The Dalai Lama's Secret and Other Reporting Adventures: Stories from a Cold War Correspondent

3. Killing the Long-Haired Lama

20 3 KILLING THE LONG-HAIRED LAMA the cables from london were angry. the first one came in the wee hours of the morning of Saturday, March 21, 1959. The overnight messenger who dozed in the New Delhi bureau of the Associated Press received a phone call from the Indian government communications office, and he pedaled his bicycle over to Eastern Court to pick up the cable. Then he woke Rangaswamy Satakopan, the AP’s invaluable reporter who lived with his wife and their nephew in rooms off one side of the office. Swamy read the cable and started calling Indian journalist friends, seeking information, but could get little at that hour. Another rocket from London, the control and relay point for most of the eastern hemisphere for the AP’s headquarters in New York. A “rocket” is an angry or unhappy message from headquarters to a foreign correspondent, typically asking why some news has not been reported. Cables were the only reliable form of communications, because telephone calls were slow, erratic, and often impossible, while other things such as Telex and fax were either nonexistent in South Asia or still unknown. Satakopan phoned Watson S. Sims, the AP bureau chief. Wally was responsible for dealing with a problem. Reuters, our main competition in providing news from South Asia to the world media, was reporting that Tibetans had risen in revolt against Chinese Communist troops stationed in Lhasa. There was fighting on “the roof of the world.” The AP had no reports on it. It was about 8 a.m. when I got to work at the AP’s ground-floor office at 19 Narendra Place. By then Satakopan had read the morning newspapers and tapped some of his numerous Indian government sources to produce a story. It was about as cursory as the Reuters one—more background and color on Tibet than facts on the fighting. As the morning wore on, we learned that initial public reports of the fight- Killing the Long-Haired Lama 21 ing had come from Darjeeling, a Himalayan hill station close to the mule trails that carried commerce out of Tibet. The Statesman had published one report, but, unfortunately, in an economy move the AP had recently quit paying a tipster in the newsroom of the newspaper’s Delhi edition to alert us to such stories the night before they were published. Reuters was tied into India’s national news agency, from which it had learned of the Tibetan uprising, while the AP lacked any domestic news agency access. We had a stringer in Darjeeling, but he was hard to reach and only mailed in occasional feature stories. At the question period that opened Parliament at noon, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a brief statement about fighting in Lhasa. India had inherited the old British Indian consulate there and maintained a small staff 22 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures with a telegraph line and a radio transmitter. Nehru cautiously said little, but this was obviously a major news story. There had been vague reports of guerrilla resistance since a few years after China invaded Tibet in the autumn of 1950, snuffing out almost four decades of de facto independence. Nehru’s government, reluctant to let anything mar its relations with China, had tried to play down the reports reaching northeastern India. It even secretly stopped cables about the resistance sent to the Daily Telegraph in London by George Patterson. George, a British resident in Darjeeling who had once been a Scottish missionary in eastern Tibet for a small evangelical Christian sect, still had good Tibetan connections. But now the reports of trouble in Tibet could not be ignored. The world wanted to know more about what was going on in the mysterious, alluring land ruled by Red China, as it was then known in the West. Only three weeks earlier, on February 27, I had arrived in New Delhi to begin my career as an AP foreign correspondent. I was still learning my way around the Indian capital, working with Wally Sims, for the next two years the best boss of my entire journalism career, and with Swamy Satakopan, a wise and generous counselor. I had little expectation of traveling for some time. But, after Nehru’s statement about the Lhasa situation, I was on that evening’s flight to Calcutta, en route to...