Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Adventure Book
Review: I thought this was a great adventure narrative, but it also included the political perspective as well. I had the pleasure of meeting the author in New Orleans and he has written a wonderful book. Buy it today.

Rating:
Summary: Excelllent book on cold war spying in China & Tibet
Review: If you are a fan of true spy stories you'll really like this book. The time is just after WWII, and China is about to go "Red", the USSR is building an atomic bomb and the US cold warriors are in country. Why did the state department abandon Tibet? This story gives us a lot of information that up until now has only been hearsay. When the USSR blew up their first bomb where did they get the U235? When did the USA know about it, and what were they doing to know more... read on.

Rating:
Summary: Excelllent book on cold war spying in China & Tibet
Review: If you are a fan of true spy stories you'll really like this book. The time is just after WWII, and China is about to go "Red", the USSR is building an atomic bomb and the US cold warriors are in country. Why did the state department abandon Tibet? This story gives us a lot of information that up until now has only been hearsay. When the USSR blew up their first bomb where did they get the U235? When did the USA know about it, and what were they doing to know more... read on.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid, fascinating, fast moving history,
Review: This is an intelligent adventure story about an American agent, Douglas Mackiernan, who was stationed by the CIA at a remote diplomatic outpost in north China in the late 1940s. Nominally he was a State Department employee. In fact he was setting up seismic instruments intended to monitor and pinpoint the sites of Russian atomic bomb tests, which were evidently expected to occur a few hundred miles to the north in Russia. And did.

When Mao-Tse Tung took over China, Mackiernan was essentially cut off from an easy exit path. He had to trek out, and headed south toward Tibet, which was then still free -- the avenue to India and escape. To give you an idea of the difficulty of this journey, he began by purchasing from a nomad chieftain a train of camels and horses that were willing to eat meat. The little caravan was headed into lands so high, cold and barren that there would be no possibility for the animals to graze on grass. The men shot game daily to keep themselves and their pack animals fed.

The pack animals were carrying a radio for encoded communications with the CIA, gold and machine guns -- which begins to hint at some of the layers of complexity in this story. Suffice it to say this was an intelligence mission, not a boy scout trip, and it ended terribly for Mackiernan, who was shot to death near the Tibetan border, apparently by mistake.

The author is a photographer as well as a writer, with long experience in Asia. His ability to present richly visual, graphic pictures of this wildly beautiful and dangerous country, in words, makes the book a real pleasure to read.

He has probably researched the story as well as it can be researched. He found a good deal of material salted around in the National Archives, and he made use of the Freedom of Information Act insofar as possible. He has also extensively interviewed survivors of the trip, and Mackiernan's family. The story was first told in a Life Magazine article in the 1950s, but the author's re-telling is far more careful and better informed. All that said, it is a story about spies. Mackiernan was a deeply complicated man, as were his companions, and you have to make your own judgements, reading along, about who was who and what really happened. It is a hall of mirrors, really - but the author manages to convey this: Without directly contradicting his interviewees, he signals you when skepticism is in order.

One thing that comes through unambiguously is how GOOD these guys were. Scientifically and technically skillful, multilingual in many difficult languages and dialects, good with guns, good with horses, good at haggling - street smart and scholarly at the same time. Amazing, exotic Americans.

The book now and then turns into a polemic. The author seems eager to be outraged about this and that - the course of diplomatic history, American blunders, the China Lobby, McCarthyism, corruption, whatever. The heated exposition interrupts an otherwise clear narrative line, but not often, and you can kind of see it coming a skip a paragraph or two if necessary.

This is a splendid book, and I read it straight through over the Christmas holiday.

Rating:
Summary: too explicit.
Review: This is not a novel, I feel that the there is need for the author to elaborate as what they were actually saying to each other. Those are not true, and it slows down my reading. :)

Also he is very biased against Chinese government. For example, he wrote that during the Cultural Revolution, xx% tibet province monasteries were destroyed. Yea, it sounds horrible that so many were destroyed. However, he failed to mention that it was a wide spread phenomena through out China. By if you didn't know that, you would think that Chinese government did that particularly to destroy the tibet province culture which is not true at all.

So if you want to really understand the complex history of tibet province, I suggest that you read the book called The snow lion and the Dragon by Goldstein. That is a book that is not biased.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping spy tale with lucid acccount of the fall of Tibet
Review: This was a spectacularly interesting read. The Cold War begins and the first atomic spy is launched. The juxtaposition between atomic energy espionage and traditional Tibet is extremely charming. Laird spent at least 30 years in Asia based in the Himalayas and knows Tibetan culture well. The characters are well drawn and each exerts a special charm. Laird interviewed many of the principals and was able to translate the spirit of the person and the age into print. The fall of Tibet and the descriptions of the state it was in at the time are---by far---the most accurate and balanced I've ever read. Full marks for this one.

Rating:
Summary: Cold War Turns Hot
Review: Tom Laird has taken a tough subject, and one which the US Govt was very keen to keep under wraps, and given us human faces and new insights into the historical context of events that preceded the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tibet has continued to suffer under the Chinese, and the US Govt, as well as all the other governments of western europe, have not been able to respond in any meaningful way.

The research appears to have been arduous and painstaking. I think this will be an invaluable contribution to the understanding of Tibet's history and of our own activities in the post-WW2 period, when everything was either "Red" or "Red, White and Blue".

Rating:
Summary: A gripping Tale of Espionage.
Review: Written by an American who has lived most of his life in Tibet, settling there as an idealistic nineteen year old in 1972. This was 22-23 years after the events he claims happened. He provides photographs to verify the secret U. S. has kept, although this story was originally in LIFE Magazine in the Fifties.

In 1949-50, five Americans were sent to talk to the Dalai Lama six weeks before he escaped for his life. Only two survived the 2,000 mile trek, and one of those was shot by border guards as he attempted to escape into India. Kept "under wraps" for fifty years by our government as they were CIA agents on a spy mission, which may have precipitated China's invasion of Tibet. It's not certain the American Imperialists armed with machine guns and gold were actually spies, although they did gather Russian atomiic intelligence of the experiments (after America used the first one in 1948). Actually, they were there to establish diplomatic relations, just went about it the wrong way.

The old photographs provided by the Mackiernan family of Massachusetts show Stuart, Malcolm, and Duncan in their amateur "Radio House". This interest in spy apparatus apparently led to Douglas' involvement and death.

He touches on Lowell Thomas' expedition to Tibet in 1950 surmissing that he was there on behalf of Acheson and not as an independent broadcaster. In his book, SO LONG UNTIL TOMORROW, Lowell Thomas relates how many years earlier, he was the first American invited to this exquisitely beautiful and special place in what seemed to be a God-forsaken location. He broadcast the first radio show from Potala and Lhasa as his regular "on the road" newscast. Getting there was an ordeal because of the terrain; getting back down off these highest mountain range s in the world was even worse. When the animal carrying him fell, Lowell Thomas suffered broken bones which created severe pain and he had to be airlifted out to civilization.

He places a lot of blame on McCarthy and the State Department for what happened to the CIA agents. Some factual, even a female American spy in her parachute, but a lot of surmissing what might (or could have) happened. It is interesting to a person who thinks Tibet is Shangrala, and would make a good movie. Brad Pitt starred in SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET based on Harrer's book. I am thinking he no doubt had read H. Harrer's SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET (on which a movie was based) which was originally published in 1953. Harrer was only in his twenties when he spent this time during and after WWII in the 1940s. He observed that the Tibetans are a laughter-loving folk. Since he and his fellow traveler had let their hair and beards grow during the strenuous trek to the holy city, he noticed that, like all Mongols, the Tibetan men have almost no hair on their faces or bodies. Some of the peasants wear a pony tail, but most shave their heads.

Laird is working on a propaganda "history" with the Dalai Lama. It is my hope that he won't end up another Nick Berg for his dallying around with history.