Vail, Colorado — An event was held to commemorate and honour the 300 Tibetan freedom fighters who were trained by the CIA in the 1950s at Camp Hale, near Vail, Colorado, and who fought the Chinese invaders on their return to Tibet. They sacrificed their lives for the freedom of Tibet and the Tibetan people.
The event is titled “Dumra/The Secret Garden – Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Program at Camp Hale”, which held on June 9, 2024, at Camp Hale National Monument in Colorado. It was organised by the Vail Symposium, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Colorado Chushi Gangdruk, as well as others. The site marked the historical significance of the CIA-Tibet training programme that took place at Camp Hale from 1958 to 1964.
The event was attended by Carole McGranahan, a Tibet specialist and anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has done extensive research over the years on the CIA's training site for Tibetan soldiers and discovered that the Camp Hale site in Vail, Colorado, was the training centre. Former agent Bruce Walker lived and worked at the secret CIA training site at Camp Hale between 1960 and 1964. Tibetan Minister Gyari Dolma of Department of Security of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), former CTA ministers, Tibetan parliamentarians Geshe Lharampa Atuk Tseten, Khenpo Kada Ngedup Sonam, Serta Tsultrum and Tenzing Jigme, as well as other special guests and Tibetans from around the world also attended the event.
According to the University of Colorado at Boulder report, McGranahan said finding the training camp’s actual location now is meaningful for two reasons. “One is that most of the veterans and retired (CIA) agents have passed, and the other is that the history of the operation had been suppressed and concealed for decades—a condition McGranahan calls “arrested history.”
Tibetans, for instance, have been unable to “celebrate and honor these soldiers in a way that they deserved,” she said. “This service, not just to Tibet but to the Dalai Lama, was the defining moment of their lives.”
The Tibetans’ resistance caught the attention of the United States. “This is during the Cold War, so this was roughly 1956, and the Tibetans were on their own, fighting communists,” McGranahan noted.
"The U.S. Department of State got involved, as did, secretly, the CIA, which launched a program to train Tibetan soldiers. That program landed in Colorado in 1958 at Camp Hale, near Vail, Colorado, the widely known training ground of the 10th Mountain Division fighters who served in World War II," the report said.
"About 300 Tibetan soldiers were trained at Camp Hale from 1959-64. The CIA kept a tight lid on information about the program, and closely guarded entrance to and from the site. The camp closed in 1964, but the CIA continued to support the Tibetan resistance until 1973," it explained.
McGranahan began researching the Tibetan resistance in 1993, when she was working on her PhD in history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. “One of the things I wanted to do was to understand and tell the story of the Tibetan resistance to China from the Tibetan perspective, because in the English language, it had been told almost exclusively as a story about the CIA,” McGranahan noted recently.
"In her doctoral research, McGranahan interviewed more than 100 Tibetan veterans, including many who had trained at Camp Hale. She noted that the 300 Tibetans who were trained in Colorado were a small portion of the thousands of fighters in the Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug army," the report said.
Though she focused on the Tibetan perspective, she also interviewed about 10 retired CIA officers who had been stationed at Camp Hale. At the time, the CIA operation was still top secret. “Protocol didn’t acknowledge the operation," she said. "There was nothing public about it.”
Former agent Bruce Walker, Minister Gyari Dolma, Tenzing Jigme and other guests also spoke at the event to honour and remember the Tibetan freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives for Tibet and the Tibetan people during the most difficult time in Tibetan history - the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s.
