As evidence of that explosion was being analyzed in the US, communist forces were closing fast on Xinjiang forcing Mackiernan to shut the US consulate in Urumchi and flee south across the Taklamakan Desert. The rest of the staff had fled earlier across the same desert into India. His orders, however, were to move into Tibet. Before leaving he was joined by a Fulbright scholar on the run from Inner Mongolia named Frank Bessac, who may have been a contract CIA agent, though the man denies this even today.
That winter, while Mackiernan's party waited on the edge of Tibet for mountain passes to clear, Washington was paralyzed by the McCarthy inquisition, leading possibly to the fateful delay in notifying Tibetan authorities of the group's arrival. Laird suggests that bureaucrats sitting on their hands back in Washington are largely to blame for Mackiernan's death. If this were the case, the government is not about to make an admission of guilt. Even today, the CIA won't acknowledge the identity of its first agent killed in action.
Because the CIA is so tight-lipped about Mackiernan's identity and activity -- presumably to avoid ruffling China's feathers -- Into Tibet leads one to assume that we are only getting a small part of what is certainly a gripping story. Even Bessac, who eventually made it to Lhasa, met the Dalai Lama and encouraged the Tibetan government to formally appeal for covert aid from the US is adamant he wasn't working as a spy.
Despite the many unanswered questions, what is made clear in Into Tibet is that the CIA carried out daring and valuable work in northwest China and that the agency was present and active in organizing Tibetan opposition to the communist Chinese invasion. What remains a tragic unconfirmed possibility is that the CIA may have inadvertently hastened the invasion by sending Mackiernan to Tibet after the communists had already pegged him as a spy.
Laird does an impressive job uncovering the details of Mackiernan and Bessac's activities to bring out a story reminiscent of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, albeit much more modest in scope and scale. Into Tibet has all the makings of a spy page-turner: idealistic and dashing secret agents (apparently Mackiernan was popular with the women), oppressed people and uncaring governments. Except this story is not fiction and the ending is grossly ironic for everyone involved, especially for Mackiernan.
The author's light-weight polemics in support of Mongolian, Kazak and Tibetan independence would have been best left to an expert in a separate section of the book instead of interspersed through the narrative. At least a dozen punctuation and spelling errors in this book also detract from its rich content.
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