Enter the Dragon: Chinese Invasion
of Tibet continues....

Lack of success was partly due to the fact that the Indian government was in appeasement mode with the Chinese, as part of Nehru's decided policy, and cross-border operations from India could not be mounted, thus increasing logistical and other practical difficulties. The first air insertion operation was mounted and coordinated from as far away as Okinawa.

There were also political hiccups on the American side; once when all operations against Communist countries were suspended for a while after a U-2 spy plane operating from East Pakistan was shot down on May 1, 1960, by the Russians near Sverdlovsk.

India’s later involvement after November 14, 1962, with Khampa resistance fighters, whose numbers had grown to some thousands in 1957-58, did not have any impact on the situation in Tibet. On the ground the Indian and CIA operations remained separate.

The original CIA project shifted its Tibetan coordination element out of India early in the 1960’s, to Mustang, a very remote Tibetan enclave in Nepal, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau along the Tibetan border. Nearly a thousand Khampa resistance fighters were assembled within Mustang. From here they carried out a few successful minor cross-border operations against the PLA. The last CIA supply airdrop into Mustang was carried out in
1965.

Nepal-China rapprochement after King Birendra became the ruler and Chinese aid to Nepal included the string attached that the Mustang Tibetan rebel operation had to be terminated by Nepal. There had been a serious internal problem within the CIA-supported Tibetan resistance at Mustang.

The appointed leader, Baba Gen Yeshi, a former monk from Bathang in Kham, proved to be a very corrupt man, and eventually a traitor to their cause. He had built some following within the fighting group, and thus had some loyalists within the Mustang Khampas. After the 1969 Nixon-Mao meeting, CIA support to the Tibetan rebel cause was shut down in 1971 as part of American government policy.

To be continued....