[R-G] Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China

[Anthony Fenton]

Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, April 10, 2008

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20080410&articleId=8625

Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical  
game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at  
this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the  
Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of  
destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush  
Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to  
ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar  
region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil  
companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes  
counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous  
efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian  
sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date  
suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset  
Chinese relations.

The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October  
last year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first  
time publicly in Washington. The President of the United States is not  
unaware of the high stakes of such an insult to Beijing. Bush deepened  
the affront to America’s largest trading partner, China, by agreeing  
to attend as the US Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional  
Gold Medal.

The immediate expressions of support for the crimson monks of Tibet  
from George Bush, Condi Rice, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s  
Angela Merkel most recently took on dimensions of the absurd. Ms  
Merkel announced she would boycott attending the August Beijing Summer  
Olympics as her protest at the Beijing treatment of the Tibetan monks.  
What her press secretary omitted is that she had not even planned to  
go in the first place.

She was followed by an announcement that Poland’s Prime Minister, the  
pro-Washington Donald Tusk, would also stay away, along with pro-US  
Czech President Vaclav Klaus. It is unclear whether they also hadn’t  
planned to go in the first place but it made for dramatic press  
headlines.

The recent wave of violent protests and documented attacks by Tibetan  
monks against Han Chinese residents began on March 10 when several  
hundred monks marched on Lhasa to demand release of other monks  
allegedly detained for celebrating the award of the US Congress’ Gold  
Medal last October. The monks were joined by other monks marching to  
protest Beijing rule on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising  
against Chinese rule.

The geopolitical game

As the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden  
eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the  
movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed to try  
to put the spotlight on Beijing’s human rights record on the eve of  
the coming Olympics. The Beijing Olympics are an event seen in China  
as a major acknowledgement of the arrival of a new prosperous China on  
the world stage.

The background actors in the Tibet “Crimson revolution” actions  
confirm that Washington has been working overtime in recent months to  
prepare another of its infamous Color Revolutions, these fanning  
public protests designed to inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing.  
The actors on the ground in and outside Tibet are the usual suspects,  
tied to the US State Department, including the National Endowment for  
Democracy (NED), the CIA’s Freedom House through its chairman, Bette  
Bao Lord and her role in the International Committee for Tibet, as  
well as the Trace Foundation financed by the wealth of George Soros  
through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of  
orchestrating the latest unrest to sabotage the Olympic Games “in  
order to achieve their unspeakable goal”, Tibetan independence.

Bush telephoned his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, to  
pressure for talks between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama. The  
White House said that Bush, “raised his concerns about the situation  
in Tibet and encouraged the Chinese government to engage in  
substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives and to  
allow access for journalists and diplomats.”

President Hu reportedly told Bush the Dalai Lama must “stop his  
sabotage” of the Olympics before Beijing takes a decision on talks  
with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, foreign ministry spokesman  
Qin Gang said.

Dalai Lama’s odd friends

In the West the image of the Dalai Lama has been so much promoted that  
in many circles he is deemed almost a God. While the spiritual life of  
the Dalai Lama is not our focus, it is relevant to note briefly the  
circles he has chosen to travel in most of his life.

The Dalai Lama travels in what can only be called rather conservative  
political circles. What is generally forgotten today is that during  
the 1930’s the Nazis including Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and  
other top Nazi Party leaders regarded Tibet as the holy site of the  
survivors of the lost Atlantis, and the origin of the “Nordic pure  
race.”

When he was 11 and already designated Dalai Lama, he was befriended by  
Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Heinrich Himmler’s  
feared SS. Far from the innocent image of him in the popular Hollywood  
film with Brad Pitt, Harrer was an elite SS member at the time he met  
the 11 year old Dalai Lama and became his tutor in “the world outside  
Tibet.” While only the Dalai Lama knows the contents of Harrer’s  
private lessons, the two remained friends until Harrer died a ripe 93  
in 2006.1

That sole friendship, of course, does not define a person’s character,  
but it is interesting in the context of later friends. In April 1999,  
along with Margaret Thatcher, and former Beijing Ambassador, CIA  
Director and President, George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama demanded the  
British government release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist  
dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England.  
The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where  
he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The Dalai  
Lama had close ties to Miguel Serrano2, head of Chile’s National  
Socialist Party, a proponent of something called esoteric Hitlerism. 3

Leaving aside at this point the claim of the Dalai Lama to divinity,  
what is indisputable is that he has been surrounded and financed in  
significant part, since his flight into Indian exile in 1959, by  
various US and Western intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs.  
It is the agenda of the Washington friends of the Dalai Lama that is  
relevant here.

The NED at work again…

As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, Friendly Feudalism: The  
Tibet Myth, “during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the  
Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all  
sorts of other help.” The US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a  
CIA front, publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai  
Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in the  
group. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup,  
established an intelligence operation with the CIA in 1951. It was  
later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits  
parachuted back into Tibet, according to Parenti.4

According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the  
late 1990s, “for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile  
movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China,  
including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama.” 5

With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India where  
he lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars  
in backing today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding  
CIA front organization, funded by the US Congress, the National  
Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been instrumental in every  
US-backed Color Revolution destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to  
Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global  
public relations campaigns to popularize their pet opposition  
candidates.

As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the US Government is fanning  
the flames of destabilization against China by funding opposition  
protest organizations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the  
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980’s,  
on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan’s Director of the Central  
Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity  
exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly  
regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step  
removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be less  
conspicuous, presumably. The first acting President of the NED, Allen  
Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, “A lot of what we  
[the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” 6

American intelligence historian, William Blum states, “The NED played  
an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key  
components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy." This network  
privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and  
engaged in other equally charming activities. In 1987, a White House  
spokesman stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy." 7

The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization  
today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington  
in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the  
NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl  
Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included  
the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav  
Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State  
Department officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft. 8

Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based  
Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a  
project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International  
Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450  
foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet,  
and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide  
against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.

The SFT was among five organizations which this past January that  
proclaimed start of a "Tibetan people's uprising" on Jan 4 this year  
and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and  
financing.

Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He  
became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that  
he had “videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed  
while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The  
tape was broadcast by BBC." The BBC film showed nothing of the sort,  
but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a  
retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a  
dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt  
organization whose main funding is from the NED.9

Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports  
the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama’s exile base at  
Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for  
“information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human  
rights and democracy in Tibet,” also based in Dharamsala. And NED  
finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

In short, US State Department and US intelligence community finger  
prints are all over the upsurge around the Free Tibet movement and the  
anti-Han Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why,  
and especially why now?

Tibet’s raw minerals treasure

Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical  
location astride the border with India, Washington’s newest anti-China  
ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet  
contains some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one  
half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia,  
enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet's forests  
are the largest timber reserve at China's disposal; as of 1980, an  
estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by  
China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the  
region.10

On the Tibet Autonomous Region’s border along the Xinjiang Uygur  
Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam  
Basin, known as a "treasure basin." The Basin has 57 different types  
of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural  
gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold.  
These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion  
yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and  
crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.

And situated as it is, on the “roof of the world,” Tibet is perhaps  
the world’s most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven  
of Asia's greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people.”  
He who controls Tibet’s water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever  
over all Asia.

But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential  
to act as a lever to destabilize and blackmail the Beijing Government.

Washington’s ‘nonviolence as a form of warfare’

The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media  
with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of  
the pictures blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not  
even been of Chinese military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks.  
They have been shown to be in most cases either Reuters or AFP  
pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by Tibetan monks in paramilitary  
organizations. In some instances German TV stations ran video pictures  
of beatings that were not even from Tibet but rather by Nepalese  
police in Kathmandu. 11

The western media complicity simply further underlies that the actions  
around Tibet are part of a well-orchestrated destabilization effort on  
the part of Washington. What few people realize is that the National  
Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also instrumental, along with Gene  
Sharp’s misnamed Albert Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert  
Helvey, in encouraging the student protests at Tiananmen Square in  
June 1989. The Albert Einstein Institution, as it describes itself,  
specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." 12

Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency  
stationed in Myanmar. Helvey trained in Hong Kong the student leaders  
from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to use  
in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. He is now believed  
acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong in similar civil disobedience  
techniques. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had  
been working with the Albert Einstein Institution and George Soros’  
Open Society Foundation long before then. In its annual report for  
2004 Helvey’s Albert Einstein Institution admitted to advising people  
in Tibet. 13

With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the US  
Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime change and  
political destabilization. As one researcher of the phenomenon behind  
the wave of color revolutions, Jonathan Mowat, describes it,

“…What we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald  
Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on  
highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time"  
intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city  
blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give  
them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the  
military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in  
constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian  
application.

“This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and  
National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet,  
cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these  
technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the  
optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that  
such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several  
specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians  
have been working in high places, (for example the RAND Corporation),  
for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of  
the most important command structures of the US military apparatus  
with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald  
Rumsfeld.14

Goal to control China

Washington policy has used and refined these techniques of  
“revolutionary nonviolence,” and NED operations embodied a series of  
‘democratic’ or soft coup projects as part of a larger strategy which  
would seek to cut China off from access to its vital external oil and  
gas reserves.

The 1970’s quote attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry  
Kissinger, a proponent of British geopolitics in an American context  
comes to mind: “If you control the oil you control entire nations…”

The destabilization attempt by Washington using Tibet, no doubt with  
quiet “help” from its friends in British and other US-friendly  
intelligence services, is part of a clear pattern.

It includes Washington’s “Saffron revolution” attempts to destabilize  
Myanmar. It includes the ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur  
to block China’s access to strategically vital oil resources there and  
elsewhere in Africa. It includes attempts to foment problems in  
Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and to disrupt China’s vital new energy pipeline  
projects to Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes  
went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty in Kazakhstan for  
geographically obvious reasons, in a region surrounded by major  
mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan,  
Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes  
between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia  
controls pipeline and other ties between it and western Europe, China,  
India and the Middle East, where China depends on uninterrupted oil  
flows from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.

Behind the strategy to encircle China

In this context, a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations  
analysis in their Foreign Affairs magazine from Zbigniew Brzezinski  
from September/October 1997 is worth quoting. Brzezinski, a protégé of  
David Rockefeller and a follower of the founder of British  
geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, is today the foreign policy  
adviser to Presidential candidate, Barack Obama. In 1997 he  
revealingly wrote:

‘Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and  
dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power  
originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional  
hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential  
political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the  
United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders  
are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and  
all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the  
world's population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its  
energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows  
even America's.

‘Eurasia is the world's axial super-continent. A power that dominated  
Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's  
three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East  
Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in  
Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa.  
With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it  
no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for  
Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian  
landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global  
primacy….’15 (emphasis mine-w.e.).

This statement, written well before the US-led bombing of former  
Yugoslavia and the US military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or  
its support of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, puts Washington  
pronouncements about ‘ridding the world of tyranny’ and about  
spreading democracy, into a somewhat different context from the one  
usually mentioned by George W. Bush of others.

It’s about global hegemony, not democracy. It should be no surprise  
when powers such as China are not convinced that giving Washington  
such overwhelming power is in China’s national interest, any more than  
Russia thinks that it would be a step towards peace to let NATO gobble  
up Ukraine and Georgia and put US missiles on Russia’s doorstep “to  
defend against threat of Iranian nuclear attack on the United States.”

The US-led destabilization in Tibet is part of a strategic shift of  
great significance. It comes at a time when the US economy and the US  
dollar, still the world’s reserve currency, are in the worst crisis  
since the 1930’s. It is significant that the US Administration sends  
Wall Street banker, former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson to  
Beijing in the midst of its efforts to embarrass Beijing in Tibet.  
Washington is literally playing with fire. China long ago surpassed  
Japan as the world’s largest holder of foreign currency reserves, now  
in the range of $1.5 trillions, most of which are invested in US  
Treasury debt instruments. Paulson knows well that were Beijing to  
decide it could bring the dollar to its knees by selling only a small  
portion of its US debt on the market.

Endnotes:

1 Ex-Nazi, Dalai's tutor Harrer dies at 93, The Times of India, 9 Jan  
2006, in http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1363946,prtpage-1.cms 
.

2 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism  
and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, 2001, p. 177.

3 Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 1: Die  
Begeisterung für den Dalai Lama und den tibetischen Buddhismus, March  
26, 2008, excerpted from the book Dalai Lama: Fall eines Gottkönigs,  
Alibri Verlag,, new edition to appear April 2008, reproduced in http://www.jungewelt.de/2008/03-27/006.php 
.

4 Parenti, Michael, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, June 2007, in www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html 
.

5 Mann, Jim, CIA funded covert Tibet exile campaign in 1960s, The Age  
(Australia), Sept. 16, 1998.

6 Ignatius, D., Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups, The  
Washington Post, 22 September 1991.

7 Blum, William, The NED and ‘Project Democracy,’ January 2000, in www.friendsoftibet.org/databank/usdefence/usd5.html

8 Barker, Michael, ’Democratic Imperialism’: Tibet, China and the  
National Endowment for Democracy, Global Research, August 13, 2007, www.globalresearch.ca 
.

9 McGehee, Ralph, Ralph McGehee’ s Archive on JFK Place, CIA  
Operations in China Part III, May 2, 1996, in www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/RM/RM.china-for 
.

10 US Tibet Committee, Fifteen things you should know about Tibet and  
China, in http://ustibetcommittee.org/facts/facts.html.

11 Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 2:  
Krawalle im Vorfeld der Olympischen Spiele, op cit.

12 Mowat, Jonathan, The new Gladio in action?, Online Journal, Mar 19,  
2005, in http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_308.shtml.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs,  
76:5, September/October 1997.


  Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl