On April 9, 2013, an article entitled Tibet: The War We Cancelled written by Jonathan Mirsky, US historian and columnist on the US policy toward "Tibet" was published on www.nybooks.com，indicating that "for much of the past century,' US relations with Tibet’have been characterized by hollow good wishes for the Dalai Lama."

The book read, as early as 1908, William Rockhill, a US diplomat, advised the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that "close and friendly relations with China are absolutely necessary, for Tibet is and must remain a portion of the Ta Ts’ing [Manchu] Empire for its own good."

"Not much has changed with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama one hundred years later," the book stressed.

According to the author, for nearly two decades after 1950, the CIA ran a covert operation designed to train Tibetan "insurgents" and gather intelligence about the "Chinese", as part of its efforts to contain the spread of communism around the world.

"Though little known today, the program produced at least one spectacular intelligence coup and provided a source of support for the Dalai Lama," he said.

In 1955, a group of local Tibetan leaders secretly plotted an "armed uprising", and rebellion broke out a year later. By that point, the rebellion had gained American backing, the book disclosed.

In the early 1950s, the CIA began to explore ways to aid the Tibetans as part of its growing campaign to contain Communist China. By the second half of the decade, "Project Circus" had been formally launched, Tibetan resistance fighters were being flown abroad for training, and weapons and ammunition were being airdropped at strategic locations inside "Tibet". In 1959, the agency opened a secret facility to train Tibetan recruits at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, partly because the location, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, might approximate the terrain of the Himalayas. According to one account, some 170 "Kamba guerrillas" passed through the Colorado program.

The book read further, many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated "nonviolence", believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama's brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that "Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support." According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974. In 1970s there was growing disagreement in Washington over the CIA’s activities in "Tibet".

The book said, as the US then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger prepared for President Nixon's meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, the program was wound down.

After the CIA mission was ended, "Tibet" became increasingly marginal to Washington's China policy, as Knaus has now made clear in a second book, Beyond Shangri-la: America and Tibet's Move into the Twenty-First Century.

On the eve of Richard Nixon's historic 1972 meeting with late Chinese Chairman Mao, the program was abruptly cancelled, thus "returning the US to its traditional arms-length policy toward 'Tibet'".

"Although 'Tibet' may not have been on the table in the Beijing talks, the era of official US support for the Tibetan cause was over," recalled John Kenneth Knaus, a forty-year CIA veteran, in his 1999 book Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival." There was no role for 'Tibet' in Kissinger's new equation," the book revealed.

By 1975, President Gerald Ford was able to say to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping,"Let me assure you, Mr. Vice Premier, that we oppose and do not support any [United States] governmental action as far as Tibet is concerned."

On June 27, 1998, the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin met with the US President Bill Clinton. In that meeting, the book said, Clinton assured Jiang that, "I agree that Tibet is a part of China, an autonomous region of China. And I can understand why the acknowledgement of that would be a precondition of dialogue with the Dalai Lama."

After a meeting in 2011 with President Obama in the White House Map Room—the Oval Office being too official—the Dalai Lama was ushered out the back door, past the garbage cans. All this, of course, is intended to avoid condemnation from Beijing，the book emphasized.

Besides, Mirsky also wrote，"in 1999, I asked the Dalai Lama if the CIA operation had been harmful for Tibet. 'Yes, that is true,' he
replied. The intervention was harmful, he suggested, because it was primarily aimed at serving American interests rather than helping the Tibetans in any lasting way. 'Once the American policy toward China changed, they stopped their help otherwise our struggle could have gone on. The Americans had a different agenda from the Tibetans.'"