This is the story of how the US government — primarily through the CIA and often in cooperation with India — came to harness, nurture, and encourage Tibetan defiance in one of the most extreme covert campaigns of the Cold War. In particular, it details an important chapter in the CIA’s paramilitary history. In Tibet, new kinds of equipment — aircraft and parachutes, for example — were combat-tested under the most extreme conditions imaginable. New communications techniques were tried and perfected. In many cases, these lessons learned would be applied to other Cold War battlefields like Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere. Tibet, therefore, became a vital proving ground for CIA case officers and their spycraft.