Safe for democracy, p.37
Safe for Democracy, page 37
On September 15, 1960, the 5412 Group convened just before a National Security Council meeting. According to a brief record note, “As a result of the discussion the DCI said he would reorient his thinking to some extent” and come back with an alternative. The key would be to limit the visibility of Mustang, switching to caravans moving overland. This meant a loss of volume delivery, but the agency had little choice—at least CIA could use the stockpiles it had accumulated in Okinawa, Taiwan, and Thailand. Des FitzGerald and Roger McCarthy did the heavy lifting on planning. The agency also began monthly subsidies to the Dalai Lama totaling $1.7 million a year that continued into the 1960s. Just before the 1960 elections CIA’s General Cabell updated the Special Group on Tibet, adding comments about Cuba, another CIA project by then in full swing.
One veteran recalls that on Election Day, Far East chief FitzGerald learned of Eisenhower’s vow that Richard Nixon, if elected, would continue Circus. Instead the presidency went to John F. Kennedy. Evidence suggests officials handed the project over to the Kennedy transition team several weeks later, though Ike himself did not sit down with the president-elect until December 6. Eisenhower specifically recalls that Allen Dulles had already briefed Kennedy on a number of international matters, including the Far East. In fact, at a discussion with Gray and Eisenhower on the morning of November 25, “Mr. Dulles reported to the President on certain consultations he had had with respect to projected undertakings in Tibet and received further guidance.” Thus Eisenhower passed on the Tibetan secret war. Now Kennedy would decide.
The New Delhi locus of the Tibet effort raised both diplomatic and intelligence problems. The DO’s Near East Division, restive at the independence of officers in India who worked with the Tibetans, made trouble for them. That affected John Hoskins and Howard T. Bane, brought in to insulate Hoskins from the CIA station chief, now Harry Rositzke, who took a jaundiced view of Project Circus. Meanwhile John Kennedy’s ambassador to India would be Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Before leaving for his post on March 27, 1961, Galbraith discussed CIA operations in India with Richard Bissell. There was an element of irony in this meeting of two economists, one perhaps the foremost Keynesian, the other a man who had long resisted Keynesian arguments but ended up administering Keynesian-style foreign and military aid, first for the Marshall Plan, now for the CIA. Bissell showed Galbraith the list of projects, many of which bothered the ambassador. A couple of weeks earlier President Kennedy had authorized CIA airdrops to Mustang. Now Galbraith found them distressing.
Galbraith determined to stop these “spooky activities,” Tibet among them. The ambassador thought the partisans “deeply unhygienic tribesmen.” Galbraith ordered his country team to make a full investigation of CIA activities one of its first moves. He recalls that Harry Rositzke made little effort to defend the program. As for himself, the ambassador writes, “I was not troubled by an open mind. I was convinced that most of the projects proposed would be useless for their own anticommunist purposes and were capable, when known, of doing us great damage as well.”
Galbraith started from behind, as JFK had already approved supply flights, and a pair of them took place even as the new ambassador prepared to leave for New Delhi. One dropped equipment over Mustang, the other one more CIA team inside Tibet. But Galbraith persisted. He took his views to Washington in May 1961, where he found Kennedy subdued by CIA failure in Cuba. He argued with the president, Bobby Kennedy, and McGeorge Bundy, and put his objections to Dulles and Bissell, telling them Kennedy had been sympathetic to ending the project.
But Galbraith’s efforts were not wholly successful. He did not get Circus canceled. The partisans had achieved the status of an ally. Kennedy, the man who challenged Americans to do what they could for their country in the Cold War, could not abandon one of the few active resistance efforts against Mao Zedong. Ambassador Galbraith would be permitted to shut down CIA activities aimed at the Indian Communist Party, but the Tibetan program lasted somewhat longer. Kennedy did rule out further flights into Tibet.
Everything depended on Mustang. The camp, a mountain stronghold northwest of the Nepalese capital of Katmandu, began growing in late 1960. Under the new formula the NVDA fighters were to be gathered in companies, more formal units to escape the tribal and clan rivalries that had previously reduced their effectiveness. But when Tibetans learned their forces were gathering at Mustang, a migration from all over India began. That meant publicity and potential security breaches. CIA officers tried in vain to curtail the migration, though they had more success blocking access to the camp. Tibetan families settled nearby.
In October 1961 the NVDA achieved a great success. A raiding party led by the Indian-trained partisan Ragra, sent to disrupt traffic along the Amdo road, wiped out the Chinese in a light truck. Among the dead they found a deputy regimental commander. The bags of documents they captured, sixteen hundred pages in all, included reports on the 1959 Lhasa uprising, material on the Sino-Soviet split, and a file of issues of the “Bulletin of Activities of the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army” (Kung-tso T’ung-hsun), a secret journal for PLA commissars covering the period January to August 1961. A CIA officer personally retrieved the material and carried it to Washington, where Allen Dulles proudly exhibited the documents to the Special Group a month later. The political journal would be translated and opened to American scholars by the State Department in August 1963. This windfall is the reason Ray Cline records that Tibet “resulted in a bonanza of valuable substantive intelligence.”
Meanwhile the CIA sent political action specialist Howard Stone, last seen in Syria, to head a beefed-up station in Katmandu. The agency also created a new proprietary airline, Air Nepal. Long Air America flights from Bangkok to Mustang used this cover. Light planes did short-range work from Katmandu. Of this Galbraith comments, “I was especially disturbed by [this] particularly insane enterprise.” He believed that later, in conjunction with Bobby Kennedy, he finally cut the Nepalese connection.
A December 1961 incident demonstrated beyond doubt that the Tibet program continued. On the morning of December 7 deep snow and icy roads around Camp Hale delayed Don Cesare’s bus of Tibetans bound for Peterson Field. Rather than flying away at night, the Tibetans reached the field after dawn. Airfield employees saw the Globemaster sitting on the apron and strange men milling about. The local sheriff raced over with two deputies. To preserve secrecy, army soldiers held forty-seven Americans at gunpoint, including the sheriff, then told them it would be a federal crime to talk about it, all in the name of a dubious national security. The story made local radio the next morning. By afternoon it was in the Colorado Springs Gazette, and it stayed out of the New York Times only due to personal appeals from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Snafus like this one had terminated projects before, Indonesia being a case in point. The Peterson incident was even more serious in its way—the CIA is proscribed by law from operating inside the United States and has no authority to detain citizens to protect secrecy. The major flap in Washington ended Roger McCarthy’s tenure as chief of the task force. He was replaced by John Knaus, a former Camp Hale trainer and a sophisticated, well-spoken secret warrior who would write a history of the resistance. In that book Knaus fails to mention the Peterson incident at all.
With Mustang the pattern of operations changed completely. The virtual end of airdrops and Chinese dominance of the trails above Kalimpong made it impossible to wage large-scale operations. Meanwhile Mustang itself proved so remote that sustained forays were not possible. Gyen Yeshe replaced Gompo Tashi, his clumsy methods an annoyance. The resistance, reduced to less than seven thousand, then to less than two thousand, became a war of expeditions and patrols, with access to Tibet each time more difficult.
The CIA made several more air missions, but permissions became bureaucratic battles the secret warriors found as tough as fighting the PLA. The document scoop in 1961 won one of these battles, but CIA lost most of what it had gained after India’s 1962 border war with China, when W. Averell Harriman made a diplomatic tour of the region and sided with Galbraith. Not even Des FitzGerald, Jim Critchfield, and John Knaus, who were among his entourage, could turn Harriman aside. The diplomat finally backed FitzGerald’s fallback proposal, an alliance among CIA, Indian intelligence, and the Tibetans. As the Mustang force diminished, most of the partisans enlisted in the Indians’ border commando unit, which eventually far exceeded the resistance in size. Indian intelligence also set up a joint headquarters. A communications center was established at Orissa by 1963, and a combined headquarters in New Delhi by early 1964, all paid for by CIA. The Indian intelligence people met weekly with CIA and NVDA representatives. Indians were supposed to command, but they never permitted the partisans to do anything big. A virtual revolt among the Tibetans eventually resulted.
Washington’s secret warriors reoriented their program again. High-level talks with Gyen Yeshe and senior leaders in the summer of 1963 found CIA managers insisting that the Tibetans return to their country as a condition for support. Kennedy simply would not authorize deliveries inside neutral Nepal. The Tibetans countered with a proposal to split their strength among both places. A couple of months later William E. Colby, now the chief of the DO Far East Division, carried a fresh proposal to the Special Group. Colby argued for a switch to targeted raids aimed at specific objectives, warning of significant losses. In 1964 the Special Group approved a scheme to continue giving the Tibet issue a high international profile but with a reduced emphasis on military activity. Payments to the Dalai Lama continued, while for the most part the resistance received CIA cash only. A final weapons airdrop took place at Mustang in May 1965. But the leading edge of the CIA effort now shifted to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell University, where the agency sponsored Tibetans learning English, writing, and international relations in the hope they could become spokespersons for their cause.
In the end, Washington abandoned the Tibetans. By 1968 the CIA had told the Special Group that no current operations justified the Tibetan forces at Mustang. The few telephone taps the CIA wanted could easily be managed by a much smaller effort. The following year the secret warriors told the Tibetans that the United States would end its support. Another blow in 1969 was the retirement of Gyalo Thondup. With the U.S. rapprochement of 1972, Mao Zedong demanded an end to the charade. When the king of Nepal visited Beijing in November 1973, Mao concerted action (John Knaus is not convinced this was the case). The next year the Nepalese, with information from the disaffected Gyen Yeshi and arrangements with the PLA to patrol their side of the border, put ten thousand royal troops up against Mustang, including Gurkhas just as fierce as any Khampa. The top commander escaped with the NVDA archives and a small escort, only to be killed in a later ambush. Seven other Tibetan leaders surrendered at Mustang and sat in a Katmandu jail until pardoned by the king in 1981. It was the end of the Khampa rebellion.
From the beginning Washington knew that Tibet could never be more than a large-scale harassment of the People’s Republic of China. To achieve this the CIA promised liberation to the Tibetans, caught up in their hopes and dreams, who suffered prolonged agony in this war. Tibet also became a searing experience for CIA paramilitary experts, who learned the language and customs of the country and became emotionally attached to its struggle, only to have to close down the project later. They saw the darker side of the CIA’s intelligence “bonanza.” John Knaus concedes “a certain operational hubris” and acknowledges that for the secret warriors, preserving the project becomes almost an end in itself, endowing the covert action with momentum and excitement.
Troubled by questions about the CIA’s role, Knaus sought out the Dalai Lama, Gyalo Thondup, Lhamo Tsering, and other key Tibetans to ask whether the secret warriors had done the right thing. Knaus’s sense of relief when most of the Tibetans accepted the American actions is almost palpable. But in truth, despite the CIA’s intelligence successes in Tibet, America’s reputation as guarantor of national self-determination gained nothing from its refusal to support Tibetan nationalism on the international stage.
For Tibetans, more than a hundred thousand of whom became refugees from their country, there would be one mitigating factor—defeat took many years; they could adjust gradually to the trauma. In Cuba, the CIA’s next paramilitary disaster, trauma would be a matter of seventy-two hours of hell.
* This name, like our usage with the Directorate for Operations in place of that for Plans, is adopted here for consistency and to avoid confusion. As recounted in the last chapter, until 1959 Africa formed part of the assignment of this DO division and figured in its name, Near East and Africa Division, though the Indian subcontinent remained within its purview.
11
“Another Black Hole of Calcutta”
AT CIA HEADQUARTERS the New Year 1959 struck in a quite subdued fashion as a number of key people sat around a table awaiting news from Havana. Fletcher Prouty represented the Pentagon at this séance, which took place the day and the hour that Richard Bissell officially assumed the office of deputy director for operations. For months the agency had followed events in Cuba in growing fear of the disintegration of America’s cozy position there. Military dictator Fulgencio Batista had been unable to quell the rebellion that spread rapidly across the island, just ninety miles from U.S. shores. Batista’s main opponents, the socialist July 26th Movement of Fidel Castro, successful in every endeavor, appeared to be marching on Havana. Despite sanguine CIA analysts who argued Batista’s solid hold on power, President Eisenhower approved measures to forestall a Castro government in Cuba.
Ike’s mind, influenced by Florida businessman and dabbler in the secret world William D. Pawley, began focusing on anti-Castro schemes late in 1958. That November Pawley, who owned the Havana bus company, had founded the Cuban airline, and fancied himself an activist, hosted several persons, including CIA Western Hemisphere Division chief J. C. King, at his Miami home. No stranger to the agency, Pawley had helped in the Guatemala operation and participated in the Doolittle report. Now he advocated Batista’s resignation in favor of a Cuban leadership not as radical as Castro, and Eisenhower let him try. Pawley traveled to Havana in early December to feel out Cuban politicians. King and another CIA officer went along. But the moment had already passed. “In Cuba the rebel drive is retaining its momentum,” noted the president’s intelligence briefing for December 29. “Many high-ranking officers in the armed forces are said to be making preparations to leave.”
For its part the CIA became involved in at least four different plots. Colonel Prouty’s group at Quarters Eye on December 31, 1958, sat there because a U.S. aircraft, a Helio-Courier from Key West, flew a clandestine mission to Cuba. Washington wished to find Cubans to whom it could deliver arms, a “third force” non-Castroite movement. The mission required backstopping—in case of a problem, a spare Helio waited in Washington. A large C-54 had been summoned from Europe, and its cargo of weapons would be packed by the day after New Year’s. The flight went as planned, but no “third force” existed.
Central Intelligence Agency officers who had succumbed to the fervor of the anti-Batista revolution, such as William Caldwell, station chief when Castro’s movement first became entrenched, had given way to more hardened attitudes. The current chief of station, James Noel, sided with Ambassador Earl Smith, who stood solidly against Castro. The station warned of Batista’s vulnerability even as the CIA tried its eleventh-hour effort.
On December 23 Allen Dulles told the NSC that Batista’s days were numbered and that Cuban Communists could be expected in any Castro government. Gordon Gray watched as a December 30 meeting canvassed possibilities. Senior diplomats, more favorable toward Castro than Ambassador Smith, nevertheless would not oppose third-force efforts. Of course Batista knew his position had become untenable—days earlier a general strike had given a frightening illustration of how unpopular the dictator had become. The question preoccupying everyone was what Batista would now do. Prouty’s group on New Year’s Eve understandably sat in an atmosphere of expectancy.
In Havana that night Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar’s New Year’s party seemed unusually subdued. Guests ate arroz con pollo served by military aides in dress uniforms, a few drank champagne, most coffee. The atmosphere is captured well by a scene in the movie The Godfather, Part II. Until that day, December 31, 1958, Batista’s last in power, the guests had been the rich and powerful of Cuba. Some of the sixty visitors knew or suspected Batista might flee.
Castro’s irresistible forces were descending from the Sierra Maestra Mountains where the struggle had begun two years earlier. At first his guerrillas had been contained by the Cuban army. But Batista’s corrupt and oppressive dictatorship increasingly lost support. Cubans flocked to Castro’s July 26th Movement (M-26, or Movimiento del veinte-seis de julio), which took its name from the date of an unsuccessful revolt Castro had once led. The M-26 guerrillas spread out from the Sierra, creating fronts in several parts of Cuba. Those who cared could see the handwriting on the wall.
Batista, no fool, knew what portended. The dictator’s brief appearance at his reception came around midnight. He handed power to his commanders. Then Batista’s family and closest associates left for the airport. Aboard three airplanes the group took flight. Batista left the Camp Columbia base at 2:40 in the morning of January 1, 1959. David A. Phillips, now a part-time CIA undercover agent in Havana, sat in his backyard as the aircraft flew over. Phillips immediately informed superiors, some of whom at first did not believe the news.
