Escape from the Land of Snows (28 page)

George Patterson was the first to reach Tezpur, forty miles south of the frontier region. The village lies on the Brahmaputra River, usually somnolent under the heat of northern India and bordered by dangerous, leech-filled swamps. It was prime tea-growing territory and had been invaded by a species unknown to the rich landscape for thousands of years: sunburned, portly British plantation owners, who congregated in the Station Club, drank Boodles British Gin, played billiards, and gossiped about the next hunt for Bengal tigers. As Patterson made preparations to go north,
further infuriating the Indian government, three other journalists arrived, including the legendary Noel Barber. Patterson was deeply annoyed. The chances of one or two men making their way through the “forbidden zone” of the military-only region were slim. With five (counting Patterson’s loyal servant), they were next to none. But Patterson and the others felt they had to try. Their foreign desks were baying for news of the Dalai Lama, and for Patterson and Barber, at least, there was a personal stake in getting the story of His Holiness out.

At nine o’clock in the evening, the journalists hopped in a car and headed out to meet some Indian guides who would spirit them through the North East Frontier Agency. The rendezvous spot was wild. “On the way the headlights of the car picked out the gleaming eyes and form of a tiger,” Patterson remembered, “disappearing into the jungle beside the road.” When they reached the meeting place, the guides learned the foreigners wanted to make the journey unarmed. The Indian men protested loudly. There were not only tigers in the jungles ahead, there were herds of wild elephants and leopards, not to mention the border guards, the Assam Rifles, who “would shoot at sight anything or anyone moving at night.” The arrival of the Dalai Lama had deep political ramifications for India, and anyone hiking through the outlawed zone would be considered a spy or a terrorist. Patterson and the others bid up the price to an astronomical 10 English pounds a head. Finally, the locals went off into the jungle to debate the matter. After a few minutes, the journalists realized the men had taken off, leaving them stranded.

Disheartened, the reporters made their way back to Tezpur, which had become, according to the
New Yorker
, “
briefly, the news capital of the world.” By mid-April, there were 200 journalists and photographers gathered there, and people from San Francisco to Marseilles were waking up to their daily newspaper to find bulletins
about Tibet on the front pages. The small outpost was becoming a rat’s nest of the world’s most highly paid newsmen. “Famous correspondents were sleeping on couches, billiard tables and wherever they could put up,” Patterson said. The newspaper war had begun in earnest: Deep-pocketed hacks had hired out Tezpur’s only two (barely working) taxis, for the exorbitant price of 50 rupees per day plus gas money, in part to have them on hand and in part to keep them away from their competitors. One desperate journalist “priced an elephant” as a possible substitute. The tea planters were offered outrageous sums to rent out their private planes, which they happily did. Nothing happened in Tezpur, ever, so to be ground zero in the story of the moment brought with it a gust of British life that the locals would never forget.

In fact, in the absence of real news coming out of Tibet, the coverage of the escape became near-deranged. One correspondent reported 100,000 dead in the Lhasa uprising, more people than the city held. Another wrote that the Dalai Lama’s psychic powers had caused him to fully insure the Norbulingka palace, and that as soon as His Holiness arrived in exile, he’d be handed a check for a cool one million dollars. The Dalai Lama was reported to be documenting his flight on a solid-gold Leica. Noel Barber contributed a story about an imaginary group of rebels who had acted as decoys, allowing His Holiness to escape: “Almost to a man …,” he reported, “the suicide squad were wiped out in a terrific battle astride the 15,000-foot Himalaya pass.” What the
Times of India
called the “maddest competition in journalistic history” caused foreign editors to ring up their correspondents four or five times a day, demanding fresh copy. “
Fiction is what they want,” one journalist said. “Pure fiction. Well, by God, fiction is what they’re going to get.”

Barber outdid them all. While waiting in Calcutta, he’d arranged to charter a plane to fly over southern Tibet and get
the world-exclusive picture of the Dalai Lama’s escape party. Remarkably, before he’d even gotten to Tezpur, the star correspondent had actually
filed a story
saying that he’d spotted His Holiness on the snow glaciers of the Himalayas—misidentifying the monk’s robes as yellow, not maroon—and written a wildly colorful description of his daring feat of airborne journalism. On the way to the tea plantation, Barber tormented the other journalists with his world scoop. “He gloated over the fact that there was nothing they could do about it now,” Patterson remembered. Now all Barber had to do was jump on a plane, find the escapees, and actually report the story he’d already written and filed.

But when Barber arrived in Tezpur, he was horrified to learn that the North East Frontier Agency was so secret and sensitive in the eyes of the Indian government that planes were not even allowed to fly over it. Anyone caught doing so faced five years in an Indian jail. None of the local pilots would take the job, even for a small fortune, and it was too late to cable the
Daily Mail
to tell them to kill the story. When the story ran, Barber faced prison for something he hadn’t actually done. The world’s most famous foreign correspondent had risked his career to get one of the greatest stories of the midcentury. And it would prove his undoing as a newspaperman.

The coverage of His Holiness’s escape became one of the legendary journalistic farces of the twentieth century. The press abandoned any semblance of truthfulness in its race for the scoop. But even as they drank themselves silly at Tezpur’s Paradise Hotel and made up scandalous fictions as they ran down to the telegraph office, Barber and his mates did a few things that proved important. They sketched out the idea that Tibet was being overwhelmed by a power it couldn’t hope to defeat. And they made it clear that this tragedy was happening to people very much like the men and women reading about it. The melodramatic way the journalists wrote about the
uprising and the escape, as inaccurate as it was, had the virtue of humanizing a people the world barely knew existed.

Tibet was no longer another world. It was like a lot of other places in 1959. Barber and his ilk brought it close.

The avalanche of press also indelibly stamped Tibet on the world’s consciousness, even as “Tibet” became—to borrow a term with a later vintage—almost virtual, a movement instead of a nation. The plight of the Tibetans caused a wave of sympathy around the world. The liberal Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and the right-wing journalist Lowell Thomas formed the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees (which some alleged was funded by the CIA, though no definitive proof ever emerged), and contributions poured in. Within a few years, twelve agencies—with home bases ranging from Liechtenstein to Australia—were assisting the Tibetan exiles. The Dalai Lama would appear in 1959 before the United Nations, which insisted that China respect Tibetans’ demands for self-determination, the first time a world body had ever put its weight behind the tiny nation. Norbu, the Dalai Lama’s brother who’d heard about the escape on the radio in his tiny New York apartment, saw the effects of all the attention. “It’s funny,” he said, “but before this thing nobody knew what a Tibetan was, or even what one looked like. They think the Tibetans are like the Chinese, but with a third eye.” The Dalai Lama’s face would soon appear on the cover of
Life
and
Time
(under the headline “The Escape That Rocked the Reds”), and his story was retold in hundreds of magazines and newspapers. The press, though it made up half the details of the journey across the Himalayas, had in a matter of a few weeks fused the story of Tibet and the image of the young man in the maroon robe.

Noel Barber later paid dearly for his fictionalized account of the Dalai Lama’s escape, which ran under the headline “Noel Barber
Moves Up to the ‘End of the Line’ as Dalai Lama Prepares for Next Lap to Freedom.” Soon after it ran, he left the
Daily Mail—
there were rumors that it was because of the fake story—and turned to writing books. The dashing foreign correspondent had vanished from the front pages. “
I don’t think he ever covered another major story,” one veteran journalist recalled. In his own way, Barber too was stripped of his position and all its glory.

But Tibet remained with Barber, as it did with so many who brushed up against the place. Even as he was spinning out exotic yarns, he turned out two books on the escape and its aftermath,
The Flight of the Dalai Lama
(1960) and
From the Land of Lost Content
(1969). The accounts were filled with barbs against the evils of communism, which was the lens through which most of the world saw the Dalai Lama’s escape. Barber wrote about China:

The Gurkha guards escorted His Holiness and the other refugees through the Indian jungle to Bomdila, a town a week’s march away. There he received a telegram from Nehru that assured him “
the people of India, who hold you in great veneration, will no doubt accord their traditional respect to your personage.” His Holiness spent ten days in Bomdila, recovering from the last traces of his
dysentery, and then was driven to a road camp called Foothills. His next stop would be Tezpur, where the world’s press awaited him.

As the Dalai Lama journeyed into the interior of India, thousands of Buddhists lined his route, crying “
Dalai Lama Ki Jai! Dalai Lama Zinda-bad!
” (“Hail to the Dalai Lama! Long live the Dalai Lama!”). At Tezpur, the by-now world-famous Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay, who six years earlier along with Edmund Hillary had been one of the first two climbers to summit Everest, stood waiting to greet His Holiness. He’d carefully avoided crossing into the special VIP section that held diplomats and luminaries and stood behind a wooden barricade, among the common people holding white scarves and praying. Norgay had come down from Darjeeling to greet the Dalai Lama because “
I was so worried about him.”

On April 18, the Dalai Lama emerged into the glare of the world press. As His Holiness appeared, monks blew conch shells and struck a note on brass gongs, the sound vibrating in the air as the young Dalai Lama, his face drawn but smiling broadly, walked ahead. Attendants held an enormous yellow, red, and white umbrella over his head, and six Brahmin priests chanted Sanskrit hymns. He looked “sick and fatigued,” according to the
Times of India
’s correspondent. “
He seemed very high strung,” observed Robert Thurman, an American Buddhist scholar, who met the Dalai Lama months later, “and did not radiate the sort of calm and massive presence that he is today, but he was very alert and aware of you.”

Two sealed letters from President Eisenhower were handed to him, congratulating him on his escape and pledging assistance. The next day, Eisenhower received a memo from Allen Dulles at the CIA. For Dulles, the escape proved not only that the Dalai Lama’s people wanted to fight but that “
the Tibetans, particularly the Khampas, Goloks and other tribes of East Tibet, are a fierce, brave
and warlike people. Battle in defense of their religion and the Dalai Lama is looked upon as a means of achieving merit toward the next reincarnation.” With the Dalai Lama safely in India, Dulles told the president, a new insurgency could be planned.

But His Holiness was not yet truly free. The irony of his exile was that Nehru was no more eager to have the Dalai Lama speaking out than Mao was. The Indians built a fourteen-foot barbed-wire fence around his bungalow in an Indian town called Mussoorie and kept all journalists and visitors away. His first public statement was actually written by bureaucrats in New Delhi.

As the Dalai Lama arrived at his final stop, an intriguing new theory of his escape was broadcast in London. “It is far more likely the Chinese allowed him to slip through,” stated the left-wing
New Statesman
magazine, “believing a reluctant Dalai Lama in their hands would be more trouble than a Dalai Lama in exile, whom they could make responsible for any troubles they have in Tibet.” The idea that the Chinese had wanted the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa was also circulating among Asian capitals and embassies in the weeks after the escape. The Chinese would later endorse the idea. From the state archives, a telegram emerged in which Mao ordered his bureaucrats in Lhasa to allow the Dalai Lama to escape, since his death would “inflame world opinion,” especially in Buddhist Asia and in India.

The theory made sense, on one level. Exiling the Dalai Lama would demoralize the Tibetan people and rob the resistance of its greatest rallying point. The clique around the young Panchen Lama seemed ready to become willing puppets of Peking and to back a far tougher line toward the rebels than the Dalai Lama had. And there was a record of dissatisfaction with His Holiness among the
Chinese leadership. In 1956, when the Dalai Lama was in India and deciding whether to return to Lhasa, Mao told an audience, “
You can’t have a husband and wife [relationship] simply by tying two people together. If a person no longer likes your place and wants to run away, let him go.… I will not be sad if we lose Dalai.” He reiterated the thought later, telling a member of Provincial and Municipal Party Secretaries that “
even if the DL doesn’t return, China will not sink into the sea.” Later, the Chinese leader Jiang Zemin even claimed that the PLA had had the Dalai Lama surrounded on a hill outside Lhasa but had let him go.