Page 68 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 68 of 237

At Yale, John Thomas Downey was liked and respected for his strength, moral and physical. He was a quiet,
clean-living, athletic lad, an honor student as well as a varsity football player and the captain of the wrestling
team. He spent a good deal of time at home, in nearby New Britain, Connecticut, where his mother taught school.
He was the type of young man the CIA was looking for.

Richard George Fecteau, of Lynn, Massachusetts, had less of an academic background. He was three years older
than Downey. He once enrolled at Boston University with the idea of becoming a football coach, but he decided
there was little future or money in it. Instead, he went to work for the government. So did Downey, who was
recruited off the Yale campus in 1951, at age twenty- one. Both men later turned up in Japan. That did not seem
unusual; with the Korean War on, thousands of young men were being shipped to the Far East.

On November 9, 1952, Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau were captured by the Communist Chinese. This was
not revealed by Peking, however, until the announcement more than two years later. The broadcast on that day
said that Downey, "alias Jack Donovan," and Fecteau, were "special agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, a
United States espionage organization." They were charged with having helped to organize and train two teams of
Chinese agents. The men, Peking said, had been air-dropped into Kirin and Liaoning Provinces for "subversive
activities," and both Downey and Fecteau were captured when their plane was downed as they attempted to drop
supplies and contact agents inside Communist China. It was also claimed that nine Chinese working for the CIA
men were taken prisoner with them.

Downey was sentenced to life. Fecteau got twenty years.

That same day, Peking announced it had sentenced eleven American airmen as "spies," charging that the plane
carrying these men was shot down January 12, 1953, over Liaoning Province, while on a mission which had as its
purpose the "air-drop of special agents into China and the Soviet Union."

Communist China claimed that, all told, it had killed 106 American and Chinese agents parachuted into China
between 1951 and 1954 and had captured 124 others. They also said these agents were trained in "secret codes,
invisible writing, secret messages, telephone tapping, forging documents, psychological warfare, guerrilla tactics
and demolition."

The State Department immediately branded the charges against Downey, Fecteau and the eleven airmen "trumped
up." The Defense Department called the accusations against all thirteen men "utterly false."

The American consul general at Geneva was instructed by the State Department to make the "strongest possible
protest" to Peking.* The charges against the "two civilians," Downey and Fecteau, were "a most flagrant violation
of justice," the State Department said. "These men, John Thomas Downey and Richard George Fecteau, were
civilian personnel employed by the Department of the Army in Japan. They were believed to have been lost in a
flight from Korea to Japan in November, 1952.

"How they came into the hands of the Chinese Communists is unknown to the United States ... the continued
wrongful detention of these American citizens furnishes further proof of the Chinese Communist regime's
disregard for accepted practices of international conduct."

The Pentagon was equally indignant. "Messrs. Downey and Fecteau," the Defense Department declared, "were
Department of the Army civilian employees. They were authorized passengers on a routine flight from Seoul to
Japan in a plane which was under military contract to the Far East Air Force. A search instituted at the time failed
to produce any trace of the plane, and Messrs. Downey and Fecteau were presumed to have been lost. It is now
apparent that they were captured ..."