Chandigarh: A New York Times investigative piece last weekend revived memories of the clandestine 1965 Nanda Devi joint CIA–Intelligence Bureau (IB) mountaineering expedition, launched to place a nuclear-powered monitoring device in the Himalayas to monitor China’s missile and weapons programmes.The surveillance apparatus, however, had to be abandoned when a sudden blizzard made it impossible to proceed near Nanda Devi’s 7,816-metre-high summit, and was never recovered in an episode that reads like a Cold War thriller and, six decades later, remains shrouded in assumptions and unresolved questions.The incident cast an ominous shadow over the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, the remote and ecologically fragile reserve surrounding India’s second-highest peak. For decades thereafter, fears persisted that the lost plutonium-powered unit might contaminate Himalayan glaciers and rivers – a spectre that lingered both in public imagination and within the highest corridors of power.And while the December 13 NYT report adds little beyond what was already known – and it remains unclear why the story was revived – it does assemble scattered details from declassified material, the cover mission, and recollections attributed to several principal participants in the Himalayan operation. Notably, many of those quoted by the NYT are deceased, departing from a long-standing convention in American journalism that cautions against relying on voices that can no longer be questioned or challenged.Even so, fuller reconstructions of the operation – codenamed HAT (High Altitude Test) by the CIA – have long been available elsewhere, including Wikipedia. India’s Ministry of External Affairs too did not respond to this recycled account, which also contains at least one serious factual error, underscoring the fact that the report added little of substance to the historical record.The NYT account appears to have wrongly claimed that, after the failed Nanda Devi attempt, the CIA eventually succeeded in installing a surveillance device in 1973 at an unidentified Himalayan location. Its broader point – that other Indian mountains were explored as potential platforms for intelligence-gathering missions – remains plausible.It goes on to state that this implanted device, though it is unclear whether it was nuclear-powered or not, functioned effectively, seemingly intercepting signals from a Chinese airborne missile before ground-based systems were overtaken by spy satellites, “rendering a small antenna on a mountaintop obsolete.”But this claim collapses under minimal historical scrutiny, as by 1973, India–US relations were at their lowest ever ebb, badly strained by the 1971 India – Pakistan war and Washington’s overt tilt toward Islamabad. The US dispatch of its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal as a coercive measure against India had left deep political and institutional scars, pushed New Delhi closer to Moscow, and eventually took decades to heal.The resultant chill was also deeply personal, with open- and publicised- hostility between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Richard Nixon, as well as his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger: Nixon disparaged Gandhi obnoxiously, while Kissinger publicly viewed India as an obstacle to US strategy in South Asia – hardly a climate conducive to covert CIA operations on Indian soil in 1973.By contrast, the earlier Nanda Devi mission had emerged from a brief post-1962 window, when shared anxieties about China’s nascent nuclear and missile capabilities temporarily overrode ideological divides; by the early 1970s, that fragile convergence and alignment had entirely collapsed, rendering the NYT claim that a surveillance device had been successfully installed in 1973 somewhat implausible.However, credible domestic accounts point to only one such subsequent joint effort – a limited CIA–IB mission to Nanda Kot in 1967, 15-20 km southeast of Nanda Devi. Seasoned Indian Navy mountaineer M.S. Kohli, who led the ill-fated Nanda Devi 1965 expedition, states that an alternative plan was devised in 1967 – involving an eight-member team of expert climbers – five Americans and three Indians – to instal another nuclear-powered monitoring device about 150 m below Nanda Kot’s summit at 6,700 m.Writing in the Indian Police Journal in 2012, Kohli – who passed away in June 2025 – noted that the device worked for a few months, confirming that China did not then possess a long-range nuclear bomb, but eventually stopped functioning.After it was determined that it had failed, a small team led by Harish Rawat, who had been part of the earlier installation, was dispatched in the summer of 1968 to retrieve it. Upon reaching the site, Rawat found no sign of the equipment, but after digging a few feet discovered a semi-spherical cave with the hot generator at its centre. The heat from the generator, writes Kohli, had melted snow up to eight feet in all directions.That said, the Nanda Devi episode is worth revisiting not so much for the operation itself, nor for the failed CIA – IB attempts to recover the lost device or install another on Nanda Kot, but for the strategic logic that underpinned it – and the enduring geopolitical relevance of such cooperation even now.China’s currently expanding nuclear and missile arsenals, growing military and cyber capabilities, enhanced deployments in Tibet, and rapidly modernised border infrastructure, amongst other indicators of hard power, mirror the very pressures that once prompted Nanda Devi–style initiatives. Similar anxieties had shaped India’s strategic choices for decades.In 1998, for instance, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wrote to President Bill Clinton – later leaked to The New York Times – explaining that the Pokhran-II series of five underground nuclear tests had been triggered by fears of China’s accelerating strategic weapons programmes and long-range delivery systems.Such logic was retrospectively evident even 33 years earlier, in 1965, when the Nanda Devi operation emerged from a moment of acute anxiety for India, just three years after its humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China. In 1964, Beijing had conducted its first atmospheric nuclear test at Lop Nor – codenamed Project 596 – alongside early missile trials capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Largely concealed across the Tibetan plateau, these developments posed a strategic threat that a militarily weakened India could neither adequately observe nor counter.And while India publicly upheld Non-alignment and, alongside, had strengthened political, diplomatic, and defence ties with the Soviet Union, it quietly agreed to a U.S.-devised plan to facilitate a CIA-led operation of placing a nuclear-powered monitoring device on Nanda Devi.The HAT plan – driven by US concerns over China’s emerging nuclear and missile capabilities- originated from a casual cocktail party conversation in Washington in 1964, between retired US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, a Cold War hawk, and National Geographic mountaineer – photographer Barry Bishop. The latter’s accounts of Mt Everest, which he had scaled a year earlier and the panoramic views from its summit of Tibet, where China had recently tested nuclear weapons and missiles, riveted LeMay, and plans for a high-altitude surveillance mission germinated.The CIA then devised a mission to install a 56 kg plutonium-powered SNAP-19C (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) generator, fuelled primarily by Plutonium-238 and, according to some accounts, possibly containing trace quantities of fissile Plutonium-239, atop Nanda Devi. The device was intended to monitor future nuclear tests and intercept Chinese missile telemetry, relaying information 40 km to a base station.With no moving parts, the generator was well suited for prolonged deployment in the harsh Himalayan environment, minimising the risk of mechanical failure. The mission itself fused Cold War intelligence imperatives with extreme-altitude mountaineering–an audacious blend of US technical ingenuity and Indian climbing expertise that underscored the extraordinary stakes of India’s post-1962 security calculus.Such close cooperation, sanctioned by the Congress Party–led government under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, included permitting U.S. military and nuclear specialists to base themselves near Nanda Devi for extended periods. This further reflected Delhi’s pragmatic Cold War posture, where strategic interests outweighed political and ideological considerations concerning the U.S.The HAT operation was closely supported by India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), then responsible for both internal and external intelligence, which coordinated logistics and security to ensure the mission remained discreet, civilian in character, and fully “withdrawable” if it became politically or diplomatically sensitive. The effort was mentored by R.N. Kao – later founder and first head of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) – and carried out under the overall oversight of IB chief B.N. Mullick.Kohli led the expedition, which included four highly skilled Indian climbers, who had received specialised CIA instruction on Mt. McKinley in Alaska, in assembling a mock nuclear device similar to the one intended for Nanda Devi in freezing conditions. To reinforce the outwardly civilian nature of the mission, seven American mountaineers – some of whom had previously summited Mt. Everest – joined the expedition, along with around 14 Sherpa porters.Many years later, Sonam Wangyal, one of the four specialist Indian climbers, told journalist Vivek Mukherji that the nuclear device carried by the porters generated heat, leaving a “warm patch” on their skin for extended periods. He recounted that the porters would huddle around the device inside their tents at night for warmth, and none of the expedition members had any inkling regarding the levels of nuclear radiation to which they were being exposed.The expedition navigated treacherous glaciers, unstable snow bridges, and extreme altitudes. Just as the nuclear device was about to be emplaced near the summit, a sudden blizzard struck, forcing the team to abandon the mission and hide the device for potential installation at a later time.In Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs, co-written with American historian Kenneth Conboy, Kohli recounted his critical decision to leave the monitoring device on an ice ledge, for retrieval later. As the blinding storm closed in and conditions became life-threatening, Kohli, as expedition leader, ordered the climbers to secure the equipment but retreat immediately to save their lives.Kohli, who passed away in mid-2025, emphasised in his book that the expedition remained civilian in character, but he also noted that the CIA had underestimated the vagaries of Himalayan weather, the challenges of the terrain, and the logistical difficulties of high-altitude operations, and had excluded Indian participants from some of the planning – facts absent from the NYT report.Three attempts to recover the device between 1966 and 1968 – one led by Kohli with a CIA team, and two others under different naval mountaineers – proved futile. Alongside, concern and panic quickly spread, both publicly and within official circles, over the possibility that melting glaciers could carry plutonium from the lost device into downstream rivers, posing serious environmental and health risks.These apprehensions, combined with severe degradation from unregulated mountaineering, led to the official closure of the Nanda Devi Sanctuary to climbers and trekkers in 1983. While environmental factors were primary, the decision was also significantly influenced by lingering memories of the failed nuclear mission, which continued to cast a shadow over the region. In July 2025, however, Uttarakhand officials and the Indian Mountaineering Foundation began discussing a controlled reopening of Nanda Devi and surrounding peaks, balancing tourism with conservation and the enduring legacy of past events.With time, the Nanda Devi episode – a high-stakes Cold War intelligence mission that went awry – has acquired an aura of intrigue, romanticised by secrecy, distance, and the drama of high-altitude espionage.Yet stripped of mystique, it reveals something more persistent: a distinct Indian strategic instinct rooted in pragmatism and selective engagement under pressure. Confronted by a nuclear-armed China and highly vulnerable after its 1962 military defeat, India quietly set aside ideological discomfort to work with the US, seeking capabilities it lacked while carefully preserving strategic autonomy; necessity, not ideology or alignment drove the collaboration for Delhi.That same instinct prevails presently, even as circumstances have changed dramatically. In the early 1960s, India was militarily unprepared and economically constrained; today it is far stronger on both counts. Yet the gap has not closed, as China has grown exponentially, emerging as a hugely formidable military, nuclear, economic, and technological power, rivalling the US.Moreover, tensions along the disputed Line of Actual Control, echo earlier anxieties, most visibly in the prolonged eastern Ladakh military stand-off that lasted over four-years-and-a-half until October 2024, and still linger.What has changed, however, is visibility. The secret operation on a remote Himalayan peak has now given way to open cooperation with the US and other Western partners through strategic and defence agreements, intelligence and military technology sharing, joint exercises, and forums like the naval Quadrilateral or Quad. Delhi’s underlying logic, however, remains intact: engage where useful but avoid binding alliances and retain strategic autonomy.Seen this way, Nanda Devi matters less for what it reveals than for what it reminds us about India’s enduring China challenge. Even in an age of satellites and high-technology warfare, China remains Delhi’s predominant strategic preoccupation – one that continues to compel India to blend selective cooperation with strategic autonomy, much as it did over six decades ago.