In October 1965, a team of American and Indian climbers hauled a CIA spy station up Nanda Devi, one of the tallest and most sacred mountains in India. The goal was to listen in on Chinese missile tests nearly a thousand miles away. The station ran on a nuclear generator packed with plutonium. Then a blizzard hit. The climbers tied the gear to a ledge and ran for their lives. When they came back in the spring, the generator was gone, and so was the ledge.

This episode of Declassified follows the trail from a Washington cocktail party to a garage in Montana full of fake business cards. You will meet the National Geographic photographer who built the cover story, the porters who slept beside a warm box nobody explained to them, and the reporter who blew the secret open in 1978. You will also hear how an Indian prime minister told the world while an American president sent a quiet thank-you note.

Sixty-one years later, the plutonium is still missing above the headwaters of the Ganges. The accounts of what happened do not match, and the one agency with the real file has never admitted the mission took place. This is the story of a secret that everybody knows and nobody will confirm.

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