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A Mission of Dissent In the Heart of Beijing
The 'Poignant' Point
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At 5:45 a.m. a few days later, team members were climbing the billboard.
Rycroft and Kirk went first. Their job was to get the banner to the top and unroll it.
The three Americans played a support role. They were the lookouts.
Within 10 minutes, Rycroft and Kirk had scaled the structure and managed to unfurl the "Free Tibet" banner. They were taking some Tibetan flags out of their backpacks when trouble arrived.
The Chinese security forces were fast. Maron was the first to spot them and their clubs.
"It's hard not to be nervous and scared when you see 12 paramilitary police in full camouflage sprinting towards you across the parking lot," he recalled.
Maron tried to talk to them, to explain that if they just left the group alone everyone would come down safely. But three of the men grabbed Bockman and pulled her down. The others quickly scrambled down, and all five were put inside a white police van.
By early afternoon, the foreigners were on a plane home.
Back in central Beijing, the Chinese police were still looking for accomplices.
Kurt Langer, a 34-year-old who works in the music industry in New York, was the "witness" assigned to the CCTV protest. He had arrived separately, evaded capture and was still talking to reporters.
But the next day, he said, he noticed four plainclothes police officers following him everywhere. Worried he might compromise the rest of the operation, he headed to the airport.
Chinese security caught up with him there and took him to an abandoned hotel. He said they then interrogated him for 10 hours -- alternately turning up the air conditioning until he was shivering, then the heat until he was sweating. He said they turned up the volume of the TV until his ears hurt and then turned off every light until it was pitch black.
The experience "drove home the point of why we were there," Langer said. "The fact that they couldn't even stand to tolerate a foreigner speaking openly in the press makes it even more poignant the lack of Tibetan voices."
In the end, police made Langer sign a 12-page confession in Chinese that he couldn't read, but he said he didn't tell the police a thing.
It wasn't because Langer didn't want to cooperate. It was because, by design, he simply didn't know.
