Nehru Permitted CIA Spy Planes to Use Indian Air Base

Washington: India allowed the US to use one of its air bases for refuelling the CIA's U-2 spy planes to target Chinese territories after its defeat in the 1962 war, a declassified official document said.

The then Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru approved overflight by U-2 missions covering the border areas with China on November 11, 1962, the independent National Security Archive (NSA) said in a report based on the latest set of declassified documents it obtained from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.

The use of Charbatia, an abandoned World War -II base in Orissa, was agreed during a meeting between the then US President John F Kennedy and Indian President S Radhakrishnan on June 3, 1963, but Indian work to improve it took longer than expected, so the missions resumed from Thailand's Takhli, NSA said, based on the 400-page CIA report released by it.

According to the report, which details the spying programmes conducted with the planes from 1954 to 1974, the U-2 mission on 10 November 1963 was the longest yet flown by a U-2 at 11 hours 45 minutes, and the pilot was so exhausted that project managers limited future flights to 10 hours endurance.

In fact, the longest U-2 mission to date was the one flown from Takhli on 29 September 1963, it said.