This is the story of America's longest held prisoner of war. John 'Jack' Downey, an American CIA operative, was imprisoned by the Chinese for 21 years during the Cold War.Don speaks to Barry Wirth, author of 'Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War.' They explore why the CIA were in Asia in the 1950s, Downey's capture and imprisonment, and why it took so long for him to be released.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What is the story of John 'Jack' Downey?
A British police officer salutes him, and the man grins, surprised, delighted. After 20 years, 3 months, and 14 days of solitary confinement, indoctrination sessions, and little distraction from the whitewashed walls of his cell, he is finally back among friends. The man is CIA agent John T. Downey, Jack.
in 1952 the c-47 aircraft he'd been flying in was shot down in manchuria he has been confined in a chinese prison ever since for more than two decades Greetings, this is American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. And here, at the almost end of summer, as temperatures drop, it's only appropriate we have a Cold War tale to tell.
That of an American spy in the 1950s who, as it happened, was captured, tortured, and imprisoned by the Chinese for 21 years. His name was John Thomas Downey, Jack Downey, a legend of CIA lore, who is the subject of a new book published this year entitled Prisoner of Lies, America's Longest Held POW, Jack Downey's Cold War.
The author of this book is journalist Barry Wirth, and we're lucky to have him today. Hello, Barry. Congrats on the book release. Thanks so much. Good to be here. Before we dive into this account of American espionage, let's brief ourselves on the context, and it's a big one. 1950s. We're in post-World War II period.
American foreign policy has now shifted to fears that communism is overtaking the world, particularly in Asia. Harry Truman and his lot have engaged the country in a civil war between North and South Korea, a slog that becomes a standstill, lasting from 1950 to 1953.
But prior to the Korean War, and this is what we really need to talk about, is the loss of China to communist forces led by Mao Zedong. Can you take us through American thinking at the time, the strategy of that time, how espionage would emerge as a major factor?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What led to the CIA's involvement in Asia during the 1950s?
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.
We've done shows on the CIA, on the birth of the CIA, all of that that goes into it. One forgets these days that Taiwan goes all the way back to that period. How much was the CIA a result of the China-Taiwan situation?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And that brings us up to 1951 and Downey's story.
Yeah. It's this can-do attitude of that OSS crowd that was really appropriate for the time, you know, fighting a war in real time with that. That then sort of transfers to a more thoughtful period, which requires a broader strategy. And that can-do turns into can't-do sometimes. Yeah. They also are in the strange position of having to recruit people, you know, out of wartime.
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Chapter 3: How did Jack Downey become a CIA operative?
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.
Tell me about the operations that he gets involved in. He's sent to Japan. For what reason?
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.
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.
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.
But Jack's job was to, as I said, train and get these guys ready to go back into mainland China to retake China.
So he was finding his recruits in Taiwan, right?
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.
And so what was the objective to drop these recruits into China and do what?
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances of Downey's capture?
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.
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.
This may have blown past people, and I just want to really put a pin in this. So the idea is this C-47, which is a large plane, gets flown over and low. And a cable is suspended downward with a winch on it, a hook, I guess.
A hook.
And it catches on to the back of somebody who's running along, I suppose.
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.
And that's what they had to hook.
That's crazier than my version.
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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Chapter 5: What happened after Downey's capture?
That's pretty creepy to sit in an office and decide that you're going to tell the parents of a guy that he's dead and gone when you know completely the opposite.
And they didn't know he was in the CIA. All they knew was that the plane that he had been on had disappeared.
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
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How do things proceed from this point? Is there an effort from the U.S. to get these guys home, or do they just ignore it at that point?
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.
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Chapter 6: How was Downey treated in captivity?
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
Evan Gershkovich and the other Americans who recently were swapped back were described.
Yeah, this does not stand alone. I mean, this sort of thing happened and continues to happen, but this is pretty out there circumstances. We've introduced an important person. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of this guy, but Alan Dulles. You fly into Dulles Airport, most Americans have no clue that that's the name and where that comes from.
But these guys really were the craftsmen behind this kind of CIA, weren't they?
Chapter 7: What efforts were made to secure Downey's release?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the backdrop of all of this are these geopolitical events around the world, all of what's happening in Eastern Europe, et cetera, et cetera. But in the midst of it all, you have this single human being that your book is about, Jack Downey. How does he bear up under this kind of pressure and deal with the imprisonment extending without knowing where it's going?
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.
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.
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
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Chapter 8: What was the impact of Downey's story on American espionage?
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,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
He refused to learn Chinese, which I find fascinating. I mean, how would you not learn it after all that time? But that was an important part of his strategy, wasn't it?
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.
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