Kurmitola extensively used for Tibet operations, says book by former CIA analyst

America’s CIA used Dhaka's Kurmitola air base extensively for dropping hundreds of Tibetan rebels in the Chinese province for sabotage and guerrilla warfare after training them at US-administered secret facilities, says a book by CIA veteran Bruce Riedel.

Bruce Riedel Bruce Riedel

Riedel says in his ‘JFK's Forgotten Crisis’ that the first group of Tibetan guerrillas was flown out of Kurmitola to the US island facility of Saipan in the western Pacific in 1957.

These guerrillas, six in number, were identified as potential leaders of the emerging Tibetan resistance by the Dalai Lama's elder brother Thubten Norbu, who, Riedel says, was already linked with the CIA-backed Committee for Free Asia.

"The ISI arranged for them to stay briefly at an abandoned World War 2 air base named Kurmitola ...the base was relatively primitive with a landing strip of 1,000 metres long," says Riedel, a career CIA officer for thirty years and advisor on South Asia to four US presidents.

"By October 1957, the first team of Tibetans were ready to go home and use their newly developed skills to help the rebellion. Polish anti communist emigres flew the B-17 bomber and dropped the trained fighters in Tibet overflying Indian territory from Kurmitola again, so that no American would risk capture if anything went wrong...the mission was a success and the second flight from East Pakistan followed in Nov 1957," says Riedel.

Bruce Riedel

Throughout the late 1950s , hundreds of Tibetan fighters were exfiltrated and re-infiltrated from Tibet to US facilities via Kurmitola for training, says Riedel.

He says tonnes of weapons, ammunition and radio equipment were also dropped for the rebels in Tibet and all these flights took off from Kurmitola.

"But most of these groups were neutralised by the Chinese troops whose numbers had grown sharply in Tibet," says the CIA veteran.

Riedel says the then Pakistani president Ayub Khan allowed the CIA to use both Peshawar in the West and Kurmitola in the East.  He said the Americans used Peshawar for flying U-2 spy planes over Russia and China and Kurmitola for the Tibetan operations.

"But the Chinese were unaware of this, though they knew some Tibetans were going to US facilities and receiving weapons and equipment after capturing a few of them. Strangely enough, they suspected an Indian hand in it and not Pakistan," says Riedel.

This is where Pakistan's ability to allow the US to use its territory for anti-China operations and simultaneously befriend the Chinese cannot go unnoticed.

The CIA operations became a thorn in Sino-Indian relations and the then Chinese prime minister Zhou En Lai often warned India not to allow its territory for US covert operations targeting Tibet.

Riedel says the Tibetan operations finally ended in the late 1960s just before President Nixon's approach to Mao's China.