Integrity Score 390
No Records Found
No Records Found
Nehru’s Folly and the ‘Loss’ of Tibet continues ..
This is in fact what could well have happened, had the American CIA had its way, of which the PRC was well aware. It was this factor, not often acknowledged in Indian writings on the subject, that kept the Chinese government suspicious of Indian motives and actions all the way up to October 1962. And they had good reason to, not so much because of the Indian motives, but because of the CIA’s actions.
During 1949-50 there was a secret American expedition to Tibet, in which only two of the five men who had set out survived. Douglas Seymour Mackiernan, one of the three men who died, is the CIA’s first operative to be ‘killed in the line of duty’ and is the first on the CIA’s Roll of Honour board at its HQ in Langley, Virginia, USA.
While the CIA’s involvement at such an early stage right at the beginning of the Cold War was primarily the collection of atomic intelligence, this was also the period of the beginning of the CIA’s involvement with Tibet and its fostering of the Tibetan resistance to the newly-arriving Chinese. While the US Government then and subsequently consistently denies that there were Americans in Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion, but the de-classification of US State Department documents has proved otherwise, even though the CIA’s documents will not be de-classified.
While the American public and the Indian government were unaware of these clandestine activities, the Chinese were fully aware of them, and this may well have influenced the timing of their invasion of Tibet in 1950.
To be continued...