https://fortune.com/longform/dalai-lama-biography-an-extraordinary-life/

Behind the scenes of the Dalai Lama’s early history with the CIA

BY 

ALEXANDER NORMAN

February 25, 2020 12:00 AM EST

When Chairman Mao announced the “liberation” of Tibet as a top priority for the newly founded People’s Republic of China, the Dalai Lama was not yet 15 years old (although, counting by Tibet’s lunar calendar, he thought himself that age). The first troop incursions occurred at the end of 1949.

A year later, the Tibetan army was completely routed after a short campaign by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Following this, on Nov. 17, 1950, the Dalai Lama was proclaimed temporal leader of his country. A further six months on and the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet was signed by a delegation of Tibetan negotiators in Beijing. Up to that point, the only window on the outside world the Dalai Lama had had was a series of roughly weekly meetings over a period of around six months with the Austrian adventurer and alpinist Heinrich Harrer.

It is thus a remarkable irony that the Dalai Lama’s introduction to the modern world came from a former member of Hitler’s SS. It was Harrer who subsequently put the Dalai Lama’s brother in touch with officials at the U.S. embassy in India and who hatched a plot with the CIA to spirit the Dalai Lama out of Tibet if he would first publicly repudiate the agreement. This the Dalai Lama declined to do—on the grounds that it was not clear that America would give wholehearted support to Tibet if he did. It was nonetheless at this moment that the agency began to take a close interest in Tibet.

What follows is an excerpt from my book, THE DALAI LAMA: An Extraordinary Life (HMH Books & Media).