Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa

Fought in the remote corners of the world, the cold war had many victims--among them the ancient kingdom of Tibet. China invaded that land in 1950, charging that Tibet was playing into the hands of enemy imperial powers. The Communist government may have had a point, to judge by Thomas Laird's reconstruction of a little-documented CIA mission into Tibet intended at least in part to keep the country's uranium stores from falling into Russian hands. Long disavowed and involving only a handful of agents, the mission also delivered arms to the Tibetan resistance--which, Laird maintains, the CIA funded and supplied until the 1970s, when it abandoned the Tibetan freedom fighters. The mission was a failure on all counts, and the surviving participants were carefully hidden away; half a century later, the CIA "cannot affirm or deny" the existence of leader Douglas Mackiernan, "shot dead on the borders of Tibet and Sinkiang," the first agent to die in a covert operation. Though sometimes disjointed, Laird's eye-opening account probes this forgotten episode, blunders and heroic moments alike. --Gregory McNamee