Kalachakra Tantra Mandala and the WTC destruction

by **baphomatic** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 1:28 pm

I wasn't sure if this discussion had come up yet, but I thought it worth sharing here. The idea of the Manadala/Yantra talismanic magick and the WTC had occured to me after watching the "Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion" documentary, which had a special feature section that included video footage of the 1994 mandala ceremony in tower 1. After reading "Sinister Forces" and understanding the interest of certain SS inner circle officers in the Tibetan culture (and its supposed posession of ancient Germanic mysteries and lost technology), the potential relationship between the Kalachakra symbolism and 9/11 began to take shape. The towers, like the Mandala, were representative of a complex interwoven causal network, an intricate microcosmic enclosure that was a concentration of energies reflected in the grid of global commerce, finance, etc. Like the Mandala, the towers were reduced to rubble and swept away in an instant, as a magical act or yogic sorcery. Now to suggest that the peaceful and compassionate little monks blew up the towers via sympathetic magic may seem like quite an outrageous suggestion, though, after some research, I found that others had done extensive investigation into this concept, with regard to the militant Shambhala ethos: "In 1992, as Director of Tibet House in New York City which he co-founded with Richard Gere, he sponsored “the Kalachakra Initiation at New York’s Madison Square Garden.” (Farrer-Halls 1998, p. 92) The Tibet Center houses a three dimensional Kalachakra Mandala and the only life sized statue of the Kalachakra deity outside of Tibet. Following the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, “The Samaya Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Port Authority jointly sponsored the Wheel of Time (Kalachakra) Sand Mandala, or Circle of Peace, in the lobby of Tower 1.” (Darton 1999, p. 219) For over thirty days, many of the World Trade Center workers and visitors were invited by the Namgyal Monks to participate in the construction of the mandala. It is said that, “ Its shape symbolized nature’s unending cycle of creation and destruction and in the countless grains of its material, it celebrated life’s energy taking ephemeral form, then returning to its source. At the end of the mandala’s month long lifespan, the monks swept up the sand and “offered it to the Hudson River.” This ritual, they believed, purified the environment. (Darton 1999, p. 219) "In our studies it was alarming to find that following the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 a Wheel of Time (Kalachakra) Sand Mandala was built in the lobby of Tower One. For over thirty days, many of the World Trade Center workers and visitors were invited by the Tibetan Monks to participate in the construction of this Mandala. When the Dalai Lama visits New York in the next days, we would ask: Why the terrible event of 9/11 could happen at the World Trade Center that was consecrated by the so called “Circle of Peace,” the Kalachakra Sand Mandala, the same mandalas that were unable to prevent the destruction of 7500 monasteries of Tibet? In this context a sentence of the Tantra expert and Indian scholar Shashi Bhusan Dasgupta may be remarkable: "The word Kala means time, death and destruction. Kala-Chakra is the Wheel of Destruction." We just did find in the Internet a statement of a participant of the WTC Kalachakra Ceremony, which seems really revealing especially because it is made by an initiand of the Tantra: “The topic shifted to the Kalachakra Mandala that was made at One World Trade Center. I was at the dissolution ceremony there, may be around '96. The monks gathered up all the sand from the Mandala at 1WTC, put it in a vase, then carried it across the bridge into World Financial Center through the Winter Garden, then dumped the sand ceremoniously into the Hudson River for the sake of World Peace. The surface of the river glittered with the afternoon sun, and I cried. 5 years later, the whole building is gone, just like the sand Mandala.” In contrary to this, Robert Thurman, the “academic godfather of the Tibetan cause” (Time Magazine) saw a dream (September 1979) the Dalai Lama as an absolute King and Kalachakra God reigning New York City. “The night before he [the Dalai Lama] landed in New York, I dreamed he was manifesting the pure land mandala palace of the Kalachakra Buddha right on top of the Waldorf Astoria building. The entire collection of dignitaries of the city, mayors and senators, corporate presidents and kings, sheikhs and sultans ,celebrities and stars—all of them were swept up into the dance of 722 deities of the three buildings of the diamond palace like pinstriped bees swarming on a giant honeycomb. The amazing thing about the Dalai Lama’s flood of power and beauty was that it appeared totally effortless. I could feel the space of His Holiness’s heart, whence all this arose. It was relaxed, cool, an amazing well of infinity” Thurman did interpret this dream as a prophecy. Stephens: From your experience in the Kalachakra Debate in Europe and your observation of mass media’s romantic portrayal of Tibet, what are the potential dangers to other faiths, including Buddhism and democracy of this growing Shambhala myth? Trimondi: Tibetan Buddhism, like the New Age of the eighties appears to be the “trendy religion” of the new millennium. But it is much more than the charismatic appearance of the Dalai Lama and his speeches about compassion, peace and happiness. The danger lies in that the Kalachakra Tantra ritual subtlety builds an ideological foundation for a future “war of religions.” If the problematic contents of this archaic belief are not openly discussed, they may present a dangerous ideological challenge to the positive legacy of Western Civilization and Democratic institutions. There is also no doubt that the Kalachakra ideology proposing the establishment of Buddhocratic rule, a universal Emperor (Chakravartin) , violence, the licence to kill and the waging of a Buddhist holy war are in direct opposition to the original peaceful teachings of Sakyamuni Buddha. Concerning this discrepancy between the aggressive contents of the Kalachakra Tantra and the original peaceful Dharma, taught by the historic Buddha, we have formulated Eight Questions to the Dalai Lama. <a href="http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-2-15.htm">www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SD...t-2-15.htm</a> <a href="http://www.trimondi.de/H-B-K/inhalt.hi.en.htm">www.trimondi.de/H-B-K/inhalt.hi.en.htm</a> <a href="http://www.trimondi.de/EN/deba03.html">www.trimondi.de/EN/deba03.html</a>

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 2:16 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>mass media’s romantic portrayal of Tibet<hr></blockquote> Sympathy for Tibet and the worship of the Dali Lama have been used by the CIA since the 1950s to generate hostility towards China amongst Americans, an ongoing goal. The west coast/left coast culture has eaten it right up. The CIA stoked the Tibetan resistance against China and the OSS alumni who were heavily focused on Asia during WWII carried on with the expanded mandate as CIA. Two different versions of the CIA in Tibet history- Here's a mainstream US-friendly version- <a href="http://www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blciawar/">www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blciawar/</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Article from Military History Magazine The CIA's Secret War in Tibet In a top secret and still little-known, decade-long 'war at the top of the world,' the CIA fostered, trained and supplied a tenacious Tibetian resistance force in its struggle against the Communist Chinese. By Joe Bageant Call it the Shangri-La factor. In the popular imagination, pre-Communist Tibet was a fabled theocracy in which a beatific Dalai Lama smiled over a kingdom where no man raised a hand in violence as he spun his prayer wheel in search of nirvana. Then along came the Communist Chinese, who made short work of these placid people. Fifty years after the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the myth still persists and has even grown, thanks to the media and the increased interest of Westerners in Buddhism. But contrary to the pop history version, the Tibetans did not simply let the Chinese roll over their country in 1951. For almost 20 years afterward they fought a long, bloody war of resistance that struck serious blows to Chairman Mao Tse-tung's expansionist plans. Invisible to outsiders as it raged, this largely unknown struggle that no novelist could have dreamed up got support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sponsored secret training camps and made arms and equipment drops to aid horse-mounted herdsmen against the bombers and artillery of the largest standing army on the planet.<hr></blockquote> And now a version that exposes more suppressed history. Sorry for the long datadump but this page needs to be read to get past the whitewash industry. <a href="http://www.takhli.org/rjw/tibet.htm">www.takhli.org/rjw/tibet.htm</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Sun, 26 Jul 1998 21:03:51 GMT Newsgroups talk.politics.tibet CIA's involvement in Tibet during the cold war was well known to knowledgable readers in this group, although the inside stories were scarce. Since Dalai Lama started so-called "non-violent" approach, he and his followers don't want people to know their dirty laundry. However, those who were involved started to talk, for variuos reasons. Following story tells us the deep involvement of CIA and cooperation between Taiwan, India, and Tibetans. Now, "non-violent" approach has got them to nowhere, except a Nobel Peace Prize that fell on Dalai Lama's lap and two Hollywood box-office bombs, they are longing once again for those good old violence. Well, could Hollywood + violence achieve what CIA + violence couldn't achieve? ****************************************************************************** Copyright 1997 The American Spectator The American Spectator December, 1997 SECTION: FEATURE The Secret War Over Tibet A story of Cold War heroism -- and Kennedy administration cowardice and betrayal. John B. Roberts II John B. Roberts II is a television producer and freelance journalist. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, doesn't want his secrets revealed. He has given his blessing to a new Hollywood film, Kundun, enshrining the officially sanctioned and sanitized history of his country's battle for independence against Communist China. And in another Hollywood Tibetan epic, based on the memoirs of German mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, actor Brad Pitt re-enacts a spiritual odyssey with the Dalai Lama in Tibet's remote and mysterious mountain kingdom. What neither film portrays are facts about the true adventures -- and tragedy -- of Tibetan freedom fighters that have remained secret for decades. But thanks to the willingness of a handful of former diplomats, military special operations personnel, and intelligence officials, the real story of America's secret war in Tibet can now be told. Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency were unusually helpful in the research for this article, although it reports events that are still classified today. Perhaps they were motivated by the desire to prevent Hollywood's propagation of revisionist histories about what really happened in Tibet. Or perhaps this is one of those rare occasions when the Central Intelligence Agency decides to take some well-deserved credit for one of its successes by revealing tidbits from its secret history. But don't expect the Clinton administration to declassify the Tibetan operation files anytime soon. The secret archives include a shameful episode involving Clinton's favorite presidency, the Kennedy administration, and Democratic icon John Kenneth Galbraith. One of the best-kept secrets of the Tibetan War is Ambassador Galbraith's role in the abandonment of an army of Tibetan guerrillas caught in a pitched battle. While special operations Air Force planes stood by to parachute ammunition and supplies to the Tibetan freedom fighters, Galbraith refused to give permission for the CIA to resupply its covert Tibetan army. Cut off and surrounded, between six and eight thousand Tibetans were annihilated by the Chinese in a massacre that has been shrouded in secrecy for more than thirty years. The parallels to the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco are eerie. In both cases the Eisenhower administration originally launched the covert programs to train freedom fighters to resist Communist domination. In both the guerrillas depended on U.S. support for arms and ammunition. In Tibet, as in Cuba, only air support and airdrops of supplies could help trapped men fight their way out of desperate situations. In both cases, when the freedom fighters were at their moment of greatest peril, the Kennedy administration chose to abandon them. This is the true story of how the Tibetan operation began in glory, and ended in shame. After Mao Tse-tung and the Peoples Liberation Army pushed the Nationalist Chinese off the mainland in the late 1940's, Peking turned its attention to consolidating its territory. In the summer of 1950, skirmishing at border posts broke out between China and Tibet. Using this fighting as a pretext, China invaded Tibet with more than 80,000 troops. Tibet's army was tiny and poorly equipped. Efforts to resist the Chinese alone would have been futile. Tibet needed allies, it needed to buy time, and most of all it needed arms. It is hard to imagine today, in an age of satellites and the Internet, how remote Tibet was in the fifties. Communications had to be relayed by messenger over mountain passes. In desperation, Tibet sent emissaries abroad to negotiate on three separate tracks. Some delegations sought an accommodation with China, on terms that would maintain some autonomy for Tibet. Others explored the possibility of asylum and financial support for the Dalai Lama and his retinue. Still others sought diplomatic support for Tibet's independence, and military weapons for armed resistance. Today, with our emphasis on Tibet's human rights situation, it may surprise many to think of the Buddhist kingdom seeking arms to fight China. Owing largely to the Vietnam war era television images of self- immolating Buddhist monks, many Americans mistakenly believe that all Buddhists practice non-violence and passive resistance. But Tibetan Buddhism, as practiced by its monks and the people of Tibet, did not shy from violence. By early 1951, Tibet's emissaries had made contact with American diplomats in neighboring India. A delegation speaking in the name of the Dalai Lama asked for support for Tibet's independence, and inquired whether the U.S. would shoulder the costs of the Dalai Lama and several hundred followers in exile. Tibet's request was handled at the top levels of the U.S. government. Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent top-secret cables to embassies in Ceylon, Thailand, and India, instructing ambassadors to sound out the prospects for asylum for the Dalai Lama. America's support for Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalists on Formosa complicated matters. Like Communist China, the Nationalists also viewed Tibet as a historic part of the Chinese empire. Stopping the Communist conquest of Tibet was attractive to the U.S., but not if it would alienate Chiang Kai-shek, who opposed Tibetan independence. But one thing was clear from the beginning. The U.S. wanted the Dalai Lama to lead his country's resistance against the Chinese. A secret cable from 1951 reveals that Washington encouraged the Dalai Lama to "remain in (a) country near Tibet for purpose of mounting resistance to Chinese Communists within Tibet." The more immediate problem was how to support Tibet's resistance war. In the early 1950's, there were no secure channels of communication between the U.S. and Tibet. American diplomats had little knowledge of the Dalai Lama's retinue. They didn't know who could be trusted to safely and accurately convey messages, and who might be a Chinese agent. Sending written notes the Chinese might intercept was risky. As a result, it took months to relay oral messages back and forth to the Dalai Lama over the mountainous reaches of Tibet. A top secret telegram from Secretary of State Acheson to the U. S. Embassy in India gives a sense of this difficulty: "Info Contel 91 July 31 and Embtel 440 (rptd Cal unnumbered) Aug 1 suggests unreliable intermediaries figured critically in failure effort persuade DL leave Yatung....Believe it unwise advise any Tibetan to receive this msg prior actual communication." The message Acheson referred to in his cable confirmed America's standing offer to the Dalai Lama: "our original position -- full aid and assistance to you when you come out." Acheson wanted U.S. aid conditioned on the Dalai Lama's agreement to leave Tibet. The Dalai Lama was told that while American planes couldn't fly into Lhasa to take him into exile, the U.S. would do all it could to aid him in fleeing Tibet. The Tibetan emissaries wanted arms. A secret cable from November 15, 1951, reports the U.S. reply: "...suggestions for overt US provision of planes, arms, supplies and leadership are practically impossible and politically undesirable at this time....US shld make at least one final effort by letter or oral messages to encourage DL to resist in ways best known to Tib Govt....Although it may not be feasible, DL might for example make pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Tib from one of which he might escape southward to Ind." Where others saw diplomatic quandaries, CIA deputy director Allen Dulles recognized opportunity. A veteran of "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, America's clandestine predecessor to the CIA, Dulles gained field experience during World War II as the OSS hustled to organize U.S. spying and sabotage operations. OSS specialized in behind-the-lines support to resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe, parachuting agents, supplies, and officers deep behind enemy lines. Some OSS officers were old China hands, and had fought alongside Mao Tse-tung's forces against the Japanese. OSS veterans like Dulles had the mindset and experience to run guerrilla operations behind Chinese lines. At the time of Tibet's invasion, Allen Dulles was CIA's Deputy Director of Plans, with responsibilities that included overseeing all CIA covert operations. While the State Department temporized about how much aid to give the Dalai Lama before he left Tibet, Dulles began to explore arming and training the Tibetan resistance. Weapons were a problem. Covert aid required arms that could not be traced to the United States. To cloak their origin, guns had to be compatible with Chinese military stocks. As a bonus, compatible guns meant Tibetan rebels could use captured Chinese ammunition. Thirty years later in Nicaragua, CIA planners faced the same challenge when they had to find Soviet weapons to supply the contras. When Israel invaded Lebanon and seized PLO warehouses full of Soviet-supplied weapons, the CIA rapidly transported the captured arms to Nicaragua's freedom fighters. But in the early 1950's, the weapons Dulles needed were German. During the decades of war-lordism that befell China in the twenties and thirties, German guns were widely used throughout the country. CIA cabled U.S. military attach s across Europe, asking them to report back on inventories of captured Nazi arms. But the CIA had little bureaucratic clout in the early days of its existence, and the Defense Department was unresponsive. Sam Cummings, now an internationally known arms dealer, was then a young weapons expert in CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. His office received a routine copy of the Defense Department report, and he knew immediately that it was wrong. Cummings had been in Europe shortly after World War II, and had seen stockpiles of Nazi arms himself. He sent his superiors a memo that claimed there were plenty of surplus guns stashed in Europe. A few weeks later, the young analyst was summoned to meet with Dulles. Richard Helms, who would later be CIA director when the Tibet war ground to an end, ushered the 24-year-old Cummings into Dulles's office. Cummings was persuasive, and soon found himself on a clandestine mission in Europe. Accompanied by a Hollywood cinematographer named Leo Lippe, and under the flimsy pretext of needing Nazi weapons for use as props in a series of war movies, he spent 1951 and 1952 moving around Europe purchasing old Nazi arms for the CIA. Cummings found plenty of surplus German Mausers and other weapons for Dulles's secret armies. For almost fifty years, the record of Dulles's clandestine operation has remained buried in the government's secret archives. After he became CIA director in 1953, Allen Dulles oversaw the creation of an audacious covert program involving tens of thousands of Tibetan freedom fighters who fought courageously against China's People's Liberation Army in a decade-long struggle for independence. The scale of Dulles's covert war dwarfed William Casey and President Reagan's aid to Nicaragua's contras, but both programs had their roots in the experience that former OSS officers Allen Dulles and Bill Casey shared running World War II's clandestine liberation wars behind enemy lines. Throughout the fifties Tibetan refugees trickled into neighboring Nepal, ripe for recruitment by the CIA. Under the Eisenhower administration, Dulles got permission to train the recruits in OSS-type sabotage techniques, demolition, and most importantly, code-and-cipher work for radio operators. Eager Tibetans were flown from the refugee camps in Dakota transport airplanes with blacked-out windows halfway across the world to Camp Hale, an army training base taken over by the CIA near Leadville, Colorado. There they were trained in the basic doctrines of guerrilla warfare, tactical small-arms use, explosives, and the tradecraft of underground resistance movements. The CIA trainees were then flown back to base camps in Nepal, and infiltrated back into Tibet. Soon Tibetan resistance armies like the Chushi Gangdruk, a force of freedom fighters headed by Andruk Gonpo Tashi, were in the field. The name Chushi Gangdruk means "Four Rivers, Six Ranges," and describes the Tibetan homeland of Tashi's fighters. Although its numbers were small compared to the divisions of the People's Liberation Army, the CIA regarded them as an effective fighting force. A memo from Dulles to the White House summarized the Agency's view of its guerrillas: The Tibetans, particularly the Khambas, Goloks, and other tribes of East Tibet, are a fierce, brave and warlike people. Battle in defense of their religion and the Dalai Lama is looked upon as a means of achieving merit toward their next reincarnation. By the late 1950's the CIA had plenty of assets inside Tibet. These included agents, paramilitary troops, and commanders. The number of Tibetan freedom fighters had risen to the tens of thousands. Tibet's mountains meant the only practical way to get supplies to the freedom fighters was by air. Colonel Harry "Heinie" Aderholt's air commandos, an elite Air Force unit tasked with supporting the CIA's special missions since the Korean War, was tapped for the job. The resupply line to Tibet started in Okinawa, the closest secure transshipment point the CIA could use in moving the clandestine arms purchases. From Okinawa, Aderholt's planes shipped the arms to a forward operating base at Takhli, Thailand. From Thailand, C-130 aircraft flew men and supplies over Indian airspace for parachute drops into Chinese-occupied Tibet. The mountain flying, unaided by radar and modern instrument navigational systems, was hazardous even in good conditions. Diplomatic considerations made it even more complicated. Because the route involved overflights of India, there was always a risk that a plane would go down in Indian territory. Prime Minister Nehru's relations with the neighboring Chinese were complex, but they were certain to be badly strained if China interpreted the overflights as tacit Indian support for the secret war. In the late fifties and early sixties, Nehru was becoming increasingly cooperative with the Soviet Union, and a breach with China might have furthered India's pro-Soviet tilt. In view of this delicate balancing act, the U.S. could not afford to create a diplomatic incident by losing a planeload of covert weapons in India. It was critical that the U.S. supply flights go off without any hitches. Air Force Major Larry Ropka, said to be "CIA's finest aerial infiltration planner," handled the operation. Ropka had a reputation as a detail-sweating perfectionist. Throughout the entire Tibetan airdrop operation, Ropka never lost a single airplane. But by far the most important CIA asset was an agent named Gyalo Thondup, elder brother to the Dalai Lama. Although he has remained in his brother's shadow, Thondup's role in Tibet's fight for freedom is unsurpassed. He was vital not only to CIA paramilitary operations in Tibet, but to the Dalai Lama's safe flight into exile. Thanks to Thondup's liaison with the CIA, the Chinese were prevented from capturing the Dalai Lama. " Gyalo Thondup was a good agent," says the retired CIA officer who met clandestinely with the Dalai Lama's brother to plan the exodus from Tibet. " He was smart, articulate." Thondup's case officer spent a career in the CIA. When he discusses the Tibetan operation, he is still careful to shelter confidences. " I've sort of trained myself to forget about the operational detail," he explains. "You don't talk very much about specific operational details, or even specific operations, for anyone who's alive..." The beginning of the end came in March, 1959, when a general uprising known in intelligence annals as the "Tibetan Rebellion" broke out. Many factors fueled the uprising, including unthinkable Chinese barbarities, communal land policies, and the crowding of refugees into the capital city of Lhasa. But the sparks that ignited the tinder were rumors that China was about to kidnap the Dalai Lama. Some 30,000 Tibetans flocked to the gates of the Dalai Lama's palace to protect him. In response, the Chinese shelled the crowd with artillery. The crisis was a turning point for Tibetan diplomacy, which for eight years had sought an accommodation with China. With no accommodation possible, the Dalai Lama took up the standing American offer of help in getting out of Tibet. CIA -trained Chushi Gangdruk fighters were strategically deployed along a southern route leading from Lhasa across the Himalayas to India. Their orders were to prevent any Chinese pursuit, blocking key passes along the southern route, and fighting to hold them as long as necessary while the Dalai Lama and his entourage made their way to safety on horseback. The Dalai Lama's trek lasted from mid-March until the beginning of April. During the entire trip through the remote mountains of Tibet, CIA -trained radio operators sent daily progress reports to Allen Dulles. Coded radio messages were broadcast from Tibet's peaks to CIA listening posts on Okinawa, and then relayed to Washington, where Dulles anxiously monitored the day-by-day movements during the two-week-long trek. In briefing the National Security Council on March 26, 1959, Dulles confidently predicted that "we have every reason to hope that the Dalai Lama will get out of Tibet fairly soon." To be precise, Washington had only five more days to wait for the Dalai Lama's safe emergence in India. Nowhere, perhaps, was the Dalai Lama's progress more anxiously tracked than at the U.S. Embassy in India. That is where Gyalo Thondup's CIA control officer and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker awaited the Dalai Lama's arrival. The clandestine radio broadcasts, once relayed to Washington, were then retransmitted to the CIA Station in New Delhi. By March's end the wait was over. On April 1, with confirmation that the Dalai Lama was safely out of Tibet, CIA Director Dulles sent a memo to President Eisenhower summarizing the Tibetan operation. The memo noted that new plans were being developed for Tibet's resistance. But before April was over, conditions for the resistance had deteriorated badly. A month of fighting between the Chinese and Tibetan resistance in the south near the Dalai Lama's route into exile had virtually decimated the guerrillas. Captured Chinese documents estimated that as many as 85,000 Tibetans had been killed in the fighting. Pockets of resistance were short on food, supplies, and hope. Many guerrillas wanted to flee into India. The backbone of the rebellion had been smashed. It took Dulles and the CIA months to find any effective resistance forces left inside Tibet. When they succeeded, the recruits came mainly from Eastern Tibet, tribal peoples known as the Khambas. Again, the Dakota aircraft transported willing novices from base camps in Nepal to Colorado for training, and Aderholt's clandestine air force planes parachuted trained men and supplies back into Tibet. But few expected the remaining Tibetan freedom fighters to win independence. They were valued mainly for their utility in harassing the Chinese -- and for the intelligence, including captured documents, they could provide to CIA. "When you're summing up the Tibetan operation," one of Gyalo Thondup's former case officers says, "there are three phases. Intelligence. Paramilitary. Political action. "It was a combination of running the guerrilla warfare, which we knew was pinpricks, and the intelligence, because until then the main source was the British in Hong Kong," he says, dredging up ancient intelligence rivalries. "Hong Kong, we used to call it our window on China." British and American intelligence have rarely gotten along. During World War II, the British secret services eagerly tutored fledgling American OSS agents in the finer points of spywork. But relations chilled early in the postwar era, when American diplomacy took a turn against British imperial claims, and American agents started spying in former British colonies. The British protested American operations in their "sphere of influence," which to Britain meant half the world. A series of spy scandals in the fifties involving Burgess, McLean, and Philby -- British diplomats and intelligence officers doubling for the KGB -- further strained relations. To analysts at CIA headquarters, Communist China was at first enigmatic, puzzling, labyrinthine. Tibet changed the intelligence outlook. Guerrillas frequently captured Chinese documents that shed light on Chinese policy and helped resolve internal disputes wracking the intelligence community. "The take was very good," says the former case officer. The Tibetan operation meant that the CIA could depend less on British intelligence to develop an understanding of China. For this reason, President Eisenhower reauthorized the covert program in February 1960. But in May of that same year, a U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Soviet airspace. The event occurred on the eve of a major summit, and proved a huge diplomatic embarrassment for the United States. Return to Takhli History Page Return to Takhli main page <hr></blockquote> update 18 aug 98

by **Avalon** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 11:16 pm

Tibetan monks had done a Kalachakra sand mandala at the American Museum of Natural History in 1988 (I was fortunate enough to be able to see it in progress). The museum, of course, has not fallen down. But hey, don't let that fact deter you. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=avalon@rigorousintuition>Avalon</A> at: 7/22/06 9:19 pm

Kalachakra Tantra Mandala and the WTC destruction

Kalachakra Tantra Mandala and the WTC destruction

Re: Kalachakra Tantra Mandala and the WTC destruction

American museum of Natural History not dead yet

Who is online