Having written last fortnight about the U-2 episode of 1960 that almost literally exploded into the faces of both the United States and Pakistan,it seems only fair to record that just over two years later,this awe-inspiring aircraft came within our ken,too. It flew from the military airport of Jhabua to keep tabs on China. These operations that went on for quite a while were top secret,of course,so few heard of them until many years later. But even if the U-2 missions had become public immediately,no one would have minded. For,the U-2 was welcomed in India soon after the trauma of the 1962 war with China. National anger against it was intense.
The Russians surely knew what was going on,but they didnt mind and so kept quiet. After all,for the U-2s taking off from Jhabua,the target were the Chinese,not them. By then the Sino-Soviet split was also out in the open. The Americans were on cloud nine. A country that had shunned them for so long was at last collaborating with them and offering them facilities they needed badly. Their hunger for spying on China was insatiable. Therefore around the same time they,in partnership with their Pakistani allies,were clandestinely fixing under the wings of PIA aircraft flying to China,equipment to measure radioactivity along the route. When the Chinese eventually got wind of this perfidious activity,the chairman of Pakistans Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was made the scapegoat.
It is perhaps needless to add that the presence of U-2s at Jhabua,and a lot more,were part of the ongoing negotiations for military-to-military cooperation between this country and the US under which New Delhi had great expectations of American air support. Orissas maverick politician and several times chief minister,Biju Patnaik,had been co-opted into Jawaharlal Nehrus inner circle entrusted with defence planning and delicate negotiations with the Americans. As an adventurous pilot,he considered himself an authority on air power. In Ambassadors Journal John Kenneth Galbraith gives a delightful account of the first time Patnaik came calling on him: The first thing he asked was whether the embassy was bugged. When I assured him it wasnt,he relaxed and raised matters so secret that we did not even discuss them. Anyhow,as reported on this page earlier (IE,January 8),high hopes about American military aid came to naught.
Cooperative relations between our Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the CIA had begun well before the Nehru government had felt the pressing need for American military aid,especially in the arena of air warfare,and these persisted even after the 1965 US embargo on military aid to both India and Pakistan. The IB was then a monolith comprehensively controlling all branches of intelligence; the legendary B. N. Mullik was the intelligence czar. From British days,the IB had inherited the philosophy,reinforced by the Cold War that Communism,too,was monolithic and therefore all Communist countries were equally dangerous. It is remarkable therefore that in his three-volume My Years With Nehru Mullik has recorded that Nehru told him not to worry about the Soviet Union,but to concentrate on China. Incidentally,the prime minister gave this directive,disguised as advice,during the notorious Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai era.
Interaction between the IB and the CIA started gathering momentum after the Dalai Lamas flight from Lhasa and escalated as tensions with China mounted. After the brief but brutal border war no holds were barred. In any case,the IB had neither the resources,nor the technology nor the expertise that the CIA could muster in a jiffy. To work jointly with it,in relation to China,was therefore in the best interest of the Indian intelligence establishment.
It was against this backdrop that the CIA came up with the brilliant idea of placing a super-sophisticated electronic listening machine on an Indian mountain peak to record what the Chinese authorities,especially military and atomic,were saying to one another. The only way to power this wonder device was to have a nuclear isotope that would generate electricity forever. Only the CIA would monitor the intelligence gathered but would share it with the IB. Mullik couldnt have agreed to this plan without a nod from Nehru in the last year of whose life the nuclear pack was installed at Nanda Devi. Some dubbed it an eye on the top of the world. The cover for the operation was simple. An Indo-US mountaineering team was going on a routine expedition. Even so,the porters that carried the unusual cargo must have felt the heat that the nuclear isotope inevitably generates. Yet not a word about this extraordinary intelligence feat leaked out for 13 years.
And then the storm burst late in 1977 when the Janata government,headed by Morarji Desai,was in power. The sensational leak took place in the US presumably because in the meantime,signals had stopped reaching the CIA monitors. All concerned assumed that avalanches and snowdrifts had perhaps swept the machine away from its original site. Intensive searches failed to locate it,and this gave birth to the theory that the Chinese might have removed it!
The moment the story broke in America,all hell broke loose in this country. Desais own statement in Parliament was critical of the Nehru government. Atma Ram,then chairman of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and a confidant of Desai,inveighed against fellow scientists for having agreed to such a dangerous venture. Paradoxically,while the entrenched anti-American sentiment erupted with full force,votaries of closer friendship with the US heaped praises on it for its help against the Chinese. However,the loudest protests came from the worshippers of the Ganga who screamed that the holiest of the holy rivers had been made radioactive. They calmed down only after meticulous tests from Gangotri to the ocean proved that no such thing had happened.
Can the lost nuclear pack still cause a catastrophe? Eminent nuclear scientists,including a highly respected former chairman of the AEC,assure me that at this distance of time there is no such danger.
The writer is a Delhi-based commentator
