Bageant, Joe. "The CIA's Secret War in Tibet." Military History (Feb. 2004). [http://www.historynet.com/magazines/military_history/3025986.html] Bageant, Joe. "The CIA's Secret War in Tibet." Military History (Feb. 2004). [http://www.historynet.com/magazines/military_history/3025986.html]
"[T]he Tibetans did not simply let the Chinese roll over their country in 1951. For almost 20 years afterward they fought a long, bloody war of resistance.... [T]his largely unknown struggle ... got support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sponsored secret training camps and made arms and equipment drops to aid horse-mounted herdsmen against the bombers and artillery of the largest standing army on the planet."
Conboy, Kenneth, and
James Morrison. The CIA's Secret War in Tibet. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
According to Jonkers, AFIO WIN 16-02, 22 Apr. 2002, this book "contains stories and details of the operations by the CIA principals as well as Tibetan, Nepalese and Chinese (Taiwan) agents, and by Indian intelligence officers.... Reading will provide not only enlightenment about this part of the world and its peoples and cultures, but a view of the difficulty of resisting an occupying force, and the complexities of such an effort both internally and externally."
Rupert, Washington Post, 15 Sep. 2002, says that this "book is alive with the sitcom-style mishaps (and minor characters) that bedeviled the CIA as it tried to run a covert war in a land where its officers had almost never set foot." A reviewer in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 2002, calls this "a clear, well written, fascinating text, accompanied by many useful photographs and maps." Haines, Diplomatic History 28.3, finds this work "[d]ense with detail, dates, organizations, and people.... There is much useful information here on U.S.-Indian relations."
For Morgan, H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews, Jun. 2002, "one of the greatest strengths" of this book is its "detailed account of CIA collaboration with the Indian intelligence services in training and equipping Tibetan agents and special forces troops and in forming joint aerial and intelligence units.... This collaboration continued well into the 1970s and some of the programs that it sponsored ... continue into the present." Although the book "clearly describes the organization and execution of CIA operations," it "provides less detail about the higher level policy decisions affecting the CIA program."
Deane, Hugh. "The
Cold War in Tibet." Covert Action Information Bulletin 29 (Winter
1987): 48-50.
Petersen: "Critical account of CIA support for Tibetan rebels in the 1950s and 1960s."
Dunham, Mikel. Buddha's Warriors: The Story of the CIA-Backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Peake, Studies 49.4 (2005), notes that the author approaches his subject "from the point of view of the Tibetan participants." The story "is well told."
French,
Patrick. "A Secret War in Shangri-la." Electronic Telegraph,
14 Nov. 1998. [http:// www.telegraph.co.uk]
"Tenzing Sonam and his wife, Ritu Sarin, have made a remarkable documentary film for the BBC which reveals the work of the CIA in Tibet and shows how desperately the Tibetans fought to get rid of the Chinese. For the first time, retired CIA agents and Tibetan veterans have given a full account of Washington's secret war in the remote Himalayan Buddhist kingdom."
The documentary was shown on BBC1's "Everyman" program under the title of "Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet."
Hopkirk, Peter. Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet. New York: Kodansha/Globe, 1994. [pb]
Surveillant 3.6: The author "ends this history with the invasion of Tibet in 1950 by the Chinese Communists."
Return to Tibet Table of Contents
Return to Covert Action Table
of Contents