Twenty years in a Chinese prison

An extraordinary story of Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau, lured by a double agent and jailed secretly, The lost 20 years of CIA spies caught in a China trap

The capture, imprisonment and eventual release of these two CIA agents is one of the most extraordinary and poignant tales in the history of espionage. Some of the material relating to their captivity remains classified but 34 years after Downey stumbled to freedom the CIA has finally allowed an official agency historian access to its most secret files.

The Downey-Fecteau case, revealed last week in the CIA’s Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, is a story of suffering, endurance and ordinary individuals trapped and manipulated by geopolitics. With the recent Iranian hostage drama, the story has remarkable contemporary resonance, but with one signal difference. The British soldiers were held in Iran for 13 days, and some made a small fortune by selling their stories after their release. Downey and Fecteau — both of whom are still living —never told their story to the media, and never made a penny out of it.

They were 22 and 24 when they were caught.

The men lived in draughty cells, on a diet of maggoty rice and vegetables. Sometimes they were allowed books and magazines. Then, with refined psychological cruelty, these would be arbitrarily removed.

The Americans developed survival strategies: daily exercise, writing, learning Chinese, and training their minds to explore the world they had once known.

Fecteau became an “expert daydreamer”, Dujmovic reports, and made an imaginary world by recalling every child in his school classes, and the sights in the Massachusetts town where he grew up.

Their prison experience has become a case study in surviving captivity.

Awarding Downey and Fecteau belated medals in 1998, George Tenet, then CIA director, observed: “Your story, simply put, is one of the most remarkable in the history of the CIA.”