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145 15 ONE HORSE, MANY HORSES he looked so lonely, often standing off on the side of diplomatic cocktail parties by himself. I decided that, between conversations with various Indian officials and foreign diplomats who might yield some useful tidbits of information, I would go over and talk with him. He was the ambassador to India from the Mongolian People’s Republic. India was one of the few nations that had diplomatic relations with the big East Asian country as part of its friendship with the Soviet Union, which so tightly controlled Mongolia that most nations ignored its claim to an independent existence. Mongolia used India as one of the few countries to which it could send students to study English, in preparation for possible wider contacts with the outside world. There was little other business between the two nations on either side of China. The ambassador’s own English was none too smooth, but he seemed flattered to have someone willing to chat briefly with him. His contacts were too limited to provide any information of use to me, as I had suspected. He was, however, eager to praise Mongolia. I politely but vaguely said that I would like to visit his beautiful land some day—unaware that it had something of a complex about how many horses and other livestock it had. The second or third time that the ambassador and I went through a desultory dialogue, he said I should visit Mongolia. Is that possible? I asked. He could arrange a visa, he said. Suddenly, this sounded interesting. I knew that Mongolia had for decades been virtually a closed country only rarely accessible to Western journalists. The next morning I sent a cable to the AP foreign editor in New York, Ben Bassett, asking if he was interested in having me pursue this possibility. Yes, by all means, he responded. Although my responsibility was to cover news from South Asia, with Mongolia being considered part of the territory covered by the 146 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures AP bureau in the Soviet Union, no one from Moscow had been able to visit it for a very long time. If I could go from India, that would be a good opportunity for the AP to offer clients a fresh look at an isolated land. The next time I saw the ambassador at a cocktail party, sometime in the summer of 1963, I told him I would love to visit his country. He said he would try to arrange a visa, and he took my card that identified me as the AP bureau chief in Delhi. Some weeks later, he phoned. I should come by his embassy to fill out the paperwork, and the visa would be issued. During those intervening weeks, the AP had asked me to move from New Delhi to Moscow in early 1964. Bassett agreed that it would be best to try to delay the Mongolia trip until after I had arrived in Moscow. When I asked the ambassador about a delay, however, he said the arrangements were waiting for me in his capital, Ulan Bator. It was that autumn or maybe not at all. Go ahead, Bassett said. Bookstores in New Delhi had a few books on Mongolia that I eagerly began reading to acquire background. The only one that came close to discussing the contemporary country was Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, by Owen Lattimore. This American scholar on Mongolia and Chinese frontier regions had ranged that area in the 1920s. In describing Mongolia’s relationship with the Soviet Union in the 1930s, he invented the political meaning for the word “satellite,” the term applied to East European nations after World War II. Lattimore’s latest book was based on a 1961 return to Mongolia. The American Express office in Delhi found connections to Ulan Bator in the international airline guide. They booked me on an Aeroflot flight from Delhi to Tashkent in Soviet Central Asia and then another flight from Tashkent to Irkutsk in Siberia, connecting there to Ulan Bator. The flight from Tashkent to Irkutsk stopped in several places, including Karaganda. That sounded interesting because I knew Karaganda was a base for Soviet nuclear weapons testing. By the time I was scheduled to leave Delhi on November 23, four months after Monica and I were married, we had just learned that she was pregnant. She had no problem with my being...

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