This is a fascinating story from six decades ago about an espionage act gone wrong possibly putting at risk millions of lives even to this day. It follows the Chinese nuclear tests in 1964 which alarmed the US. In a rare act of partnership with India who had just lost a war to China, the US tried to setup a nuclear-powered antenna atop one of India’s tallest peaks to intercept Chinese missile data from across the border.
“The whole mission was wrapped in deception from the very beginning. A trove of files just discovered in a garage in Montana show how a celebrated National Geographic photographer built an elaborate cover story for the covert operation — and how the plans completely unraveled on the mountain.
Extensive interviews with the people who carried out the mission and once-secret documents stashed away in American and Indian government archives reveal the extent of the debacle, and the ways American officials at the highest levels, including President Jimmy Carter, tried to cover it up years later.
The documents trace the anxiety spreading in Washington and New Delhi. Back then, just as now, the United States and India had a tricky relationship. They were both worried about China’s growing nuclear capabilities. They were both watching the Soviet Union’s designs on Afghanistan. They both had a precarious Cold War chessboard to manage. And just like today, the two nations, as the world’s two largest democracies, had reasons to partner up but didn’t trust each other.
The lost nuclear device and the dangers it posed could have easily led to a breakdown between them. But the files show Mr. Carter and Morarji Desai, the Indian prime minister at the time, overcoming their mutual suspicions and working together in secret, hoping to make the problem go away.”
At the centre of the story is the nuclear generator:
“Before solar technology took off, NASA considered these kinds of generators well suited to keep unattended machines running in the extreme conditions of space.
They work by converting heat from radioactive material into electricity, and NASA credits them with enabling “some of the most challenging and exciting space missions in history.”
…But by the mid-1960s, they entered a new realm: espionage
The C.I.A. laid out a bold plan. A group of American alpinists working for the agency would slip into the Himalayas undetected, drag several backpacks stuffed with surveillance equipment up the slopes and install a secret sensor at the top of a mountain to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests.
…The mission’s success hinged on two breakthroughs for the spy world: the portable nuclear devices and missile telemetry. By the early 1960s, scientists working for America’s most secret labs had figured out how to catch radio signals from ballistic missiles flying high in the sky.
…By putting an unmanned station on top of the Himalayas, the C.I.A. hoped to pluck radio signals from high-altitude missiles launched from China’s Lop Nur testing grounds, nearly a thousand miles away in Xinjiang.
…The C.I.A. then turned to India for help.
“Maybe two or three people in the entire government knew about this,” explained R.K. Yadav, a former Indian intelligence officer.
The circle may have been small, Mr. Yadav said, but the Indian government’s fear of China going nuclear was intense.
“You see, we had just lost a war to China — no, not just lost, we had been humiliated,” Mr. Yadav said, referring to the brief but intense flare-up along China and India’s border in 1962.”
As luck would have it, the mission ended up getting caught in a blizzard and the team left the nuclear device somewhere near the heights of the Nanda Devi, albeit secured to the extent they could, before making their way down for safety. With the onset of winter, the team could only make their way back several months later, only to see that the device had vanished most likely swept away by winter storms.
It was only a decade later that an investigative journalist broke the story creating panic in both countries, particularly in India:
“India, after all, was supposed to be the leader of the world’s nonaligned movement, which refused to back either side of the Cold War, Washington or Moscow. Now its government was being exposed for doing the C.I.A.’s bidding on its own soil — and doing it poorly, no less.
The biggest concern was the Ganges. Nanda Devi’s glaciers, formed millions of years ago, feed tributaries of the river, which runs more than 1,500 miles and nourishes a vast, fertile ecosystem where hundreds of millions of people live.”
The Plutonium used in the device had a half of life of 88yrs and could potentially contaminate waters that feed millions downstream.
“The U.S. Navy had searched exhaustively for a pair of SNAP-19B2 generators that disappeared off the Californian coast in 1968 when a weather satellite crashed. The government was so anxious to recover them that the Navy sent half a dozen ships and plumbed the ocean for nearly five months until they were found.
Why, then, had the Americans simply packed up in India, leaving a similar nuclear device lost in the Himalayas?”
An intriguing story well worth the read in in its entirety.
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