He identified a Tibetan pilot willing to fly and faked an intricate set of orders, originating at the helicopter base in Chandigarh. The aircraft was flown to the SFF headquarters in Chakrata, 110 kilometres to the east, where it landed under the cover of darkness. Once there, all Indian markings were removed and the helicopter was painted in desert/snow camouflage colours, with streaks of green and small Chinese military markings on the fuselage. From Chakrata it flew at low level, barely 250 feet above the ground across Nepali airspace, into Sikkim 1,200 kilometres away.
The tiny military base had received a message from Chandigarh that the aircraft was on a classified special forces mission and needed refuelling. Faced with a commando unit of blackened faces and Choedrak’s forged order papers, the base commander gave the SFF what they wanted.
The weather was clear when the pilot lifted the aircraft off from Rabangla. The stars over the plateau were more brilliant than he had ever seen them before. With its cruising speed of 250 k.p.h., Choedrak expected to be over Lhasa in two hours and probably dead an hour after that. He had not told his family. A letter was to be sent to them from Chakrata. Choedrak turned to the pilot, who gave him the thumbs-up signal, and pointed the helicopter through the mountains to rendezvous with the Antonov and the guerrilla fighters who should be on the outskirts of Lhasa waiting for them.
Drapchi Prison, Lhasa, Tibet
In the past week the beatings had started again, just like when he had first arrived at the prison sixteen years before. They had forgotten about his good behaviour and his proclaimed loyalty to the Communist Party as if they had never happened. Six days earlier, shortly after 0500, they had hauled him out of the cell alone. Outside the temperature hovered just above freezing. They hadn’t let him put on his shoes and his skin was torn on cold, hard ground as they dragged him across the yard. They kicked him and hit him behind the knees with a metal rod so that he stumbled. Once in the interrogation room, they said they were going to kill him. Then they tied him up to the wall and gave him electric shocks.
Lhundrub Togden, aged fifty-three, a Buddhist monk from Gangden Monastery in Lhasa, had three years of a nineteen-year sentence to run. After that, he would begin an eight-year sentence for organizing riots — and by then he would be sixty-four, if he survived.
‘You are accused of splittist activities,’ they said to him. ‘You are a subversive organizing the dismemberment of the Motherland.’
Togden remained silent. Whatever he said, the beatings would continue. After he had refused to speak for one whole session, they had pushed him into a close-confinement cell, the opposite to solitary, where there was no light, little air, no sanitation and prisoners were crammed together as tightly as possible in conditions which made sleep impossible.
The next day he was given nothing to eat until the evening when, close to collapse, he was handed a steamed bun and broth, so watery that he was unable to taste any vegetables or meat. He survived using the mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’, a six-syllable invocation to Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is regarded as an emanation. By reciting it endlessly, he disciplined his mind into a tranquil meditation so that he barely felt the blows or the pain.
Under prison regulations, they could torture, deny sleep and limit meals without referring to higher officials. But Togden understood the system and psychology of Drapchi. They would not move him from the Fifth Division, nor would they seriously injure or kill him, without direct permission from Beijing. He was a special-case prisoner, well known to groups such as Amnesty International, and Hollywood film stars had personally named him a ‘hero of peace’.
Togden was made to run with a bag of rocks on his back for hours on end. For years he worked in the greenhouses where temperatures would reach more than fifty degrees Centigrade. At one stage he suffered from fluid retention, becoming grossly bloated, with his cheeks and eyes puffed. He recovered from that, but his dramatic swings in size and weight left him looking gaunt and ghostlike. He spent two years in solitary confinement and a year ago was sent back to the Fifth Division, the section specially created for male political prisoners.
When news leaked out that Togden had finally been moved, Choedrak was approached to rescue him. Togden was the most commanding Tibetan figure who advocated acampaign of violent insurgency against Chinese rule. Once freed, he could change the future of the whole resistance movement.
Togden was in state of semi-conscious meditation, forcing away the pain which wracked his body. Shortly after ten in the morning, he heard the first burst of gunfire to the south, coming from the old city, near the Jokhang. This time, however, it was not unarmed defenceless civilians who were fired upon by the Chinese police. Men from the Special Frontier Force, who had walked for days over the rugged and freezing Tibetan plateau to reach the capital, had infiltrated the city like peasant warriors from another age. They came into Lhasa from the north along the Beijing Nub Lan, and only when they were interspersed with the crowds of people in the narrow streets around the Jokhang did the first unit throw back their grubby Tibetan coats to reveal the weaponry of modern commandos. From then on their chances of survival were minimal.
They threw two grenades into the police station at Bharkor, followed by a burst from two AK-47 assault rifles. The men then split up into pairs, heading north; two went past the Snowland Hotel to Beijing Shar Lam, the other two up through the Jokhang, Nangtseshag, past the Lhasa Department Store, and meeting up with the others outside the Jebumgang police station. People were running back and forth in a familiar pattern indicating the start of trouble. Police opened fire above their heads, but their volley was met with a devastating assault from the SFF Tibetans. Five policemen died. Two Tibetans were hit in the exchange, stumbling and falling. Civilians rushed forward to help, but by the time they got there both the commandos had bitten cyanide capsules and were in the throes of death.
Police ran out of the building, firing into the crowd, killing and wounding civilians: the figures are still unclear as to how many. Screams were heard all over Jokhang, bringing people out of their houses, and word spread rapidly that the armed uprising had begun, just like in March 1959. The Khampas were back to liberate their country.
With four- and five-man units, the SFF were able to attack ten different positions throughout Lhasa, spreading confusion and drawing and thinning out the Chinese forces into separate parts of the city.
Three units struck the Armed Police Auxiliary building and the Satellite Earth Station along Ngachen Lam. Two and a half kilometres to the west, the radio and television station on Lingkor Nub Lam was hit with two rocket-propelled grenades, then raked with small-arms fire. They attacked the Tibetan Military Area compound, which housed a battalion of PLA soldiers, firing from the northern bank of the Kyichu River, careful to avoid hitting the women and children’s hospital in the north-east corner of the compound.
From a stolen police jeep, they fired into the Armed Police Headquarters along Chingdrol Kyol Lam, drove straight on half a kilometre to the east, pulled up, set up a mortar and fired four rounds into the compound housing the Tibetan civilian administration. This was the first unit to come under attack from the PLA rapid deployment force, which was operational within ninety seconds of the firefight breaking out in the Jokhang.