the CIA is engaging in one of the most devastating episodes in its history, missed a flight swashbuckling China has stolen two decades of freedom for a pair of fresh-faced American agents and the cost of the lives of their two drivers.In open about the debacle of 1952, the CIA is to find ways to use it as a teaching tool. The errors of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and the paramilitary leaders taking on Al Qaeda and other terrorist targets.
At the center of the story are two CIA paramilitary wishing their overseas assignment first, John T. Downey of New Britain, Connecticut, and Richard G. Fecteau, of Lynn, Mass., whose plane was shot down in the night sky a Chinese ambush.
The mission was quickly nipped in the refusal of the U.S. government, sealed in official secrecy and sent to the darkest corner of the roof of the spy agency Affairs unpleasant.
Downey was the youngest of four. At 22, with one year of service of the CIA, he was destined to spend the next 20 years, three months and 14 days in Chinese jails. His partner of the CIA, Fecteau, was 25. He was behind bars for 19 years and 14 days.
Both survived. Their pilots, Robert C. Snoddy, 31, originally from Roseburg, Oregon, and 29 years, Norman A. Schwartz, of Louisville, Ky., did not.
Pieces of the story resurfaced over the years. But the cover was largely intact until a series of revelations - some required by the CIA, some not - has revealed a story of tragedy, a calculation error, misery and personal triumph, and the misplaced confidence of the agency could manipulate events in China.
Three years ago, the CIA has declassified an internal history of the case. Now, he was hired a director to produce an hourlong documentary. The CIA did not intend to leave the film to the public. But the agency he created for employees on Tuesday at its Langley, Va., headquarters, and an AP reporter attended.
Downey and Fecteau decreased by CIA agents to be interviewed for this article. They watched the film and have been flooded by applause and autograph seekers agency.
Their story is part of the backdrop of uneasy US-China relations today, especially anger Beijing on U.S. military support for rival anti-communist China on Taiwan.
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA had a rudimentary paramilitary force - those who have specialized skills to conduct high risk operations behind the lines -.
Downey and Fecteau were assigned to a secret program called "third force", to create a network of resistance. Small teams of Chinese non-communist exiles were airdropped into the area of Manchuria from China to engage with disaffected Communist generals.
The aim was to destabilize the new government of Mao Zedong and away from the Korean War, where Chinese forces have concluded two years earlier.
The plan failed - badly.
"The CIA has been" a, "the late James Lilley, who helped train teams of agents for inclusion in China, wrote in his memoir of 2004," China hands. " There was no dissenting Communist Chinese generals are, and Chinese Taiwan and Hong Kong who sold the idea turned out to be crooks, Lilley wrote.
"The whole program felt amateurish," the CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic said.
Donald Gregg, who entered the CIA with Downey in 1951 and had dined with him the night before his fatal flight, those flaws of the CIA who oversold the program.
"It was a moment swashbuckling wild and woolly in the history of the agency," Gregg said in an interview. "There was pressure from presidents to a regime change here and there, and there was a time very damaging."
On November 29, 1952, above the foothills of the Changbai Mountains, Downey and Fecteau flew into Chinese airspace in a C-47 Skytrain disarmed. They planned to melt a bit more pickup point marked with three small fires and use a hook line to pick up a Chinese agent on the ground without landing. Downey was the coil in the agent with a winch on board the aircraft.
As they descended, the sky suddenly exploded in bursts. It was an ambush Chinese. The agent had betrayed the Americans, attracted by promising to provide important documents from a dissident leader.
After the C-47 slammed by a grove of trees, bursting into flames and the cockpit skidded to the stop near the village of Sandao.
Downey and Fecteau, dazed and bruised but alive, were captured on the field. They were transported out of the prison - first in the city of Mukden, then Beijing - examined and isolated in separate cells. Each spent long stretches in isolation, alone with their fears.
It was a wealth of information for the Chinese. The two Americans, after a beat psychological, the wick, to varying degrees.
There was one lesson: Agency officials close ties with a program of covert action should not fly such missions.
Another blunder: When a CIA base on the Pacific island of Saipan, the Chinese agent teams lived and trained together, inevitably, learning each other's missions. Thus, the capture of a team threatened the rest.
In addition, Downey was well known to the Chinese workers, because he has trained. When Downey was captured, a Chinese security officer has done and said in English, "You are Jack. Your future is very bleak."
For two years, until China announced that Downey and Fecteau were convicted of espionage and sentenced - for 20 years Fecteau, Downey's life - neither the CIA nor the families of the men knew their fate. The families have received letters in December 1953 saying that the two men were "presumed dead."
The CIA has concocted a cover story, the families say the four had disappeared on a routine commercial flight from Korea to Japan on December 3, four days after the shootdown.
After China announced that Downey and Fecteau were held as spies, Washington publicly denied, saying they were civilian employees of the army.
China did not mention Snoddy and Schwartz until 1975, when officials said President Gerald R. Ford missing pilots were found dead and "burned badly" at the accident site, and it would be impossible to find the bodies.
Fecteau has been published by China in December 1971 and March Downey in 1973, shortly after President Richard Nixon publicly acknowledged Downey CIA connection.
Both said that their return to face their detention they have remained strictly a daily schedule.
Downey, for example, said he got up every morning and begin a series of activities in his cell the gym, cleaning, eating, reading, listening to radio and discuss an occasional packet of letters, books and magazines . Fecteau has a similar approach but varied his routine by the day of the week.
Remarkably, once home, they resumed a normal life. Downey earned a law degree from Harvard and became a judge. Fecteau returned to his alma mater, Boston University, as assistant athletic director.
The pilot, Snoddy and Schwartz are not CIA agents, but flew missions that employees of Civil Air Transport, an airline secretly purchased by the CIA in the late 1949 to support its operations in secret East Asia.
In June 2004, a research team from the Pentagon, with the approval by China, has excavated the crash site and found remains later identified as Snoddy's. Schwartz's remains were not found.
Downey and Fecteau have said little publicly. But the intriguing details of their experience were revealed by Dujmovic, based on files of the Agency remained secret. His 2006 account has been declassified in three stages next year.
Dujmovic wrote that the head of the CIA unit that approved the mission apparently made misjudgments crucial for which he has never been held accountable. For starters, the head of the unit ignored a warning that the Chinese agent team - codenamed STAROMA - had been compromised shortly after his arrival in Manchuria.
The CIA historian said Downey told a debriefing after his release, he felt no bitterness towards his CIA boss.
"I felt for him," said Downey. "It turned out to be such a fucking disaster point of view."
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