Sonam Dagpo said the CIA assistance to the Tibetans began even before the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 following a failed anti-China uprising.

``We are aware the CIA helped the Tibetan cause,'' he told AFP here, commenting on a Los Angeles Times report that the CIA gave the Tibetan exile movement 1.7 million dollars a year through much of the 1960s.

The funding was part of the CIA's Cold War effort to undermine the governments of Communist countries, notably China and the Soviet Union, the daily said.

The CIA also trained Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal and at a covert site in Colorado, it said, citing declassified intelligence documents released by the State department.

``The Tibetans were trained in Nepal and they launched guerrilla attacks in the early 1960s,'' Dagpo said. ``There was guerrilla trainingin eastern Tibet in the mid- 1950s.''

``Everyone knows that. The CIA really helped.''

But Dagpo said he did not know anything about the Times report that the CIA also gave 180,000 dollars to the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of six million Tibetans, lives in India as the head of a government-in-exile which is based in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala. It is not recognised by any country.

India is also home to some 100,000 Tibetan exiles.

Dagpo said the Dalai Lama's government had been ``running on a shoe-string budget for the past many, many years.''

He said the government-in-exile was mainly financed by the gold and jewellery which the Dalai Lama brought with him to India and on voluntary contributions from the mass of Tibetan exiles.

The Times said the CIA had long resisted efforts to disclose information about its Tibetan operations. China still accuses the Dalai Lama of being an agent of foreign forces seeking to secede Tibet.

The CIA aid ended inthe 1970s after the then president, Richard Nixon, made his historic overtures to China, Times said.

Tibetan exiles have acknowledged they once received support from US intelligence. The Dalai Lama in a 1990 autobiography, ``Freedom in Exile,'' said his brothers did make contact with the CIA in 1956.

He said the CIA agreed to help, not because it wanted to aid Tibetans, but in an effort to undermine communist China.