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Welcome to SpyC, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and we're in the midst of Camouflage Month, highlighting our new Cammo exhibit,

an exploration of the world of disguise, deception, distortion, and disappearance.

So now let's talk about disappearance, even if some of it wasn't

necessarily intentional. Because this plan went awry on a nuclear level, literally. In the 1960s,

the CIA lost a plutonium-filled generator on top of a mountain in India. It was supposed to power an unmanned

listening station, picking up signals from China's missile tests. But when mountaineers ascended the near

26,000-foot Nanda Devi under the guise of studying the environment, weather got in their way.

They left the nuclear device behind, and months later, when they returned, it was gone.

New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman reconstructed this event with a team of journalists.

It took about seven years, thousands of miles, and earning

the trust of many men who had grown old and have since passed away. Hey, Jeff, thank you so much for

joining. My pleasure. So before we get into this story, can you tell me about how it came about for you back in 2018?

It started when I was based in New Delhi.

And early on in my experience there, I came across this small article in an Indian newspaper

that mentioned this mystery about a missing

nuclear device in one of the most remote places on the planet, a mountaintop in the

Himalayas called Nanda Devi. And it was just a small article of somebody complaining that

this mystery had been unresolved and they wanted some answers.

And I looked at my colleague, Hari Kumar, who's worked in the Delhi Bureau for decades.

And I was like, Harry, what's going on with this?

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