COLD and tired, precariously perched on a ledge in sub-zero temperatures, 22,000 ft above sea level, Capt M S Kohli had a crucial decision to make. Staring at the nuclear-powered monitoring device lying outside his tent, Kohli held the fate of the mission in his mind.A few days earlier, Kohli and his team of Indian and American climbers and scientists had weathered the biting cold to haul four heavy packages to Nanda Devi. Their mission — to plant a nuclear-powered monitoring device that would monitor Chinese-occupied Tibet, looking for tell-tale signs of a nuclear or missile test across the Bamboo Curtain — was one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War.The joint leader of the mission was Kohli, an Indian Navy officer who had been attached to the ITBP and had led a record-setting team of summiteers to Everest the same year. After a training session in the US, the team decided to plant the device on Nanda Devi. The entire project was kept under wraps, but ITBP D-G Bishweshwar Chatterji was one of the few people in the know of things. ‘‘It was all sponsored by the government and I was asked to provide cover to the team that would climb Nanda Devi,’’ Chatterji remembers. ‘‘Everything and everybody was extremely secretive and we did everything possible to provide security to the mission.’’In October 1965, the team started climbing the Nanda Devi. G S Bhangu, one of the team members, carried the generator to Camp IV on October 14. But as blizzards lashed the mountain and team members perched precariously near the peak, the device lay outside, waiting for Kohli’s decision.Delhi eventually allowed them to head back, but a second mission was already being planned. But when Bhangu and his sherpas arrived at Camp IV on June 1, 1966, they failed to find the generator. As the following team arrived, the leaders realised that a avalanche had possibly ripped out the device and buried it deep in the Rishi Ganga glacier. Since it could well leak radioactive substances into the river, its recovery became imperative.Kohli went up again in July, but the search was fruitless. And the spy-masters came round to the mountaineer’s original suggestion of setting up the device on the dome of Nanda Kot. A K Dave, then director of the Aviation Research Centre, was part of the plan. ‘‘We wanted to place the device so that we could detect and gather data on a nuclear test or study a missile test, data on its telemetry. The point is, China was far advanced and we felt that it would be good to gather data on their capabilities,’’ says Dave.The second expedition succeeded in planting the device — but returned to New Delhi only to learn that it had stopped functioning. They went back to Nanda Kot to find that the antennae had been damaged and quickly replaced it. However, in October 1967, the device stopped functioning, forcing the IB to send another team to recover the device.
