“Prisoner of Lies” is a new book from Northampton, Massachusetts, writer Barry Werth. It tells the story of Jack Downey, a CIA recruit who was captured by China in 1951 while trying to organize resistance fighters.
The U.S. government did not acknowledge Downey was a spy, so they never agreed to any prisoner swaps. Downey stayed in Chinese prisons for 21 years.
Werth only learned of Downey’s experience in the early 2000s, near the end of Downey’s life.
“But Downey at that stage was not interested in any publicity,” Werth said. “I approached him, he thanked me very much, said that he wasn't interested in cooperating.”
After Downey died in 2014, Werth found a memoir Downey had written, which filled in many details of Downey’s time as a prisoner of war. Werth was given permission from the family to use that information after the memoir was published.
Karen Brown, NEPM: So what appealed to you about Downey's story?
Barry Werth: Well, it's unique in that he spent 20 years in Chinese prison, the longest-held American prisoner of war —not because the Chinese didn't want to give him back. They recognized he was a valuable asset in any sort of trade. But because the United States government had disavowed him.
So here you have this predicament of somebody who was, in fact, caught in the act, but because his own government denied that they knew anything about it, he lived another 20 years in Chinese prison before he returned home.
And that was only possible in 1973, after Nixon normalized relations with China and Downey's mother had a stroke. So China agreed to a humanitarian release. Werth said the geopolitical context was one fascinating aspect of Downey's story.
But the other thing is, I knew when he came home that he was in exceptional shape, that he had a very fulfilling second life. He quickly applied to and got into Harvard Law School. He married a Chinese American woman. They had a family. He had decades of being a very productive and admired citizen in the state of Connecticut. And he came out strong and whole and not — in his word — bitter.
Do you think that's really true? I mean, I've done a lot of stories on trauma, and people can push it down, but it seems unlikely that 20 years in, you know, being held in those circumstances, would have no impact on him.
Well, I think it did have an impact on him, but the central challenge for him was to get through it. He made himself, as he said, the busiest man in Beijing. Alone in his cell, he planned out every day down to the minute. He ran 10 miles in place. He did endless calisthenics. He was able to receive books after a certain time. He taught himself Russian. So, in a way, it was a kind of a forced monastic education.
And the hard part, I think, was just sort of putting out of mind that he had any control over — that he had no control over what was going to happen to him, and that he might have to wait for a very long time. But was he completely whole? I don't know. I mean, friends told me that he admitted that he had nightmares about it. But to look at the life that he lived afterward, you'd never have known it. So yes, maybe he suppressed it. But again, that was a strength of his.
This was more than a story about one man's resilience. This was also a lesson on the Cold War, and the extent to which governments are willing to sacrifice their own people to stand by their own rules or certain rules. So what did you learn about that, and what do you think is compelling about that history?
It's a real microcosm of what happens when the politics of a situation are controlled by lies. Because the United States government never told the truth about Downey. He was regarded as illegally detained. And for four administrations, that was federal policy.
In our current political life, which has been filled — since Trump came on the scene — with lies, we're always being asked to make decisions about things based on false and misleading information. Here in, you know, in a very small frame, was the life of one man about whom lies were perpetrated and who becomes, I think, a kind of a representative for all of us in terms of what happens when the truth isn't told.
