they still resented it. While the Tibetans' disillusionment is understandable, the record of American commitment and fulfillment of its pledges concerning Tibet is more complex.

Within weeks after Mao Zedong and his forces proclaimed their victory in Beijing, his military forces began moving troops into the Chinese provinces along the upper Yangtze valley where more than one half of the ethnic Tibetan population lives. On January 7, 1950 General Liu Bocheng announced that the Chinese Communist Army, having crushed resistance in these areas would now "liberate our compatriots in Tibet. 'At that time Mao was in Moscow engaged in the prolonged negotiations with Stalin. Secretary Acheson made one unsuccessful effort to coax Mao away from cementing an alliance with his Russian counterpart, but a new awesome dimension had entered into the Cold War.

Tibet was to assume new significance in US policy planning. Washington had discouraged the Tibetans from sending missions to Washington when the Chinese first announced their plans to "liberate "Tibet. But by June 1950, only a fortnight before the outbreak of the Korean War the State Department called in representatives of the British Embassy to discuss a proposal to " encourage and support Tibetan resistance to Communist control. "The Department acknowledged that the Chinese Communists had the military strength to capture Tibet but noted that the terrain favored guerrilla resistance. The plan was to have the Indians supply Tibetan guerrillas in secret, and have the British persuade their former wards to do so. The British declined to participate. Whatever the US might want to do about Tibet, it would have to do it alone. Its wartime ally no longer had the heart for endeavors affecting areas that were now only remembrances of an empire past. Two weeks after the North Korean invasion, Washington informed the Tibetans, who had come to New Delhi to solicit US aid to meet the pending Chinese invasion across the Yangtze, that the US was ready to assist in the procurement and financing of such military assistance -- if they obtained the Indian government's cooperation. The Tibetan negotiators had first to overcome the reluctance of some of their own government officials who were still hoping to buy time through negotiations and then persuade the Indians who were equally reluctant to alienate the Chinese. This diplomatic shadow boxing became academic when the Chinese troops announced on October 25 1950 that their troops were "advancing toward Tibet."

The defense of Tibet was pitifully unequal but mercifully short. By early November the Chinese had established their presence on the other side of the frontier established by their Manchu predecessors in 1727. They then paused and outlined their terms of surrender.

At the same time as Mao' s forces crossed the Yangtze into Tibet, his troops were pouring across the Yalu into North Korea, and the situation there had become grim. The prospect of World War III seemed real. The Dalai Lama appealed to the United Nations, but found no support there. The UN members were quite ready to accept the assurances of the Indian ambassador that Beijing was prepared to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Tibet situation. Disappointed, the Dalai Lama fled to a monastery in southern Tibet a few miles from the Indian border, while he sent negotiators to Beijing to work out the best possible deal to stave off the occupation of his capital.

Despite this bleak background, Washington had decided by January 1951 that it was time to take more active measures concerning Tibet, unilaterally if necessary, lest it " go by default, particularly in view of the UN action re Korea and also the need for checking Chi Commie advances where feasible. "The State Department informed its Ambassador in India, Loy Henderson that "every feasible effort should be made to hinder the Commie occupation "of Tibet and ensure that Tibet's case receive a hearing at the UN. It also pledged that the US government " still stands ready to extend some material assistance if appropriate means can be found for the expression of Tibetan resistance to aggression. This doughty statement of policy had been preceded a week earlier by a declaration to the British that the " United States, which was one of the early supporters of the principle of self-determination of peoples, believes that the Tibetan people had the same inherent right as any other to have the determining voice in its political destiny.

It went on the make the surprisingly sweeping judgment that "should developments warrant, consideration could be given to recognition of Tibet as an independent state." This was the background to a period of intense activity by the US government undertaken in the spring of 1951 and carried out that summer to convince the Dalai Lama that he should leave Tibet and seek asylum. Washington's objectives were both pragmatic and ideological. A few years ago Dean Rusk, who was in charge of US policy in the Far East in 1951, said that the Tibetans qualified under the Truman Doctrine of providing support to "free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. 'The Tibetan leader could provide a powerful symbol as a victim of Communist aggression and rallying point to his fellow Buddhists in Asia. This might cause the Chinese to back off from their plans to proceed with the occupation of Tibet. Above all, he said, it was US policy to block the Chinese Communist expansion wherever possible.

When the terms of the occupation agreement that the Dalai Lama's negotiators were forced to accept in May 1951 became known, the US embassy in India, fully backed by Washington, undertook a campaign to persuade the Dalai Lama to renounce the agreement and seek asylum abroad. Members of the Dalai Lama' s official and personal family shuttled across the border from the Indian border towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong carrying a series of US proposals to the young Tibetan ruler. These offers fell into three categories.

The first concerned the official position of the Dalai Lama and the legal status of Tibet with the consequences this would have for any appeals made to the United Nations. The second provided guarantees for the maintenance and political support of the Dalai Lama and his entourage while they remained in exile. The third was a pledge of support for the resistance hedged by what limitations Indian policy might impose.

These guarantees, while they were not cashed in at that time and were subsequently redefined, were to provide the substance of the relationship between the Tibetans and the US government for the following two decades.

The pledges concerning the status of the Dalai Lama and Tibet were variously expressed. In late spring of 1951 the US Ambassador in India, Loy Henderson, had sent word to the Dalai Lama that under no circumstance should he return to Lhasa, "until changes in the world situation would make it difficult 'for the Chinese Communists to take over Tibet. In the meantime he promised the Tibetan ruler that he could be "certain of finding a place of refuge in one of the friendly countries, including the United States, in the Western Hemisphere. "In June, Henderson assured one of the Dalai Lama's officials that, while the US government recognized Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, the Dalai Lama would be received in the United States as a " great religious leader and as leader of an autonomous state. "The following month the State Department reaffirmed to the Dalai Lama's brother that "the US government believes Tibet should not be compelled by duress to accept violation of its autonomy and the Tibetan people should enjoy the rights of self-determination commensurate with the autonomy Tibet has had for many years. "Furthermore, "the US will therefore indicate publicly its understanding of the position of the Dalai Lama as head of autonomous Tibet, and will endeavor to persuade other nations to take no action adverse to the position of the Dalai Lama as head of an autonomous Tibet. "US support was contingent upon the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, disavowing the agreement his negotiators had been coerced into signing, and continuing his opposition to Communist aggression. Implicit in the understanding was US support for his return to Tibet " at the earliest practical moment as head of an autonomous non-Communist country. "Further pledges along these lines were made that summer, but none was put in writing until Henderson at the shrewd Tibetans' insistence signed a letter spelling out that "an essential p art of our cooperation would be a public announcement by the United States that it supports the position of Your Holiness as head of an autonomous Tibet and would support your return to Tibet at the earliest practicable moment as head of an autonomous and non-Communist country."

George Patterson, the man who acted as interpreter in transmitting these messages, warned the American negotiators that the Tibetan language at that time made no distinction between the concepts of autonomy, self-determination and independence and terms like suzerainty and sovereignty were not in the Tibetan lexicon. The Tibetans may very well have heard what they wanted to hear, and their American interlocutors may well have been inexact in transmitting what was a still undefined US policy.

The Dalai Lama Returns to Tibet While the Ambassador' s signed promises were not delivered until after the Dalai Lama had returned to Lhasa, he had received these multiple oral assurances regarding his reception abroad in exile and accompanying promises of material support before he decided to return to Lhasa. Even after the Tibetan ruler was on his way back to his capital the Americans had sent further proposals, including one Wild West scheme involving Heinrich Harrer who would sweep across the border on a rescue mission to bring him to Bhutan. But the young man was determined to make an effort to find an accommodation with the Chinese that would preserve some form of the unique way of life that identified Tibet. For the next five years US relations with the Tibetans were put on hold. By mutual consent the US government would make no statements nor take any actions that would make it more difficult for the Dalai Lama to work out a modus vivendi with his new overlords. The Dalai Lama soon realized that his role was to be limited to that of a figurehead, but he would give it a try. In 1954 he went to Beijing where he was received with great ceremony and assured by Mao that the occupation agreement would be implemented only at a pace acceptable to the Tibetans. On his way back to Lhasa he found, however, that the Chinese had begun a concerted effort to impose their full control and Communist practices on his people, particularly in the Kham and Amdo (ethnic Tibetan) areas of the border provinces. Their efforts to confiscate weapons, the most highly prized possessions of the Khampas, produced open discontent and sabotage. They then turned to taxation, confiscation of large private and monastic properties, and to public humiliations and executions, with the monasteries as particular targets for attack. This began to evoke strong local protests. Khampa and Amdowa clan leaders briefed the Dalai Lama' s chief of staff on their plans to resist the Chinese by force when he passed through the region as part of the official party escorting the Dalai Lama back to Lhasa. The young man was returning to a country on the verge of active rebellion which presented him as a Buddhist ruler, with moral dilemmas from then on.

By the summer of 1956 local spontaneous uprisings were occurring throughout the Tibetan regions of the four Chinese border provinces and spreading across the Yangtze. The Chinese brought in reinforcements and increased their air and ground operations against their unruly Khampa subjects in a punitive campaign, culminating in the aerial bombing and destruction of the ancient monastery of Litang, built in 1580 and home to 5,000 monks with an arsenal of ancient rifles. This was to become the most frequently cited incident that caused the ordinary people, the monks and leaders of Kham to make common cause with the other clans in eastern Tibet. In Lhasa, the Dalai Lama was faced with an impossible quandary. His political authority had been reduced to that of a figurehead preventing him from blocking the Chinese policies and actions that were provoking these insurrections. But as the supreme religious authority of his people he was unable to condone the violent response these actions were evoking.

An invitation to visit India to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of Buddha in the autumn of 1956 seemed to offer a way out of this impossible situation. He would ask Nehru for asylum and carry on his fight for his country' s integrity from abroad. However, his host, who was also entertaining the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at that time, was quite unwilling to offer such hospitality. The Tibetan ruler again felt he had little choice but to return to his occupied capital with vague promises that the Chines e would delay their plans for reforms in Tibet.

US Support to the Resistance His two brothers argued strongly that the Dalai Lama not return, but accept the renewed offers of the Americans to support him in asylum abroad and continue the fight from there. While the Dalai Lama was unsuccessfully negotiating with Nehru for asylum, t hey had begun negotiations with the CIA for assistance to the growing resistance movement which was spreading westward from its original sites in eastern Tibet. For some months, Gyalo Thondup, the brother who lived in Darjeeling had been receiving emissaries from local leaders asking him to obtain the arms from abroad that they needed to continue their insurgency against the Chinese. He had been running a low key underground intelligence collection effort centered in Lhasa since he had fled from there in 1952. His objective was to inform the Indians and other friendly governments and the international press about Chinese occupation policies in Tibet. Now he was being asked to take on a more active role. He felt he had little choice. As the Dalai Lama' s brother, he had the prestige and contacts that the backwoods guerrilla leaders lacked. The Indians were interested only in supporting intelligence activities in Tibet, but representatives of the Chinese Nationalist government had showed up on Thondup 's doorstep in 1952, offering to back paramilitary operations in Tibet. Thondup decided that allying himself with the Nationalists would only validate Beijing's claims that the resistance movement was a foreign creation. In any event, he knew the Nationalists would turn to Washington for whatever assistance they might provide to the Tibetans, and he might just as well go to them directly to avoid the political baggage that would come from t he Taiwan connection. He therefore decided to approach the Americans to ask them to fulfill the commitments they had made five years earlier. A self-initiated resistance movement was now in action, and the Americans were ready to test it.

The Dalai Lama again wrestled with the dilemma of where he could best serve --by returning to Lhasa, counting on Zhou' s promises to delay the reforms that were stirring his people to rebellion or by exerting pressure from abroad. Gyalo Thondup had kept him informed of the US pledges of political support without spelling out the specific arrangements he had made with the CIA to train a pilot group of six men who would be sent back to confirm whether the resistance movements being organized in eastern Tibet warranted the arms they were requesting. The two brothers ended up going their separate ways, the Dalai Lama again returning to Lhasa to try to head off what he feared would be a tragedy while his two brothers sought support to prevent what they believed would otherwise be a massacre.

The six men selected for training by CIA were already on their way to Saipan. Their mission was to return to Tibet to provide first hand and timely reports by radio of what were unconfirmed and dated reports of active resistance activities. They were not being sent back to foment insurgency, nor to raise false expectations. The bitter lessons and recollections of Hungary were very much alive. The men were, however, qualified to instruct the local leaders in the use of modern weapons and in the tactics of guerrilla warfare if they found that the situation on the ground warranted the full support that the CIA was prepared to give.

In September 1957 the first team of two men were dropped onto dunes formed by the receding floodwaters of the T sangpo (upper Brahmaputra) River approximately sixty miles south of Lhasa. Their mission was to make their way to Lhasa and attempt to obtain a request from the Dalai Lama for the assistance that the US was willing to provide to the resistance. [his unrealistic request for an endorsement of the use of arms from a man whose whole identity is defined by opposition to violence was made at the insistence of the US State Department. It was made twice, but never given. The State Department nevertheless agreed that the CIA should proceed with the arms drops, since its intelligence reports confirmed that the Tibetans were carrying out active resistance efforts on their own. The second team dropped that autumn was sent to establish contact with the resistance groups then operating in the team leader's home area near Litang in Chinese province of Sichuan. The contact was made, and two of the men were killed in a battle with the Chinese. The leader escaped and made his way to the resistance headquarters then being set up in central Tibet five hundred miles away by his Uncle Gompo Tashi. It was then the summer of 1958, and by this time Gompo Tashi, a wealthy trader from the Kham area had pounded together a national movement from the various local groups that had been migrating toward central Tibet as they were driven by the Chinese from their home areas in the east. This was no easy task, as these local leaders were similar to Scottish clans, jealous of their local prerogatives, distrustful of their neighboring tribesmen, hostile to authority from what had been absentee Chinese officials and suspicious of their fellow Tibetan authorities in Lhasa. Gompo had accomplished what centuries of suspicions of authority and disdain for the emerging merchant chiefs like him h ad prevented. By that summer he had amassed a sizable force claiming 5,000 volunteers which had attained effective control over the area south of Lhasa to the Indian border. The CIA was in contact with Gompo through Gyalo Thondup, and it was to his group that the first two drops of arms were made, the first in July 1958 and the second in February 1959. the two drops contained 403 Lee Enfield rifles, 60 hand grenades, 20 machine guns, and 26,000 rounds of ammunition. These were the first installments of deliveries that were foreclosed when the Chinese overran this area following the Dalai Lama's escape to India the following March.

The Dalai Lama's decision to flee Lhasa in March 1959 was his own, and the planning and execution were carried out solely b y his advisors. The first team dropped into Tibet by CIA established contact with his escape party on the second day of their flight, and this was the first the CIA was aware of his departure. From then on, CIA was able to brief President Eisenhower on hi s daily progress to India. The Dalai Lama's request for asylum and the Indian Prime Minister's ready response were transmitted over this World War II agent transmitter by the two CIA trained agents cranking their hand generator. Soon after the Dalai Lama reached India, the Chinese moved sizable forces into the area formerly held by the guerrillas south of Lhasa and effectively eradicated the resistance forces in this area, forcing them into India. Gompo Tashi had brought with him information about the men he had recruited and left behind to conduct guerrilla operations in the territory northeast of his now overrun headquarters in Tibet. He advised that the local resistance forces could conduct ambushes along the Sichuan-Lhasa highway and disrupt traffic al on g this major supply route for the Chinese army. Gyalo Thondup was informed by his underground that similar resistance pockets were holding out along the other principal Chinese supply route, the highway northwest of Lhasa to Qinghai. But both needed help from Washington. The policy makers were receptive --diplomatic support for Tibet at the UN would be hollow if the resistance folded -- and the CIA was ready and eager to support the guerrillas. By then the training camp established to train these guerrillas at Camp Hale, Colorado had been in operation for over a year and trained men were ready to take on new missions. (Some Tibetans were trained at this site from 1958 to 1964.)

Between September 1959 and the spring of 1961 eight more teams of men were dropped to sites ranging from northeast of Lhasa to the Markham area on the East Side of the Yangtze. They were accompanied by some 35 flights carrying an average of 35,000 pounds of arms, ammunition, medicine, medicine, food and, by request, mimeograph machines and propaganda booklets written by the team members. The achievement of dropping men, arms and equipment into the middle of a hostile, isolated and physically forbidding area was a brilliant technical and logistical success. But from an operational point of view these missions were a failure. The concept was that the Tibetans would disperse and fight in small guerrilla bands and live off the countryside. In practice, they fought as they had for generations, accompanied by dependents and herds. The prospects of supplies from those great warehouses in the sky encouraged groups to band together, making them easy prey to the Chinese air and ground attack capabilities which had been seriously underestimated. The US had fulfilled one of the three major commitments it had made to the Tibetans, but the concept of sustaining a large-scale guerrilla movement by air had proven a painful failure. While these operations were being carried out in eastern Tibet, a parallel operation was carried out in western Tibet. In mid-1960 Gompo Tashi asserted that several thousand of his resistance army then working on road gangs in India and Sikkim were ready to return to the fight. He proposed that they regroup to operate inside Tibet opposite the Mustang kingdom of Nepal. The concept was that they would move secretly in increments of 300 men to Mustang from where they would establish guerrilla bases across the border inside Tibet. The key elements in the plan were that each increment would move only after the proceeding one had established itself in a secure area where they could be supplied by air and that this all be carried out with utmost secrecy. In practice, when the word got out, some 3,000 men moved with full newspaper coverage of this event. This began what was to be a 14-year problem. The men organized themselves into military units and carried out a series of raids along the Lhasa-Xinkiang highway. In the early 1 960s these were effective. One produced an unprecedented intelligence haul of highly classified and sensitive Chinese documents. But the guerrillas were unable to establish bases inside Tibet, and by the mid 60s the Chinese had begun to bring in greater forces which made these operations too costly. Politically their presence in Nepal was always a potential problem. The Mustang veterans were a valuable capability without a mission. After the Chinese-Indian border war in 1962, the Indians came to value this US supplied force as a complement to their border defense, and it was consequently maintained. But by 1969, the Indians had built their own Special Frontier Force and the Mustang group had outlived its operational utility. The Tibetan leaders were given notice that it was to be disbanded and the by then aging guerilla as were to be resettled. This was finally accomplished with considerable distress in 1974. The Tibetans believed that they had become casualties of the new Nixon policy toward China, but the reasons were operational, rather than political.

Political Support for the Dalai Lama.

When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, his representatives reminded the US government of the commitments it had made in 1951 and reaffirmed in 1956 when Washington, for its own reasons, was urging him to seek asylum abroad. While the operative circumstances had changed, the US was generally prepared to honor its earlier pledges.

It immediately began efforts to line up sponsors for bringing the Tibet case before the UN. Working behind the scenes to avoid the charge that this was a US Cold War initiative, three appropriate sponsors were recruited. The Irish, who had a history of religious persecution, the Malaysians, who, had fought their own battle against Communist insurgents, and the Thais as fellow Buddhists took up the cudgels. The State Department went full press to enlist support from allies throughout the world. (Surprisingly, our closest allies, both the British and the French, backed away on legalistic grounds.) And the services of one of America 's most distinguished international lawyers, Ernest A. Gross, were retained to represent the Tibetans, a mission he took on and performed for the next 20 years. The result was a resolution passed on October 21, 1959 deploring that the "fundamental human rights and freedoms of the people of Tibet have been denied them. "While the Tibetans wanted a resolution supporting their independence, there were too many questions concerning Tibet's international legal status to get such a resolution passed. But Washington had delivered what it could.

On February 29 1960 Secretary Herter publicly released a letter he had sent to the Dalai Lama pledging US support for the application of the principle of self-determination to the people of Tibet who "should have the determining voice in their own political destiny. "Herter thereby fulfilled another of the pledges made nine years earlier. Heritor's pledge was the basis for what was to be the high-water mark in the Tibetans ' claim for international recognition. On December 20, 1961 the UN General Assembly, with 56 yeas (including the previously recalcitrant British), 11 nays and 29 abstentions, renewed "its call for the cessation of practices which deprive the Tibetan people of their fundamental human rights and freedoms, including their right to self-determination. 'The new Kennedy administration had delivered on the pledges it and its predecessors had made.

International Representation

The pledges made by earlier US administrations to provide funds for the maintenance of the Dalai Lama and his staff were reaffirmed in 1959 and continued for the following 15 years. Supplementary funds were also provided so that he might open representational offices in New York, London and Geneva. The US government, while never able to grant the recognition of his government-in-exile that the Dalai Lama sought, was able to give him the means to establish his cause abroad. A small cadre of young Tibetans was trained at Cornell University to supplement the limited number of English speaking Tibetans with some knowledge of world affairs that had accompanied the Dalai Lama into exile. Funds were provided to establish a museum of the Tibetan art the refugees had brought with them when they fled Tibet. These examples of a threatened culture became the nucleus of a collection now displayed in Tibet House in New Delhi.

The funds for these activities were all terminated in 1974. It is common wisdom that this was done in response to requests made by the Chinese to President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. Kissinger denies any recollection that the Chinese made any such request, and his staff officers who sat in on the 1972 talks in Beijing, former Assistant Secretary Winston Lord and Ambassador John Holdridge, also deny that the US support of the Dalai Lama came up in these conversations. Although Tibet may not have been on the table in the Beijing talks, the era of official US support for the Tibetan cause was over. US policy had come full circle from the days in the early fifties when encouraging Tibetan resistance was part of an overall effort described by Dean Rusk as "doing anything we could to get in the way of the Chinese Communists." Two decades later Kissinger would assure President Nixon that " in plain terms we have become tacit allies" with Mao. The roles of the participants in the Cold War had so shifted that Kissinger reported to his chief". We are now in the extraordinary situation that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the People's Republic of China might well be closest to us in its global perceptions." There was no role for Tibet in this new equation.

The US government had lived up to its commitments, some in full and others in part, for almost two decades. That is a long time in foreign relations programs and policies, and this has left a lasting legacy, even though it is less than perfect. Fortunately after the US government left the Tibetans on their own, they went on to establish their cause in the conscience of the world. Nor has it been forgotten in Washington. This hearing today is proof of that. We may hope that this legacy may be finally harvested if the hopes for a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and the new Chinese leadership raised by Presidents Jiang and Clinton in Beijing last summer are finally realized.

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Last updated: 22-Mar-99