Behind The Bamboo Curtain

True Spies, Episode 166: Behind the Bamboo Curtain

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino, and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios.

JOHN DELURY: The incredible thing about this is the mission of the operation is to parachute into communist China and overthrow the communist regime. 

NARRATOR: Behind the Bamboo Curtain. November 29, 1952. The dead of night. An unmarked C-47 transport plane takes off from Seoul Airport, South Korea, and creeps north, its hulking gunmetal frame soon lost to the dark sky. On the ground below, at the 38th parallel, a Civil War is locked in a bloody stalemate. But this flight will bypass those battlefields and keep climbing. Past the border, then past Pyongyang - the capital of hostile North Korea. There is just a skeleton crew aboard -  two commercial pilots and two young CIA officers. The atmosphere is tense. The reason for this most secretive of missions? For the first time in weeks, the CIA has had contact with an undercover agent embedded in the North East of mainland China. Li Junying.

JOHN DELURY: They've got a very promising message from their liaison agent that he's got news and documents to bring back to the mothership. But how are you going to get him out? It's one thing to infiltrate agents because they just jump out of the plane and then you turn the plane around and come home. But how do you pick one up? That's the dilemma. 

NARRATOR: To risk landing the plane in hostile Manchuria is out of the question. 

JOHN DELURY: The solution that they devise is that they're going to fly in and pick up the agent, Li Junying, without landing. 

NARRATOR: No such extraction has ever even been attempted but the CIA officers are confident it can be done.

JOHN DELURY: The plane is going to come in and when they see the signal that it's safe and their agent is there, they're going to drop the big box. And in the box is going to be a harness, a sort of backpack that Li Junying will wear with a long wire that he is going to wrap around two tall poles. You can picture it almost like a little football goal. And so he's going to wrap that wire around the top of the goalpost and then lay on the ground with this backpack harness. 

NARRATOR: While the agent on the ground prepares his extraction point, the unmarked C-47 will circle around and come in to make another pass.

JOHN DELURY: And the plane is going to dangle a long wire with a hook like a giant fish hook. That hook is going to catch the wire that’s strung across the two poles and rip everything, including Li Junying, hopefully still alive, into the air without having landed. And then two guys in the back of the plane are going to operate a winch that's going to drag him up in midair like pulling your fish in. And by then they'll be safely heading back to Japan. 

NARRATOR: At least that’s the plan. As the plane approaches the pick-up site, the CIA officers are on the lookout for a pre-agreed all-clear.

JOHN DELURY: They have a basic signaling system of a triangle of fires. And the plane, they look down and everything checks out. And so they feel like it's all good to go. And they drop the box on the first approach. They see the agent down there.

NARRATOR: So far, so good. Just as planned, Li Junying collects his extraction pack and begins assembly.

​​JOHN DELURY: And so they circle around now and are preparing to do the actual pickup.

JOHN DELURY: Because of the plan for the pickup, their plane is flying as low and as slow as it possibly can. They're trying not to kill the agent that they're going to pick up.

NARRATOR: The CIA officers prepare the wire hook. Everything is in place. But as the plane makes its approach, suddenly… Movement.

JOHN DELURY: And then all hell breaks loose because guns open fire on both sides of what is essentially a gully that they're flying through to make the pickup. It turns out that the Chinese military and militia have staked out positions systematically on all sides.

NARRATOR: Ambush. The pilots barely have time to register what’s happening.

JOHN DELURY: And the pilot and copilot, they are killed either by the gunfire or by the crash - probably the gunfire itself. They're dead upon landing. 

NARRATOR: And the outlook for the two CIA officers in the back surely isn’t much better.

JOHN DELURY: But, because it's flying low and slow, actually, it's the ideal conditions for a crash landing. Two CIA officers walk out virtually unscathed. 

NARRATOR: And directly into the arms of the waiting Chinese military.

JOHN DELURY: There's an incredible photograph. 

JOHN DELURY: And it's literally the moment of capture. You also imagine, okay, well, the Chinese are well prepared for this. They've got their photographer crouched down. It looks like, a little bit - from the angle of the photo - to get the perfect shot of their two young Americans caught red-handed on their territory. It's an incredible image. 

NARRATOR: In that image: two dazed and forlorn-looking men, the reality of their situation dawning on their faces. They are lined up side by side, hands tied behind their backs. Their names? Officers Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey. And while this moment, captured on film, must feel like the most brutal of endings to their mission, it is - in ways they can scarcely imagine - only the beginning. What follows constitutes one of the most unbelievable episodes of US espionage that the world has never heard. And the man who’s about to tell you this story?

JOHN DELURY: I'm John Delury. I'm a historian of China and US-China relations, and I teach at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

NARRATOR: John Delury specializes in hidden stories like this one. He excavates the primary texts that were once locked away, behind the so-called ‘Bamboo Curtain’. The great barrier of mutual secrecy that separated communist China from the West, during the paranoid peaks of the Cold War. But this particular piece of espionage history required no prying. At least not initially. It simply landed on his lap.

JOHN DELURY: I have to admit it's almost cliché. I literally read John (‘Jack’) Downey's obituary after he passed in 2014. I was sitting in my house in Seoul, South Korea, and I get the daily newspaper in print. And I was sitting there reading the paper and I thought, ‘This is unbelievable. This story is incredible. And how could I not know about this?’ 

NARRATOR: Delury knew he had to find out more. And so he did what he does best. He began digging. And soon enough, the life that had appeared before him in black and white in his morning paper, began to bloom into startling technicolor. Jack Downey’s long journey into history began at Yale College in Connecticut.

JOHN DELURY: Jack Downey enters in 1947, right as the CIA is being born. 

NARRATOR: In 1947, as the Cold War was heating up, the need for a permanent Central Intelligence Agency had become undeniable. The future of Europe - then considered the heart of world power - was on the line.

JOHN DELURY: The first job of the CIA is to make sure that communists don't win elections and get control of countries like Italy and France. And this is called political warfare.

NARRATOR: But soon enough, it becomes clear that the Cold War is not just a European concern. First, in China - Chiang Kai-shek’s friendly government is toppled by the Communist Party, and Mao Zedong a huge blow to the US. And then, in the summer of 1950…

JOHN DELURY: Suddenly the chess board is sort of thrown off and you have a whole new set of dynamics because now there's a war on the Korean Peninsula. 

NARRATOR: America sends forces to support South Korea. Soon, China will send its own troops back to the North. It is against this backdrop - the US’s first out-and-out conflict since World War II - that the still-young CIA must begin to find its feet and its recruits.

JOHN DELURY: An interesting feature of the early CIA is how much it's an elite operation. So the Ivy League, the top schools in the United States, are actually recruiting grounds for the Central Intelligence Agency. And a lot of this does have to do with the Korean War because now, as in World War II, you've got close to wartime mobilization. And back in those days, everyone served - at least young men - and those young men needed to figure out how they were going to do their time in the military. And it's a very alluring pitch that the CIA is able to make, “Come do intelligence, and we will fly you off into communist-controlled countries.” And of course, implied that “We’ll get you home safely.” So both in terms of self-preservation as well as ambition, the CIA can make a pretty good pitch and they are recruiting intensively at Ivy League colleges.

NARRATOR: Ivy League colleges like Yale where a young Jack Downey is enrolled.

JOHN DELURY: Jack Downey is an all-American kid. He's smart. He's good at academics. He goes to the right prep school. He's a great athlete. 

NARRATOR: In other words, Jack Downey is exactly the young man that the CIA needs. And he doesn’t need to be asked twice. He’s in.

JOHN DELURY: Jack Downey's training, which is typical, is shockingly brief. He is not prepared at all for understanding the region that he is sent to. Instead, he just gets generic infantry training and then brushes up on tradecraft, paramilitary skills, dead drops, parachutes, and this kind of thing. 

NARRATOR: None of the exhaustive, grueling training that awaits modern CIA recruits at the Farm. With an escalating war raging on in the background, there’s simply no time. Jack Downey graduates from Yale in the summer of 1951. By the end of that same year, he is deployed.

JOHN DELURY: He's in Japan at a secret CIA facility working on this project, this operation to send Jedburgh teams into China.

NARRATOR: And what, precisely, is a Jedburgh team? I hear you ask.

JOHN DELURY: These were basically small teams, three- to five-person teams. They're multinational. They are trained in basic paramilitary skills. They learn how to jump out of a plane, land in a foreign country, and cause trouble.

NARRATOR: Born out of World War II, and named after the Scottish grounds where these legendary commando squads were trained, the Jedburghs held a lingering romantic appeal for young men who had missed the ‘good war’. And for the still-young CIA...

JOHN DELURY: They use this as an actual model in different parts of the world, including in the Far East. Well, let's create Asian Jedbughs. Let's create Korean Jedbughs or Chinese Jedbughs. We will train them in these basic skills and will drop them into communist territory behind enemy lines in communist territory. And we'll see what trouble they can create. That's the idea. 

NARRATOR: Of course, an operation such as this one has some attendant difficulties.

JOHN DELURY: So in the early 1950s, how do you infiltrate someone into communist territory? Well, one of your options is to fly a plane over and kick them out. There's a job called ‘the kicker’ to make sure that they actually jump and they parachute down and go from there. And of course, for that, you need planes. And when this is being done by the CIA under the guise of deniability, this is supposed to be covert. These are actions that should not be attributable to the US government. Where are you going to get your planes?

NARRATOR: A reasonable question.

JOHN DELURY: Well the CIA comes up with a pretty ingenious solution to this. They buy an entire airline known as CAT that is going into bankruptcy. It's based out of Taiwan and it's a perfect front operation.

NARRATOR: CAT’s full name? The profoundly ironic Civil Air Transport.

JOHN DELURY: You can fly CAT as a regular passenger airline. Meanwhile, the pilots and a certain core of the staff of the airline are secretly working part-time, sort of for the CIA, or flying missions that they're not told about that are, in fact, CIA operations. 

NARRATOR: It’s to this ambitious operation, complete with its own phony airline, that a freshly deployed Jack Downey is assigned.

JOHN DELURY: He's a kid. He doesn't know, really, anything about China, the Far East, its history, its culture, its language. And yet he's in a position of some authority, along with many of his American confreres, many of whom also know next to nothing about the region that they're operating in. 

NARRATOR: The men Downey will have authority over are the Korean and Chinese ‘Jedburghs’ that the CIA is actively recruiting and sending behind enemy lines. And those recruits are drawn from two main channels. The first is the island of Taiwan - where the ousted Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek - and some 2m of his followers - have sought refuge after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. But Jack Downey’s agents come from another pool.

JOHN DELURY: Something called the Third Force. They're based in Hong Kong. They hate the communists, but they also hate Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists. And that's why they went to Hong Kong and not Taiwan. 

NARRATOR: It was because of this Third Force that Hong Kong developed something of a reputation around this time.

JOHN DELURY: Hong Kong is a spy’s paradise. Everyone is spying on everyone else. And the Americans, the CIA, build up a huge presence there at the American consulate. There are like 1,000 people working at the consulate at one point. It's the biggest in the world. 

NARRATOR: Back home in the States, CIA recruiters may selectively prowl Ivy League campuses for all-American athletes, but in Asia, they need a ready stock of willing manpower. Hong Kong is exactly the place they can find it. And it’s there that Jack Downey’s very own agents of subversion are sourced.

JOHN DELURY: So Operation Merlin is the CIA moniker for that effort to recruit this group and then deploy them near their hometowns in northeast China in what we would call Manchuria. 

NARRATOR: Operation Merlin is a top-secret job. Around a dozen men are flown to a CIA base in Saipan, to receive paramilitary training from Jack Downey, who is just 22 years old. They are then split into two groups - Teams Shen and Wen - and shepherded into a CAT plane. Their mission? Only to overthrow Communist China. 

JOHN DELURY: It's to get rid of Mao Zedong and reverse the whole thing. Now, operationally, how are they supposed to overthrow communism in China? I mean, the best thing you can imagine doing is, once you're on the ground, you try to find those who hate the new regime and would be willing to support further activities. But just to do that presents logistical difficulties of absurd proportions. How are you going to connect with these people? How are you going to secretly move around the country and find allies in the counter-revolution to overthrow the current government? But that's what they're supposed to do.

NARRATOR: Jack Downey and his fellow CIA officers may be responsible for training teams Shen and Wen - but it’s a very different task to actually step beyond the Bamboo Curtain and enact this chaos. Yet the history books make scarce mention of these brave men.

JOHN DELURY: So when we talk about these agents of subversion, there are the Americans, like Jack Downey, who are running the program. But the real agents, of course, are the Chinese, and we don't know as much. It's more fragmentary the knowledge of them. But you've got some figures like Li Junying who will play a central role in this planned operation to infiltrate teams into communist China, into northeast China.

NARRATOR: The very same Li Junying, who we glimpsed at the start of this episode, from the cockpit of a CAT plane. And he's from the area. He fits the typical profile of the Chinese agent because he is a former soldier himself. He was a commander in Chiang Kai-shek’s army, but he was disillusioned by it. By the end of the Civil War, he went to Hong Kong rather than follow Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. 

NARRATOR: Li Junying’s role in Operation Merlin is to act as a liaison between Teams Shen and Wen - following behind them once they are established and have begun their subversive activities.

JOHN DELURY: He's dropped in on his own. I put myself on that plane and try to imagine being Li Junying and what it's like when at least these other groups are in teams. But imagine the feeling when you jump out of the plane in the darkness of midnight. The only thing to protect you is the dark. And you've got your parachute on and you're floating down. You're not far from where you grew up. You've fought and lost a civil war that sent you clear across the country to Hong Kong. You've now been flown around the world by the CIA to be trained and to do this. But you're entirely on your own. And your mission is to find these other teams and check in with them and see how it's going.

NARRATOR: Once Li Junying has parachuted out of that plane, he’s on his own. And Jack Downey can only speculate as to what will greet his agent of subversion on the ground. But he must know the outlook isn’t exactly peachy.

JOHN DELURY: The fact that the CIA thought they could just drop Chinese people near their hometowns and ask them to overthrow the government speaks to the profound underestimation that existed of what was Chinese communism. And that, in fact, first of all, there's a lot of public support for the new government. And so people are not all waiting to be liberated. Quite the opposite. They're there, ready to get credit by going to their local authority or the party member in their village and say, “Hey, we think there's something weird going on in the forests over there.”

NARRATOR: Which is precisely the fate that befalls the lone liaison, Li Junying - unbeknownst to his CIA handlers - almost as soon as he reaches the ground in Manchuria.

JOHN DELURY: Really his undoing is paperwork. He doesn't have the right papers and he keeps getting stopped, even in these fairly remote areas. And when you don't have the right papers, there's a system to say, “Okay, we'll go check this office, go to that office.” Before long, he knows there's serious trouble and they probably know who he is. And so he just confesses. He just blurts out and says, “I was sent here by the CIA, by the Americans, and do to me what you will.”

NARRATOR: Once Li Junying is captured, the fate of Teams Shen and Wen likewise is sealed.

JOHN DELURY: Most of the agents - including Li Junying, who are captured - quickly divulge whatever details they know. And he would know quite a bit because, of course, his job was to find the two teams. So he had a basic idea of where they were. And so he was able to give over vital information to then help the communist public security find those other teams. My sense is they would have found them anyway. They're wandering around the wilderness, basically trying to survive while they're being found out, hunted down. 

NARRATOR: But of course, Downey and the CIA know nothing of this turn of events. As far as they’re concerned, Merlin is still operational.

JOHN DELURY: So Jack Downey and his team are running this operation remotely from Japan. They are able to keep up wireless radio communications. It gets spotty but they're able to keep up some communication with their teams.

NARRATOR: But just like Li Junying those systems, and the men in charge of them, are by no means infallible. 

JOHN DELURY: The other key figures in this are the communications officers, the guys who do the radio communications from the two teams, because if you capture them alive and quickly, coercively, persuade them to follow your orders, then they can send false messages back to headquarters. 

NARRATOR: And so when a message from Li arrives in November of 1952, there is no reason for Downey to suspect anything is amiss.

JOHN DELURY: “Hey, this is going well. I've got some materials, some documents I want to bring back.” There's a hint that he has found one of these promising disaffected senior military figures who's still based in communist China and would be willing to help out with the counter-revolution. And so, Li Junying sends the message back to Japan, “You need to exfiltrate me. You need to get me out of here quickly because I've got some good news and I've got some documents and we can debrief when I'm back in Japan.” 

NARRATOR: You already know what happens next. We heard it at the beginning of this episode. The night flight to Manchuria. The experimental exfiltration. The ambush. Two dead civilian pilots and two CIA officers in the hands of the Chinese military. As I said before - not an ending. More of a beginning.

JOHN DELURY: They're held initially in the biggest nearby city in Xinjiang. The initial interrogation for a couple of months is done there. So they're held separately in these basement cells. There's some sleep deprivation but they're fed and they are not brutalized or tortured. And the Chinese get basically full confessions. Downey says it's about two weeks, give or take, before he just breaks down. And he describes in a videotaped interview later in life that he tried his best but he finally just broke down. He broke down crying. And that was the beginning of telling them everything.

NARRATOR: So now the Chinese military has confirmed that the two Americans in detainment are CIA officers. This is a big catch.

JOHN DELURY: So you imagine the degree of restraint that Mao and the Chinese government exert on themselves to not go public with this? They've got a photograph. They've got the men. They've got the plane. But they are completely silent. There is nothing. Radio silence.

NARRATOR: So in the face of that radio silence, the CIA is left to speculate as to what became of Operation Merlin.

JOHN DELURY: The CIA knows nothing. The plane doesn't come back. There's no radio message of what went wrong. They wait a day. Two days. Three days. They concoct the thinnest of cover stories. They send out a plane, a fake search and rescue mission, to give a little bit of documentation to what will later be the cover story, “Oh, the plane disappeared on a flight from Japan to Korea.” But apart from that very superficial cover-up, basically, the analysis within the CIA, when they hear nothing, comes to the conclusion, “Well, something went wrong. It must have crashed somewhere, but must not have crashed in communist China, because if it had crashed in China, whether the men were dead or alive, the Chinese government would immediately go public. They would immediately make propaganda hay and tell the world about the evil things the imperialists are doing to them.” 

NARRATOR: And so, back home, conclusions are drawn and acted upon.

JOHN DELURY: The CIA officially declares the men dead. There are letters on CIA stationery signed by [Walter] Beedel Smith, the director of the CIA, confirming to the families, “We regret to say that your son was lost.” 

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Jack Downey and Dick Fecteau are transferred to a Beijing prison. Housed in separate cells, they are cut off from each other and the world outside. In the summer of 1953, the Korean War reaches its uneasy armistice. The two nations are still divided along exactly the same line as they were when this whole thing began. American and Chinese forces withdraw.

JOHN DELURY: And as time goes on, weeks become months. Months become years. Everyone moves on, they forget about this.

JOHN DELURY: And then suddenly, Thanksgiving 1954, This announcement comes out from Beijing, from the Chinese state media. “We are informing the world of a trial just completed to sentence, among others, these two CIA officers, John T. Downey and Richard Fecteau, of prison sentences for subversion and espionage. Downey gets life. Fecteau 20 years. 

NARRATOR: When news that Downey and Fecteau are in fact alive reaches the White House, it detonates a public relations bomb. 

JOHN DELURY: The response is to lie through their teeth and deny the story from start to finish. In fact, under the ultimate Cold War Secretary of State John Foster Dulles - we’re in the Eisenhower period now, and Dulles is the secretary of state for most of the decade - Dulles goes on the offensive and he tells his diplomats across the State Department. He sends out the text of a memo to read to the Chinese the riot act. “How dare they accuse us of this? They must immediately release our POWs. These are Korean War POWs who have been viciously and illegally held by the Chinese. They should have been released at the end of the Korean War.” 

NARRATOR: And so begins a classic game of political warfare. That China is entirely right is beside the point. The US will not concede.

JOHN DELURY: Imagine it from the Chinese government's perspective. It's sort of, “The gall of these Americans. Here we caught them red-handed. We have all the evidence and they're going to lie about this to their own public, their newspapers are going to print lies?” And so the Chinese then go on the counterattack of how to prove it. And so they stage an exhibition, this huge exhibition, with the Downey-Fecteau mission at the center of it. But it includes - you always say, 10,000 things - it's the exhibition of 10,000 objects used by the American imperialist spies. And this is staged for a few weeks at the big exhibition hall in Beijing. 

NARRATOR: Some 3,000 visitors each day come and behold the evidence of America’s “imperialist invasion”: wireless transmitters and portable generators, secret codebooks, revolvers, and submachine guns. At the center of the exhibition? The photograph of Fecteau and Downey’s capture, as well as the US-issued maps of Manchuria that they carried with them. Compelling propaganda, indeed. And so, the two young American prisoners find themselves pawns in a game. For China, they are no longer people but symbols of American imperialism.

JOHN DELURY: Mao Zedong is briefed on this case. His number two is Zhou Enlai, who has the intelligence portfolio and the foreign affairs portfolio throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s. Zhou Enlai knows all the details of this case. I think for Mao and Zhou, there's something about this where, in particular with Downey, the Americans have to acknowledge what they did. That is a precondition for release. It's not okay to lie through their teeth and still get their guy back. And so the adamant - and in the case of John Foster Dulles, the self-righteous - insistence that the Chinese are lying adds this infuriating aspect to it from the Chinese government's perspective. And, of course, that's just going to make it harder and harder to actually secure the release of these men. 

NARRATOR: Yet despite this fraught back and forth, China does make one interesting concession to its enemy in the West.

JOHN DELURY: Zhou Enlai personally makes a very interesting move early on. And there are some other cases - there's a group of cases - of Americans, US citizens, who are being detained or imprisoned or, let's say, held against their will in China. And Zhou Enlai actually sends out the message. He says their families are welcome to visit them as a humanitarian gesture. 

NARRATOR: But this ‘goodwill gesture’ isn’t interpreted as such at the White House.

JOHN DELURY: Dulles, the secretary, does not want what he considers ‘good propaganda’ for the Chinese communist. So he doesn't think it's a good look if you've got these mothers going over to visit their sons. And so the State Department essentially tries to prevent the families from visiting. Even down to the point of delaying or preventing them from getting passports. I mean, it's really… This is where it gets painful to see the battle that individuals and families have to fight against the national security state which is operating on this cold-hearted logic. 

NARRATOR: Consider the families of Fecteau and Downey. First, told their sons he had died. Now, denied the right to visit them.

JOHN DELURY: One of the unlikely heroes that emerged from the research process for me was Jack Downey's mother, Mary. She's an incredible figure. I would put her up there next to him as an American hero because she has to fight against her own government just to get permission to go visit her son in Beijing.

JOHN DELURY: But she will not give up. She is indomitable as one document describes her. And she goes to the UN to lobby for her case. She eventually gets permission from the State Department. 

NARRATOR: And in so doing, Mary Downey secures her own place in the Cold War history books.

JOHN DELURY: So her visit in 1958 to China to go see Jack, her son, in prison, is the first case of a US citizen, a private citizen visiting communist China since it was created in 1949 with the permission of the US government. And it's actually financed by the CIA. So you could say it's a friendly covert operation. She makes half a dozen visits at a time when almost no - I mean, very few - Americans are going to the People's Republic of China in the late ‘50s and through the 1960s. And Mary Downey, occasionally with Jack’s brother but sometimes on her own, is making these just incredible [journeys]. Again, you try as a historian to put yourself at the feet of the people you're studying. And when I try to imagine sitting next to Mary Downey on the train heading on these long trips across China, for maybe the fifth time to go see her son in prison... It's an epic saga, if you ask me because she has no one on her side. It's just her love of her son that can't be stopped, that gets her to go visit him.

NARRATOR: What changes take place in Jack Downey’s psyche over the arc of these long years? Impossible to say for sure but he appears to withdraw [from] the visits from his mother, a tantalizing reminder of the freedom he has lost.

JOHN DELURY: He would mention that the prison visits were very painful for him. He seems to have adopted a stoic fortitude about the whole thing and it seems that maybe for him, psychologically, it was actually painful.

NARRATOR: And still, time marches on. The US becomes increasingly entangled in Vietnam, a new conflict for a new era of Cold Warfare.

JOHN DELURY: If you think about the Vietnam conflict, it's less direct than in Korea, where Chinese and American soldiers are literally shooting at one another. But the Vietnam War, certain aspects of it are also a Sino-American war fought by proxy on these two sides because, in various phases, Mao and the Chinese communists are providing massive support, not frontline troops, but much else to the North Vietnamese to their allies, Ho Chi Minh. And, of course, the Americans are completely fighting on the side of South Vietnam. So if you're these two guys, Downey and Fecteau, you're still stuck in a prison in Beijing. You’re leftovers from the Korean War and now your country is back at a covert, undeclared war against China. Now in Vietnam instead of Korea. And so the conditions make it extremely unlikely, certainly not conducive to resolving this hangover from the Korean War of these two CIA officers.

NARRATOR: That impossible situation continues right through the 1960s until the arrival of a new US president. The fourth since Downey and Fecteau’s capture in 1952.

JOHN DELURY: You have to give credit to Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, his consigliere, Henry Kissinger. They have their list of issues. They want to improve relations with communist China And, largely it's actually about the Vietnam War. I mean, that's the way that they think they can finally get out of South Vietnam. So-called peace with honor if they can cover their backs with a breakthrough with Beijing But Nixon and Kissinger recognize that the Downey-Fecteau case needs to be resolved, that that’s part of the package.

NARRATOR: When Kissinger flies to Beijing, in July of 1971, for a secret tête-à-tête with Zhou Enlai, the two CIA officers are on his agenda.

JOHN DELURY: He brings it up sort of at the end, says, "Look, for American public opinion it would help. We don't question you." So it's a completely different tune now from Dulles. There's none of this self-righteousness. He says, “We're not questioning your version of the facts or justice is on your side. But we are asking the president, asking almost personally, as a gesture of goodwill, if you would consider releasing these men.” 

NARRATOR: And Zhou Enlai, for his part, says they will consider it. Kissinger makes good on his end of the bargain and ensures that Richard Nixon, at a White House press conference, acknowledges that Fecteau and Downey are in fact CIA officers. After nearly two decades, at last - movement.

JOHN DELURY: So Fecteau is released in December of 1971. And there's no great mystery to understanding the timing of that, because, of course, it was in February of 1972 that Nixon makes his famous public visit to Beijing. That's basically the end of the covert era in US-China relations and the beginning of an overt era in the relationship. And so as a goodwill gesture to improve public image, as it were, Zhou Enlai agrees to release Fecteau.

NARRATOR: A triumph of diplomacy, no doubt. But what about Jack Downey?

JOHN DELURY: Downey is serving a life sentence. He was always in a slightly different category. And they're not willing yet to give up that card. So only one of the two men is released. So you think about it when President Nixon is getting his special tour of the Forbidden City in downtown Beijing, he's a stone's throw away from Jack Downey, this kid out of college who’s sent off on this crazy CIA operation and is still paying for it with his freedom, rotting away in a prison cell in Beijing when his president is in the same city. 

NARRATOR: In the end, there’s only so far that Nixon and Kissinger are willing to push. The same cannot be said for Jack Downey’s mother, who never, for a moment, ceases her campaigning.

JOHN DELURY: At the end of the story, you come back to Mary Downey because Kissinger and Nixon have done what they could do in terms of diplomacy to create conditions for the release the best they are able to get. First, they get Downey's sentence lightened and now he's no longer on a life term and he should be getting out in 1976. And then they're making a bit more progress because Mary Downey is having health issues. They get an informal agreement from the Chinese that it could be even earlier. And finally, she really does get severely ill with a stroke. 

NARRATOR: For Mary Downey, there will be no more adventures behind the Bamboo Curtain. She lies in a hospital bed thousands of miles from her still-imprisoned son.

JOHN DELURY: Kissinger passes the message on to Zhou Enlai that Mary Downey may not have long left and Zhou Enlai immediately orders the release of Jack Downey. 

NARRATOR: How does one even begin to understand the emotional impact of this moment on Jack Downey himself?

JOHN DELURY: Having flown on an unmarked plane uninvited into China in November 1952, after over two decades of imprisonment, Jack Downey, now in March of 1973, walks out from the southern exit basically at Hong Kong. There's this famous bridge, Lo Wu Bridge, which is a rail bridge, and there's a spot you can walk across. And so Downey walks out on his own two feet to freedom. I mean, this, you really can't imagine what's going through his head at that moment. But he's probably worried about his mother because the first thing he's going to do is be flown, I think it's to Clark Air Force Base for a transfer. And then again, sped on his way to fly back to Connecticut. There's a police escort. And actually, the governor at the time, Tom Maskell, is a family friend. And so everything is arranged to raise him to the hospital so that he can be by his mother's side. 

NARRATOR: Mary holds out long enough to see her greatest hope realized. Her son is free and at her side as she passes. Afterward, Jack Downey quietly re-enters American life. He grieves his mother, licks his wounds, and tries to make up for so much lost time.

JOHN DELURY: I mean, talk about a symbol of resilience because, by all accounts, he led a good and wonderful life. One of his classmates, Jerry Cohen, a legendary figure in the study of Chinese law, had worked very hard and helped in the process of getting his release. Jerry Cohen tells a great story of how Yale Law wouldn't accept Downey because there was a hole, there was a gap in his resume for 20 years, but Harvard Law allowed him in. And so he went. He studied law. He went on to practice law. At one point, he briefly put in his hat at a run for public office, but ended up spending his life with a career in law and was a judge outside of New Haven, Connecticut. Actually, there's a courthouse named after him.

NARRATOR: And so the tale ends within spitting distance of where it began at Yale College, in Connecticut. In the movie of Downey’s life, here’s where the credits would roll. This is, after all, a story of Hollywood proportions. Something that John Delury realized as soon as he began researching its contours. You can discover much more about Downey’s life - and the ill-fated CIA effort that capsized it - in his book, Agents of Subversion. It’s a compelling, unforgettable story. One which begs a question: why wasn’t Downey’s release, after so much drama and turmoil, bigger news at the time?

JOHN DELURY: There's this incredible moment at a press conference in the Ides of March ‘73 and Nixon gets up there and he's all excited, he's got in his notes, he's going to talk about the POW issue because it's a big issue at that moment with all the POWs in Vietnam. And so he's all excited to say, “Look, I'm getting our boys home. I even got these two guys out of communist China.” And the press couldn't care less. When the hands go up, they want to know about this random break-in that had happened months earlier. This place, Watergate, this thing, Watergate. And so that sort of explains a lot, doesn't it, in terms of why the country is not in the mood to celebrate the return of this poor guy, Jack Downey, who's lost his youth in a prison cell in China, because people are moving on to another question, which is the corruption, the deep corruption, having everything to do with secrecy, in the White House that we know as Watergate. So a new chapter in American history had opened. 

NARRATOR: And with it, another chapter quietly closed. Jack Downey, the longest-held prisoner of war in American history, was home at last. I’m Sophia Di Martino. Join us next week for a deep-sea wiretapping mission in forbidden Soviet waters.