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A meeting with a holy teen in Tibet

By Kim Briggeman | The Missoulian

The Dalai Lama greets Frank Bessac of Missoula for the first time in 49 years last May at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. The two met in Lhasa, Tibet, in June 1950.File photo/Bessac family/US

Maybe it didn’t happen this way. But through sightless eyes and the layers of 60 years, this is how Frank Bessac sees it now.

A retired professor and longtime head of the anthropology department at the University of Montana, Bessac sighed and stretched long legs out from under a sitting-room table one morning last week.

It’s June 1950 in Lhasa, the birthplace of Tibetan Buddhism. Mao Zedong’s Communists are threatening Tibet’s mystical 11,500-foot capital.

Bessac is a 28-year-old American. He walks with 15-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama who last month announced he will come to Montana next year to consecrate the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas near Arlee.

“I have a good vision,” said Bessac, who has suffered from juvenile glaucoma most of his life. “Here’s a building with walls around it, and in some of these walls, as I remember it, is a garden.”

There may be a third person, perhaps a translator. Bessac has been in China for almost five years, first as a GI with the US Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. He studied Mongolian and the pastoral nomads of Inner Asia in 1948-49 as one of the first Fulbright Scholars. But he doesn’t speak Tibetan.

They walk outside the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, through a gate and over to a corner of the garden. They sit down, maybe to tea, and talk.

As Bessac recalls, the conversation consists mostly of the Tibetan boy asking the young American who calls himself “really a nobody” questions about the Western world. The boy wonders how Tibet might enlist United States and United Nations support against Mao’s advancing People’s Liberation Army.

The Dalai Lama would have expressed concern over the mistaken attack by Tibetan border guards on Bessac’s small party in flight from western China several weeks earlier. The 29 April incident resulted in the death of three men, including Douglas MacKiernan, a CIA operative.

“He was very interested in what I had to say,” Bessac said.

The Missoula man has a different account of that audience in a memoir he and wife Susanne wrote and published as part of UM’s “Contributions to Anthropology” series in 2006. In “Death on the Chang Tang, Tibet 1950,” the Bessacs say the teenage Dalai Lama was seated on a raised dais and guarded by huge monk bodyguards. Frank and Vasili Zvanzov, a Russian and the other survivor of the border attack, approached and presented him with white silk scarves.

The Dalai Lama had not yet attained his “majority” and taken over the secular affairs of Tibet. Tradition didn’t permit him to speak with foreigners.

“Therefore, it was impossible for us to exchange views, although we grinned at each other during the entire time of the ‘interview,’” Bessac wrote. “He looked at us with a twinkle in his eyes and obviously eager to ask me many questions, but he had to obey protocol.”

Whatever the actual circumstance, it was the last time an American gained an audience with the Dalai Lama in Lhasa.

Mao’s army reached Lhasa months later. The young Dalai Lama was enthroned as Tibet’s spiritual and political leader that November. After a failed uprising in 1959, he fled by foot to northern India, where he established a government-in-exile in Dharamshala and has resided ever since.

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