Narrating the Tibetan Resistance: The Lhamo Tsering Archive

Between 1960 and 1974, a Tibetan guerrilla army operated out of a base in the high-altitude region of Mustang in northern Nepal. Comprised mainly of fighters from Kham in eastern Tibet, it was supported initially by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and joined later by the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) as well as the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile. The Mustang Resistance Force fought a long-drawn and ultimately failed campaign against the Chinese forces occupying their homeland. In the subsequent decades, the history of this armed struggle has become a reminder of an anti-colonial politics that sits uneasily with the course taken by history. As anthropologist Carole McGranahan has argued, memories of the armed struggle were “arrested” in the Tibetan exile community to make way for the Buddhist-inflected non-violent opposition favoured by the Dalai Lama since the 1970s. Seen from a global perspective, as a CIA-supported struggle against a communist state, this appears as a reactionary episode in leftist histories of decolonisation in the Cold War era.

The visual and textual materials collected by Lhamo Tsering, who was formally chief of operations, during this period form a record of Tibetans’ struggle against Chinese colonialism. It provides an important counterpoint to mainstream histories of Tibetan and global anti-colonial struggles amid the historical convergences of the Cold War world. The archive—currently with filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam—includes classified documents, maps of Tibet, photographs from the CIA training camp in Colorado and the guerrilla camp in Mustang and various other materials, many produced by the CIA.

One of the most peculiar objects in the archive is a guerrilla handbook. Filling 400-odd pages of a ruled notebook, it contains hand-written instructions in Tibetan as well as detailed illustrations in pen, ink and watercolour. Different sections cover the use of grenades, parachuting and sabotage. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of Tibetans were trained in the United States of America by the CIA, at a secret location in the Rocky Mountains which they called “Dumra,” or “the Garden,” though it was officially known as Camp Hale. Many of these fighters were paradropped into Tibet on a series of missions and went on to play key roles in the Mustang Resistance Force. The guerrilla handbook is thought to be a means of translating the techniques they learned to be passed on to their fellow resistance fighters in Mustang. However, little else is currently known of who created the handbook. The uniform lines and shading appear to be the handiwork of a person with some degree of training in drawing. Technical drawing classes may have formed part of the training the fighters received from the CIA, but these skilfully-drawn lines also hint at the varied backgrounds and interests of the fighters.

While most of the drawings in the handbook are pragmatic and illustrative—more or less direct transmissions, one would imagine, of the fighters’ CIA training—a few gesture towards the resistance fighters’ Buddhist cosmologies. On one page, after a schematic illustration of an airdrop, appears a careful line drawing of a Garuda devouring a snake. A photograph from the archive shows a line of fighters watching a Tibetan Cham dance, with a dramatic mountain peak behind them. As Tenzing Sonam notes in the publication Shadow Circus, many of the fighters were monks before they joined the resistance and many returned to monasteries after the Mustang Resistance Force—abandoned by the CIA and wracked by factional infighting—disbanded in 1974. These materials from the resistance refuse the simplistic contemporary association of Tibetan Buddhism and non-violence, gesturing towards more complex realities.

The fighters were suspended between the Cold War intrigues of the mid-century and the CIA’s technoscientific war machine on the one hand and their Buddhist traditions and practices on the other. A report by Lhamo Tsering to the CIA—contained in the archive—shows the degree to which the fighters were dependent on CIA support for everything from food to clothing. And indeed, the final failure of the Tibetan resistance is often attributed to the withdrawal of CIA funding following the United States of America’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in 1972. However, in the same report, Lhamo Tsering describes a speech he delivered to teams about to undertake intelligence-gathering missions into Tibet that lays bare the stakes for the fighters and shows them struggling to make a future on the wrong side of history. Lhamo Tsering writes, in the idiom of mid-century anti-colonial movements, “I must tell you that your given task is by no means easy. It is indeed hard and risky, for it is the task of national liberation.”

Materials from the archive have been used in Sarin and Sonam’s 1999 documentary, The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet and, more recently, in a 2019 exhibition of the same name at S A V V Y Contemporary in Berlin. Lhamo Tsering also wrote a detailed history of the Mustang resistance, an eight-volume text titled The Struggle for National Liberation (translated in English simply as Resistance), which was published by the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamshala.

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All images are from the Lhamo Tsering Archive. Images courtesy of Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam.