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

Thomas Laird (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2003

Into Tibet is the incredible story of a 1949-1950 American undercover expedition led by America's first atomic agent, Douglas S. Mackiernan -- a covert attempt to arm the Tibetans and to recognize Tibet's independence months before China invaded. Thomas Laird reveals how the clash between the State Department and the CIA, as well as unguided actions by field agents, hastened the Chinese invasion of Tibet. A gripping narrative of survival, courage, and intrigue among the nomads, princes, and warring armies of inner Asia, Into Tibet rewrites the accepted history behind the Chinese invasion of Tibet. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs are featured.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fought in the remote corners of the world, the cold war had many victims--among them the ancient kingdom of Tibet. China invaded that land in 1950, charging that Tibet was playing into the hands of enemy imperial powers. The Communist government may have had a point, to judge by Thomas Laird's reconstruction of a little-documented CIA mission into Tibet intended at least in part to keep the country's uranium stores from falling into Russian hands. Long disavowed and involving only a handful of agents, the mission also delivered arms to the Tibetan resistance--which, Laird maintains, the CIA funded and supplied until the 1970s, when it abandoned the Tibetan freedom fighters. The mission was a failure on all counts, and the surviving participants were carefully hidden away; half a century later, the CIA "cannot affirm or deny" the existence of leader Douglas Mackiernan, "shot dead on the borders of Tibet and Sinkiang," the first agent to die in a covert operation. Though sometimes disjointed, Laird's eye-opening account probes this forgotten episode, blunders and heroic moments alike. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Laird, a journalist for Asiaweek who has lived for many years in Nepal, traces the story of two CIA agents, Douglas Mackiernan and Frank Bessac, sent on an intelligence expedition to Tibet in 1949-1950, at the height of U.S. concern about the Soviet Union's atomic experiments and the spread of communism in China. Mackiernan (who was killed during the mission, the first undercover CIA agent to die in the line of duty) and Bessac, with several other cohorts, trekked through Tibet on foot, gathering atomic intelligence and establishing regional contacts. The mission was part of a U.S. attempt to arm Tibet, and Laird argues that the American presence may have precipitated China's invasion of the country, which the U.S. abruptly abandoned (cutting off covert funding) after establishing diplomatic relations with China in the 1970s. Focusing on the heart-stopping details of the expedition itself, Laird gives the now familiar story of callous CIA manipulation an absorbing twist. The need for lengthy historical context, however, results in a number of digressions on subjects such as the Tibetan earthquake of 1950 that disrupt an already meandering story and, in their brevity, are often simplistic. Further, much of the source material remains classified, forcing Laird to speculate a great deal. This (perhaps unavoidable) approach raises questions of whether Laird has the whole story. Although the adventures make for interesting reading, a lack of critical facts and focus undermine this account.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (February 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080213999X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802139993
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid, fascinating, fast moving history,, December 30, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CIA Admits Facts in This book are Correct: 2008, October 2, 2008

By 

Thomas Laird - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Into Tibet : The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Hardcover)

Since publication of this book some readers have wondered if I had gotten the story about Mackiernan right. Obviously I had to piece the facts together, from many sources, since when I reported this story CIA was still keeping all facts about Mackiernan classified.

Concerned readers should note that Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden admitted on September 16, 2008, that Douglas Mackiernan was a CIA agent, and was assigned to Sinkiang to spy on the Soviet's atomic program in Kazakhstan. Into Tibet was the first book to report those facts-- though many doubted it when the book was first published.

That debate is now over.CIA now admits I got this story right. See here: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/directors-remarks-at-lawac.html

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars fascinating but deeply flawed, August 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Into Tibet : The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Hardcover)

This books tells the story of America's weak, belated, and half-hearted attempt to prevent takeover of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang by Communist China. At the heart of this book, there is a fascinating and tragic tale of a CIA mission gone awry in the wilderness of central Asia. Intrepid agent Douglas MacKiernan was killed by Tibetan borderguards; the tale is reconstructed through Laird's exhaustive search through CIA and State Department archives, and from interviews with people who knew MacKiernan, and survivors of the journey, which took place on the eve of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. China long excused their invasion by saying it undertaken to foil Western Imperialists who had designs on Tibet. It's significant that Laird has shown in this book that American agents were in Tibet doing pretty much exactly what the Chinese thought they were doing. The pity is that they didn't do a better job of it. Herein lies one of the book's main flaws. Laird is obviously committed to the cause of a free Tibet, and detests China. Too much of the book is spent whining about America's lack of courage in defending Tibet from its invaders - (although he fails to explain why America should have had any interest in defending Tibet at all). An even larger problem Laird's glaringly inaccurate version of Inner Asian history. Reading the book, one comes away with the impression that Inner Mongolia was a country full of Mongolians and no Chinese that was ruled by a fellow named Prince De, and that Xinjiang was a country full of Kazaks and no Chinese ruled by a guy named Osman Bator. In fact, Inner Mongolia was part of Nationalist China, having been conquered by the armies of Qing Dynasty China, the Great Wall notwithstanding. Immigration of ethnic Chinese into Inner Mongolia has been taking place for about 300 years; it is not a Communist-inspired phenomena but was driven by expanding Chinese population and the consequent need for new land, and the inability of the Mongolians to defend their territory. This has been well described by Owen Lattimore, whom Laird lauds but appears not to have read. In Xinjiang, Laird's misrepresentation of history is even more disturbing, because he completely overlooks the Uighurs, an ethnic group living in Xinjiang that outnumbers the Kazaks by more than six to one. The Uighurs built city states in their oasis kingdoms of Kashgar, Khotan, Yarkand, and elsewhere, created a large and flourishing Buddhist, then later Islamic, culture, largely on the riches created by Silk Road trade. They never had a centralized government, but if anyone in Xinjiang should have an independent country, it's the Uighurs, simply because of their huge numbers and the enormous cultural gulf between them and Han Chinese. Besides these rather large misrepresenations of Inner Asian history, Laird's book is littered with many small mistakes that together give the impression that he has not traveled much in the region he writes about. For instance, he sadly comments that former Kazak pastures are now unoccupied, because the Kazaks who used to live there died or fled to exile abroad to escape the Chinese. Anyone who knows western China knows that good pasture is never left unused, and that someone MUST be using this pasture now, even if they're not decendents of the original inhabitants. There are dozens of other examples of small errors, or where Laird has uncritically accepted information provided by various independence movements without considering that such information might be biased. As a result, this book cannot stand as a work of history. Finally, as others have noted, there are many unanswered questions about MacKiernan's activities in Asia, and the truth cannot be known until more documents are declassified. To his credit, Laird does note where he has got evidence, where he is speculating, and where he just plain doesn't know. But given all the other factual problems in this book, I am unsure how much to believe even of the material that Laird says he is sure about. In the end, there is too little in this book that you can really get a hold of. It is only a great spy story that will probably be optioned by Hollywood but has little relation to reality.