The Spy America Left to Rot

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

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 Soviet military shot down the American 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 American 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 Chinese 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 American 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 Lies,” 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 died in 2014.)

Werth, the author of several other histories and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Scarlett 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 American 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.