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Barry Wirth

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American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1010.065

They had plenty of evidence to support it. He resisted. He was interrogated harshly, resisted for 16 days, and eventually admitted that he was CIA.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1023.995

And the agents on the ground all said, oh, yeah, that's Jack. He was the one who put a lot of soy sauce on his food and introduced us to American music. And so they knew who he was. But on the other side, in the United States, they originally got a report back that the drop had been successful, and then the plane just disappeared. They heard nothing further.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1047.686

So back at CIA headquarters, they made up a cover story that a civilian aircraft with two civilian employees of the army had disappeared over the Sea of Japan. An intensive search was mounted. And then the story went dark. Downey's family was told that he was probably dead. They didn't really know what happened. And for two years, there was nothing about it.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1076.393

And they didn't know he was in the CIA. All they knew was that the plane that he had been on had disappeared.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1137.527

I think there was probably considerable relief that the plane had disappeared, out of sight, out of mind. Initially, again, we didn't know that he was alive. We didn't know whether he was alive or dead. And it wasn't until late 1954 that the Chinese police tried and convicted Downey and sentenced him to life. And they announced it to the world at that point.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1162.554

And now we're in the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Dulles is the Secretary of State. Alan Dulles, his younger brother, is the head of the CIA. And the United States immediately said, we don't know how the Chinese came into possession of these men. They never said anything about them. This is a wrongful detainment, an unlawful detainment, the same way that our

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Evan Gershkovich and the other Americans who recently were swapped back were described.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Yeah, and cover was everything. Okay, deniability was everything. If they were to acknowledge that these guys were spies, our whole operation in the Far East would have been imperiled. So they just said... we don't know how the Chinese got them. This is typical of them. This is how they do things.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1236.327

I mean, Dulles, both Dulles brothers, and it was particularly John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State, were the point people on this. And Dulles insulted the Chinese. He derided the Chinese. He said, you know, but they did begin to think, you know, somehow if these guys are really alive, we have to try to get them back.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1258.266

So they went to the United Nations and invited Dag Hammarskjöld, who was the general secretary at the time, to see what he could do. And he decided, as he said, to crash the gate. He contacted Zhao Enlai, the Chinese premier, and asked whether he could come to Beijing to talk about not only these prisoners, but other prisoners as well.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1278.757

And the problem was that the other prisoners weren't spies and these guys were. And if they talked about it, it was going to raise questions not just about Downey and Factot, but the others as well. So it became very difficult to discuss. Of course, we had no direct discussions with the Chinese. We had no communication with the Chinese leadership for decades.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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So Hammerskjold was able to open the door. There were a couple of years of very intensive discussions in Geneva about what But in the end, there was no talking about getting them back or swapping for them because they were spies who were being treated as unlawfully detained.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1336.584

Let me separate this into phases. So initially, they didn't know what was going to happen to them. And as the Chinese continually reminded them, they were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. The Chinese could do anything with them that they wanted. As I said, they kept them in isolation. They kept them in shackles.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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After Jack's cover confession, where he admitted that he was CIA, they kind of left them alone for a long period. And he was terrified. He was shaken. He didn't know whether he could survive this. And then they started to put more pressure on him. They wanted a full confession. They wanted to know everything that he knew.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1370.964

And he did a very savvy thing that I think only somebody who had his kind of literary bent could do, which is he said, okay, I'll give you everything I know, but I'd like to do it in writing. I don't want to have to continually talk about this under interrogation. And they let him do it. And what he did is he wrote voluminously every day for nine months

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1395.49

filling his confession with all kinds of trivia, irrelevant material, a kind of a hyped up postmodern writing style where he'd say, oh, I met with so-and-so on Wednesday. No, maybe it was Tuesday. Oh, I think it was Thursday. No, it was probably just to bury his confession under a mountain of chaff. And when he was done,

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They had 3,000 pages of his confession, which bought more time for the CIA and also meant that it was going to take them months to go through it. But eventually they did, and that was a good part of the evidence that they used at his trial. So now it's two years later. He doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know the Korean War is over.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He hasn't seen another soul other than his guards and translators. But then slowly after that, He began after the Hammerskog visit, which ended in failure, he began to adjust and he pulled himself together. And as he said, he concluded number one, that he couldn't be brainwashed, which was very significant because during this period,

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1465.549

Americans were led to believe that the Chinese had these sophisticated brainwashing techniques and that they could take your soul away. The Manchurian candidate, yes. Precisely. He decided you are who you are. They can't get to the deepest recesses of your soul.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And then slowly, as he began to be able to receive reading material and got acclimated, began to adjust and think ultimately, you know, I'm going to have to rely on my government to get me out of here. He decided to make himself, as he said, the busiest man in Beijing. So in his small cell, He ran 10 miles a day in place or in tight circles. He read voluminously. He cleaned meticulously.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He managed to schedule every single day down to one thing after another. And as he said, with that very, very narrow focus, Days and weeks would go by and then suddenly he'd look up and months and years had begun to get by. Was he tortured? No, no. He was very insistent about that. He was interrogated harshly.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Fecteau at one point was made to stand for 24 hours, but they were not beaten and he didn't feel that they had been tortured at all. The Chinese, of course, knew that they were very valuable prisoners. Sure. Sleep deprivation was part of that though, right? Well, yeah, but not in an extreme way. The interrogations were four hours on, four hours off. So they did have some time in between.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He felt that that was a capitulation too far. He did, in fact, in prison, learn Russian because he had read Over a period of decades, he read War and Peace six times and decided he would like to read it in the original. So he did learn Russian, but he felt that to learn the Chinese language would be an acknowledgement that he knew he was going to be there for a very long time.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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It's important to remember at every single juncture, he thought the United States was doing everything it could to get him out. He knew that there was a possibility that a swap would be arranged. So he really believed that he would get out in due time. He had no idea that because of this fake cover story, there was no possibility of negotiating.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1599.39

He didn't know about the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation in China. He didn't know about the Cultural Revolution, except for how it affected the life inside the prisons. So at every point he was expecting, my government will do whatever it can to get me out. Little did he realize that it would take 21 years until the Nixon administration.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1626.004

Well, no, at that point. So after the Chinese announced to the world that he had been tried and convicted and sentenced, then the Chinese government invited his family to come visit. It took almost three years because Foster Dulles was saying, you know, we're not going to submit to this kind of barter. We're not going to trade.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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We're not going to favor the Chinese with any kind of special arrangements. You have to remember, it was the Passport office, which is under the State Department, did not allow Americans to travel to China, not even journalists during this period. But eventually he saw his family. His mother came and his brother came. They visited over the next 15 plus years, seven times.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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So no, no, he was well understood that he was alive. But again, he was being treated as an unlawfully detained prisoner. And therefore, there was no opportunity to discuss releasing him as there was with The other famous case of that period, Francis Gary Powers, CIA flyer who shot down U-2 plane over Russia, and his release was negotiated just a couple of years later.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1698.18

So at Jack's 15th college reunion, of course, he'd missed all of them. His class at Yale decided to assign a guy named Jerry Cohen, who was a Harvard law professor, fluent in Mandarin, and probably the leading expert in this country in Chinese law. They anointed Jerry with the task of trying to get him out.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1717.549

And what Jerry realized was ahead of our political leaders, we have to move closer to China. We have to be able to talk about this with China. Now, it happened that Henry Kissinger was also on the Harvard faculty at that time. And Cohen began to say to Kissinger, I understand from the Chinese that there is a formula whereby we can get down the infecto out. We need to

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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A, acknowledge that he was a spy, and B, apologize. That's what they're asking for. And Kissinger, as soon as he became first Nixon's foreign policy advisor during the 68 campaign, then his national security advisor, and ultimately his secretary of state, Kissinger really drove this. And finally, the Nixon administration did what the Chinese had long been asking for and expecting.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They acknowledged the truth of this. Fascinating moment. This is the end of the Vietnam War now. And in January 73, there was a press conference. Even though Watergate had already happened, Watergate was not the subject of the press conference. Most of the questions were about the POWs in Hanoi and when they'd be coming home.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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At the very end of an hour-long press conference, there was a planted question. Somebody asked, well, what about Downey? Downey's been in Chinese prison since 1952. Nixon said, Downey is a different case. As you know, Downey involves a CIA agent. After almost 20 plus years, this was the acknowledgement that the Chinese had required in order to free him. They commuted a sentence.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They said that they were reducing it to five more years And then shortly after that, Downey's mother had a bad stroke. And Kissinger called Chow Enlai and said, you know, if we don't get him soon, he's never going to see his mother again. And that was the thing that precipitated his release in April of 73. How much did this play a factor in that, or I guess the general swap of prisoners?

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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It was central. There are scenes in my book when Kissinger first, you know, Kissinger went as an emissary before Nixon went to China. Kissinger brought this up, said, we've reconsidered. We're willing to be more realistic about this now. When Nixon went to China, probably the most famous moment in that trip was when he was about to leave. There was a farewell banquet.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He stood up and he said, this is the week that changed the world. Not 45 minutes before that, he had made a personal plea to Chow Enlai to accelerate Downey's release. It was quite central. I think of it as being actually the linchpin of that negotiation. The Chinese were not going to let this go by.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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There are two threads to that. The first is that until 1946 or 1947, the United States never had a permanent spy service. We had espionage services on an ad hoc basis during wartime. So the CIA was formed right in the aftermath of World War II. The other thing, just moving up a couple of years, in 1949, two things happened that really upset and upended America.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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If the United States really wanted to recognize China and reopen relations, they were going to have to atone in some way for this. Because you can imagine, in China, they had him dead to rights. They caught him in the act. And they had a fair trial. We always disparage their criminal justice system as being unfair and trumped up.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1900.496

And the fact of the matter is the Chinese were completely right about this and the Americans were completely wrong about it for almost 20 years. And the Chinese were not gonna let this moment go by without an acknowledgement. And that was the key to not just Downey's release, but the normalization.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1971.173

He recognized that from their standpoint, he was a foreign invader who was trying to foment a revolution about their government. He was not an innocent by any stretch. And Downey was remarkably unbitter, as he said. He wasn't bitter at the Chinese for imprisoning him for 20 years. He wasn't bitter about the United States abandoning him for 20 years.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

1994.651

He seemed not to have a bitter bone in his body, which may have helped him in his later life, which frankly was inspirational.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

2008.05

Without much difficulty. And that was as great a surprise to him as it was to anybody else. He returns in April. He's got to catch up. He's missed two decades and two wildly tumultuous decades in American life. He has to catch up. He'd always wanted to go to law school and eventually enter politics. And he... He applied to law schools. Yale remarkably rejected him.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

2034.566

I think it's because the administration thought he... he would provoke feelings on campus and unreconstructed CIA guy. Jerk move that was, huh? So, yeah. So, and Downey's class, the class of 51 really punished Yale for that. They, a lot of them pulled their contributions, but he did, he went to Harvard for law school. And, and before he left, He was home now three plus months.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He got a letter from a young lab tech at Yale Chemistry Lab, a woman named Audrey Lee, whose life was a kind of inversion of his. She was born very close to where he was first tried, first brought after he was shot down. Her family emigrated to Taiwan. Her father was a doctor, eventually emigrated to the United States. was a physician in Eugene, Oregon. Audrey grew up here.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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She moved east, and she happened to be in New Haven when Jack, after the initial reintroduction in society, actually moved into a Yale dorm, anticipating going to law school. And she said, I can't find anybody that I can talk about about modern China because of the propaganda from both sides. Can we get together? She invited him over. They fell in love almost instantly.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Jack was able to bring her to his mother and introduce. So within four months, he had a girlfriend who eventually he would marry. He had admission to Harvard Law School and also had the opportunity to kind of recover in exile. He wasn't in New Haven. He was in Cambridge where nobody really knew his story. And he was able to put things together relatively quickly and

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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which demonstrated to him that maybe what he'd been through wasn't so hard after all, and maybe anybody could do the same thing that he did. Of course, all of us think, I couldn't last three nights in a Chinese prison, much less nearly 7,500 nights and days in a Chinese prison. But Things came together for him quickly, got his law degree, moved back, married Audrey.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They had a son, moved back to Connecticut, and he started to pick up the life that he had lost when he went to China in 1952. Eventually becomes an esteemed judge in Connecticut.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Conservative juvenile affairs, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. There's a courthouse in New Haven that's named for him, a highly cherished person in New Haven, because he brought that same temperament. to juvenile and family cases, which of course are always rancorous. And he had a very inspiring second life. He had hoped to go into politics and he ran for,

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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One was that the Soviets exploded the first atomic bomb. We thought we were years and years ahead of them, and it turns out we weren't. And the other is that the People's Republic of China was formed, that Mao's forces overtook the Nationalist Coalition and And Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists moved to Taiwan. So from 1949 on, there were two Chinas.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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the Democratic nomination for Senate in 1982 against a field of better known candidates and lost. But that was his one regret that he never got to the Senate. I guess moral of the story, if you're going to get caught spying, do it in your 20s. If you're going to have a real big setback of any kind, do it in your 20s if you can. Gives you the runway to get past it.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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I think the parallels are so interesting. Number one. like the Chinese, when Paris was shot down, now remember this was in 1960, Eisenhower was still in office. He was looking at a triumphal last six months in office. There was going to be an arms control agreement. He was going to be the first president to visit Russia.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Everything was kind of, it looked like there was an opportunity to put a, as he said, a crack in the wall of the Cold War. And then this was the very last scheduled U-2 flight. We were overflying Russia with high-tech cameras and data gathering equipment to look at their nuclear program. And when he was shot down, the Russians did the same thing that the Chinese did.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They did not announce it to the world initially. They allowed the United States to roll out a cover story. So the Eisenhower administration said there was not a spy plane, but a weather plane missing. They didn't know what happened to the pilot. And in the same way that the Chinese eventually took on the lie of the Downey cover story, the Russians announced,

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Here we have the pilot who miraculously survived. He was encouraged but not instructed to kill himself on the way down with a poison stick pin, but he didn't do it. And we have his plane with all the cameras and the high-tech gathering equipment. So we were embarrassed, as we were eventually, about the Downey story. But at the same time, there was an opportunity to negotiate for his release.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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We know all this from Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies. There was an opportunity to negotiate for his release because he was a known spy and we had a known spy of theirs. Because Downey and Fecteau were not acknowledged, there was never opportunity for a swap. Your source material was his diaries, right? Or part of your source materials. Yeah.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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I don't know that this book would have been possible if I hadn't gained access to an unpublished prison memoir that he had written. So when he ran for Senate, his handler said, voters know nothing about you really, except that you were in Chinese prison for 20 years. They need to hear your side of the story. So during the campaign, he wrote a prison memoir.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And when he lost, he put it in a drawer and and left it there, and his widow, Audrey, discovered it after he died. His friends, his Yale friends and some of his former CIA friends, wanted his story to be told, and one of them gave me a copy of this.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And as soon as I read it and discovered Jack Downey, the man, in his own voice, I realized that that's got to be the centerpiece of this book, because there's no other way to account for all that time he spent in prison. There's no other way to account. He never published a book on his own. He never cooperated with anybody on a book.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

241.53

We only recognized one of them, the nationalist government on Taiwan, which was then called Formosa. So there was a kind of a panic, and there was a brand new organization that was assigned to address the panic. And that's where the two streams converge.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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He was asked innumerable times, including by me while he was still alive to cooperate, never did that. So there was literally no other way to account for the time that he spent in prison and how he felt about it and what he thought about it without access to this. So

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Eventually, I was able to negotiate a relationship with his family where they allowed me to use it so long as I waited until it was published. So it's out there. It's by Columbia University Press. It's called Lost in the Cold War.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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What year did he die? He died in 2014. I first approached him in 2002 because a mutual friend had suggested that this might be worth a book. And then I approached him again in 2010. He said, thank you very much. I appreciate the interest. I just don't really want to go back there. I don't want to have to relive this. So this book was impossible so long as he was still alive.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And then I got going on it in 2016.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Well, it really accelerated. So because we didn't have a permanent spy service, the CIA adopted the persona of an existing spy service, which was Britain's MI6. At the same time, it took its cues from the American spy service during World War II, which was the famous OSS. And it took on an unearned swagger. As I write in the book, the early CIA could strut sitting down.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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So as soon as they got the power and the money and the assignment to address communism, they were off and running. I should say that during World War II, the most famous, even legendary operatives of the OSS were the so-called Jedburgh teams. And these were

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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These were American spies trained in espionage, trained in political warfare, who airlifted into occupied Europe ahead of the D-Day invasion in order to pave the road, so to speak. And as soon as the CIA got going, they did two things. They adopted the plans of the British as their empire was beginning to shrink to instigate secret wars against opposition governments, communist governments.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And then they took the model of the Jedbergs as their preferred method. So the first thing that happened was that we tried to launch a secret war against Albania. sprinkling in so-called pixies. And this was a disaster for both the pixies and their families and extended families.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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The effort was turned by Kim Philby, who of course was the central figure in the greatest British spiring of the period. And the Albanians knew that these agents were coming and practically caught them as they dropped out of the sky. And they were punished mercilessly. Up to 40 of their relatives were were killed in revenge. But this was the first clinical experiment with waging secret war.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And that brings us up to 1951 and Downey's story.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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That wasn't hard, as it turned out. Jack's generation, he was born in 1930. That meant he was in pubescence during World War II. It was a pent-up generation. They had watched their older brothers and cousins, and even in many cases, their fathers enlist for combat duty in World War II, the greatest generation. These were the little brothers, the kid brothers of the greatest generation.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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That's fascinating. And as Jack called them, my little narrow post-war generation. So they were pent up and eager to fight. Now, in particular, they were looking for the best and the brightest. This was during Korea, as you say. It had quickly turned into a stalemate. The fighting was horrific. People fought and bled and died to gain inches. So Jack was at Yale.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And with 100 of his classmates, up to 100 of his classmates, practically 10% of the Yale class of 1951, these guys went into the CIA believing that they were going to be doing the most adventurous, most effective work, and at the same time avoiding dying in a trench somewhere in Korea. So, as I said, it wasn't hard. Jack's CIA class was, as he said, distinctly ivied.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Many of them were from Harvard, many of them from Princeton, most of them were from Yale. And as I said, it wasn't hard to recruit these guys. They were ready to go.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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It even goes beyond that. I spent a lot of time thinking about Jack Downey, obviously a lot of time writing about him. He was an exceptional human being who didn't really believe that he was exceptional, and that may have been the most exceptional thing about him. In every cohort that he was in, he was identified quickly as a leader. He was very smart. He was an exceptional athlete.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And he had qualities of grit and determination and fire and fury, but combined with a kind of modesty and kindness. So in any group he was in, everybody looked up to him. So he was a real catch for the CIA.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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So, as I said, we were starting to wage secret wars in Asia, and the CIA was investing a lot of money and manpower. And when they all got to Japan... All of Jack's early CIA buddies were sent to the front, but he was held back precisely because of his leadership qualities. His job was to recruit and train and dispatch so-called third force elements.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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Now, this was the essence of the plan, which was that The CIA would find disaffected exiles who wanted to go back and defeat the communist government. At the same time, they were not to be allied with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government. They were going to be a third force.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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And the problem for them was that, as in Albania, they were supposed to seek out local dissidents who they could align with and build a revolutionary movement against the government. And as Jack and his buddies soon discovered, there were no such dissidents. The Chinese had taken effective control of the country and So in a way, the whole third force was an illusion.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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But Jack's job was to, as I said, train and get these guys ready to go back into mainland China to retake China.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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You know, there were exiles all over Asia and they made contact with high level dissidents. And then they found these people in Japan and in Taiwan and even in Korea.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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This is where it gets hairy. The plan was to sprinkle these agents into mainland China, into Manchuria in specific. So they trained these teams to parachute in. They were supposed to be able to demonstrate that they could survive on the ground. and then indicate whether they had actually made contact with any local dissidents.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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So in the summer of 1952, they dropped in the first team, never heard from them again. For Jack, that was a red flag for sure. But then they dropped in a second team, and unbeknownst to the CIA, these handlers, the team was identified very quickly and turned. so that the communist Chinese were instructing them how to report back. So they said, okay, we're on the ground. We've made camp.

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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We've established a presence here. We understand that there's a former Kuomintang general who we may be able to hook up with. You need to send in a courier so that we have some communications in between. They drop in the courier. And then as things develop, starting into the fall of 1952, the team is, and I should say that this is all being conducted by Morse code,

American History Hit

A CIA Man in China: 20 Years Imprisoned

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They're reporting that they need supplies for the winter and that the courier has much good news to report that the operations are proceeding and he needs to be fished out.

American History Hit

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Exfiltrated. Yes. And this is where Jack comes into the story. So they were planning to fly back into Manchuria and literally snatch this person off the ground. and with a winch and hook apparatus that was in the back of the C-47. Wow. The CIA had recruited a couple of civilian volunteers who at the last moment said, this sounds way too dangerous. We don't want to do this.

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So Jack knew how to operate the winch and hook apparatus and his superiors instructed him to get on the flight. Now, as he said, this was not under duress. He was happy to go. He was waiting to get into the action. He had spent almost a year as a rearguard drone in Japan, so he was eager to get in. But that was the mission that led to Downey's capture.

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Well, no, no, no, that's not exactly right. So the operation was this. They were to fly in low and slow, almost at stall speed, a treetop level at midnight. And on the first pass, drop a supply bundle so that the people on the ground could erect a kind of goalpost. And then the courier on the ground had a harness on. He was connected to the upper kind of elastic strap from one side to the other.

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And that's what they had to hook.

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It was harebrained to say it had never been used. But this was the level of intensity about the project. Also, once they got going on these things, hubris took over and they felt like, They were the CIA. They were Americans. They could pull off anything. So what happens? So what happens is they drop the supply bundle.

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They make a long circuit, takes almost an hour so that the team on the ground could set up this goalpost. They'd seen a video of this where a cigar chomping colonel was lying on the ground and they showed how it worked. And there were great concerns that they could

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decapitate this guy the plane was going to have to accelerate and climb very quickly so that you didn't bounce along the ground but but so they're flying in and there are three fires set they're following them in and just as they get close enough the chinese communist pull back tarpaulins They've got American-made machine guns. They crossfire into the cockpit, kill the pilots immediately.

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And Jack and another guy, Dick Fecteau, also a young CIA officer, are in the back of the plane, plane levels. And then they're flying in flames through the treetops. Jack can't understand why the plane doesn't cartwheel when they hit the ground. They just pancake. They get themselves out of their rigging. They climb out. They don't know where they are. They're incredibly... They're not wounded.

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One of them had been bruised by a bullet, but incredibly, they're fine. And they stumble out of the plane and immediately they're surrounded by Chinese soldiers. And they yell at Jack, you are Jack. You're in China. You are Jack. They knew it was an ambush, as Jack said, like in the movies. And they knew who he was and that he was coming. And it was an enormous prize for the Chinese.

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Imagine if the situation had been reversed and Chinese officers and agents had been flying into the Adirondacks. And had been shot down and captured.

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Because it was the CIA. It was a secret war. And the Chinese, for a number of reasons, didn't announce this initially. You would think if, again, if the situation had been reversed and a Chinese spy plane had been captured in the United States, we'd be hearing about it quickly. But the Chinese didn't say anything about it. And Jack was charged with insurrection.