Nehru’s Folly and the ‘Loss’ of Tibet continues....

Douglas Mackiernan of Stoughton, Massachusetts, USA, a CIA agent, died at 2 PM on April 29th, 1950, at Shegar-Hunglung (33.40 degrees North, 87.20 degrees West) on the Tibet-Sinkiang border, accidentally shot by Tibetan border guards as his little group entered Tibet after crossing the Takla Makan Desert, the Kunlun Mountains and the Changthang plateau. With him died two White Russians, Stephan and Leonid.

The letter from the Tibetan government in Lhasa ordering them to allow safe passage to Mackiernan’s party had reached the border guards too late; in fact it had been sent too late by the concerned American officials in India. Two of the party were taken prisoner and taken to Lhasa; one was Frank Bessac, another American, technically an ex-agent, and Vasili Zvansov, another White Russian. Mackiernan, as the American Vice-Consul in Tihwa, Sinkiang, had been engaged in a mission to locate sources of uranium supplies in the Sinkiang-Kazakhstan border regions. The little party had started from Tihwa, near Urumchi, when the American Consulate there was vacated on September 27, 1949, after its having been officially closed since August 15th that year. Meanwhile, the CIA’s man in the American consulate in Kolkata (Calcutta), Frederick Latrash, the American ViceConsul, had been organising information-gathering activities in Tibet.

He had also been organizing the clearing of boulders from a flat piece of land near Lhasa to be used as an airstrip for flying in arms to the Tibetans when needed.

The CIA’s atomic intelligence activities in Tibet, planned with the involvement of the highest levels of the US government, may indeed have helped America in the Cold War, but they undoubtedly helped destroy Tibet, because the Chinese knew about Mackiernan’s activities.

His cover had been blown. What made it worse was that Frank Bessac of Lodi, California, formerly a contract agent with the OSS in China, the WW-II forerunner of the CIA, whose contract had expired in 1947, and now merely a Fulbright scholar of Central Asian cullture finding his way out of Sinkiang, took it upon himself to address the Tibetan authorities.

To be continued...