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

5. Behind the Himalayas

5 BEHIND THE HIMALAYAS the trail was narrow and twisting, often disappearing into areas of landslides, where travelers had to pick their way over loose stones on steep slopes high above the Kali Gandak River. It was so difficult and dangerous that even sure-footed mules that carried freight in other rugged parts of the Himalayas —in Tibet, Bhutan, India, and here in Nepal—could not use this trail. Only human porters carried cooking oil, matches, kerosene, and other products of the industrial world to people eking out near-subsistence livelihoods beyond where the river slashed between two of the world’s highest peaks. These barefoot men returned, their heavy packs rising high off their backs, with wool, rock salt, yak skins, and other products of the Tibetan frontier. Yet, despite the steepness and difficulty, there near the top of a deep gorge, at an uninhabited point where anyone entering the frontier region had to pass, was a surprise. Rounding a turn on the twisting trail, I came upon three men sitting on the ground by a little folding table. As surprised as I was, they jumped up and silently eyed me as I waved to them and continued on my way north toward Nepal’s border with Tibet. The men clearly were Tibetan, looking unlike the various Nepali ethnic groups of the region. Before rounding the next turn, I looked back. One of the men was scampering through the brush down the steep slope below their table. This was the first sign that I had found what I was looking for on a twoweek trek into a part of Nepal normally closed to foreigners: Tibetan guerrillas operating from an area that the royal government in the capital, Kathmandu, did not control. Perhaps the American Central Intelligence Agency was supporting Tibetans there for strikes across the Nepali border against Chinese Communists in their homeland. It was early October 1961. Two and a half years earlier an uprising against tightening Chinese control in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, had caused the Dalai Lama 41 42 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures to flee into exile in India. The Chinese had cracked down savagely on Tibetan resistance to their rule. The CIA-trained guerrillas who had been fighting inside Tibet had been killed, captured, or driven across the borders into India or Nepal . Now, some were reported to have moved into a remote, almost inaccessible area of Nepal. This was an area on the northern, Tibetan side of the main Himalayan peaks, the side less known than the southern slopes facing India. Walking into the region was one of the more arduous yet interesting of my trips into the mountains above India. I had ridden a mule into the eastern Himalayas of Bhutan in May 1960. The first trek on my own was a vacation expedition in October of that year, when I walked from the lush, 6,400-foot-high Kulu Valley through a rugged crack in the western Himalayas, the 14,009-foot Hampta La, to India’s Lahaul and Spiti areas of ethnic Tibetan Buddhists. A year later, I looked for another interesting vacation destination. I consulted Nepal’s ambassador to India, Nar Pratap Thapa. He had become a friend on my visits to Kathmandu when he was Nepal’s foreign secretary. He immediately had an idea. He described rumors about a Tibetan guerrilla force up the Kali Gandak near the Tibetan border. But, he said, his government did not have any real control of the area—as was true at the time of many remote parts of Nepal difficult of access—and was not sure what was going on there. Thapa suggested that I walk up there to see. Behind the Himalayas 43 But such frontier areas are closed to foreigners, I knew. Thapa had a way around that. He knew that King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was scheduled to make a state visit to China in early October, when I proposed to go trekking. Thapa’s successor as foreign secretary would accompany Mahendra. That meant a young man who had been Thapa’s protégé would be left in charge of the foreign office, and it was the foreign office that had to issue permits for foreigners to enter frontier areas. Thapa said he would send a note to the protégé telling him to give me...