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India’s Intelligence Bureau and the CIA of the USA set upon a
joint effort to plant a nuclear-powered sensing device on a high
Himalayan peak in order to listen in to messages from China and
monitor its missile launches. The mission required accomplished
mountaineers instead of career spies. This vacuum was filled by
one of the authors, Capt M.S. Kohli of the Indian Navy, famous
for conquering Mount Everest in 1965 and producing a number of
books related to mountaineering. Other mountaineering stalwarts
who joined the mission had commendable climbing feats to their
credit, such as expeditions to Mt. Everest, Kanchanjanga, Nanda
Devi and a host of other treacherous peaks. They were joined by
a group of American climbers who had set mountaineering records
during expeditions to the Alps in Europe and Mt. McKinley in
Alaska in the Arctic Circle.
The Nanda Devi
peak was selected for its obvious advantages. The aim was to
place an unmanned monitoring device on the peak, which would
pick up electronic activity and path profile generated by any
test-fired Chinese nuclear device in south-eastern provinces of
China or in Tibet. The activity so picked up was automatically
to be relayed to a ground station in the lower Himalayas for
analysis by an American team of experts. The device on the peak
was to be powered by a thermo-nuclear generator with radioactive
fissile material. Unfortunately, the mission was beset by the
perils of hazardous climbs, weather delays, aborted attempts and
finally the accidental loss of a generator with radioactive
material along Nanda Devi slopes. This posed a serious
contamination threat to the Ganga and its tributaries. The
information regarding the non-recovery of the radioactive
material was kept under wraps for more than a decade until a
partial leakage of the same by one Howard Kohn in the Outside
magazine, USA, resulted in a media explosion, which rocked
the Indian Parliament. The then Prime Minister Morarji Desai was
forced to give a detailed statement in the House listing the
compulsion of the then government of going into such an
arrangement with the USA in the sixties. He also told the House
that the governments of the day were fully in the know of and
had approved of the joint expeditions. They were also aware of
the non-recovery of the nuclear generator, the efforts made to
retrieve it and the negation of any contamination threat to the
river waters.
The book does not
claim to be a spy versus spy thriller but it gives gripping
accounts of many mountaineering feats undertaken from 1965 to
1968 beginning with the aborted Nanda Devi mission, planting of
the first device at Nanda Devi and the loss of equipment,
including the nuclear-powered generator. This was followed by
subsequent failed missions to recover the device and
understandable building up of tension at the Intelligence Bureau
and the CIA headquarters. Successful installation of a fresh set
of devices on Nanda Kot in 1967 gave some short-lived relief to
the agencies involved. Finally the device was installed in the
Ladakh region by reducing the height parameters and changing to
a non-hazardous power source. By the time this
information-gathering system started proving its usefulness it
had become obsolete due to easy availability of satellite
imaging techniques with the USA. Thus ended the honeymoon of
almost four years between the intelligence agencies and
mountaineers of two nations.
The book also
throws light on the involvement of people in the Indian
intelligence hierarchy, such as B.N. Mullick, R.N. Kao and A.K.
Dave, in the execution of the joint project. It also talks of
our mountaineers of the calibre of Kohli, Sonam Gyatso, Gyan
Singh, Bhangu, two Wangyals, and Thondup the cook, who took each
mission as a fresh challenge as a well-knit team and enjoyed
climbing the peaks year after year. The book also gives insight
into the functioning of some of the ‘classified’ Indian
agencies such Establishment 22, Aviation Research Centre, High
Altitude Operation Training Centre, Special Frontier Force and
Special Service Bureau.
All chapters in
the book revolve around Capt M.S. Kohli. Kenneth Conboy has
worked as a policy analyst and deputy director at the Heritage
Foundation and has written on CIA’s operations in Tibet. This
is a well-documented and illustrated book, covering a historical
episode.
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WE
often hear from protagonists of friendly relations between India and
the United States of America that being the two largest democracies,
these nations are natural allies. This book is a good reminder to
the present generation that historically India and the USA have been
playing games together on the same side of the fence, most of the
times, if not always. This is not withstanding occasional outbursts
by India on the US attitude of not abandoning its traditionally cosy
relationship with Pakistan as also for keeping the leftist lobby in
the country in good humour.
