The Dalai Lama and his eldest brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu were enmeshed with the CIA 8 years before 1959, it may well have been why China came down so harshly on the Tibetan people

Full article here:  https://tibetanwhoswho.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/thubten-norbu/

Excerpts:

Thubten Jigme Norbu, aka Taktser Rinpoche who has died aged 86, was the eldest brother of the Dalai Lama. 

he left Tibet in 1951 for the US under the sponsorship of a CIA-front organisation. Within a few years he was helping the Americans to promote covert guerrilla warfare against the occupation of his homeland.

Norbu and his brother were soon helping the CIA to recruit and train Khampa fighters, from the toughest Tibetan tribe, to be infiltrated into the borderlands of China. Norbu’s name appears in reports of secret training camps in the Colorado Rockies and on the Pacific island of Saipan.

He learned by heart almost 2,000 pages of scripture, which, as he would recall, “talked of both merciful and vengeful gods and treated of the exorcising of demons”.

Shaking off more Chinese minders, Norbu finally reached Lhasa late in 1950 and told his brother the dreadful story. With the news that Chinese troops were advancing, the young Dalai Lama withdrew to the Sikkim border, but eventually rejected overtures from the US to leave the country. While he returned to Lhasa, Norbu headed for Washington as guest of the CIA-funded Committee for Free Asia. His official biography describes him as “the first Tibetan to settle in the US”. A second elder brother of the Dalai Lama, Gyalo Thondup, followed soon after. By 1956, when the Dalai Lama visited India, both brothers were involved with a CIA project to set up a clandestine network of agents in Tibet. 

Norbu and his brother were soon helping the CIA to recruit and train Khampa fighters, from the toughest Tibetan tribe, to be infiltrated into the borderlands of China. Norbu’s name appears in reports of secret training camps in the Colorado Rockies and on the Pacific island of Saipan. The operations were unsuccessful, but the Beijing authorities became aware of the brothers’ role. Their suspicions of US involvement may have heightened the harsher policies adopted towards Tibet, especially after the Lhasa uprising and the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959.

He never spoke publicly about his transition from reincarnate lama to CIA trainer, and in 2000 deprecated his religious origins.