Less than two years after the war with India, China conducted its first known nuclear test at Lop Nor in the Xinjiang province in October 1964. The Vietnam War was beginning to escalate during the height of the Cold War, but the US had limited access to intelligence. Initially, the US intended to place a SNAP unit—a sensor with a plutonium-powered generator—on Mount Everest. The device, which was the pinnacle of the CIA's monitoring capability at the time, could be found by the Chinese, and the peak borders China, which made it impossible for the plot to succeed.
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Kanchenjunga, which is now entirely within India but was not at the time since mountain is located in Sikkim, an Indian protectorate, was picked instead after it was determined that it was impractical. The Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) undertook a covert expedition to implant the device in 1965, one year after the first Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nor.
At Mt. McKinley (6,190 metres), in Alaska, a team of Indians and Americans practised the exercise. They first saw a model of the device there, where they also learned how to put it together. The generator used to power the surveillance equipment had fuel rods made of radioactive plutonium.
"The sensor was made up of four main parts that were all connected by cables and streams of wires. To keep them off the snow and ice, two of the parts were barely more than metal boxes set atop stakes. These transceivers, designated B1 and B2, were used to transmit the compiled missile data to a base station located elsewhere in India "In his book Spies in the Himalayas, Captain MS Kohli, who oversaw the expedition, says. "The collection antenna, the third element, was responsible for capturing the telemetry data from the Chinese rockets. The six-foot-tall antenna has the same appearance as the typical television aerial located atop many American homes."
"Contrastingly, the finished element appeared to be much more exotic. Its official name was SNAP 19C, or System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power, and it was a thermoelectric generator with a two-year continuous output capacity of 40 watts. The SNAP was designed to be used in equipment placed at remote, unattended locations for extended periods of time, according to Kohli, who also notes that this was the first time it had been incorporated into a mountaintop sensor. The SNAP derives its power from the heat produced by radioactive decay."
In August 1965, the American squad arrived in India. For the mission, an airport from World War II was recreated in Gauchar, in the Chamoli area. In October 1965, the operation began, with Sherpas hauling the CIA-owned spying device and the necessary gear. The weather, however, changed when the team arrived at Camp 4 on Nanda Devi and could see the peak. The climbers became stranded amid a snowstorm. Kohli and the team opted to abandon the mission due to the dangers involved. The device would be stored in a safe place on the mountain and would be retrieved for installation during the next season, it was determined.
According to Broughton Coburn, author of The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest, "they stowed the equipment in a crevasse and anchored it with the hope that they would return the next spring, transport it to the summit, and piece it together to make it operational." The device, however, was not there when they returned the next year with an American nuclear expert. The mission was given up on. Although there are numerous ideas regarding the device's whereabouts, it is generally accepted that it was either buried or swept away by a landslide.
""They think they would have easily picked up a signal," Coburn continues, "but there are no readings and no leads where the gadget might have fallen. Even though it would have been logistically impossible, according to what I understand, several of the climbers believed that Indian intelligence had surreptitiously walked up there before that spring mission, recovered the device, and taken it away in order to investigate it and perhaps collect the plutonium." In the Pithoragarh district, close to Nanda Devi, India and the US succeeded in installing a SNAP unit and signal device in 1967. Nanda Kot is a peak that rises to a height of 22,510 feet.
But over the following ten years, India made no known successful attempts to recover the lost item. Many people blame calamities like the 2021 floods in Uttarakhand's Chamoli area on the device because the question of where the object is still up for debate.
The mission was first made public in 1978 when then-Prime Minister Morarji Desai made a statement about it in Parliament.A few days later, US House of Representatives member Richard Ottinger wrote to President Jimmy Carter and Indian Ambassador to the US Nani Palkhivala to inquire about the expedition.Even though the two nations have since declassified a number of mission-related papers, a lot is still unclear.