and “the Soviets agreed to sign a declaration aimed at curbing once and for all their activities in India and elsewhere.” In spite of his agreement in the Atlantic Charter, Churchill fought to keep India in the empire, but after he was voted out of office India gained independence and partition in 1947.14
In 1933 Zahir Shah became king of Afghanistan at the age of nineteen, although for several years the actual rulers were the king’s uncles. In 1934 Afghanistan was admitted to the League of Nations, and in 1940 it proclaimed its neutrality in the war. Louis Goethe Dreyfus, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Iran since 1939, was given an additional appointment with the same title to Kabul. The first representative of the U.S. government to reside in Kabul was Major Gordon Enders, military attaché, who arrived in December 1941, followed by the chargé d’affaires, Charles Thayer, in June 1942. The first resident minister, Cornelius Van H. Engert, arrived in July 1942. The Americans were welcomed, for they appeared to have no territorial interests in Afghanistan, whereas the Afghans remained wary of the British, with whom they had fought three wars. By 1943, however, as the Axis appeared to be losing World War II, the Afghans saw the British and Americans as useful antagonists to Russia, their ancient enemy to the north.
At the same time that Enders, Thayer, and Engert were creating an official role for the United States in Afghanistan, the United States was also engaging officially in Tibet for the first time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had authorized an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission to Lhasa in 1942. Major Ilia Tolstoy, grandson of the famous author, and Captain Brooke Dolan II were dispatched with a framed photograph of FDR as a gift to the seven-year old Dalai Lama. They left Delhi in September 1942, assisted by the secretary of state for India, Sir Olaf Caroe, and FDR’s friend Suydam Cutting (then a captain in the OSS in Delhi), and arrived in Lhasa in December. The State Department sought to demonstrate American friendship and the War Department “was interested in a possible military supply route between India and China through the Tibetan mountains.” The mission was terminated in March 1943. The OSS chief in China, Milton Miles, was skeptical about the mission. Tolstoy and Dolan were operating independently, whereas he believed their mission should have been placed under his command. Perhaps because he understood China’s long-term interest in the territory of Tibet, he also thought the Chinese would oppose it.15
As viceroy, Wavell correctly saw that India would become independent, and he attempted to ameliorate the problems that he believed would (and did) ensue. Wavell was punished for his efforts by Clement Atlee, Churchill’s successor as prime minister, and was pushed into retirement. But independence could not be denied, and Lord Mountbatten presided over the final ceremonies of the handover from Britain and the partition of India on August 15, 1947. After Britain left India in 1947, “for the British, at least, the Great Game was well and truly over.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last governor of the NWFP before the independence and partition of India, concurred.16
The Travelers, and Others Who Were Involved in the Trip
And I am reckoned something of a player of the Game myself!
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
The Adventurer: Enders
Gordon Bandy Enders was the instigator and driving force behind the trip along the border of Afghanistan and India in November–December 1943. It is very likely a journey that he had wanted to make when he was a child, growing up on the border between India and Tibet, where he imagined that he was an “American Kim.”1 He saw that the journey became a real possibility when he was appointed as the U.S. military attaché to Kabul in the fall of 1941; he began to plan for the trip at that time. Two years later he drove the jeep that took the three Anglo-American officers from Peshawar over the Lowari Pass to Chitral, and then to Quetta, in Baluchistan.
Gordon Enders was born in the little town of Essex, Iowa, 7 May 1897. He was the second of the three children of E. Allen Enders, a circuit-riding Presbyterian minister, and his wife, a Swiss Huguenot named Frances-Marie Seibert. His older sister Miriam had been born in November 1895, and his younger brother Robert was born in September 1899. In about 1901 the father was accepted as a missionary, and the young family sailed to Bombay. His father began his work as a preacher while his mother raised the family and taught school at Etawah, near the Grand Trunk Road. In 1906 they moved to the village of Almora, about 250 miles to the north, near the border of India and Tibet. Their house was about eight miles outside the village, on the top of a seven thousand–foot mountain known as Simtolah, with the great peak of Nanda Devi in the background. Gordon lived in India in his formative years, from the age of four until he was fifteen.
As a baba (child) his first teacher was Jowar Singh, a high-caste Hindu hillman; from him he learned to hunt and to speak Hindustani. Kipling’s book Kim was published in 1901, and although he was young, Gordon read enough of it to recognize the experiences of the fictional Kim that were similar to his own. While he was recovering from a severe burn, he was taken into the household of Jowar’s father-in-law, a Tibetan named Chanti, who he learned was a spy for the Indian government. Enders became the chela (student or disciple) to Chanti, his guru. This relationship was similar to that of Kim, who was chela to his guru, a Buddhist monk. Chanti taught him the ways of the spies, the “Kim-men,” as Enders called them. Gordon’s imagination was vivid: “Before Chanti left Almora he took Jowaru and me along the Pilgrim’s Trail . . . [where a] bronzed priest of Nepal trudged unseeing through the human stream, a naked boy at his heels. They might have been Kim and his Lama.” He learned that although the Tibetans preferred to remain in isolation, they preferred Britain to Russia.2
Enders’ father died in 1910, and his mother accepted a post as matron of girls at Allahabad College, which was Chanti’s alma mater. Gordon returned to America in 1912 to begin preparation to enter college at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. He spent five years in Wooster—two years finishing high school, and three years in college. One of his housemates was William A. Eddy, who a quarter century later was “a Princeton professor [who] had lived through so many Armenian massacres in Asia Minor that he was always getting them mixed up.” Enders’ friend was already famous by 1935, when Enders wrote these words, and he went on to an even more memorable career in World War II.3
Enders had a remarkable career in World War I. He left college the year before he was to graduate, first serving as an ambulance driver for the French in Picardy and at Verdun, and then, after completing aviation school, as an aviator for the French and American air forces. It was a grim business. Forced down more than once—perhaps three times—he was so badly wounded at one time that he was declared dead. He awoke to find a Red Cross “gray lady” named Elizabeth Crump at his side. He fell in love with her, and they were married at the Hôtel de Ville in La Rochelle on 22 April 1919.4
He was in New York until 1920, but he planned to return to the Orient. While he was in New York, he wrote a two-page piece, “Prohibition in Old India,” that was published in the monthly journal Asia. The lead article in this issue of Asia was by Roy Chapman Andrews. It is unlikely that Enders could have known it, but Andrews had until recently been an undercover secret agent of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), a fact not revealed until 2003. Lowell Thomas was then an associate editor of Asia. Three years later Thomas became the first private American citizen to visit Afghanistan, about nineteen years before Enders became the first American diplomat to live there.5
Enders took the civil service examination for clerk to trade commissioner, under the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. He was sent to the American legation in Peking (now spelled Beijing), where he was an assistant to the commercial attaché until 1923. He then went into business, selling American cotton to Chinese and Japanese mill operators,
