"Tough," "unfair," and "hard" doesn't begin to describe what these two guys went through . . . .


The lost 20 years of CIA spies caught in China trap

Lured by a double agent and jailed secretly, the tale of Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau is one of the most extraordinary in espionage



On a crisp spring morning in 1973 a pale and emaciated man made his way slowly across the Lo Wu bridge from China into Hong Kong. A British soldier at the frontier post saluted him as he approached. This was, the man later reflected, “the first act of dignity shown to him in 20 years”.

His name was Jack Downey. He was a CIA agent, and since 1952 he and a colleague, Richard Fecteau, had languished in a Chinese prison, often in solitary confinement, secret hostages in the Cold War between the US and China.

The capture, imprisonment and eventual release of these two CIA agents is one of the most extraordinary and poignant tales in the history of espionage. Some of the material relating to their captivity remains classified but 34 years after Downey stumbled to freedom the CIA has finally allowed an official agency historian access to its most secret files.

The Downey-Fecteau case, revealed last week in the CIA’s Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, is a story of suffering, endurance and ordinary individuals trapped and manipulated by geopolitics. With the recent Iranian hostage drama, the story has remarkable contemporary resonance, but with one signal difference. The British soldiers were held in Iran for 13 days, and some made a small fortune by selling their stories after their release. Downey and Fecteau — both of whom are still living —never told their story to the media, and never made a penny out of it.

In 1952, Downey and Fecteau had both recently graduated from university, Downey from Yale, and Fecteau from Boston. Downey, 22, had joined the CIA in 1951.

Fecteau, recently married for the second time, was 24, and had been a CIA agent for only a few months. Both were about to embark on their first operational mission, which would also be their last.

In June of that year, the US had parachuted five ethnic Chinese agents into Manchuria on a mission to destabilise the Communist regime by linking up with local anti-government forces and carrying out guerrilla operations.

The team, which Downey had helped to train, made radio contact in November, reporting that they had obtained important documents and wanted one of the team to be picked up by “air snatch”. This risky procedure for aerial pick-up involved flying an aircraft at low altitude and hooking a line stretched between two aluminium poles. “The line was connected to a harness in which the agent was strapped,” writes the CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic. “Once airborne the man was to be winched into the aircraft.”

On November 29 a C47 US transport plane set off from the Korean peninsular: at the controls were pilots Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy; manning the winch were Downey and Fecteau. With the Korean War at its height, both men knew the perils of Operation Tropic. They did not know they were flying into a trap.

Unknown to their handlers, the Chinese agents had been captured soon after landing, “doubled” in spy parlance, and were being used to lure the CIA into an ambush. At around midnight, having received the correct torch signal from the ground, the pilots swooped low over the rendezvous point in the Manchurian foothills, where two poles had been erected and a man in harness appeared to be waiting for the pick-up.

At exactly the moment when the plane should have hooked its agent, two anti-aircraft guns, camouflaged in the snow by white sheets, opened fire at the cockpit. The pilots were killed, the engines cut out, and the plane crash-landed among some trees, breaking apart on impact. Downey and Fecteau, secured by harnesses, survived unhurt, and staggered out of the wreckage to find themselves surrounded by whooping Chinese troops.

With impressive understatement, Downey remarked to his partner that they were now in “a hell of a mess”.

The two captured Americans were tied up, bundled into a truck, and driven to Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria, where they were shackled and locked in separate cells.

When the transport plane failed to return, the CIA invented a story that Downey and Fecteau were civilian employees of the Army Department who had been aboard a commercial flight lost in the sea west of Japan. The men were presumed dead, and letters of condolence were sent to their families.

The two Americans, meanwhile, were undergoing brutal interrogation: they were never physically tortured, but prevented from sleeping or bathing, made to wear leg irons continually, and interrogated for up to 24 hours at a time. Eventually, inevitably, both confessed to being CIA agents.

The men were moved to Beijing, and finally, two years after their capture, they were put on trial before a secret military tribunal.

Seeing his companion for the first time in two years, dressed in prison garb, Fecteau whispered: “Who’s your tailor?” As the senior officer, Downey received a life sentence; Fecteau was given 20 years.

The first that the CIA knew of the real fate of the agents was a broadcast by the Chinese state news agency, announcing that two American spies had been convicted. Officially, the US Government continued to insist that the men were civilians, while allegations of espionage were dismissed by the State Department as “utterly false”.

So began the long, crushing years of incarceration. The men lived in draughty cells, on a diet of maggoty rice and vegetables. Sometimes they were allowed books and magazines. Then, with refined psychological cruelty, these would be arbitrarily removed.

The Americans developed survival strategies: daily exercise, writing, learning Chinese, and training their minds to explore the world they had once known.

Fecteau became an “expert daydreamer”, Dujmovic reports, and made an imaginary world by recalling every child in his school classes, and the sights in the Massachusetts town where he grew up.

Though they were required to study Marx and Mao, the men were never brainwashed. “They could scare you into saying just about anything . . . but actually believing it is a much more difficult proposition,” said Downey.

The Chinese jailers told them they had been abandoned by their own Government. This was untrue, for though the US refused to bargain with or recognise the Chinese Communist Government, Washington exerted whatever pressure it could for the release of the men. At one stage, the CIA even contemplated a commando raid to try to free them, but abandoned the plan because their whereabouts were too uncertain.

Small snippets of news reached the captives, tailored to show the West in the worst light: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the riots at Kent State University. Not until their release would they learn, with astonishment, that a man had walked on the Moon.

Downey and Fecteau were held separately, but did their best to maintain contact, using a system of distinctive coughs to indicate where they were inside the prison complex, and drawing baseball scores in the dust of the exercise yard.

In the outside world, diplomatic relations between China and the US were slowly thawing. In 1971, Henry Kissinger made his secret visit to Beijing and on December 9 of that year, Fecteau was suddenly released.

Downey would remain in prison for another 15 months, before he too was set free, the year after Richard Nixon’s visit to China. The trigger for the releases was Nixon’s admission of what the US Government had denied for so long: that the two men were indeed CIA agents, captured on a spying mission inside China.

They emerged into a world utterly transformed. Fecteau’s wife had died, tragically, in a house fire soon after his capture. The baby twin daughters he had left behind were now in their twenties. Both agents had been promoted during their incarceration, and their unspent pay had steadily accumulated.

Given the continuing sensitivity of relations with China, they were deliberately released without fanfare. Both refused offers to sell their stories. Downey laconically observed that the entire experience had been a “crashing bore”. Fecteau joked that his good health was due to having spent “19 years without booze, broads or butts”.

Over the years, some parts of the story leaked out, but it was not until this year that the CIA decided to reveal the full truth. After long negotiations, in 2004 the Chinese Government allowed US scientists to retrieve human remains from the crash site, which DNA testing identified as those of Robert Snoddy. The body of the other pilot, Norman Schwartz, has never been found.

Even today, the two former captives are reticent. Contacted in his Massachusetts home, Fecteau, 80 this year, is polite but firm: “I am an old man now. I would rather not talk about that time.” Downey and Fecteau both retired from the CIA within a few years of their release. Fecteau became sports director at Boston University, his alma mater. Downey’s second life was, in some ways, as extraordinary as his first: he attended Harvard Law School, married a Chinese woman born in Manchuria near where he had been shot down, and finally became a distinguished judge in Connecticut, specialising in juvenile cases.

Downey once remarked that he thought his years in prison had given him a special sensitivity towards sentencing others. The John T. Downey Juvenile Courthouse and Detention Centre in New Haven is named in his honour: a man who lost his youth in a Chinese jail has a youth prison with his name on it.

Having denied its own agents for 20 years, the CIA has now elevated the two men to the status of icons, while their prison experience has become a case study in surviving captivity. Awarding Downey and Fecteau belated medals in 1998, George Tenet, then CIA director, observed: “Your story, simply put, is one of the most remarkable in the history of the CIA.”

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WOW!