This apparently isn’t even the “real” Panchen Lama

Sort of the joke of religious doctrine. These people aren't actually reincarnated Buddhist Wizards who can magically divine the destiny of their successors.

This Panchen Lama is as much "real" as the current Dalai Lama is "real".

These are humans, they can be educated and influenced as easily as anyone, and their politics/religion is a consequence of their upbringing rather than some magical pre-birth spiritual intuition. And they can also grow up, realize their position in the world, and regret their decisions in hindsight.

In 1999, the Dalai Lama suggested that the CIA Tibetan program had been harmful to Tibet because it primarily served American interests, claiming "once the American policy toward China changed, they stopped their help ... The Americans had a different agenda from the Tibetans."

Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama's elder brother, also expressed frustration with the role of the CIA in Tibetan affairs. In a 2009 interview, he stated "I never asked for CIA military assistance. I asked for political help. I wanted to publicize the Tibet situation, to make a little noise. The Americans promised to help make Tibet an independent country. All those promises were broken." He continues, claiming that America "didn't want to help Tibet. It just wanted to make trouble for China. It had no far-sighted policy for Tibet. I wasn't trained for this (clandestine operations). We didn't know about power politics."

During the Tibetan program's period of activity, some of its largest contributions to the CIA's interests in the region came in the form of keeping the Chinese occupied with resistance, never actually producing a mass uprising establishing independence for Tibet from Beijing. The program also produced a trove of army documents that Tibetan insurgents seized from the Chinese and turned over to the CIA in 1961 in what has been referred to as "one of the greatest intelligence successes of the Cold War".