Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit in a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao.
In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, he belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail, disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong’s government for the next twenty years.
Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, historian John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release.
Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao’s campaigns to eliminate counter-revolutionaries and his use of captive spies in diplomacy with the West.
Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.
Read a review in Foreign Affairs by Jane Perlez
Praise for Agents of Subversion
Order now at Amazon.com
“John Delury brilliantly traces the threads of dead-end intelligence operations, intense foreign policy battles, and philosophical riptides that patterned American Cold War engagement with East Asia. Agents of Subversion describes the trends and sets of relations that fixed Beijing and Washington into decades of hostility.”
“In this gem of a book from one of our best northeast Asia experts, John Delury writes of a key episode from the Cold War years. Agents of Subversion is a cautionary tale of intelligence failure set against the backdrop of the evolving relationship between the United States and China.”
“Agents of Subversion is a captivating and exciting read. John Delury brings together human drama and the complex histories of movement between China, the United States, and Korea.”
“A riveting account of American efforts to subvert and ultimately work with the People’s Republic of China during the Cold War, Agents of Subversion masterfully uses the stories of American strategists, intellectuals, and secret agents to tell a cautionary tale about the perils of universalistic impulses and fears of foreign influence. This is an essential work of history and strategy.”
“Brilliantly conceived and superbly researched, Agents of Subversion transforms our understanding of US-China relations. John Delury provides a riveting portrait of espionage and diplomacy, showing how the fear of subversion, and cycles of repression, shape dealings between Washington and Beijing.”
“Agents of Subversion reveals how Washington’s missteps in the conduct of espionage in China have led to enduring consequences in both US foreign policy and American civil rights. Through innovative reconstruction, John Delury illuminates pivotal moments of Chinese history before the establishment of Chinese Communist Party rule. Fascinating and essential reading.”
“John Delury’s illuminating history of Cold-War relations between China and the United States is a driving story of espionage, counter-revolution, diplomacy, and war. In this earlier era of mistrust we can find dark lessons for the rising tensions of the present day.”