Behind the Bamboo Curtain | CIA
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Join Walmart in shouting out your favorite black-led products, creating a new world of choices at walmart.com forward slash black and unlimited. 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.

True spies. 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? This is True Spies. The incredible thing about this is the mission of the operation is to parachute in to communist China and overthrow the communist regime.

I'm Sofia Di Martino and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Behind the bamboo curtain. November 29th, 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 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 from an undercover agent, embedded in the northeast of mainland China.

Li Jianying. They've gotten 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. To risk landing the plane in hostile Manchuria is out of the question.

The solution that they devise is that they're going to fly in and pick up the agent, Li Junying, without landing. No such extraction has ever even been attempted. But the CIA officers are confident it can be done. 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 a big box. And in the box is going to be a harness, a sort of backpack that Li Juning 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 kind of backpack harness. While the agent on the ground prepares his extraction point, the unmarked C-47 will circle round and come in to make another pass. 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, you know, like pulling your fish in. And by then they'll be, you know, safely heading back to Japan. At least that's the plan.

As the plane approaches the pickup site, the CIA officers are on the lookout for a pre-agreed all-clear.

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

And so they circle around now and are preparing to do the actual pickup. 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. The CIA officers prepare the wire hook. Everything is in place. But as the plane makes its approach, suddenly, movement begins.

And then all hell breaks loose. Guns open fire on both sides of what is essentially kind of a gully that they're flying through to make the pickup. It turns out that Chinese military and militia have staked out positions systematically on all sides. Ambush. The pilots barely have time to register what's happening.

And the pilot and co-pilot, they're killed either by the gunfire or by the crash, probably the gunfire itself. They're dead upon landing. And the outlook for the two CIA officers in the back surely isn't much better. But because it's flying low and slow, actually it's the ideal conditions for a crash landing. The two CIA officers walk out virtually unscathed.

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

In that image, two dazed and forlorn-looking men, the reality of their situation dawning on their faces. They're 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 U.S. espionage that the world has never heard. And the man who's about to tell you this story? I'm John Delury. I'm a historian of China and U.S.-China relations, and I teach at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

John Delory specialises 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.

Well, I have to admit, it's almost cliche. I literally read Downey's obituary after he passed in 2014. I was sitting at 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 story?

Delory 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.

Jack Downey enters in 1947 right as the CIA is being born. The first job for 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. 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,

Suddenly the chessboard is sort of thrown off, you know, and you have a whole new set of dynamics because now there's a war on the Korean Peninsula. America sends forces to support South Korea. Soon China will send its own troops to back the North. It is against this backdrop, the U.S.'s first out-and-out conflict since World War II, that the still young CIA must begin to find its feet.

and its recruits. An interesting feature of the early CIA is how much it's an elite operation. So the Ivy League, you know, 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, you know, kind of

everyone serves, at least young men, those young men need to figure out how they're going to do their time in military. And it's a very alluring pitch that the CIA are able to make. You know, come do intelligence and we'll 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. Ivy League colleges like Yale, where a young Jack Downey is enrolled. Jack Downey is, you know, the all-American kid. He's smart, he's good at academics, he goes to the right prep school. He's a great athlete. In other words, Jack Downey is exactly the kind of young man that the CIA needs. And he doesn't need to be asked twice.

He's in. Jack Downey's training, which is typical, is shockingly brief. He is not prepared at all for understanding the region that he's sent to. Instead, he just gets kind of a generic infantry training and then...

brush up in tradecraft and paramilitary skills and dead drops and parachutes and this kind of thing. 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's deployed. He's in Japan at a secret CIA facility working on this project, this operation to send Jedburgh teams into China. And what

What precisely is a Jedberg team? I hear you ask. These were basically small teams, you know, 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.

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

They use this as an actual model in different parts of the world, including in the Far East. You know, well, let's create Asian Jedburgs. Let's create Korean Jedburgs or Chinese Jedburgs. We'll train them in these basic skills. We'll drop them into communist territory, you know, behind enemy lines in communist territory. And we'll see what kind of trouble they can create. That's the idea.

Of course, an operation such as this one has some attendant difficulties. So in the early 1950s, you know, 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.

But of course, for that, you need planes. And when this is being done by the CIA under the guise of deniability, you know, this is supposed to be covert. These are actions that should not be attributable to the U.S. government. Where are you going to get your planes?

A reasonable question. 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 kind of front operation. CAT's full name? The profoundly ironic Civil Air Transport.

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, you know, sort of for the CIA or flying missions that they're not told about that are in fact CIA operations.

It's to this ambitious operation, complete with its own phony airline, that a freshly deployed Jack Downey is assigned. He's a kid. He doesn't know really anything about China, the Far East. You know, 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.

The men Downey will have authority over are the Korean and Chinese jetbergs 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 2 million of his followers have sought refuge after their defeat in the Chinese civil war.

But Jack Downey's agents come from another pool. 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. It was because of this Third Force that Hong Kong developed something of a reputation around this time.

— 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's like a thousand people working at the consulate at one point. It's the biggest in the world. — 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. 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.

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? 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...

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.

When we talk about these agents of subversion, there are the Americans like Jack Downey who are kind of 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 China.

teams into communist China, into northeast China. 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. Li Junying's role in Operation Merlin is to

is to act as liaison between teams Shen and Wen, following behind them once they're established and have begun their subversive activities. You know, he's dropped in on his own. I put myself on that plane and try to imagine being Li Junying. At least these other groups are in teams, you know, 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 now 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. Once Li Jianying 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. 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, you know, 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 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 forest over there.

Which is precisely the fate that befalls the lone liaison, Lee Chun-ying, unbeknownst to his CIA handlers, almost as soon as he reaches the ground in Manchuria. Really, his undoing is paperwork.

You know, 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, OK, we'll go check, you know, go to this office, go to that office. Before long, he knows there's serious trouble and they probably know who he is. And so he he just confesses. He just blurts out and says, I was sent here by by the CIA, by the Americans. And do to me what you will.

Once Li Junying is captured, the fate of teams Shen and Wen likewise is sealed. Most of the agents, including Li Junying, who are captured, they quickly divulge whatever details they know, you 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 kind of wandering around the wilderness, basically trying to survive while they're being found out, hunted down,

But of course, Downey and the CIA know nothing of this turn of events. As far as they're concerned, Merlin is still operational. So Jack Downey and his team, they are running this operation, you know, remotely from Japan. They are able to keep up wireless radio communications online.

But it gets spotty, but they're able to keep up some communication with their teams. But just like Li Jianying, those systems and the men in charge of them are by no means infallible. The other key figures in this are the communications officers, you know, the guys who do the radio communications from the two teams, because if you capture them alive and

and quickly, coercively persuade them to follow your orders, then they can send false messages back to headquarters. And so, when a message from Lee arrives in November of 1952, there's no reason for Downey to suspect anything is amiss. 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.

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. You already know what happens next. We heard it at the beginning of this episode. The night flight to Manchuria, the experimental exfiltration of...

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.

They're held initially in the biggest nearby city in Shenyang. The initial interrogation for a couple months is done there. So they're held separately in these basement cells. There's some sleep deprivation, but they're fed and they again 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 videotape interview later in life that, you know, he tried his best, but he finally just broke down. He broke down crying, and that was the beginning of kind of telling them everything. So now the Chinese military has confirmed that the two Americans in detainment are CIA officers. This is a big catch. 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. So in the face of that radio silence, the CIA is left to speculate as to what became of Operation Merlin.

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 information.

the thinnest of cover stories. I mean, they do send out a plane, you know, a fake search and rescue mission, you know, to give a little bit of documentation to what will later be the cover story that, oh, the plane disappeared on a flight from Japan to Korea. But apart from that, a very sort of 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.

And so, back home, conclusions are drawn and acted upon. The CIA officially declares the men dead. There are letters on CIA stationery signed by Beatle Smith, the director of the CIA, confirming to the families, you know, we regret to...

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

And as time goes on, weeks become months, months become years. Everyone moves on, they forget about this. And then suddenly, Thanksgiving 1954, this announcement comes out from Beijing, you know, from the Chinese state media. We are informing the world of a trial is just completed to sentence, among other, these two CIA officers.

John T. Downey and Richard Fecteau of prison sentences for subversion and espionage. Downey gets life, Fecteau 20 years. When news that Downey and Fecteau are in fact alive reaches the White House, it detonates a public relations bomb.

The response is to lie through their teeth and deny the story from start to finish. In fact, under the ultimate kind of Cold War Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, this were in the Eisenhower period now, and Dulles is the Secretary of State for most of the decade.

Dulles goes on the offensive, you know, and he tells his diplomats across the State Department. He sends out the text of a memo to kind of read the Chinese, the riot act. How dare they accuse us of this? They must immediately release our POWs. You know, 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.

And so begins a classic game of political warfare. That China is entirely right is besides the point. The U.S. will not concede. Imagine it from the Chinese government's perspective. It's sort of, ah, the gall of these Americans. You know, here we caught them red-handed. We have all the evidence. And they're going to lie about this, you know, to their own public? Their newspapers are going to print this?

And so the Chinese then go on the counterattack of proving it, how to prove it. And so they stage a exhibition, this huge exhibition with sort of the down effect omission at the center of it, but it includes, you always say 10,000 things. So there's 10,000, 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. Some 3,000 visitors each day come and behold the evidence of America's imperialist invasion.

wireless transmitters and portable generators, secret code books, 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. Mao Zedong is briefed on this case. His number two, 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. You know, I think for Mao and Zhou, there's something about this where, in particular with Downey,

you know, the Americans have to acknowledge what they did. I mean, 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, self-righteous insistence that the Chinese are lying, you know, that adds this kind of 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.

Yet despite this fraught back and forth, China does make one interesting concession to its enemy in the West. Zhou Enlai personally makes a very interesting move early on. And there are some other cases. There's a group of cases of Americans, U.S. 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, you know, their families are welcome to visit them as a humanitarian gesture. But this goodwill gesture isn't interpreted as such at the White House. Dulles, the secretary, does not want any kind of what he considers good propaganda

for the Chinese communists. 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, you know, to see the battle that individuals and families have to fight against

the national security state, you know, which is operating on this cold-hearted logic. Consider the families of Fecteau and Downey, first told their sons had died, now denied the right to visit them.

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, you know, she has to fight against her own government just to get permission to go visit her son in Beijing, but she will not give up. She is indomitable.

as one document describes her. And so she goes to the UN to lobby her case. She eventually gets permission from the State Department. And in so doing, Mary Downey secures her own place in the Cold War history books. Her visit in 1958 to China to go see Jack, her son in prison, is the first...

case of a US citizen, private citizen, visiting communist China since it was created in 1949 with the permission of the US government. She's the first citizen to do that. And it's actually financed by the CIA. So you could say it's a friendly covert operation. She makes a 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... Again, you put yourself in 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 kind of an epic saga, if you ask me, because she has...

sort of 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. 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. The visits from his mother, a tantalizing reminder of the freedom he has lost. He would mention that the prison visits were very painful for him. He seems to have

adopted a stoic fortitude about the whole thing, you know, and it seems that maybe for him psychologically it was actually painful. And still, time marches on. The U.S. becomes increasingly entangled in Vietnam, a new conflict for a new era of cold warfare. If you think about the Vietnam conflict...

It's less direct than 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 kind of 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.

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.

You have to give credit to Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, his consigliere, Henry Kissinger. They have their list of issues they want to improve relations with communist China. And, you know, largely it's actually about the Vietnam War. I mean, that's the way that they think they can finally get out of South Korea.

South Vietnam, so-called peace with honor, if they can kind of 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. 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.

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 the self-righteousness. He says, we're not questioning your version of the facts. Justice is on your side. But we are asking, the president is asking almost personally,

as a gesture of goodwill if you would consider releasing these men. 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. Fecteau is actually...

released in December of 1971.

And there's no great mystery to understand the timing of that because, of course, it's in February of 1972 that Nixon makes his famous public visit to Beijing. That's basically the end of the covert era in U.S.-China relations and the beginning of an overt era in the relationship. And so as a goodwill gesture, you know, to kind of improve public image, as it were, Zhou Enlai agrees to release Fekto-P.

A triumph of diplomacy, no doubt. But what about Jack Downey? You know, 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,

You know, 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. 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.

At the end of the story, you come back to Mary Downey because while Kissinger and Nixon have done what they could do in terms of the 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 a kind of informal agreement from the Chinese that it could be even earlier. Finally, she really does get severely ill with a stroke. 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.

And 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. How does one even begin to understand the emotional impact of this moment on Jack Downey himself? 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 at basically at Hong Kong. There's this famous bridge, Lowu Bridge, which is a kind of rail bridge and there's a spot you couldn't walk across. And so Downey walks out on

on his own two feet to freedom. I mean, this, you really can't imagine what's going through his head in 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 to race him to the hospital so that he can be by his mother's side.

I mean, talk about a symbol of resilience.

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 who 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 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.

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 Delory 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 the question: why wasn't Downey's release, after so much drama and turmoil, bigger news at the time? 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, but increasingly the questions are getting serious. This place Watergate, this thing Watergate. And so that sort of explains a lot, doesn't it, in terms of why the country's 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 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. And with it, another chapter quietly closed. Jack Downey, the longest held prisoner of war in American history, was home at last. I'm Sofia DiMartino.

Join us next week for a deep-sea wiretapping mission in forbidden Soviet waters.

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