Military Digest: When CIA trained 260 Tibetans for guerrilla operations against Chinese occupation

Indian Express

06-07-2025

The 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama is also an apt occasion to remember the active role that the United States of America and its clandestine agencies played in helping train Tibetan resistance fighters following the Chinese occupation of the region in the 1950s.
Declassified documents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), curiously titled 'Covert Action in High Altitudes', throw much light on the entire gamut of the US involvement in Tibetan affairs from 1951 onwards. Although these documents are heavily redacted and key portions are not available, they reveal significant information about these activities.
It was in the spring of 1951 that Loy Henderson, the US Ambassador to India, began informal conversations with representatives of the Dalai Lama to explore the terms of his possible refuge outside Tibet. 'A variety of Hollywood-like schemes for flying or sneaking the Dalai Lama to safety outside Tibet were considered and discarded. The American Government was interested in having the Dalai Lama remove himself to a place such as Ceylon where he could rally his follow (fellow) Buddhists against the Chinese Communists,' the CIA document says.
The terms of American support were outlined in a letter which Ambassador Henderson sent to the Dalai Lama on September 17, 1951. The US government pledged appropriate financial support to him, his family, and a retinue of approximately 100 people, 'so long as mutually satisfactory purposes are being served'. The letter also said the US government regarded resistance to Communist encroachment in Tibet as a long-term problem and was prepared to 'support resistance now and in the future against Chinese aggression and to provide such material (support) as may be feasible'.
The CIA document says that in July 1952, the US promises of covert aid were shelved while the Dalai Lama attempted to reach an accommodation with the Chinese. 'By 1956, the Dalai Lama had despaired of his ability to provide effective political rule to his country, and he considered withdrawal from all secular life. His two brothers, Takster Rimpoche and Gyalo Thondup had traveled to Europe and the United States making inconclusive contacts with various governments from whom they sought aid,' read the documents.
Political events in Lhasa caused the CIA's time schedule for building resistance organisations inside Tibet to be scratched. 'On March 10, 1959 thousands of Tibetans, apparently suspicious of Chinese intentions, surrounded the Dalai Lama's palace in Lhasa and prevented him from going to a theatrical performance that the Chinese authorities had invited him to attend at their military headquarters. During the coming week, the break between the Chinese and the Tibetans worsened steadily, and on the night of March 19th the Dalai Lama, dressed in the rough clothes of a Khamba farmer, left his palace to begin a long and secret flight to asylum in India,' say the documents.
Meanwhile, that same year, CIA began training Tibetans at a training site which had been established in Colorado in the US. This training camp, known as 'Dumra' (garden spot) among the Tibetans, was to operate for the next five years. During that time, approximately 260 Tibetans were trained in this valley south of Leadville, where the early Colorado mining pioneers had prospected and the US Tenth Mountain Division had trained during World War II.
Simultaneously, the CIA also began encamping Tibetans in the Mustang region of Nepal. The declassified documents refer to 1,800 Tibetans who were encamped in the Mustang region.
'These men, most of them Khambas from eastern Tibet, had made their way from the Darjeeling region in early 1960 when they heard that a new guerrilla army was forming in Nepal. We had talked to the Tibetans in terms of a few hundred men for cross-border raids into Tibet, but more than 2,000 potential guerrillas jammed into Indian trains or came by foot to enlist and to demand arms. While it was supposed to be a secret operation, word got around very quickly,' the documents state.
In June 1962, CIA officers met with the Tibetan guerrilla leaders and made plans for reconnaissance teams to begin operating north of the Tsangpo River inside Tibet, supported from guerrilla bases dispersed throughout the Mustang peninsula. In Delhi, the then US Ambassador Kenneth Galbraith continued to voice objections to these guerrilla operations on the grounds that US involvement would become public knowledge.
In Washington, Acting Secretary George Ball questioned the long-term utility of these operations, fearing that they represented merely a pinprick rather than any serious harassment to the Chinese.
'By mid-November 1962, the Chinese were invading the northeast frontier of India in force, and there was no question but that the United States would fully support both the Tibetan resistance efforts that it had built,' the documents say.
Accordingly, training proceeded under the concept of building self-sufficient teams of three men each who were to be sent back into areas across Tibet from Lhasa to the Golmo region on the West China border. The agents were to resettle in these areas—assuming they found support among the population—and build local underground resistance units.
By June 1963, the 135 men at the Colorado site had completed their training and were ready for dispatch. The trainees began returning to India in groups of 40 in late November 1963.
It is not difficult to see that in these early CIA efforts to train Tibetan guerrillas lay the foundation blocks of the Special Frontier Force (SFF), comprising Tibetans, raised by India immediately after the 1962 war with China.