Description

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 the agent belonged to an obscure anticommunist 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 Zedongs government for the next twenty years

Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue 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 decades of covert activity directed against China while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release