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Although it was never the official American policy, the Tibetans were led to believe – and perhaps their American mentors came to believe it themselves – that they were being trained for the fight to regain Tibet’s independence. Thinley Paljor, who worked as an interpreter at Camp Hale, recalls, "During the training period, we learned that the objective of our training was to gain our independence. In our games-room we had a picture of Eisenhower, signed by him, ‘to my fellow Tibetan friends, from Eisenhower’. So we thought that even the president himself was giving us support." But Sam Halpern, a senior CIA officer at the time, has no illusions about what the aim of ST Circus was: "I think basically the whole idea was to keep the Chinese occupied somehow…keep them annoyed…keep them disturbed. Nobody wanted to go to war over Tibet, that’s pretty clear. I would think that from the American point of view it wasn’t going to cost us very much, either money or manpower. Anyway it wasn’t our manpower involved, it was the Tibetan manpower, and we would be willing to help the Tibetans become a running sore and a nuisance to the Chinese."

Between late 1959 and January 1960, the CIA parachuted four separate groups of Camp Hale trainees into Tibet to make contact with what was left of the resistance. Each team carried with them wireless sets and weapons for their own use. Each member had a cyanide capsule strapped to his wrist; they could choose to kill themselves rather than be captured alive. The first team was dropped in September 1959 at a place close to the great inland lake of Namtso, north of Lhasa. On landing, they discovered that the guerrilla force they were sent to contact had already been destroyed by the Chinese. They escaped back to India through Nepal.

Around the same time, another group of 18 men was dropped at a place called Chagra Pembar, northeast of Lhasa, where a huge group of resistance fighters, along with their families and livestock, had gathered. The CIA made an arms drop soon afterwards. Unlike before, the weapons were now American, mostly M-1 rifles but also mortars, recoilless rifles, machine guns and grenades. After the Dalai Lama’s escape, there was less concern about maintaining the "plausible deniability" that had determined the composition of the earlier arms drops. According to plan, five of the Camp Hale trainees left Chagra Pembar after the drop and headed north where they linked up with yet another large rebel force, based in a desolate area called Nira Tsogo just south of the Dhang La pass that marks the watershed between the provinces of Central Tibet and Amdo. This gathering was also made up of families and animals and resembled a medieval encampment rather than a guerrilla force on the move. The team radioed for more support. In response, three more teams, totalling 16 men were parachuted at Nira Tsogo and several arms drops were made, both here and at Chagra Pembar. By now, the numbers of people concentrated in these two places had swollen to huge proportions as more and more escaping families joined them. The CIA frantically gave instructions to its men to convince the leaders of the various groups to break up into smaller outfits and fan out so that they would be less vulnerable to attack, but this did not happen. It was only a matter of time before they were discovered.