CIA Tibetan program

Western Government secret intervention into Tibet began before the 1959 CIA supported insurrection. British MI6 agent Sidney Wignall, in his recent autobiography, reveals that he travelled to Tibet with John Harrop in 1955 posing as mountaineers. Captured by the Chinese authority, Wignell recalled that he was surprised to find two CIA agents were already under Chinese detention. Tibetan exiles trained in a CIA camp in Colorado clashed with Chinese forces in 1959 during the celebration of the Tibetan New Year, after which the 14th Dalai Lama, with CIA help, went into political exile in India. After 1959, the CIA trained Tibetan guerrillas and provided funds and weapons for the fight against China. However, the effort stopped when Richard Nixon decided to seek rapprochement with China in the early 1970s. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, in The CIA's Secret War in Tibet , reveal how the CIA encouraged Tibetan revolt against China — and eventually came to control its fledgling resistance movement. The New York Times reported on October 2, 1998 that the Dalai Lama's administration acknowledged that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960s from the CIA, but denied reports that the Tibetan leader benefited personally from an annual subsidy of $180,000. The money allocated for the resistance movement was spent on training volunteers and paying for guerrilla operations against the Chinese, the Tibetan government-in-exile said.