[mobglob-discuss] New Book: The CIA in Tibet

[Macdonald Stainsby]

How the US listened in as the Soviets got the bomb

Into Tibet The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa by
Thomas Laird
Grov 364pp $26
Reviewed by James Rupert, Washington Post

In July 1950, a world focused on the Korean War took only brief note of Douglas
MacKiernan's singular death. "U.S. Consul, Fleeing China, Slain By Tibetan on
Watch for Bandits," read the headline of the lone front-page story in the New
York Times.

For more than a half-century, that's all the news on MacKiernan that his real
employer, the CIA, has wanted to see. The agency still classifies as secret his
identity as an officer (the first to be killed on duty) and his early Cold War
missions: on the Chinese-Soviet frontier, and in Tibet, as it desperately sought
independence from Mao's communist China.

Among the CIA's secret anti-communist wars its operations in Tibet have remained
particularly obscured. Now a book reveals more of this hidden history. Thomas
Laird, a photographer, journalist and 30-year Himalayas aficionado based in
Nepal, tells a gripping tale of MacKiernan's mission and helps illuminate what
the agency was doing in China at the birth of the Cold War. MacKiernan was a
technical-scientific wizard and during World War II he shoved his way into Army
intelligence. The Army sent him to Sinkiang, on northwestern China's border with
Soviet Central Asia, to run a weather station that predicted what skies
America's B-29 pilots would find while bombing Japan.

After the war, the newborn CIA sent MacKiernan back to Sinkiang under consular
cover. Now Soviet troops had seized part of that region and were mining uranium
for the weapons that would soon challenge America's atom-bomb monopoly. Riding
into the desert, MacKiernan got ethnic Kazakh tribesmen to help him investigate
what the Soviets were doing.

Laird argues that MacKiernan played an even more critical role, by burying
transmitters in Sinkiang's sands and using microphones to pinpoint the nuclear
blast that created the world's second nuclear power in August 1949. Within weeks
of the Soviet blast, Sinkiang was falling to Mao Zedong's Communists, and
MacKiernan was the only American left there, except for Frank Bessac, a fellow
CIA agent. Washington ordered the pair to flee across the Takla Makan Desert in
northern Tibet. As they left, MacKiernan handed gold to his Kazakh friends in
support of their rebellion against communist rule. News of that act got quickly
to Beijing, which proclaimed MacKiernan a spy.

Months later, as the bedraggled Americans stumbled toward the Tibetan border,
Washington was in chaos over Sen. Joseph McCarthy's charges that spies riddled
the State Department. Amid infighting, State officials dithered over notifying
Tibet of the Americans' arrival, and Tibetan frontier guards confronted them,
shooting MacKiernan dead.

So why is the CIA's operation in Tibet still such a secret? Digging up the Tibet
war risks upsetting the increasingly important Sino-U.S. relationship.

The Guardian Weekly 3-10-2002, page 34
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Macdonald Stainsby
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--
In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht