John Downey Survived Twenty-Year Imprisonment

American CIA officer John T. Downey spent more than 20 years in Chinese prisons after Chinese forces shot down his aircraft over Manchuria in 1952. He and another CIA officer named Richard Fecteau had entered China aboard an unarmed C-47 to extract an agent, but Chinese forces ambushed the plane and later convicted both men of espionage. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai offered their release first for an admission that they were CIA agents and later for access by American journalists, but US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rejected both proposals. After US President Richard Nixon publicly admitted Downey's CIA connection, China released him on in 1973.

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