CIA asset

 

“Dalai lama” is a book in Swedish about the Tibetan god-king. The author is Bertil Lintner, a Swedish foreign correspondent resident in Thailand. Lintner met and interviewed the Dalai Lama a couple of times.

While his book is about 100% pro-Tibetan/anti-Chinese, it´s not a pure hagiography of the exiled Tibetan leader. Quite the contrary, Lintner reveals that the peaceful Buddhist “socialist” was once a CIA asset, and that the CIA conducted a large-scale secret war against China using armed Tibetans as proxies. The Dalai Lama can´t have been unaware of the situation. Indeed, the escape of the Dalai Lama from Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959 was aided and abetted by the CIA.

When Lintner met the Dalai Lama for the first time in 1984, the Tibetan leader revealed that he originally wanted to go into exile in Burma (Myanmar), a predominantly Buddhist nation which at the time was neutral. However, the Burmese turned him down, so the Dalai Lama went to India instead. There is just one problem with this story: how on earth could the Dalai Lama´s traveling party on the run in Tibet get a message across to the Burmese government? The method used, or so Lintner believes, was radio communications with the CIA at Okinawa (then controlled by the United States). The Americans then radioed Rangoon. Officially, none of this happened, and the Dalai Lama supposedly sent a messenger on foot (or was it yak) to India to ask for asylum there – something Lintner believes can´t have happened, the whole thing being too risky. So the contacts with the Indian government probably also went through Okinawa.

The Dalai Lama had to call off the armed struggle in 1974 (I think), due to the thaw between the United States and China (the US needed China as an ally to contain the Soviet Union). It seems he successfully transitioned to a peace apostle and international lobbyist after that, and no longer calls for a fully independent Tibet, but the Chinese government obviously still see him as a potential threat to the “unity of China”.

Lintner wonders what will happen when the Dalai Lama passes away. He is 87 years old, and although he has stepped down from his political positions in the Tibetan exile government (based in McLeod Ganj close to Dharamshala in India), most Tibetans still see him as their rightful leader. Traditionally, the new Dalai Lama is appointed through a peculiar system in which a small boy is found by monks from the Geluk sect of Tibetan Buddhism and declared to be the reincarnation of the former Dalai Lama, but this means that it takes decades before the new Dalai Lama can start functioning as a real leader. Lintner fears that the Chinese Communist regime will “find” their own “Dalai Lama”, in effect setting up a kind of anti-Pope, something they already done with the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama may have tried to reform the system, perhaps proposing that the Tibetan government in exile becomes wholly secularized, but it´s possible that the traditional-minded Tibetans will refuse to accept such reforms.

As for China, the only Chinese Communist leader who has expressed any kind of understanding for the plight of Tibet is Hu Jintao, who seems to have been finally purged from the CCP leadership in 2022. Everything points to repression in Tibet becoming worse in the near future. Lintner speculates that the armed struggle may erupt again after the current Dalai Lama is gone, since an important Tibetan exile organization, the Tibetan Youth Congress, is more militant and demands full independence. I also wonder how the creeping neo-cold war between the PRC and the US will affect the Tibetan question. The Dalai Lama has met all US presidents since George Bush senior (except Donald Trump), so the United States clearly haven´t forgotten their old allies in this particular geopolitical theatre…

If Swedish is a language you can actually read, “Dalai lama” is a good introduction to modern Tibetan history and politics (the book is 170 pages short). And, of course, to the life of the 14^th Dalai Lama. One thing the book doesn´t describe very well are the actual religious beliefs of Tibetan Buddhism, but then, that´s an extremely complex topic and I don´t fault a foreign correspondent for not understanding them!

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