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| Home Front: Politix |
| American Patriots - CIA Officers Spent 20 Years In PRC Prisons |
| 2007-04-21 |
| Below is an excerpt. It's a long, impressive article. On a crisp spring morning in 1973 a pale and emaciated man made his way slowly across the Lo Wu bridge from China into Hong Kong. A British soldier at the frontier post saluted him as he approached. This was, the man later reflected, “the first act of dignity shown to him in 20 years”. His name was Jack Downey. He was a CIA agent, and since 1952 he and a colleague, Richard Fecteau, had languished in a Chinese prison, often in solitary confinement, secret hostages in the Cold War between the US and China. The capture, imprisonment and eventual release of these two CIA agents is one of the most extraordinary and poignant tales in the history of espionage. Some of the material relating to their captivity remains classified but 34 years after Downey stumbled to freedom the CIA has finally allowed an official agency historian access to its most secret files. The Downey-Fecteau case, revealed last week in the CIA’s Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, is a story of suffering, endurance and ordinary individuals trapped and manipulated by geopolitics. With the recent Iranian hostage drama, the story has remarkable contemporary resonance, but with one signal difference. The British soldiers were held in Iran for 13 days, and some made a small fortune by selling their stories after their release. Downey and Fecteau — both of whom are still living —never told their story to the media, and never made a penny out of it. In 1952, Downey and Fecteau had both recently graduated from university, Downey from Yale, and Fecteau from Boston. Downey, 22, had joined the CIA in 1951. Fecteau, recently married for the second time, was 24, and had been a CIA agent for only a few months. Both were about to embark on their first operational mission, which would also be their last. In June of that year, the US had parachuted five ethnic Chinese agents into Manchuria on a mission to destabilise the Communist regime by linking up with local anti-government forces and carrying out guerrilla operations. The team, which Downey had helped to train, made radio contact in November, reporting that they had obtained important documents and wanted one of the team to be picked up by “air snatch”. This risky procedure for aerial pick-up involved flying an aircraft at low altitude and hooking a line stretched between two aluminium poles. “The line was connected to a harness in which the agent was strapped,” writes the CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic. “Once airborne the man was to be winched into the aircraft.” On November 29 a C47 US transport plane set off from the Korean peninsular: at the controls were pilots Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy; manning the winch were Downey and Fecteau. With the Korean War at its height, both men knew the perils of Operation Tropic. They did not know they were flying into a trap. Unknown to their handlers, the Chinese agents had been captured soon after landing, “doubled” in spy parlance, and were being used to lure the CIA into an ambush. At around midnight, having received the correct torch signal from the ground, the pilots swooped low over the rendezvous point in the Manchurian foothills, where two poles had been erected and a man in harness appeared to be waiting for the pick-up. At exactly the moment when the plane should have hooked its agent, two anti-aircraft guns, camouflaged in the snow by white sheets, opened fire at the cockpit. The pilots were killed, the engines cut out, and the plane crash-landed among some trees, breaking apart on impact. Downey and Fecteau, secured by harnesses, survived unhurt, and staggered out of the wreckage to find themselves surrounded by whooping Chinese troops. With impressive understatement, Downey remarked to his partner that they were now in “a hell of a mess”. Much more at the link. |
| Posted by:mrp |
| #2 True Iron Men. |
| Posted by: Icerigger 2007-04-21 14:29 |
| #1 Charles McCarry might have based an incident in his novel The Last Supper on the experiences of these men. A stunning sacrifice on their part. |
| Posted by: Jonathan 2007-04-21 12:20 |