This book, written jointly by legendary mountaineer and former Indo-Tibetan Border Police officer M.S. Kohli and Kenneth Conboy, deputy director of the Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, provides an absorbing and authentic account of a top secret operation undertaken by the intelligence communities of India and the US after the Sino-Indian war of 1962.
The objective of the operation was to have a sensor with a nuclear-fuelled generator planted in the Himalayas by a team of Indo-US mountaineers to monitor nuclear and missile developments in China. While practically all the mountaineers selected from the Indian side came from the Intelligence Bureau and its allied agencies, those from the US were private climbers, with the CIA providing the leadership.
The first attempt to plant the device on Nanda Devi in 1965 was beaten back by bad weather. Instead of bringing the device back, the team, with the clearance of the IB and the Aviation Research Centre (ARC) HQ in New Delhi, left it cached on the mountain, planning to return the next year to retrieve it. When the team returned, it had disappeared—causing concern about possible radioactive contamination of the environment.
The first attempt to plant the device on Nanda Devi in 1965 was beaten back by bad weather. Instead of bringing the device back, the team, with the clearance of the IB and the Aviation Research Centre (ARC) HQ in New Delhi, left it cached on the mountain, planning to return the next year to retrieve it. When the team returned, it had disappeared—causing concern about possible radioactive contamination of the environment. retrieved the next year and returned to the US. The idea of using a device with a nuclear-fuelled generator was thereafter abandoned. Instead, a gas-powered device and a solar-powered one were planted in peaks in the Leh region and in the Northeast.
After the spy-in-the-sky satellites in the 1970s, which performed the same tasks more effectively and with much less risk of a political controversy, technical spies in the Himalayas lost their relevance. The sensitive joint project was kept a well-guarded secret till 1978, when Outside, an American journal, exposed it with a highly exaggerated and alarming account of the likely hazards to the environment from the lost nuclear-fuelled generator.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20030428&fname=Booksa&sid=1
Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs (Modern War Studies) by M. S. Kohli Kenneth J. Conboy and other books on secret wars (including CIA involvement in Tibert) by Kenneth J. Conboy.
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