-Caveat Lector-
>From Boston Globe On-line
> BOOK REVIEW
> Absorbing look at CIA's role in Tibet
>
> By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff, 06/25/99
>
>
>
> <Picture>s a young CIA operations officer in 1958, John Kenneth Knaus was asked
> to lecture on Sino-Soviet relations to a group of men identified only as
> ''Asians'' at a covert site near Washington.
>
> But realizing that his audience was Tibetan ''trainee guerrillas,'' including a
> brother of the Dalai Lama, Knaus scrapped his ''standard semi-academic
> presentation'' in favor of what he hoped would be ''a useful exposition of how
> their fight was related to the free world's stand against communism.'' Useful or
> not, Knaus was invited to stay for a new year's celebration featuring Tibetan
> dumplings and ''lots of American beer.''
>
> Now retired from the CIA and an associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East
> Asian Research, Knaus recounts the story of the Tibetan resistance and the CIA's
> role, in an absorbing and valuable book, resisting the temptation to turn the
> story into a personal memoir.
>
> The CIA's involvement with the Tibetan resistance began in the early 1950s, just
> a few years after Mao Zedong's victory in China and the advance of his People's
> Liberation Army troops into Tibet. As the Korean War was winding down, Knaus
> writes, ''covert action against communism [had] attained an importance among the
> CIA's missions that would not be equalled until the Reagan administration.''
> Support for the Tibetan resistance ''was tailor-made for a covert action program
> designed to challenge communist consolidation.'' And Knaus is almost certainly
> right when he notes that ''if Americans had known about it, they certainly would
> have supported it.''
>
> The first air drop of arms and supplies to the Tibetan guerrillas was made in
> the early summer of 1958. By early 1959, Knaus writes, the Volunteer Freedom
> Fighters force controlled ''large pockets of central Tibet'' and had the Chinese
> forces ''definitely under siege.''
>
> There was now ''a full-scale commitment'' to support the Tibetan resistance and
> the CIA's training camp was moved from outside Washington to the more Tibet-like
> surroundings of a mountain pass near Aspen and Vail, Colo. Knaus was the
> political ''ghegen,'' teaching propaganda techniques, ''supplemented by
> practical instruction in the use of a portable mimeograph.''
>
> Quoting the officer then in charge of the CIA's China operations, Knaus writes
> that ''there was something so `special' about Tibet'' - including a romantic
> ''Shangri-La factor'' - that well into the early 1960s there was ''no opposition
> ... to whatever the CIA proposed in support of the resistance.''
>
> But already the tide was turning. In response to the early victories of the
> Tibetan guerrillas, China increased its forces in Tibet. Within a month after
> the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in March 1959, CIA Director Allen Dulles was reporting
> that ''the resistance boys had been badly trapped.'' The revolt in Lhasa had
> been crushed, and there seemed to be ''nothing more'' that the CIA could do at
> that time.
>
> Still, there was initial support for the operation from the Kennedy
> administration, for whom a newly created Special Frontier Force ''embodied the
> boldness and innovation of the New Frontier and the new administration's desire
> to meet the challenges of the Cold War in new ways.'' But John Kenneth
> Galbraith, the newly appointed ambassador to India, took ''an instant dislike''
> to what he called ''a particularly insane enterprise'' involving ''dissident and
> deeply unhygienic tribesmen.''
>
> By 1968, the United States cut back on its support for the guerrillas, and in
> one of the many curious details of this story, the last military operation of
> the New Frontier's SFF was with the Indian Army during the Bangladesh War of
> 1971.
>
> Citing officials involved in President Nixon's meetings with Chinese leaders in
> Beijing in February 1972, Knaus disputes the notion that Nixon agreed to drop
> support for the Tibetans. But even if ''Tibet had not been on the table in the
> Beijing talks,'' he writes, ''the era of official support for the Tibetan cause
> was over.''
>
> Knaus concludes that the ''basic flaw'' of the operation ''was not in the
> logistics but in the concept.'' The Tibetan guerrillas did not resemble the
> resistance fighters of Nazi-occupied Europe who ''benefitted from a greater
> military effort,'' nor did they operate from a ''secure territorial base'' as
> Mao's own forces had done before 1949.
>
> ''Orphans of the Cold War'' is an authoritative account of largely unknown
> events in a still-unresolved struggle. But it derives its intensity from the
> personal factor. Knaus recalls his relations with Gyalo Thondup, a brother of
> the Dalai Lama and the man ''most responsible for obtaining the CIA's support
> for the resistance.'' They shared a sense of ''the great danger and adverse
> odds'' faced by the guerrillas sent back into Tibet. ''They were the best and
> the bravest of their generation,'' Knaus writes, ''and we wept together when
> they were killed fighting alongside their countrymen.''
>
> This story ran on page D10 of the Boston Globe on 06/25/99.
> � Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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