Prisoner of Lies
Jack Downey's Cold War
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
A “riveting” (The Economist), “gripping” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) 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 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 for 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 1972, 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. Prisoner 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 “thrilling, richly informative” (Stephen Kinzer, author of The Brothers) 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
