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One full moon night in September 1957, they took off in a modified B-17 aeroplane from the same airstrip near Dhaka. Before long they were flying over the Himalayan range, its peaks gleaming in the clear night sky. Athar Norbu and his partner, Lhotse, were the first to jump, their target a wide sandbar in the Tsangpo River close to Samye Monastery in Central Tibet. He can still recall the excitement of that moment: "The Tsangpo appeared below us. We could see it gleaming in the dark. There were no clouds, it was a clear night. A feeling of happiness surged through me when I realized that we would be able to make the jump. The plane descended and at the signal ‘Go!’ we went rattling out of the plane." Their mission was to proceed to Lhasa and make contact with Andrug Gompo Tashi and, if possible, to meet the Dalai Lama.

In Washington, DC, their first radio message was awaited with eager anticipation. An operation of this nature, involving as it did, numerous logistical challenges, was audacious even by CIA standards: parachutes had to be modified to accommodate the high altitude; the pilots flying the B-17s had only old turn-of-the-century British maps to navigate with (the CIA would later map Tibet using the U-2 spy plane); a certain type of gold coin then favoured in Tibet had to be found for the men to take back with them (the bazaars of the Far East were scoured); even the Kellogs cereal company was roped in to produce tsampa, the roasted barley flour that is a staple in Tibet. Ken Knaus, Roger McCarthy’s successor as head of ST Circus, was at the CIA’s old headquarters in the capital when the message finally arrived. "I suppose you could have heard the cheers from one end to the other when that first message came in saying that the guys had arrived and they were safe," he says, smiling at the memory of that moment. "Yeah, that was indeed a time for celebration. It’s a pretty incredible achievement to think of, you know…here you are, what? 15,000 miles away, message going out, guy sitting out there with a hand cranked generator spinning this stuff out, spinning through the air, and somehow it gets back here on a piece of paper!"

The remaining four men from the pilot group were not so lucky. Three of them, under the leadership of Gyato Wangdu, were dropped near Lithang where they linked up with a large guerrilla force. The fourth man went in by land but was killed before he could join his companions. Before the CIA could send any help, the force came under heavy attack from Chinese reinforcements. Wangdu’s team mates were both killed in the fighting and he himself only just managed to escape, making his way under incredibly harsh conditions across the desolate Jangthang plain before crossing safely into Nepal.