2002. 226 pp, photos. The CIA planned expeditions to plant a nuclear powered device on Nanda Devi to spy on China's nuclear tests. The expeditions have been secret, and involved some of America's best climbers including Barry Bishop, Tom Frost, Barry Corbett, Robert Schaller and Jim McCarthy. Hardcover with dust jacket, VG-Fine condition.
At 23,000 feet above sea level, basic processes like thinking and breathing become quite challenging. So how ambitious-if not foolhardy-would it be to send teams of mountaineers up India's highest mountains to install complicated, nuclear-powered tracking devices?
That's precisely what the CIA and India's intelligence apparatus did in the mid-1960s, with some success. In response to the growing nuclear threat China presented, the two countries cooperated in placing a sensor at the top of the highest mountain range in the world to track China's nuclear tests. However, world-class mountaineer Kohli, leader of the missions, and policy analyst Conboy here offer an arid account of the missions to scale Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot. All high-altitude mountaineering narratives are about overcoming obstacles, and this is no exception.
The account differs from others in that this team used outside assistance, including helicopters and the like, since its goal was not the climb itself. While the substance is captivating, the writing leaves much to be desired. The authors present Kohli's doings in the third person, a choice illustrating the authors' failure to engage their audience emotionally. The stiff writing and mangled syntax read like badly translated prose. Still, the heretofore largely unreported material should please mountaineering enthusiasts. Maps, photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
In the towering mountains of northern India, a chilling chapter was written in the history of international espionage. After the Chinese detonated their first nuclear test in 1964, America and India, which had just fought a border war with its northern neighbor, were both justifiably concerned. The CIA knew it needed more information on China's growing nuclear capability but had few ways of peeking behind the Bamboo Curtain. Because of the extreme remoteness of Chinese testing grounds, conventional surveillance in this pre-satellite era was next to impossible.
The solution to this intelligence dilemma was a joint American-Indian effort to plant a nuclear-powered sensing device on a high Himalayan peak in order to listen into China and monitor its missile launches. It was not a job that could be carried out by career spies, requiring instead the special skills possessed only by accomplished mountaineers. For this mission, cloaks and daggers were to be replaced by crampons and ice axes.
Spies in the Himalayas chronicles for the first time the details of these death-defying expeditions sanctioned by U.S. and Indian intelligence, telling the story of clandestine climbs and hair-raising exploits. Led by legendary Indian mountaineer Mohan S. Kohli, conqueror of Everest, the mission was beset by hazardous climbs, weather delays, aborted attempts, and even missing radioactive materials that may or may not still pose a contamination threat to Indian rivers.
Kept under wraps for over a decade, these operations came to light in 1978 and have been long rumored among mountaineers, but here are finally given book-length treatment. Spies in the Himalayas provides an inside look at a CIA mission from participants who weren't agency employees, drawing on diaries from several of the climbers to offer impressions not usually recorded in covert operations. A host of photos and maps puts readers on the slopes as the team attempts repeatedly to plant the sensor on a Himalayan summit.
