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.

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