Twenty Years in China

In the winter of 1951, Mary Downey waved goodbye to her eldest son John at a small Connecticut train station. She had only a vague notion of the job he was going to take in Japan --it had something to do with the Korean War. "A shudder went through me then," she recalled, "and I have always felt it to be a premonition of the horrible thing that was to happen to Jack."

A year later, she was informed that he was missing on a flight from Japan to Korea. In 1953, she received his death certificate from the Defense Department. The following year, Jack Downey appeared on trial in China as the "archcriminal of all U.S. prisoners." He was sentenced to life imprisonment. After many pleas, Mary Downey was permitted to visit her son five times. Now 75, she suffered a severe stroke earlier this month. President Nixon appealed directly to Premier Chou En lai, and Downey was released last week.

He did not think that there had been anything heroic about his long incarceration in a mazelike prison outside Peking. "I thought the 20 years were to a large extent wasted," he said at a press conference in New Britain, Conn. "I don't see that it benefited anybody. Not Uncle Sam or anybody else. I wouldn't recommend it for character building." He admitted that, under pressure, he had told his captors everything he knew. But it was "ancient history" without much importance. He is not planning to write a book unless a publisher is interested in "500 empty pages. Life in a Chinese prison is a crashing bore."

If someone had to be chosen to spend that much time in prison, probably a more resourceful man could not have been found. At Yale, Downey was a B.M.O.C.--a good student who majored in English literature, a sturdy guard on the football team and captain of the wrestling team. He was the kind of man the CIA liked to recruit, particularly in the cold-war days when the organization had glamour and an allure for ambitious, idealistic youth.

Downey has not described his brief, fateful career with the CIA. Another American P.O.W., Steve Kiba, has supplied the details. After he was shot down in North Korea in 1953, Kiba served part of his two-and-a-half-year sentence in the prison where Downey was confined. Downey told him that he had joined the CIA after graduation and was given paramilitary training, then was sent to Japan to work with Chinese Nationalists who were smuggled onto the mainland to get information. On one mission, nine agents were dropped by parachute at Jehol in Manchuria. They were captured almost immediately, and one broke down under interrogation. He agreed to radio Seoul, requesting that the CIA plane return to pick up one of the agents. Downey and a fellow civilian, Richard Fecteau, went along for the ride in the C-47, even though they did not have to; they were restless and itching for some action in the field.

Crunch. The plane was to make a low sweep over the appointed area, then drop a sling for the Nationalist agent to jump into. But as soon as the aircraft made the pass, the Communists opened fire with machine guns, and the plane was forced down. The pilots were shot; Downey and Fecteau were captured. The date was Nov. 29, 1952.

The first two years in prison were the worst. Downey spent ten months in leg chains. Kiba describes the prison food as consisting of a thin rice gruel for breakfast and rice with a few vegetables for lunch and dinner. Occasionally, the Chinese placed small white stones in the rice gruel. The famished prisoners would crunch down on the food and cut their mouths. "You had to learn to move your mouth around to sift out the stones," says Kiba.

Downey said he had been intensively questioned but not beaten in prison. According to another American airman taken captive, Wallace Brown, the Chinese employed an "extremely subtle torture that is as difficult as any other, and Downey had as much of that as anyone did." For days on end, a P.O.W. would be made to stand without sleep or food until he finally talked. When he refused, he was prodded with a rifle barrel and threatened with death.

When relations between the U.S. and China were strained, the prisoners suffered. When relations improved, they were better off. Fecteau was released in 1971. Though not permitted to read American newspapers during his imprisonment, Downey was given all the English-language Chinese publications he wanted. Despite the propaganda, he was able to glean from them an outline of world events. His family sent him hundreds of paperback novels.

He did not learn Chinese, but his captors proudly took him on tours to see the newest factories or farm machinery. Once a month, he was allowed to write a one-page letter to his mother. He once wrote that he had "done 23,000 calisthenics, run about 55 miles and washed about 100 items of clothing." He stayed sane, he says, by living in the present and forgetting about the future. "On a day-to-day basis, you'd be surprised how much time can be taken up by picayune chores like sweeping the floors. You learn just to go along."

Downey looked and acted well on his return. Uncertain about what he will do now, he is being compensated in some small way for the time taken from his life. His back pay at the CIA amounts to about $350,000. "I wish it were $2,000,000," says ex-Prisoner Brown. "Whatever it is, it's not enough."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.