The tale of the CIA prisoners

In 1952, a CIA plane was shot down over China and the two surviving CIA officers spent the next 20 years in Chinese prisons. The CIA has never before fully explained the mission of the two men, John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, and the bungling that led to their capture. But the agency does so now, apparently for the first time, in this fascinating official account. The mission was for the CIA to air drop supplies to ethnic Chinese working to bolster an insurgency against the Communists who had recently captured power in China, and to pick up one man.

The account also contains a series of post-release suggestions on how to maintain morale during long-term capture. I hope that I, and no readers of this posting, ever face that bleak situation. But I must admit I thought about it plenty when I lived for four years in Colombia, which at the time had about 3,000 for-ransom kidnappings annually. Many abductees faced years in the jungle while ransoms were negotiated. Two of our fellow journalist friends, Ruth Morris and Scott Dalton, were among those abducted, although only briefly. A presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, abducted in 2002, is still held.

One of the CIA account's suggestions is the following:

"Create a Routine. Both men said that it was essential to busy themselves with a daily schedule, no matter how mundane each task might be. The prison environment, of course, mandated a certain routine, but within that general outline, as Downey put it, one could organize “a very full program every day.”

"I had my day very tightly scheduled—and if I missed some of my own selfappointed appointments, I’d feel uneasy. As a result, the days really moved along. Whereas if you just sit there and think about home, feeling sorry for yourself, then time can really drag."

I also found interesting the various “cover stories” that the CIA mounted to prevent identification of the two captured men. Not included in this article is the criticism that if only the CIA and the Eisenhower administration had admitted the operation, the two men probably would have been released in 1955 or 1957, not after 20 years of imprisonment. Big difference. The cost of denial was huge for these two men.

P.S. One reader says the link doesn't work. It didn't work for me this morning either. In any case, you can go to the CIA homepage, www.cia.gov, then click on the right side where it says Center for the Study of Intelligence. That takes you to a page with the contents of the Journal of the American Intelligence Professional. Right now, it is on Vol. 50, No. 4. Look for the article Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-1973, by Nicholas Dujmovic.

P.P.S. The author of the report, Mr. Dujmovic, has written to me and commented that he "winced" at my description that this is an official account. "Sure, I am a staff historian, but the Agency is smart enough not to try to dictate what we historians research and write about, or what our conclusions are. And Studies in Intelligence is an independent voice that very often is critical (but hopefully constructive)."

Comments

[ts]

Do you notice when you click on this story link https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol50no4/html_files/prisnors.html

It's gone.

-ts