Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey's Cold War

by Barry Werth Narrated by Stephen Graybill

Overview

The remarkable true story of the longest-held prisoner of war in American history, John Downey, Jr., a CIA officer captured in China during the Korean War and imprisoned for twenty-one years.

John (Jack) Downey, Jr., was a new Yale graduate in the post-World War II years who, like other Yale grads, was recruited by the young CIA. He joined the Agency and was sent to Japan in 1952, during the Korean War. In a violation of protocol, he took part in an air drop that failed and was captured over China. His sources on the ground had been compromised, and his identity was known. Although he first tried to deny who he was, he eventually admitted the truth.

But government policy forbade ever acknowledging the identity of spies, no matter the consequences. Washington invented a fictitious cover story and stood by it through four Administrations. As a result, Downey was imprisoned during the decades that Red China, as it was called, was considered by the US to be a hostile nation, until 1973, when the US finally recognized the mainland Chinese government. He had spent twenty-one years in captivity.

Downey would go on to become a lawyer and an esteemed judge in Connecticut, his home state. Prisoners of Lies is based in part on a prison memoir that Downey wrote several years after his release. Barry Werth fluently weaves excerpts from the memoir with the Cold War events that determined Downey's fate. Like a le Carré novel, this is a harrowing, chilling story of one man whose life is at the mercy of larger forces outside of his control; in Downey's case as a pawn of the Cold War, and more specifically the Oval Office and the State Department. His freedom came only when US foreign policy dramatically changed. Above all, Prisoner of Lies is an inspiring story of remarkable fortitude and resilience.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/17/2024

Journalist Werth (The Antidote) offers a riveting account of a “botched and blown” spy mission during the Korean War and the subsequent 21-year imprisonment of CIA agent Jack Downey (1930–2014), “America’s longest-held captive of war.” In 1952, Downey was among the crew of a clandestine flight into northern China assigned to exfiltrate a courier who was supposedly carrying vital communiques. But the “air-snatch” (literally dropping a line from a slow-moving plane) was a setup, Werth writes; the asset had turned coat, the plane was shot down, and Downey and another survivor were taken captive. Within a month, Downey confessed to working for U.S. intelligence. China offered to release Downey as a spy and, over time, began allowing visits from Downey’s mother, who spoke openly with journalists about her son’s plight. But U.S. policy was to never acknowledge spies held by a hostile power; even as spy exchanges with Soviet Russia became de rigueur, Downey continued to languish, unacknowledged as an American operative because the U.S. didn’t officially recognize China’s communist government. In a dense narrative, Werth meticulously details the tangled diplomatic goals and maneuvers that contributed to Downey’s long interment and his eventual release in 1973 when the U.S. began to normalize relations with China. It adds up to a robust look at the Cold War’s perpetual limbo through the prism of one spy’s harrowing ordeal. (Aug.)

Kati Marton

"In this real-life spy thriller, a brave young American survives the cruelty of both sides in the Cold War. Jack Downey is the resilient hero of this astonishing saga, told by a writer in full command of his material. You will not soon forget this shocking tale."

Daniel Okrent

"It's difficult to grasp what Jack Downey went through in his Chinese imprisonment - and just as difficult to grasp how he was able to recover from it so thoroughly and so fruitfully. In Barry Werth, Downey's story has found the perfect writer: thorough, fair, insightful, and most of all empathetic. This is an important book."

Joe Nocera

Barry Werth's Prisoner of Lies is many things: a bracing saga of survival, a post-war history of government hubris, and a painful example of the consequences of America's anti-Communist fervor. Most of all, though, it is a thrilling story about the fortitude, determination and courage of Jack Downey, the man who spent more years in a Chinese prison than any other American.

Booklist

Readers will revel in Werth’s raw and unsparing depiction of international power politics and a brave American hero.

The New York Times - Kevin Peraino

"[A] thoughtful and engaging narrative of Downey’s life and captivity. . . . Shares something of the appeal of Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II survival story Unbroken — a tale of resilience in the face of almost unthinkable misfortune."

Michael Gorra

All countries lie and all countries spy. But for a while in the dead middle of the 20th century the United States pretended that it was different, and the young CIA recruit Jack Downey became the victim of the truths his country refused to tell. Barry Werth’s wonderful new book is a real-life page-turner, a history of the Cold War, a study in stoic heroism, and a profound tale of forgiveness and rebirth.

Stephen Kinzer

"This long-overdue book cuts through the web of deceit that shaped one of the most dramatic secret episodes of the Cold War. Written with restrained outrage, it is both the story of one remarkable CIA officer and of the government that abandoned him. Thrilling, richly informative, and infuriating."

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2024-06-11
The gripping tale of a victim of an early CIA debacle who spent more than two decades in a Chinese prison.

Werth, journalist and author ofBanquet at Delmonico’s and31 Days, relies primarily on Jack Downey’s memoir, published in 2022, eight years after his death. With no access to his subject and interviews with only a few elderly colleagues, the author adds little to Downey’s account of his prison years, but readers will encounter insightful details about American Cold War policy, which ensured that Downey would remain even as other Americans were released. It’s well known that the fledgling CIA recruited heavily from Ivy League schools, and when a representative came calling in Downey’s graduation year of 1951, there was no shortage of applicants: He and five other Yale men joined the CIA’s entry class. The CIA’s initial plan to roll back communism involved the infiltration of native insurgents into enemy states to support local resistance fighters. The strategy’s failure in Europe did not discourage the agency from adopting it in China, where it also failed. In Manchuria, Downey’s plane crashed. When he was captured, the Chinese knew he was a CIA agent even before he admitted it. American policy was to never acknowledge spies, so he was publicly proclaimed an innocent traveler. This meant that during prisoner exchanges, which occurred regularly, the Chinese refused to include him. He remained until America recognized the mainland government in 1973. Werth mixes illuminating yet painful details of Downey’s interrogations, trial, and long, miserable internment with pertinent Cold War history, which featured little intelligent leadership on either side. Readers can take solace in Downey’s long life following release, during which he obtained a law degree, enjoyed a modest political career, and ended life as a judge.

A thrilling spy story and informative Cold War exploration.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191396439
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue PROLOGUE
In the shadow of World War II, a rugged, literary, Yale-bound scholarship student named John Thomas “Jack” Downey capped off a lofty boarding school career (class president, captain of the wrestling team, cum laude grades) just as President Harry Truman and special envoy General George C. Marshall “lost” China to the Communists, sending shock waves through both countries that reverberate to this day. Impressionable schoolboys of what Jack called his “little narrow postwar generation” shared the inherited guilt of being too young to fight in the war. Their elders considered them lucky. Time labeled this cohort the “Silent Generation,” aloof, muted, wary of ideologies. Among themselves, they burned to defend their country and families and freedoms against totalitarian Communism, and to test themselves against an implacable enemy, and each other. By the time he finished college, Downey—along with up to one hundred of his classmates—seized a prized opportunity, joining the Central Intelligence Agency during the Korean War.

The CIA, five years old, modeled itself on the British Secret Intelligence Service—MI6. Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the daring, legendary American World War II spy organization, imbued the fledgling Agency with an unearned swagger; it could strut sitting down. It was Jack Downey’s special misfortune to undertake his first mission as a twenty-two-year-old covert officer—a perilous, botched, and blown air-snatch attempt inside Manchuria—on the same day in 1952 that General Dwight Eisenhower, as president-elect, flew in secret to Korea to try to end an increasingly unpopular war mired in a bloody stalemate. With vice president–elect Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy hunting Reds in government on Capitol Hill, and the sanctimonious, long out of power, crusading Christian-nationalist brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles preparing to take over at the State Department and CIA, Ike reversed the “treadmill policies” of Truman and Marshall, whom Truman promoted to secretary of state, then secretary of defense, after Marshall failed despite thirteen months of intense personal diplomacy to unify China’s warring factions in a pro-West coalition. Under the Republicans, Communism was instead to be “rolled back” through brinksmanship, espionage, and deception.

In Peking (Beijing), Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai bided their time. They kept Downey’s capture secret for two years until—as they braced to confront Washington over its support for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s breakaway regime on Formosa (Taiwan) by shelling two small islands in the contested waters between Taiwan and China—they released the news of his confession, trial, conviction, and life imprisonment to the world. Aimed as a propaganda blow, the disclosure cued a rash of indignant denials. The Dulles brothers protested that Downey was one of two civilian employees whose plane disappeared over the Sea of Japan. Both were believed to be dead. “How they came into the hands of the Chinese Communists is unknown to the US,” Foster Dulles said. Ike told a press conference the situation was “cloudy” and he couldn’t discuss it. Senate Republicans demanded that Beijing release Downey and other American prisoners or risk a war that threatened to go nuclear.

Isolated, disavowed by his country, unaware of the seismic politics at work, Downey staggered through the first years of his punishment. He despaired over “time present” and “time future.” The bright destiny he left behind—he had imagined prospering, like his father, as an attorney, then pursuing their shared passion: public office—slipped away from him as he read his missal and ate his gruel and exercised furiously, trying to get through another day and night without losing hope. More and more on edge, he desperately gamed out diplomatic scenarios that might free him. When UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold journeyed to China in early 1955 to seek the release of three groups of imprisoned American fliers amid the spiraling war fever in Washington and Beijing over the Taiwan Strait, Jack’s fate and the fate of US-China relations fused. History took Downey hostage and made him an emblem of his anxious times in both capitals without his knowing it.

Zhou told Hammarskjold that China would discuss releasing Downey and other prisoners in return for an admission of truth, but the Dulleses and Ike refused. Deniability was the essential condition of US intelligence. Foster Dulles, pious, pompous—“a bull,” Winston Churchill reportedly remarked, “who carries his own china shop around with him”—heaped insult on injury. Doubling down on his claim that Downey was being detained unlawfully, he accused the People’s Republic of diabolically bartering innocent American lives to blackmail Washington. Mao and Zhao scorned the inversion of truth and deceit, right and wrong; America’s duplicity, unreason, chauvinism, truculence, and bluster flaring in the face of unimpeachable reality. Jack had no clue war was averted, or how close he came to being freed.

He pulled himself together at age twenty-six, when he understood he simply couldn’t know his fate. Long before his privileged classmates, Jack discovered the hard way that life was more than positioning yourself to reach and rise and then collecting the fruits. Whether he would ever go home, and when, was out of his hands. He trusted his government to do what needed doing to get him released, and he no longer feared being brainwashed, giving him hope that he could endure imprisonment without “losing myself.” With acceptance came strength. Downey shrank his focus to the minute tasks at hand, filling his time with endless reading, running ten miles a day in place or in tight circles, calisthenics, hygiene, rigorous cell cleaning, and other self-maintenance. He made himself “the busiest man in Peking.” When Dulles finally permitted Jack’s mother and brother to visit him the following year, they found him fit and optimistic.

For the next decade, China’s internal upheavals—the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward and the frenzied purges of the Cultural Revolution—shaped and obscured Downey’s imprisonment. He refused to learn Chinese so his communication with his guards was abstract and monosyllabic. His case faded into the tumult and noise of the 1960s.

Another Cold War flashpoint illuminated the cruel facts of his abandonment. The 1960 Soviet shoot-down of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers again delivered the Communists not just another airborne American spy caught in the act like Jack Downey, but also a proven strategy for baiting Washington into a disastrous error, allowing it to roll out a cover story before puncturing America’s credibility, moral standing, and legal arguments by producing the live flier and indisputable proof of his guilt. Unlike six years earlier, Ike and Allen Dulles couldn’t deny Powers’s mission: the Kremlin possessed, and displayed to the world, his high-tech cameras and data-gathering devices. Eisenhower’s hopes for a “crack in the wall” of the Cold War were smashed. Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Nixon, Ike’s loyal, ruthless heir apparent.

When Kennedy secretly sent a Brooklyn insurance lawyer to negotiate Powers’s release in 1962, Downey and his family were dealt a fateful disappointment: Washington would barter only for acknowledged spies. As long as it maintained that he was an innocent civilian who inexplicably ended up in Red hands—in other words, wrongfully detained—he was out of luck, his hopes of early release futile. Alone in his cell, Jack paid a harrowing price for the distortions and self-deceptions of the era, becoming America’s longest-held captive of war. He had become a prisoner of lies, and all he could do was hope for the truth to free him.

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