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Transcript100 lines
- [00:00]
Don Wildman
It's better over here now.
- [00:02]
Barry Wirth
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Don Wildman
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Barry Wirth
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- [00:29]
Matt Lewis
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- [01:02]
Don Wildman
An Orca pod is on the hunt.
- [01:04]
Dr. Eleanor Yanaga
These aren't your average orcas. These guys are organized marketing team.
- [01:10]
Don Wildman
Did you get those social media posts scheduled for the SEAL migration?
- [01:13]
Barry Wirth
Aye aye Captain.
- [01:15]
Don Wildman
We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live.
- [01:19]
Dr. Eleanor Yanaga
They use Monday.com to keep their teamwork sharp, their communication clear and their goals in sight. Monday.com for whatever you run. Even orcas go to Monday.com to dive deeper.
- [01:33]
Barry Wirth
Just before 11am on March 12, 1973, a 42 year old American male crosses the Lo Wu Border bridge from Shenzhen, China into Hong Kong. Wearing thick rimmed square glasses, royal blue trousers with a matching high button jacket and a navy cap over his slightly balding head, the man carries just a black suitcase and an overcoat. 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 C47 aircraft he'd been flying in was 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.
- [03:23]
Don Wildman
Thanks so much. Good to be here.
- [03:25]
Barry Wirth
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?
- [04:06]
Don Wildman
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 Chiang Kai Shek and his Nationalists moved to Taiwan. So from 1949 on, there were two Chinas. 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.
- [05:14]
Barry Wirth
We've done shows on the CIA, on the. 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?
- [05:29]
Don Wildman
Well, it really accelerated. So because we didn't have a permanent spy service, we adopted 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 Jedburg 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 Jedburghs 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 sparring 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 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.
- [07:30]
Barry Wirth
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 certain turns into can't do. Sometimes they also are in the strange position of having to recruit people, you know, out of wartime. They're having go look for the right kind of man, probably white man who fits the bill. And along comes Jack Downey, John T. Downey. How do they find the likes of him and why there and what are they looking for?
- [08:07]
Don Wildman
That wasn't hard. As it turned out. Jack's generation, he was born in 1930. That meant he was in pubescence. During World War II was a pent up generation. They had watched their older brothers and cousins and even in many cases their fathers enlisted for combat duty in World War II. The Greatest Generation, these were the little brothers, the kid brothers of the greatest generation.
- [08:32]
Barry Wirth
That's fascinating.
- [08:34]
Don Wildman
And as Jack called them, my little narrow post war generation. So they were, they were pent up and eager to fight. Now in particular, they were looking for the best and the brightest. This was during Korea, as you say. It had quickly turned into a stalemate. The fighting was horrific. People fought and bled and died to gain inches. So Jack was at Yale and with 100 of his classmates, up to 100 of his classmates, practically 10% of the Yale class of 1951. These guys went into the CIA believing that they were going to be doing the most adventurous, most effective work and at the same time avoiding dying in a trench somewhere in Korea. So as I said, it wasn't hard. Jack's CIA class was, as he said, distinctly ivied. Many of them were from Harvard, many of them from Princeton, most of them were from Yale. And as I said, it wasn't hard to recruit these guys. They were ready to go.
- [09:32]
Barry Wirth
Yeah, he becomes a kind of an archetype of that era of the CIA. He's an extraordinary student, this guy. He goes to Choate, class president, then to Yale and so forth. He's really right out of the gate, isn't he? When you're recruited for this, he's a 22 year old who goes into action.
- [09:48]
Don Wildman
It even goes beyond that. You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about Jack Downey, obviously a lot of time writing about him. He was an exceptional human being who didn't really believe that he was exceptional. And that may have been the most exceptional thing about him. In every cohort that he was in, he was, he was identified quickly as a leader. He was, he was very smart. He was an exceptional athlete. 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.
- [10:25]
Barry Wirth
Tell me about the operations that he gets involved in. He sent to Japan for what reason?
- [10:30]
Don Wildman
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.
- [11:47]
Barry Wirth
So he was finding his recruits in Taiwan. Right.
- [11:50]
Don Wildman
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.
- [12:00]
Barry Wirth
And so what was the objective? To drop these recruits into China. And do what?
- [12:05]
Don Wildman
This is where it gets Harry. The plan was to sprinkle these agents into mainland China, into Manchuria in specific. So they trained these teams to parachute in. They were supposed to be able to demonstrate that they could survive on the ground and then indicate whether they had actually made contact with any local dissidents. So in the summer of 1952, they dropped in the first team. Never heard from them again. For Jack, that was a red flag for sure. But then they dropped in a second team, and unbeknownst to the CIA, these handlers. The team was identified very quickly and turned so that the Communist Chinese were instructing them how to report back. So they said, okay, we're on the ground. We've made camp. We've established a presence here. We understand that there's a former Kuomintang general who we may be able to hook up with. You need to send in a courier so that we have some communications in between. They drop in the courier, and then as things develop, starting into the fall of 1952, the team is, and I should say that this is all being conducted by Morse code. They're reporting that they need supplies for the winter and that the courier has much good news. To report that the operations are proceeding and he needs to be fished out.
- [13:23]
Barry Wirth
Okay. Exfiltrated. I love that word.
- [13:26]
Don Wildman
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 a C47.
- [13:44]
Barry Wirth
Wow.
- [13:44]
Don Wildman
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.
- [14:12]
Barry Wirth
This may have blown past people and I just want to really put a pin in this. So the idea is this C47, 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, and it catches onto the back of somebody who's running along, I suppose.
- [14:31]
Don Wildman
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, a kind of elastic strap from one side to the other. And that's what they had to hook.
- [15:01]
Barry Wirth
That's crazier than my version.
- [15:04]
Don Wildman
It was harebrained to say it had never been used, but this was the level of intensity about the project also that, you know, 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.
- [15:20]
Barry Wirth
So what happens?
- [15:21]
Don Wildman
So what happens is they drop the supply bundle, they make a long circuit, takes almost an hour so that the team on the ground could set up this goalpost. They'd seen a video of this where a cigar chomping colonel was lying on the ground and they showed how it worked. And there were great concerns that they could decapitate this guy. The plane was going to have to accelerate and climb very quickly so that he didn't bounce along the ground. But so they're flying in and there are three fires set. They're following them in. And just as they get close enough, the Chinese communists pull back tarpaulins. They've got American made machine guns. They cross fire into the cockpit, kill the pilots immediately, and Jack and another guy, Dick Fecteau, also a young CIA officer, are in the back of the plane, plane levels, and then they flying in flames through the treetops. Jack can't understand why the plane doesn't cartwheel when they hit the ground. They just pancake they get themselves out of their rigging. They climb out. They don't know where they are. They're incredibly. They're not wounded. One of them had been bruised by a bullet, but incredibly, they're fine. And they stumble out of the plane. And immediately they're surrounded by Chinese soldiers. And they yell at Jack, you are Jack. You're in China. You are, Jack. They knew it was an ambush, as Jack said, like in the movies, and they knew who he was and that he was coming. And it was an enormous prize for the Chinese. Imagine if the situation had been reversed and Chinese officers and agents had been flying into the Adirondacks and had been shot down and captured.
- [16:58]
Barry Wirth
Yeah, I mean, so the whole thing had been set up. The team that was. That he thought he was communicating with, honestly, was actually already turned and sending him.
- [17:07]
Don Wildman
They'd been doubled.
- [17:08]
Barry Wirth
Yeah, they'd been doubled. And so he was flying right into a trap. So he is taken captive, along with Dick Fecto, the other, his partner there, and taken into prison. I imagine immediately there is word back home, oh, my gosh, we've lost our men. There's a national emergency. The newspapers have headlines, and none of that happened. Because it was the CIA.
- [17:27]
Don Wildman
Because it was the CIA. It was a secret war. And the Chinese, for a number of reasons, didn't announce this initially. You would think if. Again, if the situation had been reversed and a Chinese spy plane had been captured in the United States, we'd be hearing about it quickly. But the Chinese didn't say anything about it. And Jack was charged with insurrection, had plenty of evidence to support it. He resisted. He was interrogated harshly, resisted for 16 days and eventually admitted that he was CIA.
- [17:58]
Barry Wirth
I mean, they've been listening to his communications, right? They knew this Jack guy.
- [18:02]
Don Wildman
And the agents on the ground all said, oh, yeah, that's Jack. That, you know, he was the one who ate, you know, a lot of soy sauce on his food and introduced us to American music. And so they knew who he was. But on the other side, in the United States, they originally got a report back that the drop had been successful. And then the plane just disappeared. They heard nothing further. So back at CIA headquarters, they made up a cover story that a civilian aircraft with two civilian employees of the army had disappeared over the Sea of Japan. An intensive search was mounted, and then the story went dark. Downey's family was told that he was probably dead. They didn't really know what happened. And for two years, there was nothing about it.
- [18:47]
Barry Wirth
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.
- [18:54]
Don Wildman
And they didn't know he was in the CIA. All they knew was that the plane that he had been on had disappeared.
- [19:03]
Barry Wirth
I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Spark something Uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from Uncommon Goods. The busy holiday season is here and Uncommon Goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand picked gifts for everyone on your list. All in one spot. Gifts that spark joy, wonder, delight. And that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. They scour the globe for original, handmade, absolutely remarkable things. Somehow they know exactly the perfect gift for every single person you know. Here's one of my favorite gifts I found on their site. I bought a pair of Buffalo Bills pint glasses for my football loving, beer loving friend. The perfect thank you. When you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses. Many of their handcrafted products are made in small batches, so shop now before they sell out this holiday season. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com americanhistoryhit that's uncommongoods.com AmericanHistoryHit for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer Uncommon Goods we're all out of the ordinary.
- [20:22]
Matt Lewis
I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes.
- [20:36]
Don Wildman
Who were rarely the best of friends.
- [20:38]
Matt Lewis
Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History. Hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:51]
Dr. Eleanor Yanaga
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- [22:04]
Matt Lewis
Service fees and terms apply.
- [22:13]
Barry Wirth
How do things proceed from this point? Is there an effort from the US to get these guys home, or do they just ignore it? At that point, I think there was.
- [22:22]
Don Wildman
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 tried and convicted Downey and sentenced him to life. And they announced it to the world at that point. And now we're in the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Dulles is the Secretary of State. Allen 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 was swapped back were described.
- [23:13]
Barry Wirth
Yeah, this does not stand alone. I mean, this sort of thing happened and continues to happen, but this is pretty, 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?
- [23:36]
Don Wildman
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 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 Doc Hammarskold 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 Zhou 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 Downy and Facteau, but. 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 Hammarskold 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.
- [25:20]
Barry Wirth
Well, the backdrop of all of this are these geopolitical events around the world. You know, all of what's happening in the. 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?
- [25:40]
Don Wildman
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, they could do it. 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 him 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, 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. Which bought more time for the CIA and also took. Meant that it was going to take them months to cull through it. But eventually they did, and that was, you know, 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 doesn't know any. He hasn't seen another soul other than his guards and translators. But then slowly after that, he began. After the Hammarskold 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. They could take your soul away.
- [27:55]
Barry Wirth
The Manchurian Candidate.
- [27:57]
Don Wildman
Yes, precisely. He decided, you are who you are. They can't get to the deepest recesses of your soul. And then slowly, he. 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. 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.
- [28:41]
Barry Wirth
Interesting. Was he tortured?
- [28:43]
Don Wildman
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.
- [28:59]
Barry Wirth
Sure. Sleep deprivation was part of that, though, right?
- [29:03]
Don Wildman
Well, yeah, they. You know, they. But not in an extreme way. They. The interrogations were four hours on, four hours off, so they did have some time in between.
- [29:13]
Barry Wirth
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?
- [29:22]
Don Wildman
He felt that that was a capitulation too far. He did, in fact, in prison learn Russian because he want. 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 acknowledgment that he knew he was going to be there for a very long time. It's important to remember at every single juncture he thought the United States was doing everything it could to get him out. He knew that there was a possibility that a swap would be arranged. So he really believed that he would get out in due time. He had no idea that because of this fake cover story, there was no possibility of negotiating. He didn't know about the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation in China. He didn't know about the Cultural Revolution except for how it affected the life inside the prison. So at every point he was expecting, my government will do whatever it can to get me out. Little did he realize that it would take 21 years until the Nixon administration.
- [30:21]
Barry Wirth
That entire decade goes by. 21 years eventually, but I'm saying the entire 1960s go by and no one even knows this man's alive.
- [30:29]
Don Wildman
Well, no, at that point. So after the Chinese announced to the world that he had been tried and convicted and sentenced, then the Chinese government invited his family to come visit. It took. It took almost three years because Foster Dulles was saying, you know, we're not going to submit to this kind of barter. We're not going to trade. We're not going to favor the Chinese with any kind of special arrangements. You have to remember, it was the passport office, which is under the State Department, did not allow Americans to travel to China, not even journalists, during this period. And. But eventually he saw his family. His mother came and the brother came. They visited over the next 15 plus years, seven times. So, no, no, it was well understood that he was alive. But again, his. He was being treated as an unlawfully detained prisoner. And therefore there was no opportunity to discuss releasing him, as there was with the other famous case of that period, Francis Gary Powers, CIA flyer who shot down U2 plane over Russia. And his release was negotiated just a couple years later.
- [31:36]
Barry Wirth
It really is Nixon's reconciliation in the 70s that changes everything, right?
- [31:41]
Don Wildman
Yes. So at Jack's 15th college reunion, of course he'd missed all of them. His class at Yale decided to assign a guy named Jerry Cohen, who was a Harvard law professor, fluent in Mandarin, and probably the leading expert in this country in Chinese law. They anointed Jerry with the task of trying to get him out. And what Jerry realized was ahead of our political leaders. We have to move closer to China. We have to be able to talk about this with China Now. It happened that Henry Kissinger was also on the Harvard faculty at that time. And Cohen began to say to Kissinger, I understand from the Chinese that there is a formula whereby we can get Downey Infecto out. We need to A acknowledge that he was a spy and B apologize. That's what they're asking for. And Kissinger, as soon as he became first Nixon's foreign policy Advisor during the 68 campaign, then his national security advisor and ultimately his Secretary of State, Kissinger really drove this. And finally the Nixon administration did what the Chinese had long been asking for and expecting. They acknowledged the truth of this fascinating moment. This is the end of the Vietnam War now. And in January 73 there was a press conference most of even though Watergate had already happened. Watergate was not the subject of the press conference. Most of the questions were about the POWs in Hanoi and when they'd be coming home. And at the very end of an hour long press conference there was a planted question. Somebody asked, well, what about Downey? Downey's been in Chinese prison since 1952. And Nixon said downey is a different case. As you know, Downey involves a CIA agent and after almost 20 plus years, this was the acknowledgment that the Chinese had required in order to free him. So they commuted a sentence. They said that they were reducing it to five more years. And then shortly after that, Downey's mother had a bad stroke and Kissinger called Chao in line and said, you know, if we don't get him soon, he's never going to see his mother again. And that was the thing that precipitated his release in April of 73.
- [33:50]
Barry Wirth
How much did this play a factor in that or I guess the general swap of prisoners?
- [33:55]
Don Wildman
It was central. There are scenes in my book when Kissinger first, you know, Kissinger went as an emissary before Nixon went to China. Kissinger brought this up, said, we've reconsidered, we're willing to be more realistic about this now. When Nixon went to China, probably the most famous moment in that trip was when he was about to leave. There was a farewell banquet. He stood up and he said, this is the week that changed the world. Not 45 minutes before that, he had made a personal plea to Chao Enlai to accelerate Downey's release. It was, it was quite central, I think of it as being actually the linchpin of that negotiation. The Chinese were not going to let this go by. If the United States really wanted to recognize China and reopen relations, they were going to have to atone in some way for this. Because you can imagine in China, they had him dead to rights. They caught him in the act in his and they had a fair trial. We always disparaged their criminal justice system as being unfair and trumped up. And the fact of the matter is the Chinese were completely right about this and the Americans were completely wrong about it for almost 20 years. And the Chinese were not going to let this moment go by without an acknowledgement. And that was the key to not just Downey's release, but the normalization.
- [35:24]
Barry Wirth
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [35:32]
Matt Lewis
I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. And in God Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and popes.
- [35:46]
Dr. Eleanor Yanaga
Who were rarely the best of friends.
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Matt Lewis
Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really by subscribing to Gone medieval from history, hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Dr. Eleanor Yanaga
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- [36:39]
Barry Wirth
Did Downey feel this way about how he was treated? Did he see some sort of justice in their treatment of him?
- [36:45]
Don Wildman
He recognized that from their standpoint, he was a foreign invader who was trying to foment a revolution about their government. He was not an innocent by any stretch. And Downey was remarkably unbitter. As he said, he wasn't bitter at the Chinese for imprisoning him for 20 years. He wasn't bitter about the United States abandoning him for 20 years. He seemed not to have a bitter bone in his body, which may have helped him in his later life, which, frankly, was inspirational.
- [37:16]
Barry Wirth
Let's talk about that. So when he comes home in 73, how does he put his life back.
- [37:21]
Don Wildman
Together without much difficulty. And that was as great a surprise to him as it was to anybody Else he returns in April. He's got to catch up. He's missed two decades. In the two wildly tumultuous decades in American life, he has to catch up. He had always wanted to go to law school and eventually enter politics. And he, he applied to law schools. Yale remarkably rejected him. I think it's because the administration thought he, he would provoke feelings on campus and unreconstructed CIA guy.
- [37:59]
Barry Wirth
What a jerk move that was, huh?
- [38:00]
Don Wildman
Yeah, so. Yeah, so. And Downey's class, The class of 51 really punished Yale for that. They, a lot of them pulled their contributions, but he did. He went to Harvard for law school. And before he left, he was home now three plus months. He got a letter from a young lab tech at Yale chemistry lab, a woman named Audrey Lee, whose life was a kind of inversion of his. She was born very close to where he was first tried or first brought. After he was shot down. Her family emigrated to Taiwan. Her father was a doctor, eventually immigrated to the United States, was a physician in Eugene, Oregon. Audrey grew up here. She moved east. And she happened to be in New Haven when Jack, after the initial reintroduction society, actually moved into a Yale dorm, anticipating going to law school. And she said, I can't find anybody that I can talk about about modern China because of the propaganda from both sides. Can we get together? She invited him over. They fell in love almost instantly. Jack was able to bring her to his mother and introduce. So within four months he had a girlfriend who eventually he would marry. He had admission to Harvard Law School and also had the opportunity to kind of recover in exile. He wasn't in New Haven, he was in Cambridge where nobody really knew his story. And he was able to put things together relatively quickly, which demonstrated to him that maybe, you know, maybe what he wouldn't been through wasn't so hard after all. And maybe anybody could do the same thing that he did. Of course, all of us think I couldn't last three nights in a Chinese prison, much less nearly 7,500 nights and days in a Chinese prison. But things came together for him quickly. Got his law degree, moved back, married Audrey, they had a son, moved back to Connecticut, and he started to pick up the life that he had lost when he went to China in 1952.
- [40:06]
Barry Wirth
Eventually becomes an esteemed judge in Connecticut.
- [40:09]
Don Wildman
Yes.
- [40:09]
Barry Wirth
Concerned with juvenile affairs, I suppose.
- [40:11]
Don Wildman
Yeah, yeah. There's a courthouse in New Haven that's named for him. A highly cherished person in New Haven because he brought that same temperament to juvenile and family cases which of course, are always rancorous. And he had a very inspiring second life. He had hoped to go into politics and he ran for the Democratic nomination for Senate in 1982 against a field of better known candidates and lost. But that was his one regret, that he never got to the Senate.
- [40:46]
Barry Wirth
I guess. Moral of the story, if you're going to get caught spying, do it in your 20s.
- [40:49]
Don Wildman
If you're gonna have a real big setback of any kind, you would do it in your 20s if you can. Gives you the Runway to get past it.
- [40:58]
Barry Wirth
You brought up the subject of Gary Powers. It's an interesting contrast and I think it's important to define that Powers, what happens to Powers happens because he is acknowledged as a spy right away versus Downey, who they needed to have a cover story. And that really held up.
- [41:14]
Don Wildman
I think the parallels are so interesting. Number one, like the Chinese when Paris was shot down. Now remember, this was in 1960. Eisenhower was still in office. He was looking at a triumphal last six months in office. There was going to be an arms control agreement. He was going to be the first president to visit Russia. Everything was kind of. There looked like there was an opportunity to put, as he said, a crack in the wall of the Cold War. And then this was the very last scheduled U2 flight. We were overflying Russia with high tech cameras and data gathering equipment to look at their nuclear program. And when he was shot down, the Russians did the same thing that the Chinese did. They did not announce it to the world initially. They allowed the United States to roll out a cover story. So the Eisenhower administration said there was not a spy plane but a weather plane missing. They didn't know what happened to the pilot. And in the same way that the Chinese eventually took on the lie of the Downey cover story, the Russians announced, here we have the pilot who miraculously survived. He was encouraged but not instructed to kill himself on the way down with a poison stick pin. But he didn't do it. And we have his plane with all the cameras and the high tech gathering equipment. So we were embarrassed as we were eventually about the Downey story. But at the same time there was an opportunity to negotiate for his release. We know all this from Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies. It was an opportunity to negotiate for his release because he was a known spy and we had a known spy of theirs. Because Downey and Fecte were not acknowledged, there was never opportunity for a swap.
- [43:02]
Barry Wirth
Your source material was his diaries, right? Or part of your source materials?
- [43:06]
Don Wildman
I. Yeah, I don't know that this book would have been possible if I hadn't gained access to an unpublished prison memoir that he had written. So when he ran for Senate, his handler said, voters know nothing about you, really, except that you were in Chinese prison for 20 years. They need to hear your side of the story. So during the campaign, he wrote a prison memoir. And when he lost, he put it in a drawer and left it there in. His widow Audrey discovered it after he died. His friends, his Yale friends, and some of his former CIA friends wanted his story to be told. And one of them gave me a copy of this. And as soon as I read it and discovered Jack Downey, the man in his own voice, I realized that's got to be the centerpiece of this book, because there's no other way to account for all that time he spent in prison. There's no other way to account. He never published a book on his own. He never cooperated with anybody on a book. He was asked innumerable times, including by me, while he was still alive, to cooperate. Never did that. So there was literally no other way to account for the time that he spent in prison and how he felt about it and what he thought about it without access to this. So eventually, I was able to negotiate a relationship with his family where they allowed me to use it so long as I waited until it was published. So it's out there. It's by Columbia University Press. It's called Lost in the Cold War.
- [44:31]
Barry Wirth
Okay. What year did he die?
- [44:32]
Don Wildman
He died in 2014. I first approached him in 2002 because a mutual friend had suggested that this might be worth a book. And then I approached him again in 2010. He said, thank you very much. I appreciate the interest. I just don't really want to go back there. I don't want to have to relive this. So this book was impossible so long as he was still alive. And then I got going on in 2016.
- [44:54]
Barry Wirth
Wow. Fascinating. An ironic, happy ending to a very, very difficult tale. The book is called Prisoner of Lies. America's Longest Held pow, Jack Downey's Cold War. And it's filled with much more detail than we have gone through here and a fascinating lens to look at all of the Cold War, which we have talked about a lot on this show. This is very exciting to read. The author is Barry Wirtz, journalist who has worked on many, many books and articles for the likes of New Yorker and New York Times, GQ magazine, and taught journalism and nonfiction writing at Smith and Boston University. Thank you very much. Barry.
- [45:28]
Don Wildman
Thanks so much.
- [45:29]
Barry Wirth
Don hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me. Don Wildman so grateful for your support.
- [46:06]
Matt Lewis
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