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In this cross between a travel adventure story and an espionage novel, Sydney Wignall tells how he became an ad hoc spy for a renegade faction of Indian intelligence operatives in 1955. Wignall had set out to climb the highest mountain in Tibet, but was recruited to investigate Chinese military activity in the region. After being caught, he spent months in a rat-infested, sub-freezing cell as he underwent interrogation. When international pressure forced his release, his captors "released" him and two companions in a nearly impenetrable wintertime wilderness and said "Go home." Yet Wignall survived--and managed to smuggle out vital information. It is an exhilarating story that only now can be told.
From Publishers Weekly
While organizing a Himalayan expedition in 1955 to climb Tibet's highest peak, Welsh mountaineer Wignall was recruited as a spy by India's secret service. This exhilarating account of his espionage, arrest by Chinese communists, several weeks' imprisonment in a rat-infested Tibetan jail and harrowing escape over a never-before-scaled Himalayan gorge is at once a thrilling real-life spy tale, a serendipitous adventure and an ethnographic travelogue. It is laced with intrigue, close escapes from death, breathtaking vistas and affectionate observations of the Tibetan people surviving under draconian Chinese rule. Wignall, who displays acerbic wit and a flair for storytelling, obtained proof of China's Tibetan military buildup for an attack on India-intelligence ignored by India's Prime Minister Nehru, who befriended the supposedly "anti-imperialist" Mao Tse-tung until China's invasion of northern India in 1962. In prison, Wignall endured solitary confinement and kept a diary that he hid in an inflatable mattress. Decked with sketches from his trek-a mission he was prohibited from divulging for 25 years-his book condemns the West for allowing China's cultural and physical genocide of Tibet. He notes ominously that China is now building a strategic highway to Nepal-an easy means for a future invasion that would give Chinese troops direct access to India. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
