Though his eyes had lost their focus and his ears strained to catch words, when he spoke in his slow, measured English, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother was clear in the sentiments he wished to convey.
Gyalo Thondup, who died Saturday aged 97, evinced no doubt in his sense of the disappointment and betrayal he felt in failure of a U.S. intelligence operation that once promised to support Tibetan fighters in their battle for independence against occupation by Communist Chinese rule.
Speaking to RFA late last year from his hilltop home in Kalimpong, India, he dispensed with any pretense of diplomacy on the matter. “I don’t consider that the United States genuinely helped the Tibetan resistance force to gain independence,” he said. “If the United States and the Indian government had genuinely helped Tibet, the current situation of Tibet could be quite different,” he added.
Not all who participated in the nearly decade-long guerrilla campaign against China’s Communist forces agree with Thondup’s dark assessment of the foreign powers involved in the movement. Before his death in 1999, the late Lhamo Tsering, Gyalo Thondup’s right-hand man, told a documentary interviewer: “Whether America genuinely helped us or used us, it still supported our goal. I wasn’t sad when the funding stopped…. Whether we won or not, we confronted the Chinese.”
Over the past year, RFA has spoken with leaders and fighters of the Chushi Gangdruk, or “Four Rivers, Six Ranges,” guerrilla movement, including Thundop, who died aged 97 on Feb 8, 2025.
Some of these men, who are now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, also disagreed with Thundop’s sentiments.
But for all, the fight brought together the disparate traditional regions of Tibet to form, for the first time, a shared sense of unity that has ramifications for Tibetans many decades later.
That concept of Tibetanness forged by men from Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang fighting alongside one another is struggling to reach into modern Tibetan politics in exile today. Former fighters and analysts say the history is under threat of being forgotten, lost to the fissures of bickering factions, or never fully told.
When he recalled the days of the campaign, which began in earnest in 1959 and continued to 1974, Thondup was always somewhat cautious in describing the details of his involvement.
“I didn’t approach the CIA on my part,” he told RFA in November.
“The CIA asked my elder brother [Thubten Jigme Norbu] from Tokyo to come in to help him,” he said. “So the CIA brought my brother Norbu from Tokyo to India, and introduced the CIA to me, and the CIA came to India, and also asked me to introduce them to the Tibetan resistance fighters.”
“They said, they want to help for the independence of Tibet, they want to help us. So I have introduced the Tibetan resistance leader, Gompo Tashi.”
A more complete retelling of his involvement in his 2015 memoir “The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong” recounts painful recollections of the Chinese invasion, the doomed bravery of the Chushi Gangdruk and the political difficulties that beset the resistance.
In his book, Thondup freely admitted that Tibet in the mid-twentieth century was a society ripe for reform, but, at the same time, indisputably its own sovereignty where the authority of the Dalai Lama was deeply respected by all.
As a toddler, Thondup’s brother had been identified as the 14th incarnation of the Dalai Lama. The young leader was only in his teens when the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, began its deployments into Kham, a traditional region of Tibet on the southeast of the plateau that covers modern-day Chinese province of Sichuan.
At the time, Thondup was abroad. He moved to India to live in semi-exile in 1952 following stints in Taiwan, the U.S., and China, where he was sent to study as a teenager so that he might one day return to advise the Dalai Lama when he came of age. Instead, Thondup said, internal Tibetan politics kept him away. He was in India when the turmoil and resistance first began.
By 1954, the CIA began floating offers of assistance and Thondup came to serve as a chief interlocutor in the planning.
It took two more years for the offer of aid to turn into a solid plan. Beginning in the mid- 1950s, the CIA actively trained over 200 Tibetans involved with the resistance in various secret locations.
In 1958, the operation shifted to Camp Hale, Colorado, a backcountry wilderness in the southern Rocky Mountains that had previously been used as training grounds for U.S. soldiers. The secret site ran until 1964 and its precise location was only rediscovered in 2024, by an academic, a hiker and the last remaining CIA trainer who worked there.
RELATED STORIES
Gyalo Thondup, Dalai Lama’s older brother, dies aged 97
REVEALED: Inside the CIA’s (largely) secret role in the Tibetan resistance
EXPLAINED: Why choosing the Dalai Lama is not just a spiritual matter
Sonam Wangchuk was just a teenager when he was summoned by the Dalai Lama’s family to study in India in 1958. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was part of a secret mission.
They traveled by horseback and on foot for hundreds of miles, crossing through mountains and plains before finally reaching Kalimpong.
Once they arrived, Thondup arranged for Wangchuk and others to learn English privately.
Wangchuk had previously had no formal schooling. Before then, “we were farmers, busy working in the fields and grazing domestic animals,” he told RFA. “Our lives revolved around farming and taking care of animals.”
But the language lessons would soon give his young life a new purpose — one that, Wangchuk said, forged his sense of a united Tibet.
“Our spirit of Tibetanness was incredibly strong,” he recalled. “We had fighters from all three traditional regions of Tibet, and there was no sense of factionalism or regionalism as we see today. We were united as one Tibetan community, ready to sacrifice.”
Wangchuk arrived for training in the U.S. in 1961 and stayed for nine months. “At that time, I was quite young and immature,” he said, recalling how he rather enjoyed the training, despite its hardships. At one point, unaware of basic survival skills, he and others became sickened by eating wild mushrooms that ended with a trip to the hospital and a temporary pause in training.
“We were ready to sacrifice our life at any time and anywhere. No doubt,” Wangchuk said. “I’m not just joking or exaggerating. Sometimes when I think about those days, [I even wonder] ‘how did someone have that type of mentality?’ One hundred percent patriotic.”
At the same time, such unity was also solidifying back in Tibet. In 1958, the disparate grassroots resistance that had begun simmering in Kham nearly a decade earlier coalesced into the Chushi Gangdruk.
Tsering Dorjee, another veteran who was 23 when he arrived at Camp Hale in 1962, said he was approached by Gompo Tashi, the leader of the resistance fighters, when he was a young man just out of school in India. Like Wangchuk, he was recruited to serve as one of the nine Tibetan interpreters.
Now living in California, Dorjee recalled the secret trip that delivered him to Colorado all those years ago. “We flew to Thailand, then Okinawa, where we received U.S. Army clothing, leaving our own clothes behind,” he said. From there, they traveled to Denver, and finally rode to Camp Hale hidden in the back of a truck.
“Even my family didn’t know where I was going,” Dorjee said. “When I left Darjeeling for Delhi, I was on a public train with many others, but once we boarded the plane in Delhi, everything became highly classified.”
Like Wangchuk, he remembered how the trainees became “a united group, representing people from all across Tibet — Kham, Amdo, Utsang. Despite our different backgrounds, we were all determined to learn and serve our cause.”
Dorjee worked as an interpreter at Camp Hale for two years. Others were dropped into Nepal or India. Forty-nine fighters from the camp were directly dropped into Tibet over the course of the six years the training program went on. The plan was to have the fighters recruit and train locals on the ground, as well as to distribute guns, radios and other weapons the CIA dropped with them.
That plan had little success. Of the four dozen fighters who landed back in Tibet, only 12 reportedly survived. Two were captured by the Chinese, while others disappeared, with Tibetans believing they may have escaped to India.
Looking from across the decades, there seems to be no small measure of bitterness when Thondup assessed the project. In both his memoir and his interview, he deemed the idea doomed from the start.
“There were tens of thousands of Tibetan resistance fighters in different regions in Tibet, but the CIA’s weapons and arms were very limited,” he told RFA.
By Thondup’s estimates, some 40,000 fighters joined the cause, but the total material support only amounted to a few hundred units of equipment.
At times in the past, he has seemed remorseful of his role. In a previously unpublished interview with RFA in 2022, he reflected more broadly about the arc of his life and his legacy. Asked whether he regretted the operation, he took a long pause before replying: “Thousands of Tibetans have lost their lives ...I have often felt like I couldn’t help, which saddens me.”
Western historians, too, seem to largely agree that the aid was never intended to mount a true independence fight but rather to disrupt the Chinese.
John Kenneth Knaus, a former CIA trainer, disclosed that U.S. support for the Tibetan resistance movement “...arose in the context of American policy during the Cold War seeking to contain communism, often times through CIA covert operations.”
“Aiding Tibetans in their fight against communist China fit into this strategy,” he wrote in his book “Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival.”
All that, however, changed when American policy towards China started to take a turn in the early 1960s, eventually leading to the close of the Camp Hale training facility in 1964. Bruce Walker, the lone surviving CIA case officer at Camp Hale, told RFA in June 2024, that when “President Nixon went to China to meet Chairman Mao, one of the stipulations, I understand, was that the Chairman insisted that we terminate our [American] relationship with the Dalai Lama [Tibetan resistance].” Subsequently, the CIA cut off all support to the Tibetan resistance in 1973.
To be sure, the first blow came when Gompo Tashi, the charismatic Khampa trader who led the Chushi Gangdruk, died from wounds sustained during a battle with the PLA in 1964.
“It was a national tragedy,” said Wangchuk, who was in India when Tashi died. “He was a symbol of unity among the resistance fighters. There’s no doubt about that. All the resistance fighters from different groups respect him and follow[ed] his command. When he was no longer there, everybody turned into many groups with their own leaders. They did whatever they wanted to do.”
That fracturing has reached into the Tibetan community in exile’s politics and identity today, which makes reexamining and truly understanding the history and pan-national nature of the Tibetan resistance movement crucial, Carole McGranahan, an anthropologist who has studied and written extensively on the Tibetan resistance, told RFA.
“In terms of what it means to be united in exile, sometimes it’s hard for regional identities to coexist with a national identity,” McGranahan said.
“To understand that the resistance was something Tibetans from throughout Tibet participated in together – not without difficulties… but worked together – I think knowing that history can allow [the Tibetan] people to both appreciate it and get a new direction forward together in exile that allows for regional identities, regional histories, regional cultures to thrive alongside a pannational culture,” McGranhan added.
Thondup, for his part, told RFA: “My hope is that Tibetans work together in unity and harmony and make Tibet’s culture, Tibet’s situation known to the whole world, and without losing heart continue to find ways to overcome difficulties. So everyone, please work hard.”
