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CAMP HALE
The first indication that June 9 was going to be an out-of-the-ordinary Sunday was the group of Tibetan monks gathered on the side of Interstate 70 near the exit to Silverthorne.
They stood together, their maroon and orange robes fluttering in the slipstream of semi-trucks speeding past. One wore a pale khaki bucket hat; another wire glasses like the Dalai Lama’s. A woman with a long black ponytail seemed to be directing them. They looked exposed, a little delicate, even, on that roadside many miles from where dozens of other monks were gathering.
High in the mountains near Leadville, Tibetan leaders from around the world were meeting at Camp Hale, the military base north of Leadville where the 10th Mountain Division trained to fight Nazis in the Italian Alps and help liberate Europe during World War II. The remains of the camp sit at 9,200 feet in an alpine valley in the White River National Forest. It’s a cold, dry, windy climate Tibetans might favor.
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In 2022, President Joe Biden made Camp Hale a national monument, and a 4,700-word brief on the White House website explains why the long, milewide valley, where just a few concrete reminders of its history remain, is worthy of protection.
The site provides “veterans, their families, and other visitors with a place to learn the history of the 10th Mountain Division; to honor their sacrifices and contributions to our nation; and to experience firsthand the formidable environs that taught American soldiers to endure extreme mountain terrain, deep snow, and punishing cold,” the White House proclamation says. It also highlights the Ute ancestral lands on which the camp sits and the mining, construction and ski industry ties to the area. But it barely mentions the reason dozens of Tibetans were making their way there.
The monks were going to pay homage to a part of the camp’s history that’s been largely ignored, although it’s just as important as the others. It’s a key element of a human rights struggle that has continued since China invaded Tibet in 1949 and began a campaign to erase Tibetan identity. The brutal occupation continues today, with the U.S. State Department calling out ongoing human rights violations including censorship, religious restrictions, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and enforced disappearance.
Inside Tibet, considered an “autonomous region” in southern China that shares the Himalayas with Nepal, the estimated 6 million Tibetans have few ways to resist. But outside, members of the Tibetan diaspora totaling roughly 145,000 keep the struggle for freedom alive for themselves and those still inside. Many Tibetans believe one day they will get their country back. And the history of the dusty, high-altitude camp where Tibetan freedom fighters came to train is a vital symbol of resistance that gives many contemporary Tibetans hope.
That’s also why a University of Colorado professor and 30-year scholar of the Tibetan struggle went where seemingly no one else would go and resurrected the missing Camp Hale history, with the help of the Tibetan community, a CIA agent, a photograph, and a snowshoe trip last February.
A more complete history of the CIA-Tibet training program
Here is what the White House literature says about Tibetans at Camp Hale:
“In the late 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency trained various special mission teams, including nearly 170 Tibetans for operations in China against the communist government.”
But research conducted by the chair of the anthropology department at CU Boulder and Tibetan scholar Carole McGranahan tells a much richer story.
In 2009, McGranahan published a book called “Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War,” which details the Tibetan resistance and the social processes that have shaped it.
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10th Mountain Division soldiers gather in Colorado to celebrate the past, train for alpine battles
10th Mountain Division members are training at Camp Hale before this weekend’s Legacy Days, with parades and memorials at Ski Cooper and Vail
Read moreThe book draws from decades McGranahan spent studying the Tibetan struggle for independence — living with Tibetans in exile in Nepal, sneaking into Tibet in military convoys, building lasting relationships with expatriate communities and earning the trust of some of the highest-ranking members of the Tibetan government in exile.
This is how she describes the CIA-Tibet history at Camp Hale, which was known in Tibetan as “Dumra,” meaning garden.
Between 1958 and 1964, the CIA ran a secret training program for Tibetan soldiers. The men were fighting communist China, which had invaded Tibet in 1949. Shortly thereafter, everyday Tibetans — men and women, from shopkeepers to nomads — formed a citizen army to defend their land, culture and religious and political leader, the Dalai Lama. But they were vastly outnumbered by the Chinese and fighting using whatever outdated weapons they had on hand. The U.S. government had a goal of eliminating Cold War-era communism by any means, so when the Tibetans sought assistance from foreign governments, they found an eager partner in the U.S. In 1959, a partnership was born in which Tibetan soldiers came to Camp Hale to train with the CIA.
About 300 of these soldiers went through the training, according to interviews McGranahan conducted with Tibetans and former CIA. They rotated in and out in groups, learning surveillance and combat maneuvers. Lessons included radio transmission, parachuting and intelligence collecting, as well as clandestine exchange of written material and film, world history, geography, and small armament training with bazookas, grenades and rifles. All told, eight teams of Camp Hale-trained radio operators parachuted into Tibet, while others did undercover surveillance work in India and Nepal.
Along the way, the Americans and Tibetans became friends. Many of those relationships were lasting. Recently, 91-year-old Bruce Walker, the only Camp Hale CIA agent still living, playfully heckled 85-year-old Tsering Dorje, one of the few living Tibetan trainees, as Dorje, uncomfortable with public speaking, recounted their shared history. “Tell them about the beer we used to drink!” Walker interjected.
Many members of the guerrilla army known as Chushi Gangdruk died when they parachuted back into Tibet after training in Colorado. But they put up a good fight and had a crowning achievement.
It’s important in our struggle to be able to come here and remember their sacrifices.
— Lobsang Sangay, The first democratically elected leader of the Tibetan government
In 1959, they helped the then 23-year-old Dalai Lama escape to India. He still lives there, in Dharamsala, with thousands of Tibetans refugees who followed him.
Chushi Gangdruk survivors today might be compared to American soldiers who survived D-Day. But there’s a difference: China accomplished its invasion of Tibet.
Though Tibet is considered an autonomous region, China governs it with a repressive hand, including mass relocations from villages that Human Rights Watch says “drives risk of causing a devastating impact on Tibetan communities.”
The relocations also damage Tibetan culture and ways of life, “not least because most relocation programs in Tibet move former farmers and pastoralists to areas where they cannot practice their former livelihood and have no choice but to seek work as wage laborers in off-farm industries,” Human Rights Watch says.
An estimated 6 million Tibetans live inside its closed borders and another 145,000 live in exile, according to the Central Tibet Administration. This means they have no country, and to have no country is to have no freedom, said Sonam Tsering, who escaped Tibet as an 11-year-old in the 1980s and was among the wave who traveled to Camp Hale on June 9.
Tsering now lives in Minnesota, home to the second-largest Tibetan population in America. His uncle trained at Camp Hale and Tsering came to pay his respects. “The old generation sacrificed their lives for our country, and now we have a duty to commemorate what they did,” he said.
Many Tibetans hold on to the belief that they will one day be allowed to return to their country.
They include Lobsang Sangay, the first democratically elected leader of the Tibetan government in exile after the Dalai Lama stepped down in 2011, and a senior visiting fellow at Harvard Law School.
FIRST PHOTO: Thupten Jangchup, left, and Atruk Tseten are monks who were born in Tibet and escaped to India. Inside Tibet, Buddhist monasteries form a key part of the country’s national identity, says Free Tibet, a non-governmental organization that advocates for Tibetans’ rights. SECOND PHOTO: Khensur Rinpoche Lobsang Tsephel, center, leads a blessing during a ceremony commemorating Tibetan and CIA history at Camp Hale. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
“Is there a future for Tibetans? Of course,” he said in a phone interview. “One should always remain hopeful because there are so many examples of exiled people regaining their freedom. Jewish people lived in exile for 2,000 years before they settled. Eight empires collapsed in the 20th century. In the 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed. With so many cases where people fought for democracy or freedom and won, why not us?”
Both men agree the wait could be long. Yet McGranahan believes “the recognition of the Tibetan struggle by those in power can be energizing and knowing this history can provide context and inspiration for the future.”
Which explains her reaction to a quiet ceremony to acknowledge the CIA-Tibet program in 2010 that she told The Vail Daily she found “meaningful on all sorts of levels” as “the first acknowledgment of what happened” there, but found troubling all the same.
A history in need of an anchor
U.S. Sen. Mark Udall was the formal host of the ceremony, which honored the Tibetans trained as insurgents to conduct guerrilla operations against the Chinese. As reporter Scott Miller wrote in his account of the ceremony in The Vail Daily, the soldiers wore poison capsules around their necks so they could kill themselves if they were captured. The ceremony was the culmination of years of lobbying by the soldiers and their descendents for recognition of a crucial part of their history.
But it was invitation-only, so a relatively small gathering given its historical importance, McGranahan said.
The ceremony occurred next to the main Camp Hale parking lot, in an area where there were already interpretive signs and a picnic table. The monument exists mostly on open land, sagebrush covered meadows, and mountains still topped with snow in early summer. A few remnants of the buildings that housed the 10th Mountain Division remain, but any trace of the dozen or so buildings that had housed the CIA’s five-year covert training mission were wiped clean in 1973 to protect its secrecy, McGranahan said.
The highlight of the event was the unveiling of a plaque the forest service had commissioned to commemorate the site. The plaque is about the size of a 24-inch iMac and it’s nailed to a fence near a grove of aspens. Some Tibetans who’ve visited have carved messages into tree trunks. “But you go and see the plaque, and you’re like, ‘… uh, OK.’ And there’s nothing more,” McGranahan said. “Whereas you go to Vail Village, to the 10th Mountain Division exhibit in the Colorado Snowsports Museum, and there’s like 30 or 40 books on the 10th Mountain Division and Camp Hale, but not a single book about Camp Hale and Tibet.”
Tibetans around the world were grateful for the gesture of the plaque. It became a pilgrimage site for the Tibetan community, McGranahan said. They would visit it to make offerings, as they were unable to go to the site of the camp itself since it remained unknown. But following the ceremony, some attendees were dismayed.
“The CIA guys got in their rental cars with some of the Tibetan veterans,” McGranahan said. “They wanted to go to the site of the camp and see this place where they had lived and trained. But they just … they couldn’t find it. The CIA had eliminated all traces of the camp. And this was a huge disappointment to all of them. A huge source of distress.”
As a researcher, McGranahan’s job is to “factually document history, culture and politics,” and as an ethnographer it’s to “understand how these shape and impact people’s lives in meaningful ways,” she says. “Being a responsible scholar means doing this with the Tibetan community, rather than ‘about’ them.”
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So when she saw how the men were impacted by the erasure of their history, she made a silent vow. “I thought, I need to find where the camp was,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure how to find it. Camp Hale is such a vast area and, in what was perhaps a classic CIA maneuver, a retired officer had told me that it was located several valleys back from the main road. It turns out this isn’t true. The camp is hiding in plain sight. But, I set aside this goal, putting it on my to-do list for the future.”
And there it sat until last November.
She shared the story of her quest to find the camp with Tracy Walters, a Vail-based property manager and avid skier and cyclist. He knew Camp Hale well, so she sent him five photos she had of the CIA-Tibet camp.
Walters studied the photos and recognized a rock outcropping that seemed familiar. Then he started triangulating the photos and contemporary maps with satellite images, McGranahan said.
In February, the two snowshoed to where Walters estimated the site to be. McGranahan remembers crunching along, scanning the hillsides, filled with anticipation. They had printouts of the photos that they held up, trying to match the images to ridgelines. This was proving easier said than done and after a while they were ready to give up. “Then — you know how you turn a corner sometimes and there something is? We came around a corner and saw the landmark,” she said. “We’d hit the perfect angle to match up one of the photos.”
That evening, she emailed Walker a photo of herself holding up his photo to the hillside with the identifying feature and wrote: “Can you confirm that we found it?”
He wrote back the next morning saying, “You nailed it! And I took that photograph you are holding.”
McGranahan began calling her Tibetan friends and colleagues to share the information.
Honoring Camp Hale the right way
One of the first people McGranahan called was Lobsang Sangay.
He said, “You need to have a ceremony there,” and put her in touch with Kunchok Tenzin and Tenzin Norsang, president and vice president of Colorado Chushi Gangdruk. Together, they started planning a ceremony that would truly honor the Chushi Gangdruk and the ongoing Tibetan fight for freedom.
“Carole was so excited, so emotional because she’d found the site,” Sangay said. “My uncle had trained there and then fought in Tibet and died, so to find the actual location where it had started had major symbolic and emotional significance.”
“I have met many scholars, many experts with knowledge of a region. But when you meet them, they have this emotional disconnect,” he added. “Carole has both. Experience in the field and emotional connection.”
As word of McGranahan’s discovery got out, it reached Tibetan communities across Colorado and the world, family members of Chushi Gangdruk fighters, and people like Thutop Yothok, who is 70 and lives in Westminster.
He wanted to attend, he said, because “everything started from here. The U.S. trained people here. They learned to fight here. They also did immunization and other materials drops over Tibet during this period.”
Yothok was 10 when the Dalai Lama escaped Tibet with the help of Chushi Gangdruk soldiers. A month later, Yothok’s family followed. They had no escort across the hundreds of miles of barren landscape and bitter cold to the border of Nepal in the Himalayas, but they had hope.
That’s what McGranahan’s discovery and the ceremony will give others. Hope.
The June 9 ceremony was organized by the CU Department of Anthropology and CU’s Tibet Himalaya Initiative along with the Colorado Chushi Gangdruk and Vail Symposium.
Tibetans came from all over, including Colorado, Toronto, New York City, Santa Fe and Boston.
The monks from a monastery in Los Angeles were there as well as their abbot, Khensur Rinpoche Lobsang Tsephel, who is 93 and trained at Camp Hale. At the ceremony, he sat in a tent designated for dignitaries including many members of the Tibetan exile government, Chushi Gangdruk family members, Walker, Tenzin Dorje and Tibetans who had taken great effort to make the trek.
People outside the Tibetan community attended, too. That made McGranahan happy, because she says the more people who care about this history and the Tibetan cause, the better.
“When you’re struggling, you have to remember the past and fight in the present,” Lobsang Sangay said. “Our struggle is a continuation of the one happening when the Chushi Gangdruk were living and training at Camp Hale, all of the people who trained there and the many who died. It’s important in our struggle to be able to come here and remember their sacrifices.”