[A-List] US/China rivalries: history section

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

How the US listened in as the Soviets got the bomb

Into Tibet The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa
by Thomas Laird
Grov 364pp $26
Reviewed by James Rupert, Washington Post

In July 1950, a world focused on the Korean War took only brief note of
Douglas MacKiernan's singular death. "U.S. Consul, Fleeing China, Slain
By Tibetan on Watch for Bandits," read the headline of the lone
front-page story in the New York Times.

For more than a half-century, that's all the news on MacKiernan that his
real employer, the CIA, has wanted to see. The agency still classifies
as secret his identity as an officer (the first to be killed on duty)
and his early Cold War missions: on the Chinese-Soviet frontier, and in
Tibet, as it desperately sought independence from Mao's communist China.

Among the CIA's secret anti-communist wars its operations in Tibet have
remained particularly obscured. Now a book reveals more of this hidden
history. Thomas Laird, a photographer, journalist and 30-year Himalayas
aficionado based in Nepal, tells a gripping tale of MacKiernan's mission
and helps illuminate what the agency was doing in China at the birth of
the Cold War.
MacKiernan was a technical-scientific wizard and during World War II he
shoved his way into Army intelligence. The Army sent him to Sinkiang, on
northwestern China's border with Soviet Central Asia, to run a weather
station that predicted what skies America's B-29 pilots would find while
bombing Japan.

After the war, the newborn CIA sent MacKiernan back to Sinkiang under
consular cover. Now Soviet troops had seized part of that region and
were mining uranium for the weapons that would soon challenge America's
atom-bomb monopoly. Riding into the desert, MacKiernan got ethnic Kazakh
tribesmen to help him investigate what the Soviets were doing.

Laird argues that MacKiernan played an even more critical role, by
burying transmitters in Sinkiang's sands and using microphones to
pinpoint the nuclear blast that created the world's second nuclear power
in August 1949. Within weeks of the Soviet blast, Sinkiang was falling
to Mao Zedong's Communists, and MacKiernan was the only American left
there, except for Frank Bessac, a fellow CIA agent. Washington ordered
the pair to flee across the Takla Makan Desert in northern Tibet. As
they left, MacKiernan handed gold to his Kazakh friends in support of
their rebellion against communist rule. News of that act got quickly to
Beijing, which proclaimed MacKiernan a spy.

Months later, as the bedraggled Americans stumbled toward the Tibetan
border, Washington was in chaos over Sen. Joseph McCarthy's charges that
spies riddled the State Department. Amid infighting, State officials
dithered over notifying Tibet of the Americans' arrival, and Tibetan
frontier guards confronted them, shooting MacKiernan dead.

So why is the CIA's operation in Tibet still such a secret? Digging up
the Tibet war risks upsetting the increasingly important Sino-U.S.
relationship.

The Guardian Weekly 3-10-2002, page 34