Book Review: ‘Prisoner of Lies,’ by Barry Werth.

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Book Review: ‘Prisoner of *****,’ by Barry Werth.

PRISONER OF *****: Jack Downey’s Cold War, by Barry Werth

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At the height of the Cold War, C.I.A. pilots carried a silver dollar attached to a poison-tipped stickpin. Their handlers encouraged them, if their planes went down, to use the pin on themselves to avoid betraying their country.

Of course, not every spy heeded this advice. In the spring of 1960, the ******* military shot down the ********* U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and captured him alive, leaving President Dwight D. Eisenhower caught in a quandary. His administration initially issued a false cover story but quickly regretted it. “When the world can entertain not the slightest doubt of the facts,” Eisenhower later recalled, “there is no point trying to evade the issue.” Less than two years after Powers was captured, he crossed the Glienicke Bridge from East Germany to freedom as part of a prisoner swap.

Yet amid the hubbub of Powers’s release, another ********* spy continued to languish, largely forgotten, in foreign captivity. Jack Downey, a Connecticut-bred and Yale-educated nephew of the singer Morton Downey, was 22 in 1952, when ******** troops shot down his C-47 over Manchuria during the Korean War.

Although Downey confessed his identity as a C.I.A. operative to his captors after 16 days, the U.S. government refused to acknowledge his mission for more than two decades. Downey would ultimately become the longest-held prisoner of war in ********* history, until President Nixon negotiated his release and Downey finally departed his cell in 1973 wearing a Mao suit and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

“Prisoner of *****,” Barry Werth’s thoughtful and engaging narrative of Downey’s life and captivity, gallops along from Downey’s school days in the 1940s all the way through the rise of Donald Trump as a public figure in the 1980s. (Downey ***** in 2014.)

Werth, the author of several other histories and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Scarlet Professor,” is an elegant writer, and a virtue of this book is that it situates Downey’s personal drama in the context of his times, which stretch across the ********* Century and beyond. It is a reminder of just how intertwined foreign and domestic policies can be; we see in detail how the populist xenophobia of the McCarthy era, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the student protests of the Vietnam War conditioned and confined the maneuvering of spies, diplomats and politicians.

Werth’s book, which draws heavily on Downey’s own

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, shares something of the appeal of Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II survival story “Unbroken” — a tale of resilience in the face of almost unthinkable misfortune. Downey battled foot-long intestinal worms that writhed like cobras. He read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” all the way through seven times. The occasional games of badminton or quoits turned into hypercompetitive grudge matches into which he and his fellow prisoners channeled all their frustrations.

When he was first taken prisoner, he most feared that he would somehow lose his personality under the pressures of captivity. But he comes to recognize that in “the final analysis, you are what you are, and nobody can get to the deepest recesses of your soul.”

Other aspects of Downey’s story are far less uplifting. His mission — to covertly train a ******** “third force” loyal to neither Mao nor the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek — was misguided from the start. The ignorance of the young men charged with this task was breathtaking. In 1950, when Downey heard the news that the Korean War had broken out, he and his friends asked each other, “Where the ***** is Korea?”

Tactically, his mission’s exfiltration scheme was harebrained; it involved flying over a ******** informant wearing a contraption made of aluminum poles and nylon rope, dangling a ***** from the plane to catch the rope, then yanking the informant into the air, Werth writes, “like a marlin at the end of a fishing line.” Over the years, the C.I.A.’s efforts to penetrate mainland China through covert action of this kind were almost entirely unsuccessful.

Mao and his deputies were guilty of their own clumsy statecraft and spy work. Shortly before Downey flew his mission, Mao wrote to Stalin complaining —

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— that ********* pilots had dropped “****** flies, fleas and lice” on ******** soldiers in North Korea. (“The ********* imperialists in Korea have systematically and deliberately disseminated the bacilli carriers,” he told his ******* counterpart.) After Downey was captured and confessed, his ******** interrogators revealed that they did not really understand the structure of the ********* intelligence apparatus. The C.I.A. was still in its infancy, and his captors found it difficult to grasp why the U.S. would operate a second intelligence agency separate from its military.

What Beijing sought more than anything was an admission of guilt — an acknowledgment that Downey had indeed been a spy. Werth faults the “crusading **********-nationalist” brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles, who headed the C.I.A. and State Department in the ’50s, for refusing to puncture the righteous outrage of the ********* public and admit Downey’s true role.

Only Downey himself comes across as sensible. “I think it’s just as well not to put in time trying to overthrow other people’s governments if you’re not in a state of war with them,” he tells a C.I.A. psychologist after his release. It is moments like these, above all, that provide a glimpse of Downey’s true character and courage.

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PRISONER OF *****: Jack Downey’s Cold War | By Barry Werth | Simon & Schuster | 422 pp. | $30.99

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