Nanda Devi Feature Story in Rock & Ice Magazine
Dec 8, 08:26 PM | Magazine Articles
This month’s issue of Rock & Ice features an article I’ve written, derived from An Eye At The Top Of The World
THE SECRET OF NANDA DEVI
In 1965 a team of America’s best climbers planted a plutonium-powered spy device high in the Himalaya. The shocking story of what happened when it was lost … and what could happen next.
BY PETE TAKEDA
From *The Secret of Nanda Devi* – Rock And Ice (January, 2007):
“I stumbled upon the legend of Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot and 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.”
Mark Petnuch — Dec 24, 10:37 PM #
From an upcoming letter to Rock and Ice:
Good to see a new book from another point of view on the infamous CIA mission on Nanda Devi to place a nuclear powered device overlooking China during the cold war. Seems I recall seeing a short piece in R & I back in 2003 revealing pieces of then new R.S.Kohli book about that mission. It was a very revealing story at that time. Looking forward to reading what Takeda has to add to the story.
For those who are just stumbling into this piece of history for the first time, well it has had a long history of association with climbing and outdoor magazines. I still have my original copy of the ‘Maria-Outside’ magazine that revealed this incident back in the 70’s to most readers for the first time. For those who live to read both exciting CIA and climbing stories, check out a couple other books. ‘The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet’, by Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison(2002) tells the story of how the CIA took Tibetans up to the former 10th Mt. Camp Hale to train them for insurgency missions in Tibet. ‘Spy on the Roof of the World’ by Sydney Wignall (1996) goes even farther back. This story tells of the Brits ,who back in 1955 on a climb of Gurla Mandhata, secretly reported on Chinease movements after the invasion of Tibet. The Cold War goes back a long way, and trained climbers working for the CIA, British Intelligence and others have always been an active part and will continue to do so today when needed.
Mark Petnuch