Covert Subversion Left Spies Suffering Chinese Jails

In the fall of 1952, two young CIA officers boarded an unmarked C-47 plane in Korea, bound for enemy territory in Manchuria, in northern China. Their mission: to pick up a Chinese agent who had been in China for several months. The Americans planned to fly low over the ground, release a hook that would pluck the operative from the cold and treacherous terrain, and then return to the safety of Korea. The officers and their two pilots had no cover and no exit strategy if anything went wrong. They spoke only a few words of Chinese between them. As the plane approached the pickup spot, a full moon above, a blaze of gunfire slammed into the fuselage. The C-47 crashed, killing the pilots and stranding the officers, who were swiftly captured. A grainy photograph shows the dazed Americans, dressed in winter clothing, standing in a field as a Chinese soldier binds their hands. This failed covert mission was kept quiet for decades. The captured spies, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, spent two decades in grim Chinese jails, often in solitary confinement. Fecteau was released in 1971 and Downey in 1973. The breakthrough came thanks to the diplomacy of U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the dogged campaigning of Downey’s mother, Mary, who traveled to China on five occasions to visit her imprisoned son. The press, bamboozled by the U.S. government, had shown little interest in the case.