Agents of Subversion

The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China

By: John Delury

Narrated by: Lee Goettl

Length: 16 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

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 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, 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.

Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used 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.

©2022 Cornell University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Exciting, and revealing, history of US China relations

This book was so excellent I also purchased a hard copy. It is exceedingly rare to encounter books that are as exciting as they are academically interesting. This book does both a wonderful history of the central events of Downey’s capture and release, but also presents it alongside an excellent history of China expertise in the United States, US China relations and more. Excellent prose propels the listener straight through.

Great story, terrible pronunciation!

The history of US subversion in China is compelling, exciting even as it pieces together the covert and counterproductive efforts of the US government to undermine the new Communist Party Regime in China. The role of John Foster Dulles is especially revealing and maddening. Unfortunately, the reader badly mispronounces even simple to say Chinese names (Zhou Enlai), throughout. It’s quite distracting and annoying. How hard could it be to get some instruction on initial consonants and basic vowel sounds. Chinese Pronunciation is not difficult at this level, although I did finally stop cringing and just go with it. It might be better to read the book instead of listen.