Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICEs exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
In February 1784, a young nation, the United States of America embarked on a historic venture, dispatching a trading vessel to one of the world's most ancient and storied civilizations. Major Samuel Shaw and John Green overseeing a load of 30 tons of Ginseng, $18,000 in silver coin, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence embarked on the ship Empress of China. Their voyage concluded seven months later in August, anchoring in Guangzhou, Southern China marking the formal commencement of diplomatic and trade relations between the two nations.
The bilateral relationship between the US and China remains one of the most significant and intricate in the world. Since the founding of the PRC under Mao Zedong in 1949, the two powers have navigated periods of both tension and cooperation, addressing a spectrum of critical issues including trade, climate change, and now the emerging domain of artificial intelligence. To give a glimpse of the modern stakes, here's a clip from my recent inside the ICE House conversation with Tom Siebel, founder chair and CEO of C3 AI.
Tom Siebel:
We are at war in the AI front and we're primarily at war with China. And if we look at the next generation of the kill chain, whether we're dealing with space, whether we're dealing with cyber, whether we're dealing with subsurface, autonomous vehicles, hypersonic platforms, contested logistics, all of these technologies will be driven by AI. And so we have a open, not kinetic warfare with China, and this will be the ultimate test, I think of the free enterprise system versus the totalitarian state.
Josh King:
As both nations vie to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence, global attention is riveted on which will first master and then exploit its capabilities. What a far away we've come in such a relatively short period of history. It wasn't long ago in the years after World War II, the US and China found themselves on opposing sides of the emerging conflict on the Korean Peninsula America defending the South and its Cold War adversaries supporting the communist north.
Approximately 37,000 Americans lost their lives during the Korean War. Add to that, over 92,000 wounded and 8,000 missing, nearly 5,000 military officers and soldiers were captured and held as POWs, among them CIA Officer Jack Downey, who became our longest held prisoner of war. This is a story I've known about in some sketchy detail from internal CIA histories for a couple of years, given the vast library of narrative non-fiction chronicling the triumphs and pitfalls of our intelligence community over the decades. I've long wondered why the Downey affair escaped much notice. The drought is now over. Chronicling Jack Downey's life before, during, and after his imprisonment is today's guest, Barry Werth, an award-winning journalist and author.
Barry is a master of the art of narrative non-fiction with previous efforts detailing the final days of the Nixon administration, the mysterious world of big pharma, Charles Darwin's big ideas, and much more. In a minute, Barry joins us inside the ICE House to discuss his latest book, Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War out now from Simon & Schuster, we're going to relive Jack's youth, his journey into the nascent CIA, span his two decades of imprisonment in China, his repatriation and the life he lived after returning home. Our conversation with author Barry Werth is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Remember, please to subscribe wherever you listen and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. Our guest today, Barry Werth is an award-winning journalist and author of six books, including his latest Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War out Now from Simon & Schuster. Werth's articles have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and GQ among others, and he's taught journalism and nonfiction writing at Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Boston University in my homeland, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Barry, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Barry Werth:
Thanks for having me on.
Josh King:
What was your research process like using texts of the past and accessible information on Downey to provide a further glimpse of his life as both a free citizen and then a Chinese prisoner of war?
Barry Werth:
Back in 2002, Downey was still alive. He had been approached numerous times during his life to author his own book, to cooperate with others on books that they were writing, to do documentaries. And he always declined for reasons that we can talk about later. And so I approached him and he thanked me very much and said, "No, thank you. I really don't want to go back there."
I approached him again in 2010. I got the same response and then he died in 2014, and I realized that that point that there was a possibility, it was after the extraordinary Fidelity film that you're describing was released on the internet. So I knew that the CIA had done some internal review of this and that it had looked at the situation itself. And at that point, I approached Downey's family. I also approached the CIA and I started gathering whatever string was available, knowing that ultimately the book was going to rise or fall on my ability to characterize his time in prison there.
Josh King:
So besides 31 days, some of the books previously include The Antidote and the Billion-Dollar Molecule that details Joshua Boger's founding of Vertex and the fight against Big Pharma, also Banquet at Delmonico's discussing Charles Darwin's ideas in post Civil War America. What attracts you to this genre and how did your writing process for Prisoner of Lies compare to some of the previous works?
Barry Werth:
Well, I started out in journalism and I learned long form journalism working for a magazine called New England Monthly back in the late 80s, and then started writing for national magazines. And then I did what a lot of nonfiction writers were doing at the time, which is I used some of my magazine pieces as both a template and a launching pad for a book length project. I didn't really have that option here. I knew the bare bones of the Downey story. I knew I was interested, I thought maybe I could get it, which is always, of course, the final judgment. You can become extremely fascinated. You can become obsessed by a story, but you have to believe that you're going to be able to fill in all the details. And I think rather naively, I thought that was going to be true in this case.
I thought I would be able to get some cooperation from the CIA since they were starting to do their own look at this. I thought I would be able to get cooperation from Downey's family, but I didn't know any of that. I simply believed that the fact that it had been laying there for such a long time and nobody had written it meant A, that it might be a game worth the candle it might be pursuing because it was so interesting and B, somehow I was going to be able to rise above the reporting challenges.
But it was purely faith. So to generalize, I get very excited about these stories. When I first hear about them, I start to imagine what they might look like and what it might take to get them, but you don't really know until you get into it. And then it's a years-long slog. It's leveraging one piece of information and one source to get to another. And this one took an extremely long time for a lot of reasons, which I'm happy to discuss. But essentially, it starts with a sense that the story must be told and that you somehow the writer are the one who can and should do it.
Josh King:
Well, as a guy who got a start at New England Monthly and lives sort of in central Massachusetts near the Connecticut border, and this also put you in the right place geographically to get in the head and life of Downey and his family. Early in the book you describe Jack as being from Wallingford, Connecticut just down 84 or so from where you are. "As a young man with the ability to lead a combination of ease, grace, daring grit and kindness." I'm going to quote you there. Also qualities that stemmed both from his character and the influence of his uncle Morton Downey, a celebrated singer and radio host of the time. While the Downey name resonated through the new Haven suburb from which he hailed who was Jack Downey beyond this familial legacy?
Barry Werth:
It's important to see Downey as a member of his generation. Downey was born in 1930, so he grew up in the depression, but he was too young to fight in World War II. Now of course, we remember particularly the men of that generation as the so-called greatest generation because of their bravery, because of their heroism, because of their sacrifice. Now imagine you're a young adolescent and you're watching the war unfold riveted to it and seeing how all of these great qualities and characteristics, particularly of manhood, but just of humanity in general are being paraded out every day. But you're a kid still, you're looking up at this.
And so Downey graduated from Choate, which is a boarding school in Central Connecticut in 1947 right after the war. And he and his classmates all were champing at the bit to exceed themselves and distinguish themselves and show that they could do with the generation just before them had done. He describes his generation as my little narrow post-war generation. The generation was also described in Time Magazine as the silent generation, wary of ideologies, cautious, concerned, but I think it's really important to see him in that light. This was a generation that had something to prove. His father died when he was eight years old. He was the oldest of three children, so he became the man in the family very quickly.
Josh King:
How did that death affect him becoming the man of the family so quick?
Barry Werth:
In his memoir, he just says, "I knew that I loved him and missed him, and I knew that everything had changed." His mother obviously relied on him more than parents ordinarily rely on their eight-year-olds. He really had to step up. But I think, I spent a lot of time thinking about this man and what were intrinsic characteristics and what was learned along the way. He had within him a balance of both compassion and strength and also curiosity and affection for other people. So he had a lot of really good qualities from the get-go, which I think raised him up as much as the necessity of having to help out his mother. He went on to Choate, which among the elite boarding schools is the one that has always been most focused on creating future leaders. John Kennedy, of course, went to Choate. When John Kennedy famously said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
He was cribbing directly from the headmaster at Choate who routinely would say, "Ask not what Choate can do for you, ask what you can do for Choate." So he had a proper training. He was an extraordinary athlete, heavyweight wrestler, also played football, a favorite of his peers and masters, class president at Choate. Only applied to one school as many prep school students then did. He applied to Yale and got in. And so in the spring of 1947, just as Truman and Marshall were in quotations, "losing China to the communists" he went off to Yale. And that's really where the emergent Jack Downey, the Jack Downey who would go off to fight with the CIA against the Chinese government, really started to come together.
Josh King:
Yeah. So he ends up graduating with the Yale class of '51. And as you say, while he was at Yale, not only was he a great athlete, he's also a traveler, a member of St. Anthony Hall. How did he end up getting introduced to this nascent organization, the CIA and how did he first learn about this OSS like opportunity after college? You and I, wherever we went to college, we think, "What can we do that's super exciting?" How did this fall into his lap?
Barry Werth:
You're right to bring up the OSS. Probably the most famous operatives in the OSS were the so-called Jedburgh teams. So these were young American and Belgian primarily, paramilitary spies who airlifted ahead of the D-Day invasion. So they went into occupied France and they went into other portions of occupied Europe, and they were to lay the groundwork for the invasion, partly through intelligence gathering, partly through assassination. They had a motto that was something like "Arrive, kill, vanish" or something along those lines. William Colby, the future director of the CIA was a Jedburgh. But in any case, up and through World War II, we didn't have a permanent intelligence service. We only had these ad hoc services that were constructed when we needed them. But after World War II, it was determined that the United States really needed a permanent ongoing intelligence service, and the CIA was formed in 1946 or '47, I can't remember exactly.
So the young CIA, which was confronted with how does the United States use its spy service in this new war? This Cold War inherited what I considered to be an unearned swagger from the OSS. It didn't really have any experience of its own, but it had many former OSS operatives involved. And it took its cues primarily from the British spy service, MI6. And in the late 40s began a program of running secret wars around the world. The first one was in Albania. It was a catastrophe. It was the same model as the one in China that is the idea was to recruit Albanian nationals who had been exiled from their country and were determined to go back, airlift them, air drop them in, and arrange for them to somehow make common cause with people who are already there on the ground in order to build a movement against the government, in that case, the communist government of Enver Hoxha.
And actually, the first operatives were brought in by boat and they were quickly swept up and captured, and in most cases executed. When the air drops started, almost every single one of them was scooped up almost as soon as they hit the ground because the mission had been betrayed by Kim Philby, the British master spy of that period. He was in Washington during this period. He knew all about the plans, the locations, everything they were passed on. And as I say, the Albanian government practically captured these guys as they were falling out of the sky. They were all executed and what's more, up to 40 of their relatives were also executed as a lesson to others. But in any case, the CIA had this operational fantasy that it would somehow be able to foment revolutions against communist countries by using exiles under the training of the CIA.
Josh King:
As Downey joins the CIA as part of a class, I guess of about 35 recruits completes his training, awaits his assignment, the Korean War is underway. The domestic political climate is rife with communist acquisitions, largely driven by Senator Joe McCarthy. I just want to hear a brief clip.
Senator Joe McCarthy:
One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. One communist among the American advisors at Yalta was one communist too many, and even if there were only one communist in the State Department, even if there only one communist in the State Department, that could still be one communist too many.
Josh King:
"One communist too many." Barry, amid all these widespread accusations by McCarthy and others within the federal government, how did young Jack react to that, and how did this political climate influence his eagerness to get his assignment and join the war effort?
Barry Werth:
I'm glad you asked that. We'll go back to Yale for a minute. So you've got this pent-up generation, this little narrow post-war generation eager to prove itself. The CIA during Downey's, after we got involved in the Korean War in 1950, heavily recruited among all the Ivy's, probably the most among Yale. And when the recruiters came, they'd have 20 or 25 young men sitting in a room, and what they said was, "You're going to be able to do work that was exciting and meaningful as much as the Jedburgh's did during World War II." And they asked them literally, "How would you feel about being dropped behind enemy lines?" Now, this is during Korea, when the war was already stalemated, the conditions on the ground were brutal, people fought and died to advance a few yards, and here this brand new spy organization is coming in and saying, "You can do the most exciting, most meaningful, most glamorous work. We're coming to you because you're the best and the brightest."
And up to 100 of Downey's classmates signed up for the CIA. It's a remarkable figure. And a class of 1000, 10% apparently took the bait and decided they would rather do this than be fighting in a trench somewhere in Korea. And they were all very gung-ho. They were deeply anti-communist. That was a majority position then, and they were dying to get into action. So it wasn't really that hard to recruit them or for that matter indoctrinate them. They knew who the enemy was and they wanted to get out and fight. The fighting was on now and they wanted to be in it.
Josh King:
So here we are then in 1951, right out of school, Jack Downey arrived at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan where he gets assigned to a desk job rather than, as you say, jumping behind enemy lines in South Korea. His mission was to train third force elements in China to lead an anti-communist uprising on the mainland. After four months, I guess, he confided in his friend Rufus Phillips saying, I'm going to quote him here. "I'm feeling qualms of conscience about the service since the job hasn't turned out quite like I expected, although it may be in the foreseeable future, and that's the damn rub. I'd hate to quit and then see the roof cave in the next day." How did Jack address his desire to leave that desk job at Atsugi and have what he perceived as a greater impact in the war?
Barry Werth:
So all these young guys get to Japan, and most of them are sent off right away into action, but they held Jack back primarily because he had tested higher on leadership than the others, and they were hoping that they would be able to use him to train these Chinese nationals and incorporate them into this third force. But it was a desk job and all his friends were off at war. They'd come back, they'd have R&R and there was no question about it. They would say, "Boy, it must be awfully comfy here."
He really was starting to feel very frustrated and misused and disappointed in himself that he wasn't in the action. He was extremely pent-up, frustrated, and desperate to get into action, and there was finally an opportunity for him to go and train a group of these third force fighters who were supposed to be dropped into China, and he jumped at it. So he was probably no more relieved in his life than to put Japan behind him and to be going to Korea where the action was.
Josh King:
So here's where the story gets really crazy, because you imagine this as being put on film in a movie scene, and you can't imagine that it actually was something the CIA would attempt to do. It's November 1952, and Jack alongside another CIA de facto was designated by Joe Kianaga to substitute for a couple of recruits moving what was known as a snatch pickup over China.
Their objective is to extract one of the third force couriers from the ground and lift him onto a slow moving C-47 just flying above the rooftops. And I've seen diagrams of this and the contraption that was used, and it just seems crazy. And of course, the mission ends in failure. The plane gets shot down, there's anti-aircraft fire coming from the trees, and both pilots get killed and Jack and Dick get captured. Was this mission doomed from its inception Barry?
Barry Werth:
Well, I think it was. So the plan was to drop two groups of agents into China, into the Forever White Mountains, which is about 60 miles north of the Korean border. They dropped the first group in. This is not Jack and Dick, but the CIA dropped in one group just to see whether they could survive and they never heard from them again. But then in late summer 1952, they dropped in a second group, and when they did hear back from them, and this was all conducted by Morse code, mind you, it seemed that they had accomplished what they set out to do, which was to sneak into China and begin to set up operations on the ground. At one point, they got a message back saying, "We've made contact with a former corpsman Tang general. He's interested in working with us. This is starting to take off. We need to send in a courier so that we have a go-between."
They dropped in a courier and then they got a message back saying, "We're facing winter, we need more supplies, and you need to try to get the courier out because he's got loads of information and we're moving on this." So as you say, they arranged this so-called snatch pickup, which had never been used in the field before. It had been practiced on various airstrips, and they borrowed it basically from rural mail collection. There was a winch in the back of the plane with a hook attached to it, and they would drop the hook out and try to hook a bag of mail or a marlin on a fishing line, hook the courier from the ground and reel them up into the plane. Downey and Fecteau were not supposed to be flying over enemy territory, but at the last minute, the winch and hook operators dropped out for whatever reason, and Downey and Fecteau were ordered to do this, and they knew how to do it.
And as I said, they were championing to get into the action. So as Downey said, he would have objected. He was eager to do it. Though he was ordered to do it, he wasn't under duress. And the plan was this to fly from Korea, get to the place where the meetup point by midnight and on the first pass, drop a bundle down with some poles and some rope and a harness that they could assemble into a goalpost with the courier laying on the ground, facing in the direction of the plane, connected to an elastic band up above. And then in the hour that it took Downey's plane to circulate and come back, they got all this set up and they were coming in now low and slow, practically at stall speed at treetop level, there were fires set to mark the target, and as they got close enough, the communist soldiers peeled back tarpaulins.
They had American machine guns. They fired into the plane. They knew they were coming. This had all been, it was essentially an ambush, as Depp said, just like in the movies. So they fired into the cockpit, they killed the pilots, and amazingly, the plane didn't cartwheel. When it hit the ground, it hit flat. And though it burst into flames, Downey and Fecteau ripped off their parachutes and stumbled out of the plane and were immediately surrounded by Chinese troops. And they started yelling at him, "You are Jack. You are Jack. You were in China. You are Jack." And he had not really been prepared. He was told, if you get captured, tell them you're on a leafleting mission that went off course. Tell them anything, but don't tell them you're CIA. But in any case, they were marched off and led to a farmhouse first and then a local cell, and then the interrogations began.
Josh King:
At what point did Jack realize what was going on? And in the old adage of knowing your value, he's a captive. He has information. He has an ability to preserve himself if he can do the right thing under captivity. How did he strategically leverage his value to ensure that maybe he never was going to reach a point where he was deemed expendable and they'd hang him or shoot him?
Barry Werth:
Well, A, he was 22. B, We were not at war with China, so he knew going in that he didn't have any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions. He was not going to be a prisoner of war. As the Chinese said, "We can do anything we want with you." He was terrified, both of them were, but they didn't obviously didn't want to confess immediately. And he and Fecteau each withstood about two weeks of intense interrogation, four hours on, four hours off.
As he said, "I lied, and then I embellished that lie with another lie, and then I embellished that lie with another lie. I tried to conceal and hide and obfuscate in every way that I could until I was dizzy, spinning, trying to keep track of my own lies." But he didn't know if they were going to kill him. He thought maybe if I tell them what I know, maybe they'll kill me if I don't tell them what I know, maybe they'll kill me. He didn't know whether the United States knew that he had been captured and he wasn't able to have any contact with Fecteau. So he was entirely alone in addressing this. And after a couple of weeks, as I said, he finally confessed to being a CIA agent.
Josh King:
I guess maybe going back to his training at Choate and Yale where they give you some decent literature and writing courses, he knows perhaps that he could improve his conditions if he creates a written narrative as part of this confession, and I think it was 3000 pages worth, most of it filled with drivel. How did he spawn the inspiration to craft that literary opus, and do you have any information about where these papers might be, assuming they could possibly still exist?
Barry Werth:
I compare him to Scheherazade. He felt like as long as he had a story to tell, they would keep him alive. And after the initial, he was in shackles for the first 11 months that he was in Chinese prison and in solitary, didn't know really where he was or whether Fecteau was nearby. And after a while, they left him alone I think probably just to think about his situation. They said to him again and again, "Tell the truth and your future will be bright. Lie, and your future will be dark. Don't tell the truth and your future will be dark." So he had a lot of time to think about this, and as you say, he was actually quite a wonderful writer. He had taken writing classes at Yale and had, I think a journalist's passion to put things down on paper. And it suddenly dawned on him after about nine months when they started to ratchet up the pressure, said, listen, sooner or later I'm going to have to tell them everything, but if I tell them in writing, I'll control the ball game.
So he said, "I'll do this, but I'd like to have a written confession rather than an oral confession." And they agreed. So they gave him a pen and some paper, and he sat on a stool next to his bed, and for another nine months, he read everything that he could think of. He did confess everything that he knew, but it was packed inside, as you say, mounds and mounds and mounds of drivel and irrelevancies and a postmodern writing style. So that he would say, "Well, I met with so-and-so on a Wednesday. No, maybe it was Tuesday" I can't remember. Perhaps it was...
He just stretched it out and stretched it out and stretched it out, and in the end it was 3000 pages. Now as to where they are, whether they exist, I thought going into this that I might be able to, might need to go to China and try to track some of this down, but I never got there and I'm not sure that I would've found anything. I don't speak Chinese. I wouldn't know how to navigate that system. And fortunately, I was able finally to get his prison memoir, which explained enough of it so that I didn't really have to try to do that really, really hard digging of locating some of these materials.
Josh King:
So about a year after his capture, July 27th, 1953, the Korean Armistice gets signed, marking the end of hostilities between the north and the south. I want to listen to just a bit of a path a newsreel as President Dwight Eisenhower announces the end of the war to the American public,
President Dwight Eisenhower:
My fellow citizens, tonight we greet with prayers of thanksgiving the official news that an armistice was signed almost an hour ago in Korea. It'll quickly bring to an end the fighting between the United Nation forces and the communist armies. For this nation, the cost of repelling aggression has been high. In thousands of homes, it has been incalculable. It has been paid in terms of tragedy with special feelings of sorrow and of solemn gratitude. We think of those who were called upon to lay down their lives in that far off land to prove once again, that only courage and sacrifice can keep freedom alive upon the earth.
Josh King:
So while their fellow prisoners of war, like General Frank Schwebel were repatriated to the US after Eisenhower's remarks, Downey and Fecteau, they have to remain in captivity. What distinguished their treatment from that of the other prisoners of war?
Barry Werth:
We hadn't declared war on China. We had declared war on North Korea. And as the Chinese pointed out, they were not prisoners of the battle. They were involved in secret agent activity against the communist Chinese government, the PRC. And as I said earlier, they had no protections from the Geneva Conventions. So their situation was completely different. And because our country didn't acknowledge what they were doing there, and in fact it disavowed it so that they were civilian employees of the army whose plane had disappeared over the sea of Japan, they had no leg to stand on. In fact, they didn't know that the war ended. They didn't find out until a year afterwards. But they weren't treated as other POWs were because of this unique situation where they were actually spies.
Josh King:
Because of this unique situation it was then, I guess November 1954, two years after their plane had got shot down that the Chinese government, its news agency broadcast to the world that both Downey and Fecteau were in fact alive. How did both families of Downey and Fecteau and the federal government initially react, having presumed that both had been killed in that plane crash in '52?
Barry Werth:
So I'll try to set this up. So now we're in the fall of 1954, and the first Quemoy and Matsu conflict, the Formosa Strait conflict was heating up. And now they've been captive for two years. American government always assumed that if they had been captured at some point, the Chinese would tell the world. Well, that point didn't come until two years later. Two years after Mary Downey, Jack's mother, accepted that he was missing and most likely dead. And then suddenly there's this announcement. So I'll get to Mary first. She was a schoolteacher and she gets a call down to the principal's office that there's a reporter on the phone and the reporter says, "The Chinese has just announced that they have somebody. Sounded like his name is Jack Downey. Do you have a son, Jack Downey?" She believes he's dead. She's taken pictures off the wall.
She's given all of his clothes and his possessions to his younger brother. She's never quite entirely gave up hope, but she believed he was dead. So this came as a severe shock to her that he might even be alive. I did get the chance to speak with Jack's younger brother, Bill. Their father being dead, their coaches, their athletic coaches were always the older senior figures in their lives. And Mary contacted the Yale wrestling coach to drive to Cambridge where Bill was in graduate school to tell him about it. And he said it was such a shock that he got on his bed and he slept for 17 hours.
But as for the government, now they were really in a quandary because they had been this cover story. And if they were to say, oh, so our spies were captured and they received a fair trial with evidence and under the Chinese legal system that would have been an acknowledgement that in fact, we did have this secret war against China. But obviously they weren't going to do that. The point person was John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, and in his indignation, he said, "The Chinese have never mentioned Downey and Fecteau before. It's just like them. They don't abide by any of the rules. This is an outrage. We don't understand how the Chinese came into possession of these men." He tried to put all of the blame back on China. And Eisenhower was subsequently asked at a press conference to comment on this, and he said, "Well, the situation is cloudy and I can't really comment on that." So because the government was determined to stick with the cover story and deny what had actually happened, that really put Downey and Fecteau in a special kind of limbo.
Josh King:
The situation was cloudy and Downey and Fecteau in a serious case of limbo. After the break, we're going to continue our discussion of Jack Downey's imprisonment as well as the over 20 years he spent as a prisoner of war. All that and more with Barry Werth is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. If you are enjoying this conversation, want to hear more from guests like Barry Werth, author of Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War, remember, please to subscribe to the inside the ICE House podcast wherever you listen, and give us a five-star rating if you would, and review on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. Before the break, we were discussing Jack Downey's life from humble origins in Wallingford, Connecticut to joining the CIA right out of Yale and the events that led to his capture by the Chinese in 1952. Despite the uncertainty of whether and when he might ever return home, Jack maintained a kind of resilience and optimistic spirit. How did he manage to persevere and maintain hope for his eventual release even as the months and years were ticking by?
Barry Werth:
He didn't have that at first. He was panicked at first and desperately gamed out diplomatic scenarios whereby he might be released or included in a swap for a Chinese prisoner in the United States. The first probably three, three and a half years were very tough. Again, he assumed that the United States government would be doing whatever it could to get him out. He knew he was a high-value prisoner. He discovered during that time, as he said, that brainwashing was really a myth. Now, if you remember, Americans were led to believe that the Chinese were soulless, that they had no regard for human life, and that they had developed brainwashing techniques where they could literally scrub your soul and then rebuild your interior mind back into what they wanted it to be. And he, of course, had been fed some of this before he left, but he learned that that wasn't going to happen.
He said, "They can't reach the inner recesses of your soul." So slowly he started to begin to think, this is my lot. I can survive this. And about three and a half years in, as he said, "I just said to myself, enough of this crap." He stopped feeling sorry for himself, and he started to transform himself into what he described as the busiest man in Beijing. Now he's in solitary. He's got no resources, hardly anything to read.
But over time, he started to live his life in a very monkish way. He scheduled his days down to the minute. He ran 10 miles either in place in his cell or if he could get out into a courtyard, into very tight circles. He had been a great athlete and he did calisthenics as much as he possibly could. He started to get a lot of reading material, mostly novels, which he devoured, and then histories which he devoured. He read War and Peace seven times over. The last time, he actually taught himself Russian so that he could read it in the original, meticulous cell cleaning. And as he said, he shrank his life down to simply surviving each minute, each day with such focus that when he looked up days and months and years had gone by. So it was this intense narrowing of his focus that he said enabled him to continue on.
Josh King:
As the years went by Barry 1958, for the first time since 1951, Jack Downey is reunited with his mother, Mary, his brother Bill, authorized by the State Department to visit China. Mary and Bill traveled to Beijing then called Peking, where Jack was imprisoned. What were the emotions like during that reunion, and how much, if anything, did Jack reveal to his family about his experiences as a spy in his time in prison?
Barry Werth:
So let me try to set that up. So after the Quemoy and Matsu crisis, US government decided to turn to UN General Secretary, Dag Hammarskjöld, to try to negotiate their release. And Hammarskjöld went to China, crashed the gate as he said. No UN general secretary had ever been to a foreign capital in precisely in that sort of role, and was able to get many prisoners released. But because there had been no acknowledgement about what Downey and Fecteau were doing, the Chinese refused to even discuss it. There were negotiations afterwards. At that time, no Americans, not even journalists, could travel to China to the PRC. There was a complete ban under the State Department, and the Chinese were eager for some recognition and normalization. So they invited Downey's family and Fecteau's family and the families of other POWs to come.
And John Foster Dulles said, "No, that would be recognizing them. We're not going to barter for the souls of innocent civilians who've been wrongfully detained." So for years, even though the invitation was on the table, Mary Downey and Bill Downey couldn't go and visit. And finally, Downey was able to see them after he had been imprisoned for almost six years. He was obviously by that time, desperate to see them. But at the same time, he really worried about what seeing them would do to him because he realized how constrained and diminished his life had become. He also worried, and this was borne out by the fact that when his mother and brother were finally brought in, there was a photographer and a stenographer there that the Chinese were hoping that he would confess to his mother and brother, and then they were going to broadcast that confession to the world. So he was very anxious about seeing them.
He was about to start talking about, I think he said something like, "Mother, the Chinese had told me I can talk to you about my crimes." And his brother, Bill's younger brother, cast him a harsh glance and said, which in effect said, don't do it. And when he took the cue, he didn't start telling them anything about what he had been doing there, and the photographer and the stenographer finally left. But the meeting with the families was so traumatic for Fecteau that he told his mother "Don't come back." Fecteau had a 20-year sentence, by the way, Downey was sentenced to life. But he said, "This is just too painful for both of us. Don't come back." But Downey's brother and mother went back several times before he was ultimately released.
Josh King:
So you mentioned that Fecteau had a 20-year sentence. From that point that Mary and Bill were visiting, I guess it's another 13 years from '58 until Fecteau gets released in '71. I want to listen just to a little bit of a Pathé newsreel as Fecteau reflects on the conditions and his own unwavering sense of hope.
Speaker 15:
What was the day like there? How do you spend a day, day after day for 19 years?
Richard Fecteau:
Reading, walking in the cell, one hour outside. The same thing, day after day.
Speaker 17:
Did you say writing in the cell, reading?
Richard Fecteau:
Walking.
Speaker 17:
Walking. You mean it's like you would think of like an American prison?
Richard Fecteau:
No, because there are no bars.
Speaker 17:
No beds?
Richard Fecteau:
No bars.
Speaker 17:
No bars. [inaudible 00:48:04].
Richard Fecteau:
Four walls, a door with a peek hole in it looking through that's covered, and the window was covered halfway up, so you cannot look out the window.
Speaker 18:
Was there any point at which you gave up hope of getting out prison?
Richard Fecteau:
I never gave up hope, no.
Josh King:
How did Jack cope with the emotional weight of seeing Dick return home while he remained in captivity?
Barry Werth:
Jack knew a lot more. I mean, he had been a trainer for the agents who were dropped in. He knew much, much more about the mission. He had been much more central to it than Fecteau. Fecteau, though he was a CIA officer, had only been brought in at the last moment. So he understood that they were going to receive different sentences. In fact, at their trial, a number of the Chinese agents were sentenced to death. There's a wonderful, wonderful, there's a very dramatic scene where Downey is standing waiting to be sentenced, and the judge is pronouncing the sentences down the line says, "10 years, 10 years, 20 years, life, death, life, death." And then Fecteau was sentenced to 20 years, and Downey was sentenced to life. And he said it was like having a granite slab laid on his chest. He knew Fecteau was going to go home before him.
At this point, I don't know what he thought about what the United States was doing to try to negotiate his release. But as I said, he thought something eventually would change and administration would change, the Chinese government would change, something would change that would free him. But when Fecteau left after almost 20 years there, Downey, I believe had his sentence reduced by five years, primarily for his good behavior. And at that point he thought, I'm not going to die here an old man. I am going to get out. So it wasn't as if he were crushed that his friend and compatriot was free and he was having to stay on alone. I think he just thought, I'll get out eventually, and this is what it's going to look like.
Josh King:
So Barry, talking about administrations eventually changing the Johnson administration gives way to the Nixon administration. Two years after Fecteau returned home, Jack release finally comes about after President Nixon personally appeals to Chinese's Premier Zhou Enlai prompted by Jack's mother Mary suffering a severe stroke back home. Do you think Jack would've remained in prison longer if not for Mary's illness?
Barry Werth:
No, I don't. A very important person in all of this is Jerry Cohen, who was a classmate of Jack's and went to Yale Law School and became A, Harvard law professor, and B, probably the premier expert in the Chinese legal system. Jerry taught himself Mandarin a really very distinguished person. And in 1966 at Jack's 15th College reunion, his classmates recruited him to try to do what could be done to get Jack out. Now, that was the middle of the cultural revolution. We had no way of communicating with the Chinese. They were completely absorbed in their own internal struggles.
Johnson was still president. We were still in the midst of escalating during the Vietnam War. And as Cohen said, "What I realized is that we had to somehow get closer, figure out a way to approach the Chinese." When Nixon was elected and chose Henry Kissinger, another Harvard professor ,as his national security adviser, Cohen wrote to Kissinger and said he apprised him of the situation. He said, "This is one of the longest standing disputes we've had with the Chinese. I think the formula for getting him out would be to reassess the situation, acknowledge that Downey was a spy and apologize." So literally from the first weeks of the Nixon administration, Kissinger was saying to Nixon, whatever we do with China, Downey's got to be part of the package and this is what we're going to have to try to do. And it took now from '68 to '70, when did Nixon go to China? '71?
Josh King:
'72. February of '72.
Barry Werth:
'72, took four years. But in some sense, the Downey negotiations were the linchpin of the larger normalization discussion because the Chinese were not going to release them until the United States acknowledged that we indeed had had a secret war against China, and that Downey was a captive of that war.
Josh King:
And that's why I find the thinking and planning of Nixon's trip and all the related factors so fascinating because even this was wound into it in one way or another. It's easy Barry from where we sit in the vantage point of history, looking back at Nixon especially, and also Kissinger, the caricature that we have of Nixon during Watergate and in his final days and what we think of him generally as a president based on the final tumultuous year of his presidency. But how does the Downey affair cast a new light, if any, on the image that we have of the president and the secretary of state waging an empathetic diplomatic marathon on behalf of one of their citizens?
Barry Werth:
Nixon obviously a very complex historical figure. The China normalization really his crowning achievement. And Nixon was a brilliant, brilliant political player. You're right to bring up the visit to China. Literally before Nixon went out and had that first famous toast where he said, "This is the week to change the world" he was in a back room saying to Zhou Enlai, "What can we do to get Downey out?" It was almost the last thing they discussed before that historic statement.
So he was on it and he realized how important it was to the Chinese. To the Chinese, the fact that we had flipped everything on them, that Foster Dulles and subsequent US officials were chastising the Chinese for wrongfully detaining him, that the United States made it appear for a generation that we were right and they were wrong, that we were moral, and they were immoral, that we were just and they were unjust when in fact we had tried to invade their country with this small force and denied it and denied it and denied it. It really stuck in their crawls and it's understandable. They were trying very hard in some sense to show that they could at least live by some of the rules of international law, but everything had been inverted, right and wrong, truth and lies. And finally, for Nixon to concede and the way that he did, it was so brilliant concede that yes, in fact, Downey was a spy. That was the thing that brought the resolution of the Downey saga finally to a close.
Josh King:
Brought it to a close part three of Prisoner of Lies. You mentioned this a little bit earlier in our conversation, but you remind us of one of the great American espionage novels that it was eventually made into a spy thriller, Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra in John Frankenheimer's, The Manchurian Candidate, and the perception of what it would be like for imprisoned Americans in a mysterious country in the same way that we don't understand the inversion of perceptions of what China was all about. Downey and Fecteau are now home. Tell us about the winding history of that film, how united artists and Sinatra work to keep it out of circulation and what it tells us about Downey and Fecteau's return to freedom.
Barry Werth:
Okay, so the novel The Manchurian Candidate, I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but he was a publicist for Walt Disney.
Josh King:
Condon, right? Richard Condon.
Barry Werth:
Richard Condon was a satirical novel. And the basic premise was that a group of American flyers were shot down and taken from North Korea into China to be brainwashed. And then one of them, the one played by Laurence Harvey was going to be turned into effectively a zombie killer who could be triggered at any moment. His mother, who in the film was played by Angela Lansbury, was married to a McCarthy-like figure who was the vice president, and the plot was to get the Laurence Harvey character to assassinate the president so that her husband could become the president. So it was an assassination movie with these undertones of brainwashing. Now, the American flyers had been in the Chinese camp for three days, and during that time, if you've seen the film or you've read the book, they had their minds wiped clean and they were brainwashed. And this is of course, what everybody expected when Downey came home, that he was going to be somehow altered in the deepest possible way.
So Nixon got Downey out by finally confessing at the press conference after the Vietnam War ended. This was January now 1973. We had an armistice with the North Vietnamese. All of the questions at this press conference, even though Watergate was in the air, questions weren't about Watergate. They were all about the prisoners. When are the prisoners coming home? Are you going to meet the prisoners when they get off the plane in California? Nixon said, "No, no, no. We're not going to grandstand. This is a time when they need to be able to get together with their families and have some privacy." And the very last question, which was a plant, was, "Well, what about Downey? Downey's been in Chinese prison for 21 years." And Nixon's exact quote is, "Downey, as you know, is a different case. Downey involves a CIA agent."
Now, he was wrong about him being an agent. He wasn't an agent, he was an officer. But that was the acknowledgement that was finally the acknowledgement that the US government was no longer going to pretend that Downey was an innocent civilian wrongfully detained. And that's what set in motion, the release. As you said, Downey's mother had a stroke. At that point, there was communication directly between the White House and Zhou Enlai, and they got him back as fast as they could because they thought, I mean, he'd been in a model prisoner and they thought he should be able to see his mother while she was still alive. He gets back in March of '73, and he gets to the hospital in Connecticut where his mother is, she's tangled up in tubes from various kinds of bottles.
She's been slipping in and out of consciousness, but she's awake and she's aware of his situation. She says to the doctor, "Sit me up straight. I don't want to be on my back like this." And she sees Jack and she says to him, "You're going to be a celebrity now. Don't let it go to your head." And then within 15 minutes after that, he's rushed downstairs to a press conference. There are 100 reporters in a makeshift press room in the hospital, and they're starting to fire away questions. Now, the reporters are all wondering this guy, he's Rip Van Winkle. He has stepped out of time. He's been in prison since the Korean War. This is the end of the Vietnamese war. We have these presumptions about the way Chinese treat their prisoners. The brainwashing theme was always underlying, and they start to ask him questions, and he's forthright.
He's relaxed, he's not bitter in any way. He does say, "No, I wouldn't do it again. I don't think anybody gained anything by it." But he was himself getting back to these qualities, these intrinsic qualities of empathy and self-awareness, and a sense of humor about himself. Know he was a fatalist. At some point, he realized, this is out of my hands. I am, as his son Jack he says, "God's unwitting stooge in all of this." And he saw the irony, and he didn't blame the Chinese. He thought they treated him reasonably well. He didn't even blame the United States government until he found out some years later about the fact that Zhou Enlai had offered to return him in Fecteau in order to allow American journalists into China. He was bitter for about a day or so it seemed about John Foster Dulles, realizing if Dulles had conceded who he was and what he was doing there, he probably would've been released 15 years earlier.
But he was really an exceptional person. He uses the word unbitter, and I like that word. And the other thing was he wasn't affected by all the tumult and noise of the 60s and 70s. So he was kind of all those years in prison, he just became more and more who he was. And those were very disillusioning years. We all had those of us who grew up after World War II, we had hopes and expectations about what America was, what life meant, and a lot of the events of that period, the assassinations, the war, crushed all that. But he didn't go through that. He was also, he was not only unbitter, he was undisillusioned. So he came out whole in phenomenal shape, physically and ready to go. He was just glad that he'd finally been released. Now you think about it, I'm not sure I could spend a night in a Chinese prison cell, and he spent 20 years. The characters in The Manchurian Candidate had spent all of three days.
Josh King:
So about a decade after his release, 1982, repatriated, reintroduced, Jack Downey chose to challenge Lowell Weicker in Connecticut's Senate election, despite benefiting from the strong name recognition that he had, also enthusiastic backing from some influential figures in New Haven politics, Downey's campaign faltered, and it led to his decision to withdraw from the race in May of 1983. What factors led to the lack of success of Downey, the politician Downey, the public figure after this person that you paint who sort of got to skip the tumult of the 60s and 70s and emerge as the same character that emerged from Yale in 1951?
Barry Werth:
Well, I think the main problem, there were lots of problems there. He was running against Toby Moffett, who was very popular, who eventually did get the nomination. Weicker was a kind of middle of the roader. He was the first Republican to call for Nixon's resignation. And Downey, though, had lifelong Democrat was also a middle of the roader. But the main thing was he had this giant blank in his history that he couldn't account for. And in fact, his handlers said, "You should write a prison memoir, which we can turn into a campaign autobiography if you get past the primary." And at that point, he actually did write about his experience in China and his training, his mission, his capture, his interrogations, the works. He wrote about it all, but at that point, he wasn't talking about it. So here's this guy who people admire because he spent 20 years in Chinese prison and came out whole, but they don't know anything about him, and you can't really tell them anything about him.
I don't know how much of this was him being faithful to the CIA, not talking about the situation that had gotten him there, and how much of it was his own reticence and simply not wanting to go back there. But he could have won a house seat. There was an open house seat and he could have won it, but he had his heart set on going to the Senate.
It's interesting because he was released at exactly the time that John McCain was released, and McCain did enter politics by winning a house seat and was obviously a very effective politician from that point on. Downey had higher aspirations. I wouldn't want to serve in House of Representatives. I don't think he wanted to serve in the House of Representatives. He wanted to be a senator, but he was totally outflanked. There was already a popular frontrunner in Toby Moffett. George Bush's brother was running on the Republican side. There were a lot of heavily funded, much better known candidates. And then when the campaign was over, he took the prison memoir and put it in his drawer and didn't take it out again until his wife found it after he died.
Josh King:
Well, I mean he didn't get to the senate neither did Toby Moffett, by the way, but instead he gets to the Connecticut State Superior court appointed in 1987 by Connecticut's Governor William O'Neill, and he presided over a lot of cases involving delinquency, child welfare, and then his tenure became a little controversial when he ruled in favor of an 18-year-old girl who had initially relinquished her baby for adoption but then later sought to regain custody, overriding the perspective adopted parents. That decision garnered a lot of national attention and subjected Downey to some criticism. In your opinion, did the ruling tarnish or maybe undermine the legacy that he built from his CIA service in this two decades of imprisonment?
Barry Werth:
I'm not sure. So briefly, an 18-year-old girl in Connecticut has a baby. Nobody knows she's pregnant. We've seen these kinds of stories before. She just claims that she didn't know she was pregnant. She gets picked up on the street, taken to a hospital in North Haven and flees that night, and then decide sometimes later that she wants the baby back by which time the state had found, let's call them pre-adoptive parents. The adoption hadn't gone through, but they agreed to take the baby under the assumption that they would be able to keep her eventually. And Downey initially in order to accelerate that process before the birth mother showed up, approved that, and then the birth mother did show up and he looked into how hard the state or how hard the state had looked into trying to locate her and realized that they had done very little to find out who the birth mother was, and he overruled himself.
He changed his decision, decided that the birth mother still had rights, and that's what the case hinged on. Now, the pre-adoptive parents were a couple that had tried very hard for many years to have a child of their own and couldn't. They were hardworking suburban people. The birth mother was having difficulty with her family. She moved out of the house. She was actually living in a homeless shelter when the court decided that she should be able to get her baby back. So this made Downey extremely unpopular in Connecticut especially, but this was the period of court TV and court watchers around the country were just alarmed that he would take this child from a safe situation and put in a potentially dangerous situation. As it turned out, the whole thing was appealed. The appeal was led by Richard Blumenthal, now Senator then attorney general of the state up to the state Supreme Court and the state Supreme Court ruled in Downey's favor that he did have jurisdiction.
He was in his rights to reverse the original decision. He never expressed any doubts or hesitations or regrets about it as far as I know. Talked to a lot of his colleagues and people who worked in the courthouse. He felt that there were many other issues about what's best for the child. Is being with the biological mother best for the child or other kinds of security, are they more important? And so it became a famous case. I don't think it really detracted from his legacy. I think he felt like he did what needed doing and that he approached it with honesty and integrity and followed the law.
Josh King:
As we wrap up Barry, you mentioned to the acknowledgments that Jack had declined, and we talked about this earlier, declined your interest in telling his story twice during his lifetime. When he had passed, it was his wife Audrey and their son Jack, who granted you permission to go forward with writing the book. Given his reluctance to discuss himself, how do you imagine he'd perceive this book today as he looks at your galleys with its detailed chronicling of the significant moments and experiences of his life?
Barry Werth:
I think he'd appreciate it. Of course, as his son Jack, he said, "I just think he didn't want to go back there during his lifetime." He didn't want to have to relive it, but looking at it from his vantage point now, he's not having to relive it. He would only see that the whole story finally come out. I'll go out on a limb and say, I think he'd be pleased to see how his story dovetailed with the larger political story of his times.
One of the things that Jerry Collins said, "Is all those years in prison, Downey had no idea really what his experience meant." He didn't understand, for instance, during the cultural revolution that when there's a massive movement like that within a communist country, that every institution is affected and every individual is affected. I don't think he really quite knew how he fit in, if I can say fit into the history of his times. And I think that's the thing that I've been able to show is how this one man story is illustrative of a much, much larger picture of the world during those decades,
Josh King:
A much larger picture of the world during those decades. Fascinating read really hit home for me because of my interest in this case in particular, grateful for you writing it and also for spending time with us Barry Werth inside the ICE House.
Barry Werth:
Terrific. Thanks so much. I really appreciated it.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Barry Werth, author of Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War out now from Simon & Schuster. If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our guests to tackle on a future show, make sure to leave a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Lance Glenn with production assistance, editing and engineering from Ken Abel. Pete Ash is the director of programming and production at ICE. And I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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