Robert Schaller' The Spy'
Implanting nuclear device
AN AWFUL SPY OPERATION OF CIA ON NANDA DEVI WHICH FAILED MISERABLY
The Goddess looms in his memory. She is both muse and Mata Hari, and for a brief moment nearly half a century ago, she was his.But Nanda Devi, the Himalayan peak known as the Goddess for her beauty and her wrath, is a fickle mistress. She has stolen other men's lives and sent a woman to her grave. She has claimed a piece of Robert Schaller as well.In 1965, Schaller was part of an American spy team that tried to place a nuclear-powered surveillance device on top of Nanda Devi, one of the highest mountains in the world.That mission was a spectacular failure. The device and its nuclear core vanished along with, or so the CIA hoped, any news about it.But even secrets leave traces. Today, India restricts access to the mountain. Climbers whisper she is radioactive. And information the government likely hoped would remain buried forever has slowly begun to surface.General Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force chief of staff from 1961 to 1965, who helped conceive the Nanda Devi spy mission.Read more on Robert-Schaller-s-life-of-secrecy-betrayal:http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Spy-Robert-Schaller-s-life-of-secrecy-betrayal-1232285.phpThe Indian involvement
On 1 September 1965, two junior officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) came to Lata village near Mt. Nanda Devi to recruit porters for a joint Indian-American espionage mission on the mountain.
The mission was to scale Nanda Devi and install a terrestrial communication interpreter, powered by a nuclear electrical generator, at the summit. In 1964, China had conducted its first nuclear tests in the western province of Xinjiang, stunning American intelligence agencies, who thought the Chinese were still years away from nuclear capability. The remote sensing device atop Nanda Devi was intended to gather information about any future Chinese atomic tests.
Beginning in early 1965, American officials devoted all their energy to enlisting the co-operation of their Indian counterparts.
The joint Indo-US covert mountaineering mission was the largest and the longest the world has seen, involving an army of porters and Sherpas, twin teams of mountaineers, nuclear experts, intelligence officers, and signal experts. But it would end in disaster: in October 1965, the onset of winter weather forced the mountaineers to abandon their climb. The material intended for the summit of Nanda Devi was deposited at a camp along the ascent, where the climbers expected to find it at the start of the next season. But that winter the equipment—including a 17-kilogram nuclear assembly—was swept away by an avalanche. It may not have been the worst failure in the history of Indian and American intelligence, but it would prove to be the one with the most long-lasting consequences.After three consecutive years of searching for the missing nuclear device, the CIA and the IB decided it would never be retrieved. Today, 45 years later, the generatoris still at large in the vicinity of Nanda Devi.
The precise dangers still present are unknown: in the worst-case scenario, one of the head streams of the river Ganges that begins at the Nanda Devi glacier could carry the nuclear material, if it surfaces, down from the Himalayas and into the Ganges basin, home to millions of Indians. If the device is found by someone who doesn't understand its origins, it could be dismantled and distributed as scrap, spreading the risk of radiation to everyone who comes into contact with it.
From "The Nanda Devi expedition and its failure remained an official secret."By VINOD K JOSEPublished :1 December 2010The villagers of Lata and Reini believe even today that the nuclear device was destroyed by the Goddess Nanda Devi and would never be found