An unrelated news clipping is being shared on social media with the false claim that Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk’s father, Sonam Wangyal, was involved in a covert mission in India with the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
However, BOOM found that the Sonam Wangyal referenced in the report is not Wangchuk’s father, but a different mountaineer with the same name. The mission cited in the clipping was a joint operation conducted by the CIA and India’s Intelligence Bureau, not an independent CIA mission.
The Claim: Sonam Wangchuk's father was part of the team with CIA that lost a plutonium-powered nuclear generator on Nanda Devi Himalayan mountain
The viral clipping was posted on X by Vijay Patel (@VijayGajera), who runs the right-leaning website Onlyfact.in. Patel posted an archive news clipping with the headline, "CIA reportedly lost nuclear generator in India"
Patel's caption read, "This is extremely serious. I was conducting research on Sonam Wangchuk and came across a shocking fact: the CIA lost a nuclear generator(which contained plutonium) at the Nanda Devi mountain, from which the Ganga River gets its most water. Sonam Wangyal, the father of Sonam Wangchuk, was part of the team with the CIA, and later he became a politician in Congress. Shockingly, a dangerous nuclear generator is still somewhere in the Himalaya"
Click here to view an archive.
What We Found:
1) News reports on 1965 CIA-IB joint mission to install a nuclear-powered monitoring station on Nanda Devi in Uttrakhand
We found several reports including from The Washington Post from April 1978 which reported on the mission referenced in the viral clipping. The reports stated that in October 1965, there was a joint operation between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB). The reported objective was to install a plutonium-powered surveillance device high on the Nanda Devi peak in Uttarakhand to monitor Chinese nuclear activity during the Cold War.
Due to severe weather conditions, the expedition team was forced to abandon the device, which was later reported missing. The reports clearly state that it was a joint CIA–IB mission, and not an independent American operation as claimed by Patel in his post.
2) Mountaineer Sonam Wangyal
We then looked for reports on Sonam Wangyal, the mountaineer referenced in the viral clipping and found that he is a different individual and not Sonam Wangchuk's father who has the same name.
Mountaineer Sonam Wangyal had summited Everest at the age of 23, and was part of the 1965 Indian Everest Expedition for which he received the Arjuna Award and later the Padma Shri. Wangyal was deputed to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) for a better part of his career and retired from service in 1993 as Assistant Director, ITBP.
In a 2005 interview with Rediff, he recounted his involvement in the Nanda Devi operation saying, “Nanda Devi is not an easy mountain to climb and the device weighing 56 kilos was carried by porters on their back. But before we along with our American counterparts could reach the summit, the weather turned bad and so we decided to leave the device and then come back the following year and activate it. The next year we returned to the same place. We searched, but it could not be found.”
3) Sonam Wangchuk's father Sonam Wangyal
Sonam Wangchuk's father Sonam Wangyal was a politician and had served as a minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government in 1975 and died on November 10, 1998. We also found reports of his death anniversary being commemorated over the years and a mention on his 23th death anniversary on November 10, 2021 on Administration of Union Territory of Ladakh's official government website.
However, the mountaineer Sonam Wangyal referenced in the clipping is still alive, as evidenced by interviews he has given to the press in recent years.
