Gyalo Thondup, Dalai Lama’s brother and towering figure in Tibet, dies

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Gyalo Thondup, the elder brother of the Dalai Lama who helped the CIA mount an ill-fated armed uprising against the Communist Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s and later spent decades as a chief envoy of the Buddhist leader in his peaceful liberation struggle, died Feb. 9 at his home in Kalimpong, in India’s West Bengal state. He was believed to be 97.

His death was widely reported in the Tibetan media, but no cause was provided.

After the Dalai Lama, Mr. Thondup was arguably the second-most important figure in modern Tibetan history and a crucial player in his people’s campaign to ease China’s ironfisted control over their landlocked region high in the Himalayas.

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The charismatic Dalai Lama thrived in the spotlight and hoisted Tibet to the forefront of popular awareness, speaking at venues the world over and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He embodied Tibetan demands for greater religious, linguistic and political freedom, making his homeland a centerpiece of the global struggle for human rights and a persistent thorn in China’s underbelly.

His elder brother played a less visible role, ricocheting among New Delhi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the conditions for his brother to return to Tibet after decades in exile.

The two siblings could scarcely have contrasted more vividly. The Dalai Lama, clad in maroon and saffron robes, preached a core message of compassion and pacifism to world leaders and met with scientists, Hollywood actors, religious eminences and legions of people curious about the impish Tibetan monk.

Mr. Thondup, for his part, never trained in a monastery and was gruff by nature, comfortable with spies and underground weapons deals. He thrived in his political dealings, negotiating with global rulers including Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping of China. According to historians, many heads of state viewed Mr. Thondup as a de facto political leader of Tibet.

“He played an important role in history not just in Tibet, but I would say in global politics in the late Cold War, the second half of the 20th century,” said Tsering Shakya, a scholar of Tibet at the University of British Columbia.

In a 2015 memoir, “The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet” – the title refers to the barely mechanized noodle factory that he ran in India’s West Bengal state after he retired – Mr. Thondup touched on his high-level jousting over Tibet’s plight.

He also sought to clear his name from controversies that trailed him for decades, particularly his involvement with the CIA-led campaign to arm Tibetan rebels and with bungled efforts to smuggle monastic wealth out of Tibet following the Dalai Lama’s exile to India in 1959.

Teams carried gold bullion and other assets across the Himalayas. But as Mr. Thondup wrote in the memoir, co-authored with China scholar Anne F. Thurston, “something went terribly wrong,” and most of the treasure went missing.

Mr. Thondup, who was nominally in charge of the operation, said that he “never touched a single rupee of that money” and that he had “nothing to do with the way it disappeared.” In his later years, he lived in Kalimpong, on a three-acre compound that included the noodle factory.

Gyalo Thondup’s exact birth date is unknown, but the book jacket of his memoir says he was born in 1929. Other online sources put the birth year at 1927 or 1928.

He was the third of seven surviving siblings of illiterate farmers in the village of Taktser, in the east of what is modern-day Qinghai province in China, near the ancient Kumbum monastery.

When the fifth sibling, Lhamo Thondup, reached the age of 2 in 1937, a party of high lamas arrived in a mission to recognize the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who had died in 1933. Certain omens and visions had led them to Taktser, where they conducted tests on the boy and soon recognized him as the 14th Dalai Lama, or spiritual leader, of the dominant school of Tibetan Buddhism.

The family moved to Lhasa, the administrative and religious center of Tibet, so that Lhamo could receive instruction in the Potala Palace, the towering structure that has served as home for dalai lamas for nearly four centuries.

Gyalo Thondup was groomed to serve the young Dalai Lama. At one regent’s behest, Mr. Thondup was sent to study in Nanjing, then the capital of China, where he found a powerful patron in Chiang Kai-shek, the military head of the nationalist government who favored closer ties between China and Tibet. Chiang and his wife “came to treat me as a son,” Mr. Thondup wrote.

“His staff found me a comfortable three-bedroom house and provided me with a cook, servants, and a car with a driver – until I learned to drive,” Mr. Thondup recalled in the memoir.

Mr. Thondup abandoned China when Mao Zedong’s communist revolution triumphed in 1949. He took with him a Chinese bride, the daughter of a general in the defeated nationalist army, and returned to Tibet.

Chinese troops moved into eastern Tibet a year after the revolution, and, as they tightened their grip on Lhasa, Mr. Thondup fled on horseback to India in 1952. He eventually settled in Kalimpong, where he built an iron-roofed house guarded by Tibetan mastiffs.

From there, he watched as Tibet fell into geopolitical jockeying, with China claiming sovereignty. Soon after, Mr. Thondup wrote, the CIA offered to train and provide weapons to Tibetan exiles eager to return and fight the Chinese military occupation. Mr. Thondup helped select recruits, and nearly 300 of them were trained at Camp Hale, in Colorado, a site chosen because of its physical similarities to mountainous Tibet.

Eight groups of fighters were airdropped back into Tibet between the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Camp Hale graduates trained thousands of other fighters. During those years, the CIA delivered 700,000 pounds of rifles, ammunition, grenades and radio equipment to the Tibetan resistance, CIA officer John Kenneth Knaus estimated in a 2009 interview with the Toronto Star, but the fighters were largely killed, captured or reduced to conducting only occasional forays.

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama, disguised as a soldier, had slipped through a Chinese security cordon around his palace in 1959, fled over the Himalayas to India, and settled in Dharamsala, a remote hill station in the north. Mr. Thondup said that, in respect for his brother’s pacifist stance, he never sought the Dalai Lama’s active approval of the CIA campaign.

The CIA halted its support in 1972 when President Richard M. Nixon sought a rapprochement with China. Mr. Thondup later told the Wall Street Journal that his involvement with the CIA was his greatest disappointment because the agency never provided enough weapons to give the Tibetan resistance a fighting chance.

The United States, he recounted to the Journal in 2009, “didn’t want to help Tibet. It just wanted to make trouble for China. It had no farsighted policy for Tibet.”

Pivoting to peaceful methods, Mr. Thondup spent more than a decade as a direct intermediary with the Chinese, pressing them fruitlessly to negotiate over the terms of the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet.

China declared part of the Tibetan Plateau an autonomous region in 1965, but many exiles say mass migration of Han Chinese onto the Plateau has diluted Tibetan culture and use of the Tibetan language, and they complain bitterly that the Communist Party has placed spies in monasteries and interfered in religious practices.

Mr. Thondup remained a powerful voice in the Tibetan exile community. His fluency in Chinese, English and Tibetan helped him build enduring political, cultural and educational institutions, including the Offices of Tibet in the United States and Switzerland.

Mr. Thondup’s wife, known by the Tibetan name Diki Dolkar, died in 1986. Their daughter, Yangzom Doma, was killed in a car crash in the early 1980s. He is survived by his sons Ngawang Tanpa Thondup and Khedroob Thondup, according to the International Campaign for Tibet.

At the invitation of China, Mr. Thondup returned briefly to Lhasa in 2002, five decades after fleeing on horseback over the Himalayas. But he was never able to realize the dream of the Dalai Lama, who longed for the brothers to return side by side to dwell again in Tibet.

“We have to return home together,” the Dalai Lama said he told his brother.

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