How to Climb

The Secret of Nanda Devi

Forty years ago a team of top american climbers participated in a botched cia operation that lost a plutonium spy device high in the himalaya. Here’s senior contributing editor pete takeda’s account of that bizarre expedition and his attempts to uncover t

I stumbled upon the legend of Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot and the lost CIA plutonium on a cold October night in 1987, sitting with friends, swilling cheap malt liquor around a roaring campfire in Yosemite. To my best recollection, Tucker recounted the most outrageous climbing yarn I’d ever heard. Tucker, whose low-slung build lent him an authoritative air, was one of those whose expression becomes more earnest and animated with each drink.

Before falling from buzzed eloquence to drunken rambling, the swaying Tucker cast a spellbinding tale of legendary climbers, CIA spooks, radioactive poison and mountains bigger than we could imagine.

Tucker’s story went like this: Elite climbers were trained by the CIA and paid huge sums of money to carry an atomic-powered spy gadget to the top of an undisclosed peak. The stage for the 007-esque drama was the Himalayas. Somehow this plutonium-powered device was lost or stolen, now either providing the fissile juice to a secret Pakistani nuke or threatening every man, woman, and child in India with deadly radiation in the form of contaminated run-off into the Ganges River.

Hunkered around the campfire, I don’t think any of us really believed the CIA recruited climbers as spies or that several pounds of the deadliest substance known to man lay buried at the source of the Ganges River. But the story intrigued me, and nearly 20 years later I began investigating Tucker’s bizarre story, a story whose facts proved to be more outrageous than even the best fiction writer could spin.

 

 

From 1965 through 1968, the CIA, with the full cooperation of the Indian Government, trained some of the best Indian and American high-altitude climbers to spy on Communist China. They did so by attempting to deploy two plutonium-powered surveillance devices in the Himalayas.

Legend has it that a chance meeting at a Washington, D.C. cocktail party sparked the Faustian plot to employ nuclear technology to spy on the People’s Republic of China from the Roof of the World. It was 1964 and Cold War paranoia was at its height. No plan was too outlandish, no investment too great and no means unjustified.

The plot came on the heels of an October test of Red China’s first nuclear weapon in the remote Xinjiang province in western China, and the chance meeting was between none other than Barry Bishop and General Curtis LeMay. Bishop was an unassuming climbing legend, a summiteer on the first successful American Everest expedition in 1963, and recipient of the National Geographic Hubbard Medal from President John F. Kennedy himself.

LeMay had his own chestful of medals including the Distinguished Service Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor. Called “Iron Ass” by his own troops, he was the archetypal Pentagon hawk—a real-life cigar-chewing model for the rabid General Buck Turgidson of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. LeMay is credited with the infamous quote, “They’ve [the North Vietnamese] got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

At that time, America had no dependable spy network within China, and it was years before effective spy satellites could be deployed. Thus it’s easy to imagine LeMay’s interest when Bishop recounted the unobstructed line of sight he’d had from the summit of Everest: You could see all the way into western China. From this casual exchange emerged an unlikely inspiration: Recruit America’s best high-altitude climbers to place a nuclear powered observation device atop the world’s greatest mountain range.

The peak ultimately chosen was Nanda Devi—a mountain sacred to Hindus as the abode of their preeminent Goddess. The peak, India’s highest, rose from a pristine bowl of alpine meadow bordered by a jagged rim of summits. If anything on earth was Shangri-la, the Sanctuary—as the enclave was known—was it. In 1965, at the start of the CIA field operation only six climbers from various expeditions had stood on Nanda Devi’s summit at a cost of three lives. Indeed, only as late as the 1930s did humans even penetrate the Sanctuary.

The CIA planned to intercept radio telemetry signals between the Chinese missiles and ground control. A transceiver, powered by a plutonium battery pack, would beam information to a CIA listening station, where data analysis would reveal the range, speed and payload of the Chinese missile.

Reflecting the era’s unbridled enthusiasm for atomic power, the transceiver was powered by a System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) turning radioactive heat into electricity. The Nanda Devi SNAP, designated Model “19C,” hid seven plutonium rods totaling 1,900 grams of alloyed plutonium—Pu-238 (half-life of 87 years) and Pu-239 (half-life of 24,400 years). The unit, expected to run the four-part Nanda Devi sensor for two years, was a round microwave oven-sized metal bin with five radiating fins. Towering above was a six-foot long antenna.

Two mountains were targeted. On the first, Nanda Devi, the device was lost—presumably avalanched thousands of feet after being cached in a late season storm 1,500-feet shy of the 25,645-foot summit. To this day, the lost plutonium likely lies in a glacier, perhaps being pulverized to dust, creeping towards the headwaters of the Ganges River.

On the shoulder of the second peak—the square-topped massif of Nanda Kot—the Indo-American spy team successfully installed an identical eavesdropping device. That device, repeatedly buried in frequent blizzards, was eventually recovered after producing no worthwhile intelligence. A non-nuclear component was never located and subsequently abandoned.

With these certainties in mind, I boarded an Air India 747 in late August 2005. I’d quit my day job a year earlier to pursue the life of an author. The spy story was my inaugural title. Part of telling the tale meant going to India to check things out myself. It was a long and tricky process to get permission for Nanda Kot alone, and a year of hopeful wrangling garnered nothing more than a permit denial for Nanda Devi. The reason given was environmental degradation in the Sanctuary, but in my eyes, it was all because of the lurking SNAP.

louds rise from the valley below and pour from the summit ridge above, hemming us in a whiteout. A few hours ago our world was a broad vista of ragged Himalayan ridges and peaks—some exceeding 21,000 feet—marching northward to Tibet. Now, in the decreasing visibility, our only sense of what lies ahead is the encroaching rumble of avalanches. Heavy waves of snow lash us. We move from below an ice cliff into an adjacent cave-like gash in the mountainside—the remnants of a deep crevasse, roofed by a sheet of ice—and pitch our tents.

The four of us—ace climber Jonny Copp, a past Himalayan teammate Chuck Bird, and his girlfriend, fellow climber Sarah Thompson—have spent the last few weeks trekking through a Tolkeinesque landscape of vibrant green foothills, deep river gorges, and ghost-towns deserted following Sino-Indian border clashes of the early 1960s. Now we climb into the abode of the gods, surrounded by ranks of peaks including our objective Nanda Kot and the majestic Nanda Devi.

Sleep comes quickly. But at 11:30 p.m. on September 3, 2005, one month after we left Colorado, Chuck wakes with a start. “Oh God!” he screams. He’d been dreaming something dark and nasty, but I’m just awake and annoyed. I don’t vocalize it, but inside I say to Chuck, “Shut up.”

At this moment, I’m convinced we’re on the threshold of success. In perhaps one long day, we’ll summit the hammer-headed Nanda Kot, which at 22,510 feet is merely one of hundreds of such summits in this great range. Her attraction lies neither in her height nor beauty, but in the fact that somewhere on these icy flanks lies a tangible vestige of the most bizarre spy adventure of the Cold War, a vestige that has brought me halfway around the world and could threaten the lives of millions.

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