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.