Nehru Permitted CIA Spy Planes to Use Indian Air Base

NSA said that the first deployment to Charbatia in May 1964 ended because Nehru died.

According to a newly declassified CIA history of the U-2 programme obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by National Security Archive, it was the secret flights made by these U-2s aircrafts by the CIA, which informed New Delhi about the nature of Chinese incursions inside Indian territory.

"Charbatia was still not in early 1964, so on 31 March 1964 Detachment G staged another mission from Takhli. The first mission out of Charbatia did not take place until 24 May 1964. Three days later Prime Minister Nehru died, and further operations were postponed," the report says.

"The pilots and aircraft left Charbatia but other remained in place to save staging costs. In December 1964, when Sino-Indian tensions increased along the border, Detachment G returned to Charbatia and conducted three highly successful missions, satisfying all of COMOR's requirements for the Sino-Indian border region," it said.

"By this time, however, Takhli had become the main base for Detachment G's Asian operations, and Charbatia served merely as a forward staging base. Charbatia was closed out in July 1967," the report said.

According to the CIA report, in October 1962, the People's Republic of China launched a series of massive surprise attacks against India's frontier forces in the western provinces of Jammu and Kashmir and in the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA).