When Lisa Cathey was visiting her 76-year-old father, Clay, six years ago, she noticed a 'Free Tibet' bumper sticker on his golf cart. Thinking it odd, she asked him about it. She was stunned to find out he had been part of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Tibet Task Force in the late 1950s and 60s, a covert operation to train Tibetan guerillas in the United States and parachute them into their homeland, to fight the Chinese.
'I knew dad had been in the CIA but he never shared any information on his work until that day,' the 45-year-old film producer says.
Cathey was surprised again when she discovered few people knew about the operation, even though it ran for almost two decades (1956 to 1974) and yielded key intelligence on China. (In 1961, CIA-trained Tibetans bombed a Chinese army truck and bagged a satchel of classified documents. Among other revelations, they contained the first official evidence of the widespread famine that resulted from the agrarian reforms of the Great Leap Forward.)
Cathey was inspired to dig further and began work on an independent documentary, CIA in Tibet, which is due to be released next year.
While Cathey was gathering a team to make her film, another researcher, Belgian author Birgit van de Wijer, was interviewing Tibet Task Force veterans in Nepal. In 2007, van de Wijer recorded the stories of 48 former freedom fighters living in three settlement camps: Jampaling, Paljorling and Tashi Gaang, near Pokhara. The camps, paid for with money from the exiled Tibetan government and the CIA, were set up in the 70s to house the veterans following the end of the insurgency.
Now in their 60s, 70s and 80s, most of these men had been monks, farmers or nomads, with little or no education, before they took up arms. Many of them speak about having witnessed Chinese soldiers kill their family and friends or destroy their monastery.
In the years following 1950, when the Chinese asserted sovereignty over Tibet but accorded it a certain amount of autonomy, Tibetans found the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army to be polite and friendly. Gonchoe, a 74-year-old resident of Jampaling, tells van de Wijer: 'The first time the Chinese people came into my country, they were helping people and brought whatever we needed.'