The Dalai Lama's Great Escape

by Stephan Talty at Book Beast

Stephan Talty is the author of Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama’s Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero (594 pages, US$26) out this week from Crown. His last book was The Illustrious Dead.

This new book gives the fullest account yet of the Dalai Lama’s 1959 escape from Tibet and the CIA’s role. Author Stephan Talty says in the process the Tibetan leader lost a country but gained an international movement—and surprisingly a belief in Buddhism.

In the middle of a Saturday night in the spring of 1959, a phone rang on a quiet suburban block in Chevy Chase, Maryland. John Greaney mumbled an apology to his pregnant wife and reached for the nightstand. The clipped voice on the other end said that an “OpIm” had just come in and, after giving a few details, promptly hung up. Greaney sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas, wondering just what in God's name was going on.

Unknown to his neighbors, John Greaney was not the gray-faced government functionary he appeared to be. He was in fact the deputy chief of a small unit at the CIA known as the Tibet Task Force. It sounded dashing, but in fact the work of the five or six men that comprised the unit was so lacking in excitement that Greaney compared it to running an import-export firm. All the action was down the hall, where the Latin American group would soon be planning the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But beginning that Saturday, Tibet—through the story of the Dalai Lama 's great escape—was about to become famous.


The OpIm message—short for Operation Immediate, the second-highest category of urgency at the agency—came from a CIA-trained guerrilla in the desolate back-country of southern Tibet. Over that weekend, a series of messages from this guerrilla would make it clear that the Dalai Lama had fled from his summer palace in the capital of Lhasa and was heading for the Indian border. His people were in revolt behind him, fighting against better-armed and trained Chinese soldiers. In the next 17 days, thousands would die, tens of thousands would follow their spiritual leader to India, and Tibet as a global cause would be born.

Full piece and photos at Book Beast.