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A note to our listeners, this episode contains explicit language. From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last three episodes, we've told the story of a joint CIA-Indian intelligence team tasked with placing a spying device atop Nanda Devi, a 25,000-foot Himalayan peak.
The goal? To spy on China's nuclear missile program. High on the mountain, a storm hit, forcing them to abort the mission. A later attempt to place a device on a different mountain was successful.
On today's show, we're joined by climber and outdoor writer Pete Takeda. His book, An Eye at the Top of the World, explores the real story behind this Cold War mission. As part of his research, Pete found himself atop Himalayan peaks in search of clues.
Pete Takeda, welcome to Against the Odds. Thanks for having me. When did this story first come onto your radar, and did you believe it at first? Yeah, I mean, this story first popped up on my radar when I was a young climber in Yosemite. I basically grew up, went to school, and quit my job and ended up pursuing my passion for climbing. And part of that was living in Yosemite National Park for six or seven years. And I was
As tradition follows, we would go climbing all day and then sometimes you find yourself sitting around a campfire drinking wine or beer. And that's when the stories start flying. And, you know, I heard more than once this yarn spun by someone about how the CIA had hired a bunch of America's best climbers in the 60s and how they had tried to utilize them to plant a spy device on a high Himalayan peak so they could eavesdrop in on China. They
They end up getting caught in a storm. They stash the device at a high camp. They return after the winter, and when they arrive at the place they had stashed the device, it was gone.
The full details and the specifics of that came out later because, as with all fables, this fable was highly embellished. Wow. What was it about the story that made you want to dive deeper and write a book about it? You know, when I heard about the possibility of there being this clandestine U.S. government plot to spy on China and, by golly, they were using climbers, it's pretty exciting to me because it's
At some point, I realized, you know, if the people involved are still alive, I either know them, know of them, or perhaps they are childhood climbing heroes of mine. But I always had this, I don't know, this boyhood fantasy of uncovering something, doing some investigative journalism. So that's how that whole thing started rolling.
I imagine so much of the information was classified. How do you even start to research a thing like this? Yeah, for me, it started looking back at old magazine articles. There was a piece written in a magazine called Mariah Outside, which later on became Outside Magazine. And the reporter had gotten one of these climbers to spill the beans outside.
And though his story was factually inaccurate, that kind of cracked the story open. I think that was in the early 70s. You know, it was chasing down stuff like that. It was chasing down climbers to interview climbers.
And the one key piece that emerged was the book written by this guy named Conboy. And he interviewed the leading Indian climber who was essentially in charge of these clandestine operations because it took place on Indian soil. And that was a key piece of information because he had, you know, names and dates and times attached to it. And from that, I could sort of piece together information.
and add on to that with my research. Was the CIA open to talking with you? No, and if I could, if I wasn't a trained journalist...
Like I look back now and I go, wow, there is so many things I could have done. But, you know, I'm essentially a college dropout who is a self-taught writer who figured out how to work my way around these things. The best things I did was like as far as research, I actually tracked down and interviewed some people for the book who were surviving and ultimately wanted to talk about it.
I think that's the heart of what I accomplished. And what were you hoping to find? I was hoping to find pictures and eyewitness statements and dramatic recollections of these events.
You know, I uncovered quite a bit of that. And the thing that was also really important was two rolls of film that was shot with a bifurcated spy camera. And I actually have those in my possession. I didn't publish it in the book, but I have the actual pictures of the people involved. I have actual images of the plutonium-powered spy device. Wow, that's insane. That's really cool. Did you want to figure out the truth behind that campfire yard?
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really wove in and out of each other's worlds. He used to crack open National Geographic back then, and you would see, you know, climbers climb Everest, and then you see something about Jacques Cousteau diving, you know, in the deep waters. And then you would also see something on the strategic deterrence and strategic air command. So all these worlds intermingled. And so, yes, as the story was told, it was at a cocktail party where
You have one of the leading climbers speaking with one of the leading generals in the Air Force, Curtis LeMay. They were talking about this problem of how do you acquire intelligence on a Chinese ballistic missile program. And yeah, you can easily imagine the climber saying, well, you know, I was standing on Everest and I could look all the way across the Tibetan plateau into China.
And you could see someone like Curtis LeMay go, wow, I wonder if we can spy on China from the summit of a high Himalayan peak. So at the time, the Chinese had detonated a nuclear weapon. They had no ability to deliver said bomb in a way that would be effective, unlike the Soviets. So they were developing a ballistic missile. And that's what this spy device attempted to eavesdrop on China.
So they were doing their ballistic missile tests. There's no on-ground human intelligence in the area because China at the time, it's the bamboo curtain. It's very opaque.
The CIA at the time was very touchy about flying U-2 spy planes over China. So that ruled out that source of intelligence. And the best that they could come up with was, well, let's take this transceiver that essentially listens in on radio telemetry being transmitted by a testing missile and a ground station in China. If you could pick up those signals and retransmit it to another station, that
You could extrapolate what the capability of the ballistic missile was. We got to remember the era. This is the Cold War, but it's also the time where Americans are standing on Everest, where also America has this space program. So exploration, defense, exploration.
national interests, technology, all these things combine together. And yeah, they came up with this. We can look back now as a pretty crackpot idea. I'm imagining an inspector gadget or James Bond type device. What exactly was this thing the CIA wanted to put up in the Himalayas? Yeah, that's a good description. I'm looking at a picture of it. It essentially looks like a homegrown ham radio operators setup. There's two
microwave-sized boxes. One is a transceiver that picks up the radio telemetry. The other is a transmitter. And then there's a separate battery that contains plutonium. It's an exotic battery that runs off the heat generated by nuclear decay. And it has fins on it to dissipate heat. And these things just sit there perched on these
metal poles, and they are all anchored into the snow and stabilized with some metal guy lines. It sounds kind of big to have to haul up the mountain and everything like that. Yeah, it's a real taxing activity to haul these devices on your back. It's just incomprehensibly difficult.
So the idea was to get the device up a mountain in the Himalayas. Give us a brief geography lesson. This mountain, Nundadavi, can you tell us where it is and describe the landscape around it? So if we picture the Indian subcontinent, it kind of looks like a triangular wedge. And at the very top of it is, it's bordered by the Himalayan range. And the Himalaya range is essentially this arc of very high peaks that divides the
the Tibetan Plateau and China from the Indian subcontinent. And so, yeah, if China is testing a ballistic missile program in Tibet, then you could theoretically surveil them from the high peaks of the Himalayas. Wow. The region is often called a Shangri-La. Why is that? Part of Nanda Devi's appeal comes from this remoteness because it lies in this, it's almost like this colossal eggshell of
whose jagged rim is formed by these peaks that are like 18 to 21,000 feet high. So it's this near impregnable wall that encompasses this, it's like a hundred square mile basin of alpine landscape. Within this bowl is this microclimate.
It's kind of this oasis for rare flora and fauna. They have this endangered Himalayan musk deer, there's snow leopard in there, there's black bear. And these animals roam this lush meadow and there's these Himalayan pines and cedars. And so there's these rare plants.
And rare animals that live in this, it's almost like this island in the middle of this vast frozen Himalayan range. Interesting. That sounds beautiful. Yeah, there's nothing like it in the world.
So the CIA hatches this plan, but then of course they need to send a team to actually place this device on Nanda Devi. What was the team up against? How hard is this mountain to climb? So Nanda Devi is interesting because it is one of those peaks that tends to attract people
I think climbers who are not interested in climbing something just because it's the highest thing. So there's two different schools at the time. One is that, well, we need to climb Everest because it hasn't been climbed yet. And then there's this other school that says, well, I want to go climb this beautiful peak. So when it got climbed in the 1930s,
It was probably the hardest thing that had been climbed at the time. One could argue that it's a harder thing to climb, especially in the style that it was climbed, than a peak like Everest. Everest has kind of nothing more than it's really high, but highness doesn't necessarily equate with difficulty. So fast forward to the 1960s, you have a team of American and Indian climbers. And so what they're faced with is a very difficult route.
on a very remote and inaccessible peak. It has all the combinations of extreme altitude. It has the bad weather that's kind of endemic to the Indian Himalayas. It has a monsoon season where meters and meters of snow fall. Yeah, and then you have a pretty steep route to climb. And then add on top of that, you got to carry this, what must have been hundreds of pounds of transceiver battery and
that go along with that, the packing, the metal structure to mount this device. So it must have been horrendous. Okay, so in 2005, while researching your book, you decided to go to the Himalayas. Were you able to climb the same mountain as the CIA team, Nanda Devi? Where did you climb? So Nanda Devi lies in this area called the Sanctuary, and it's been off-limits to any access since the early 1980s.
I had hoped to acquire permission to enter the sanctuary and then climb Nanda Devi via the route that the CIA attempted to place the Spite of Ice, but I was not granted that. So that was a huge disappointment to me. There was another set of CIA expeditions that after the failure of the Nanda Devi expeditions happened.
They actually placed a working spy device on an adjacent peak called Nandakot, and it actually picked up and retransmitted telemetry from a Chinese ballistic missile.
We were actually able to climb on Nandaka and retrace the footsteps of that other CIA expedition. Wow. What was the plan as you started to climb? I just wanted to find traces of this device or traces of the passage of these expeditions. And we were able to find some stuff where you could tell that people had camped and people had like discarded things that were from the 60s.
My hope with the Nandakot climb was to actually be able to see where they had placed the spy device and also get an idea of where that device might be because after a period of time, the device stopped transmitting. And so they sent a team up to climb to the point where they had left the device and realized that because of the heat of the device, it had melted its way down.
into the snow and they actually unburied it and took the battery down with them. What they left behind was the two transceivers and the structure that had held this device in place. So one of my like fantasy goals was to actually be able to see where the
the abandoned materials might have been. And a long shot would be to actually recover the abandoned pieces of equipment. How did what you experienced differ from what we know about the CIA's expedition? Well, on Nandakant, we definitely followed the route that the CIA took.
And I can say that because I was able to actually see the pictures that were smuggled out from the CIA trip. And, you know, I could recognize the features on the mountain. And so, you know, I had a pretty good idea we were climbing on the same route. Some of the challenges that we faced that the CIA didn't face is we had some awful weather conditions.
And, you know, we didn't have the backing of the United States and Indian government. We were basically a poor people who self-financed an expedition and carrying all our own stuff on our backs. It was very much a shoestring, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of climbing expedition that we did where...
CIA trips, it was pretty well logistically supported. That said, I grew up in an era of elevated technical standards, and so the climbing and the techniques and the tools I had were more advanced than what these guys were climbing with in the 60s.
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So the CIA and Indian intelligence assembled a team of Americans, Indians, plus Sherpas to go and place the device. During your research, you spoke with a couple of the team members. Who did you speak with and what did you learn about how they prepared for this mission? One guy who was fairly instrumental in cracking the story open is a fellow named Jim McCarthy. I believe he's like 91, 92 now. But he was a leading climber ever.
in the eastern U.S. in the 60s. And he actually attended one of these expeditions. So interviewing him and getting his
very dramatic take on the events. That was pretty good. The other fellow I ended up interviewing is a fellow named Robert Shaler. He, I think he passed away maybe six or seven years ago, but he was a surgeon, a pediatric surgeon in Seattle. And I believe he was going through his residency when he was first approached by the CIA as a way of serving his country. And
He really laid out some of the details because where McCarthy had attended one of the six or seven expeditions, I think Shaler was on almost all those expeditions. And so to train for these things, I mean, people would go climbing. I believe there were a couple of these training climbs. They did one in Alaska and then some in California. They got these classes from the CIA on expeditions.
Everything from like survival and navigation and they even had a demolition course, how to blow things up in order to place the device. As you were ascending this mountain, Nandakot, did you get a sense of what the CIA team went through?
Yeah, you know, that was one of the goals of this trip was to kind of assess and get kind of an estimation of like what they must have gone through to carry this device up there. Yeah, so we got a pretty good idea. In relative terms, the peak is fairly straightforward. So it's not too steep. There's not a ton of really, really technical sections. I would say from in terms of elevation, because you're dealing with elevations over 20,000 feet,
Just the expanses that they had to have carried this device, it would be quite a bit of effort to just lug this stuff up there. I don't know. They definitely earned their paycheck up there. You can also see why they abandoned the non-critical parts of the device to retrieve the plutonium and leave the rest up there. Because to carry that stuff down, I would imagine you would need one, two, three, I mean, six or more additional people just to carry that stuff down. Yeah.
I know you ran into some rough weather on your ascent up Nundakot. What happened? You know, this was 2005, and it's different than it is today. We had no sat phone. We didn't get pinpoint weather forecasts.
So you're kind of flying by the seat of your pants and you're definitely isolated. So we started up the peak. We didn't realize that there was a huge storm rolling in. And we got into two days of climbing. We got high on the peak and then a huge storm rolled in. Later on, we'd find out that it was one of these record-breaking storms. It's like 24 feet of snow fell in a pretty short period of time.
And we were high enough on the peak where we couldn't retreat. There were many dangerous avalanche slopes below us. And we also weren't high enough to where we could be above the slopes that would present an avalanche. It's the worst possible place to be on a mountain when a storm like that rolls in. We were fortunate in the fact that we had taken shelter.
in a crevasse. And so we had this island of safety in the middle of this war zone of avalanches. We got avalanched on three times. At one point, we were stuck in this cave that's about the size of an average living room. It had avalanched so heavily that we were actually buried in that room-sized cave.
with probably 25 feet of snow between us and the outside. Actually, at one point had to get a shovel, start digging in this wall of snow. I had to have someone hold my legs in case the whole thing collapsed. And I dug for 25 feet.
And then poked my head out and it was just like poking your head into a war zone. It's just this gale. It's this howling wind. You can't see anything because the snow is just blowing and you could hear nothing but this endless kind of set of avalanches going off. So pretty wild times on Nondukott.
In your book, An Eye at the Top of the World, you describe what it is like to get caught up in that storm and the avalanche. Can you read a short excerpt for us? Yeah, I'd be happy to. Thanks for asking. As the snow makes its crushing onslaught, I'm halfway out of my sleeping bag, torso through the tent door. I'm almost out as the first swell washes over me. Instantly, I'm pawing through a crushing tide that's the consistency of fine sand. It's like swimming through glue.
The wait is incredible, a remorseless crushing tide. Behind my shoulder, over the deadly roar, I can hear Chuck yell. The only clear word is a drawn-out, fuck. The rest is a nonverbal grind of consonants drowned as soon as they become audible. He's behind me by no more than one second, an interval that, in this race, might prove fatal.
Wow, that just shows how unpredictable climbing mountains like these can actually be. That is intense. Yeah, it's one of the most unpredictable things are avalanches. They have this thing where, you know, you can study avalanche science, but I just think it's so complex. You can never predict things absolutely accurately. We know the CIA team on nearby Nunnedah Davey had their own run-in with bad weather on that 1965 mission.
At Camp 4, at 23,000 feet, they encountered a brutal storm. How did the survivors you spoke with describe that storm? The people I spoke with who described the storm said it was one of those impending things that you have to make a decision about fast.
So they were in radio contact with the base camp. The storm is rolling in. It's starting to snow. For the safety of the people involved and for the overall efficacy of the expedition, they had to make the call. You know, there's been some arguments among people as to whether it's a good decision to have abandoned the device and then gone down. But anyway,
It's a great example of how, you know, you have to err on the side of safety and being conservative when it comes to the lives of human beings. And so the person in charge of the expedition, an Indian Navy captain named Kohli, he was in charge of the expedition. He was on the radio with the team that was high at Camp 4 on Nanda Devi, and he made the decision to leave the device there and for the team to retreat.
You know, in these things, an hour of hesitation can make a huge difference. Like the conditions can change fast. And if you have people stuck up there and they're in the teeth of this huge storm, then, you know, it can be fatal. You mentioned speaking with Captain Coley. What does he say about the decision to abort? One American climber, Jim McCarthy in particular, was very critical of Coley.
As Jim tells the story, you know, there's this yelling match going on in camp because the radio person is talking to the team at camp four and Coley is relaying his decision to them to leave the device and come down. McCarthy claims that he was in base camp there and he said that it was foolishness to leave the device behind, that they should bring it down.
According to McCarthy, he said he could foresee that they would leave this device and it would get avalanched. If you read Coley's side of the event, he just made a decision to leave the device there for the safety of the team members and also so they could move it up the mountain for the subsequent trip next season. But
You know, in the end, someone has to make a decision and we all have to live with it. From your experience, when you are up on a mountain and the conditions go south, how hard is that mentally and emotionally to turn back when you're so close to achieving your goal? Yeah, so I've had to do that more than once to forego a summit for the safety of the team. You know, you're always weighing out your risk and mortality against the reward of a summit or a successful climb.
When it comes to climbing mountains, I believe that the people you're with should have a say in the safety and whether or not one should carry on. And the policy I go by is if you're on the mountain, say with another person and they want to go down for whatever reason, they don't even have to articulate it. You should go down.
It could be even if they have a bad feeling about it or they have a nightmare or something and they, you know, they have some prescient feeling that they're going to die. Then you just go down and later on in base camp, you can argue about the relative merit of that decision. And so, you know, I've had my successful summits. I've had my summits that were unsuccessful because of adhering to that policy. But I'm 57 years old and I'm still alive and I'm still climbing.
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An Indian climbing team went back up to Nundadevi in the spring of 1966 to retrieve the device they had left behind. When you were climbing near Nundadevi in 2005, you could actually see the area where the device is believed to have fallen. What did it look like? Can you describe it for us? Yeah, from where we were climbing, we could look directly across at the route that the CIA and Indian expeditions had taken.
The route is called the South Ridge, and that's what it is. It's the South Ridge of Nanda Devi. And so it's this long, soaring ridge of snow and rock that ascends at this almost perfectly consistent angle all the way up to a small break in the ridge. And then the route follows this path down.
up this kind of open face directly to the summit of Nanda Devi. And so I could see where they had stashed the device. It's on this break in the ridge. You know, there's a ledge there and you can see how there's a sheltered part of it where you could theoretically secure something. But you can also see
The huge summit slopes directly above it, if those things collected a lot of snow, it could easily dislodge even the most securely placed object. Wow. So what's your best guess about what happened to it and its whereabouts today? Yeah, I think it was swept aside by an avalanche. It probably fell down this gully on the other side of the ridge. It probably entered the
the glacier because I mean the device was packaged in these separate parts
But no doubt the plutonium battery, because of the heat it generates, has melted into the glacier. And it's somewhere in that glacier that is immediately blown onto Devi. It's probably traveled some distance down the glacier. I would imagine it's at the bottom of the glacier where the glacial ice meets the rock. And so it's in there somewhere locked away in the ice. You also took samples from the nearby river to see if some of the plutonium had leaked out. What did you find? Dr.
The sanctuary, this Shangri-La-like bowl in which Nanda Devi resides, has essentially one way in and one way out. And this one way in and out is called the Rishiganga Gorge. It's this huge, circuitous, and really tenuous gap that pierces the wall of this sanctuary. And through it runs this river.
And so if the device and the battery had cracked open and unleashed its material, its radioactive material, there's only one way out of that, and it's going to be that river. So we ended up going to where this river emerges and enters this valley far below Nanda Devi, and we took some silt samples and had them tested by two different entities,
One entity was connected with the Atomic Energy Commission, and they came up with a report that said there was no discernible radioactivity from it that could have come from a plutonium-powered battery. The other group said that it was highly likely that the radioactivity that they found within it came from this nuclear battery.
So essentially it's inconclusive. And part of the reason for that is we had like an empty hot sauce bottle and we scooped up water and some silt and put it in this bottle and flew it back with us and had it tested. I think if one was to return and test the silt, you know, you would have a subject matter experts and scientists be along for that. And
And if you did a real thorough test and had the resources to do it, you could come up with a pretty conclusive answer. Has the Indian government looked for the lost spy device since it went missing? I don't think the Indian government has really put in a whole lot of effort into finding this device. They did conduct...
Some fairly exhaustive searches immediately after the device was lost, and those were fruitless. It is like a proverbial needle in a haystack to find this thing. Do we know if they've tested the water like you did? I don't believe that the Indian government has conducted any serious silt testing.
And one reason I believe this to be the case is that there's no upside for the Indian government. If they do the testing and they find that it's inconclusive,
This still won't kill the notion that, wow, maybe this plutonium is leaking into the Ganges. If they come up with a positive result, it's like, wow, the plutonium is leaking into the Ganges and we still can't find this device. So the only other option would be if they said, well, there is absolutely no possibility that this plutonium is leaking. And I don't think that...
It's possible to state conclusively based on any test that this wouldn't be the case. Do you think there is a lesson buried in the story for all of us? The big lesson one could take out of this is, does the end justify the means?
And granted, yeah, there is this huge potential threat of China developing ballistic missiles on which to potentially launch nuclear weapons. And so it becomes this Cold War race between competing ideologies and the threat of another nuclear power emerging on the world stage. But does that justify this crazy, almost crackpot scheme to put a plutonium-powered device, which essentially...
would be placed at the headwaters of the Ganges. Mountains have a personality of their own. Mountains do not abide by the rules that we have in the regular world. And so what we have here is this convergence of the notion that the end justifies the means. The irony is several years later, the US space program and the CIA develops the KH-11 spy satellite. And so within several years of this unsuccessful spy mission,
Do you have plans to go back to the Nundah Devi area one day?
Yeah, you know, I'm in discussion with some people about a documentary project. And, you know, it's the film world. So who knows, like film projects and documentary projects are about as capricious as monsoon weather in the Himalayas. But we'll see. So there is a chance of going back there to shoot a documentary. I'd like to go back regardless at some point just to go climbing in that part of the range.
It's one of those real untraveled areas of the Himalayas. There's very little infrastructure. Most people associate the Himalayas with Nepal and the Everest circuit and all the tea houses with the internet and the hundreds of people just swarming on the trail. There are places you can go in this world where you can have these incredible experiences, witness the stunning scenery, and also have the whole place to yourself.
Yeah, I'd like to go back there just for kicks. Well, if you do go back, we'd love to hear what you find. Good luck on that. Thank you. Pete Takeda, thank you so much for joining us today on Against the Odds. Thank you so much. This is the final episode of our series, Himalayan Spy Mission. To learn more about this event, we recommend reading An Eye at the Top of the World by Pete Takeda. I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Our
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