In 1978, a 23-year-old Indian Air Force pilot, flying his single-engine Chetak helicopter, noticed a strange contraption near the 17,982 foot Khardung La pass. It was virtually in the middle of nowhere, and it fired his curiosity.
“It was right on top of the Khardung La ridge,” Manmohan Bahadur, who retired as air-vice marshal, told THE WEEK. “If you are at Leh, and if you look towards Khardung La, the antenna was located about 400 metres east of the pass, and bang on the ridgeline. My seniors in the IAF told me that it possibly had something to do with intercepting Chinese broadcasts or radio transmissions. It became a point to watch out for while flying over the ridge.”
Bahadur later commanded a helicopter unit in Leh, from where he would fly sorties to places in the Nubra Valley, Daulat Beg Oldie and Thoise, and would notice the device regularly.
“It was only after I retired from service that I found out what its real purpose was,” he said. “It was a listening device to detect signals from Chinese missile tests and nuclear devices in their Lop Nor desert.”
From up in the helicopter, the contraption looked like a television antenna, with three-four horizontal poles and another three-four vertical ones, all fixed on a single big pole. Next to the structure was a hut. “The hut might have housed a power generator because it was dark and possibly covered with soot, and there were traces of oil spillage,” said Bahadur.
From the hut there was a band of cables that took off downhill.
“For all one knows, the structure may still be there. It will all be junk now with the important equipment taken out,” he added.
From Leh town, a narrow mountain trail snakes its way up to Khardung La. About a one-hour walk later, we reach a point from where we get a good 360 degree view of Leh. What catches our eye, almost in the middle of nowhere, is an old circular cement ring, about 12 feet in diameter, with small bolts attached to it. This ring―much closer to Leh than to Khardung La―was set up as part of a joint India-US effort to mount listening devices at vantage points to detect Chinese nuclear activity in the late 1960s. Those days, satellites did not have the kind of effectiveness they do now.
Sonam Wangyal, then with the Intelligence Bureau, had led the team to install the device―part of which was the antennae that Bahadur saw―at Khardung La. He told THE WEEK: “The device was installed under my watch. It was connected to a data collection device near Leh (of which the ring was a part) as the scientists and technicians found it difficult to climb to operate, repair and maintain the device.”
After Leh, Wangyal was posted to Sikkim, and does not remember details of when the device was removed. A bad bout of Covid battered the hardy mountaineer. Now 85 and hard of hearing, Wangyal said: “Covid was bad. I lost 32kg.”
It all started in 1964, when China took the western world by surprise by testing a nuclear bomb in Lop Nor in the western province of Xinjiang. Till then, the west believed that China did not have the technology to do so.
The following year, the CIA wanted a listening device at about 25,000 feet near the Nanda Devi peak in Uttarakhand to detect more Chinese nuclear tests. The device was powered by plutonium capsules with a half-life of about 100 years.
Renowned mountaineer Captain M.S. Kohli, then with the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, led the CIA-IB-Indian forces team that went to plant the device on the Nanda Devi glacier. A blizzard, however, forced the team to step back; they buried the device in the snow a few hundred feet before the summit.
The Indian team included Wangyal, Kohli, Sonam Gyatso, Harish Rawat and G.S. Bhangu, many of whom were from the newly raised Special Frontier Force or Establishment-22. Most of the members were trained in a CIA facility at Mount McKinley in Alaska.
In 1966, a team that went to recover the device found that the power generator was missing. There was panic as the seven nuclear-powered capsules placed at the core of the generator had half the power of the nuclear bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. An estimated 5kg of plutonium 238 and 239 was stored in the generator to power the sensor.
Captain Kohli had then said: “We worked very hard for three years to locate the lost device but in vain. I was posted at Tapovan for three years along with a scientist who tested the waters of the Rishi Ganga river every day for traces of radioactivity.
“After some years, I was called by the chief of the Atomic Energy Commission in Bombay. I told him that the generator with the seven capsules was quite hot and may have dug into the glacier after melting the about 30 metres of snow and may have hit rock bottom. We agreed that there was no possibility of recovering the device. We thought nothing would happen. When the story became global, prime minister Morarji Desai summoned me from Sydney, where I was working with Air India. I presented a 30-page confidential report to the PM and suggested that the device may have sunk in deep.”
The government appointed six scientists―Atma Ram, Homi Sethna, M.G.K. Menon, Raja Ramanna, V. Ramalingaswami, and A.K. Saha―to investigate the case of the missing generator. The report they submitted remains a secret.
Dr Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and former director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, said: “I joined BARC in 1964, but in subsequent years I remember there was a lot of talk about listening posts to keep an eye on China’s nuclear tests, of which the ones at Nanda Devi and Khardung La may have been a part of.”
Many Americans those days believed that Indian agents and scientists might have retrieved the capsules to study them. They connected it to the fact that India exploded a nuclear bomb on May 18, 1974, in the Pokhran desert of Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer district, without any external help, in an operation code-named ‘Smiling Buddha’. The rest is history.
Notably, the device at Khardung La was not nuclear-powered; as per Bahadur’s version, it was gas-fired.
Pointing at the cement ring just above Leh town, leading mountaineer and Padma Shri awardee Chewang Motup told THE WEEK: “There was a prominent white dome here. A thick black wire used to run from here to the foothill. We were then told that this is some kind of a listening station that was connected to one just close to the Khardung La Top on the old traditional route, not the present route. Earlier we used to cross Khardung La to walk from Nubra to Leh to go to school.”
Looking at the nuts and bolts that have not yet caught rust after so many years, Motup added: “The people here say that once upon a time, a lot of foreigners would come and work on these devices. We already know that the CIA with the cooperation of the Indian intelligence and security planted several devices on high-altitude locations. We know about the one at Nanda Devi peak, Nanda Kot, and so this is the one at Leh-Khardung La.”
The white dome-like structure above Leh, of which the cement ring was a part, was connected by thick wires to a nearby complex a few hundred metres below, at Taqski-Thang, where raw data was collected and collated at the office of the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), the force now mandated with the security of India’s borders with Nepal and Bhutan.
An SSB officer who was posted in Leh at the time told THE WEEK on condition of anonymity: “Leh at that time was not a tourist destination. But a lot of English-speaking foreigners would come in a Beechcraft aircraft, land in Leh and then proceed to work with the listening posts at Leh and Khardung La. The aircraft belonged to the Aviation Research Centre (which is under the Research and Analysis Wing).”
The nuclear story of Nanda Devi remains an unsolved mystery, but the Khardung La chapter adds even more intrigue to India’s intelligence operations and its relationship with both the US and neighbour China.