A Secret War On The Roof Of The World

Under the Kennedy administration, the CIA moved the covert program to Mustang, a remote kingdom in Nepal surrounded by China on three sides. The guerrillas ran hit-and-run operations into Tibet. In one of several key raids into Tibet during the early '60s, commandos ambushed a military convoy and made off with a bulging stash of bloodstained documents. Among the captured "work papers" were Beijing's plans to move many more troops into Tibet, and documents that provided the first concrete evidence of the Sino-Soviet rift. "It was one of the single greatest intelligence hauls in history," says Knaus, who recently published a book on Tibet called "Orphans of the Cold War." The Tibetans provided human intelligence and other important "insights into China's... early efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability," a former U.S. operative told NEWSWEEK.

By the mid-'60s, the Tibet operation was costing Washington $1.7 million a year, according to intelligence documents. That included $500,000 to support 2,100 guerrillas based in Nepal and $180,000 worth of "subsidy to the Dalai Lama." But it was at this time also that Washington became disillusioned with the operation, which had no hope of reversing the Chinese occupation, and scaled back. After the United States cut its support, Beijing pressured Nepal to close the Mustang camps. From his exile in Dharmsala, the Dalai Lama wanted it to end. In July 1974 he sent a 20-minute-long recorded message asking the fighters, now led by a CIA-trained Khampa named Wangdu, to surrender their weapons to local Nepalese authorities. Wangdu and a handful of bodyguards tried to escape and made their last stand against Nepalese soldiers only 20 miles from the Indian border. At nearly 18,000 feet, where the air is thin and a man can see forever, all but one died in a barrage of gunfire.

Wangdu's death marked the end of the CIA-trained guerrilla movement, but Chinese authorities have long memories. They heatedly opposed the Kosovo war, for instance, because they fear future U.S. intervention in their own separatist hot spots. As they fret about Taiwan, Xinjiang and, yes, even Tibet, they can't help but recall the secret war they fought four decades ago over the high Himalayas.

87 Years in Tibet