An Eye at the Top of the World

The Terrifying Legacy of the Cold War's Most Daring C.I.A. Operation

By Takeda, Pete

Publishers Summary:
At some point during the inhumanly cold Himalayan winter straddling 1965 and 1966, a peculiar collection of box-shaped objects — one sprouting a six-foot, insect-like antenna — plummets nine thousand feet down the sheer flanks of a remote peak. Ripped from its moorings by an avalanche, the jumbled apparatus slides down a funnel-shaped hourglass of hard snow and shoots over a black cliff band, careening a vertical distance six times the height of the Empire State building. The boxes come to rest on the glacier at the mountain's base. One, an olive-drab casing the size of a personal computer, begins to sink. Then, trailing a robotic dogtail of torn wires, it slowly burns through the snow, melting into solid blue glacial ice, eventually disappearing beneath the surface, and never seen again.No one actually witnessed this event. But as you read these words, nearly four pounds of plutonium — locked in the glacier's dark unknowable heart — are almost certainly moving ever closer to the source of the Ganges River. Eye at the Top of the World, provides a harrowing present-day account of Takeda’s expedition to solve the mystery of Nanda Devi.

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ISBN
978-1-56025-845-2
Publisher
Thunder's Mouth Press


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on October 9, 2006

In 1965, a CIA-recruited team of elite American and Indian mountaineers planted a sensor atop a Himalayan peak in India to eavesdrop on nuclear bomb and missile tests in western China, then unreachable by spy planes and satellites. But one sensor-powered by highly poisonous, radioactive plutonium-disappeared in an avalanche and remains lost to this day. Compelled by the mix of Cold War intrigue and his climbing jones, veteran mountaineer a...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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