The Indian Spy Who Fell for Tibet
If it hadn’t been for a bout of malaria, Sarat Chandra Das might never have become a spy. As a civil engineer, he might have worked in Calcutta forever. But in 1874, upon recovering from his illness, he was offered a position as headmaster of the Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling. The mountain air would do him good, he thought, so he accepted. This was how, at 25, Das came to run a school for spies, training agents to work along the India-Tibet border, growing so besotted with Tibet himself that he made two surreptitious journeys to the kingdom.[Source]