There are things we don’t know. There are things we choose not to learn. And there are things we hide. Redaction, however, is not necessarily performed by an individual subject (or agent as this particular case may be). In the case of the CIA, redaction is institutional. It is in the name of the state and is in service to the state. What is redacted is not always what matters to the stories we need to tell. It might matter to other stories and to other times. It might matter elsewhere or otherwise. It might not matter at all.; ; In this chapter, I consider the cultural and political status of things not revealed in relation to Tibet and the CIA, specifically the CIA’s training of several hundred Tibetan soldiers at a secret camp in Colorado. Based on 25 years of ethnographic research with Tibetan resistance veterans and their families, and with retired CIA officers and their families, I consider what is deemed important or relevant and by who. While redacted documents play a role in the story I have to tell, I am also interested in other forms of redaction as a politics of knowing and world-making. Ethnographically, the story moves between the USA and Tibet, between the Rocky Mountains and the Himalaya, traversing the way people are known by others through names, through relationships, through both shared and secret pains in search of what it means to not know something.
