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John Delury is a historian of modern China, professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, and starting this fall will be Tsao Family Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Along with Orville Schell, he is the author of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (2013), which provides biographical sketches of the most important historical Chinese leaders and thinkers. In October, he published Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China (2022), a book which traces the tale of a captured CIA agent in China and the broader history of the intelligence community’s interactions with China during the mid-twentieth century.

Q: How did this book project start? 

A: The easy answer is it started with reading the obit in The New York Times in November 2014 for this gentleman, John T. Downey. Here’s this incredible tale of a Yale graduate who joins the CIA, was sent off to the Far East, flies into China at the height of the Korean War; the plane was shot down and he spends over 20 years in prison, before being released after the Nixon visit [in 1972]. And then he goes back to the United States to live what by all appearances was a very happy life. 

I was flabbergasted that I didn’t know the story, in particular because John Downey ended up very near New Haven, Connecticut, where I was studying at Yale for both my undergrad and my PhD. I figured if I hadn’t heard of this, with these overlaps — of Yale and my interests in U.S.-China relations — a lot of people wouldn’t know about this. As book projects begin, you just start pulling on threads. And I started pulling, because the story has so much drama to it. But also there were a lot of unanswered questions, about why exactly he was on that plane, and who came up with the idea for this project? It turns out he was going into China to extract a Chinese agent. As a Chinese historian, that really intrigued me: what do we know about these Chinese agents? How did they end up on the planes that brought them in? And how many planes exactly were there? What’s the scope of this one operation? What’s the broader scope of CIA activity, and U.S. government covert activity in China directed against China, during this period of time, which is basically the Cold War between the U.S. and China?

The Cold War is a funny thing on many levels, one being that it has these nice clean dates, in terms of ending with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were always the principal adversary of the Cold War. But in the first half, there really was a quite active Cold War between the U.S. and China. In fact, arguably, if you look at the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, China’s far more deeply involved on the other side of the battlefield than the Soviets. But that ends in the 1970s. So I wanted to look at the Cold War between the United States and China, and that means looking at the late 1940s until the early 1970s. And so that ended up being the scope of the book, and the more I worked on it, the less it was about John Downey, and was more about everything around him, and also what’s called transnational history — trying to use my training in modern China and language abilities to get deeper into the Chinese side of the story. 

The reason Downey was on that plane into China, which ended up getting shot down, was to create dissent in the name of the so-called ‘Third Force’ in China. Can you explain what the Third Force was?

The Third Force is one of those things I hardly knew about before starting to research. The simple explanation of the Third Force, which is very much a product of this historical moment, is that it is Chinese who are opposed to communism, they dislike Mao Zedong; but their real animus actually is directed against Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, the great leader of the Nationalist Party of the Republic of China and of the National Army which is soundly defeated in the Chinese Civil War by 1949 — leaving behind all of these refugees, most of whom follow Chiang to Taiwan, but a whole chunk of whom do not, in part because they despise him, and see him as a fascist, as incompetent. And so instead, they go to Hong Kong, and they become the potential for this Third Force. That’s why the agents who were recruited for this particular operation, which was a Third Force operation, not a pro-Nationalist operation, were recruited in Hong Kong, not in Taiwan. 

Now, the Third Force was the kind of thing where when I first came across it in context of the John Downey story, I shook my head and thought, ‘Oh my god, what classic CIA self-delusion.’ There are certain affinities in space and time, even into the present, between this Third Force in China and U.S. government inventions ever since in support of liberal moderate centrists in Country X, who are the ‘hope’. That was almost a trope of the Cold War in fighting communism — looking for some liberal alternative who was not the right-wing autocrat or military dictator that the United States was often saddled with. And it’s a trope of the post-Cold War as well. 

But as I went deeper in my research I found it’s more interesting than that. As an idea, and as a movement, the Third Force has deep roots in early 20th century Chinese intellectual history and political history. It never captures power, but it’s there. And the best way to explain its lineage in a modern Chinese context is that the path goes back to Liang Qichao, who is this towering figure in the early 20th century — I would say the single-most influential thinker and public intellectual of his era. And he’s really a Third Force figure. In his political life, especially after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in the beginning of the Republic of China, Liang Qichao was trying to create a Third Force. He creates the Progressive Party, he’s a more-or-less liberal centrist moderate figure, who is, in a way, trying to ensure structurally a multiparty democratic system by having a third party at all, and it’s aimed at the center of the political spectrum. 

In the book, there’s a little bit of Liang, but even more important of a figure is one of his students and protégés, known as Carsun Chang, who is equally fascinating. He’s less well known, but he’s the big Third Force guy. He was the one that carried the idea through the 1930s and 40s into the 50s in fact, right up to the moment of this CIA operation in the fall 1952. Two months earlier, Carsun Chang published a book, The Third Force in China, in the English language in New York. In it, he spends hundreds of pages explaining what this non-Communist, non-Nationalist alternative is, how it’s deeply rooted in Chinese philosophy and history, how it’s the inevitable future of China, of a real democratic, liberal China. 

So the Third Force has been around for a while, always on the margins of Chinese politics. And what happens in this moment is that the U.S. government, through the CIA, weaponizes the Third Force. They give them guns and see what they can do. And that is the product of a very specific moment, with two factors explaining it: one being the Korean War, which is militarizing the region from a U.S. perspective. There are a lot of guns flowing into the Far East. And there’s a search, almost a desperate search, for some sort of military leverage because the Korean War is going very badly for the United States. In addition to the Korean War, you have this lingering disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek. The wound is being healed between Washington and Taipei through the Korean War, but it takes some time, there’s still a lot of sore feeling and concern that Chiang Kai-shek is incompetent, that he’s corrupt. That’s why there’s still some space for the Third Force to say, ‘Hey, forget about him. Try us.’ And that’s what happens in this operation.

Though it seems like the CIA has been around forever, this story unfolds relatively early in its existence. Can you situate this story in the broader history of the CIA?

The CIA, as an organization, was created through the National Security Act of the fall of 1947. The term national security, which we use 5,000 times a day if we’re talking about U.S. foreign policy, is kind of a creation of this moment: It’s really through that law that it becomes the coin of the realm and everything is explained in terms of national security. It’s that law that creates the National Security Council (NSC), which again, we take for granted, but it was a brand new thing. 

…the CIA that we’ve come to know and love, which has its classic era in the 1950s of overthrowing governments left and right around the world, really has its origins in the transformation that happens during the Korean War.

The purpose of the CIA, which was created by Harry Truman through the act of Congress, was simple. It was to have some centralized civilian organization of government that would make sense of the massive amount of political and military and strategic information that is just pouring into Washington. And especially in this post war moment, when the United States is the new center of the world or center of half of the world, it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming for Truman, who didn’t like intelligence. Truman dis-established the first experiment in civilian intelligence, called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had been created by FDR in 1941 to fight the war that was coming. Truman didn’t like it, he said we’re getting rid of that, we don’t want an American Gestapo. But then, a few months later, he realizes, okay, this is not tenable, I need some organization to make sense of the deluge of information. And that is why he signed off on this idea of the CIA. 

It starts quite modestly, and it has a hard time getting going. The first CIA directors only last about six months each. It’s a small organization, and it’s really there to be a funnel that will take this massive flow of both covertly acquired secrets, as well as open source analysis flowing in from embassies. The purpose of the organization is to sit there in Washington, and go through that and to evaluate it, and then brief the President. 

The CIA is really struggling for the first few years of its existence to execute that mission, and to work out all the inter-agency power struggles, and there are some titanic battles going on between the different armed services still, and between the Defense Department and the State Department. You get the sense through the 50s, the State Department is a way bigger player than it is now — no offense to my friends in Foggy Bottom. It was a different time, in part because the NSC was not then what it is now. 

The Korean War is the turning point for many things in early Cold War America. First of all, the spigot opens up for everyone involved in anything military or paramilitary. Suddenly, the U.S. government is going all-in and again, it’s Harry Truman making the decision: we’re going all-in to defend South Korea, to expel the North Koreans, and then actually to push up into North Korea. That is a dramatic reversal from all the demobilization that had come after World War Two. So with that big spigot now open, suddenly there’s money sloshing around the CIA. And it grows exponentially in the context of the Korean War, but it’s a particular kind of growth. It is focused on what some called the “monkey business,” the clandestine paramilitary operations of the sort that I focus on in my book, rather than the analytical work, the “strategic intelligence.” That’s where the CIA that we’ve come to know and love, which has its classic era in the 1950s of overthrowing governments left and right around the world, really has its origins in the transformation that happens during the Korean War.

Reading about Downey’s particular mission, I kept asking myself how anyone thought it was going to work. It seems so destined to fail. What’s to blame for that failure — do you think that this was just ignorance about what it would take to do this type of mission, or a lack of oversight? 

So that’s a great question you had in your mind. The answer at the time may have been, why not? Why not see what might work here if we can get away with it? 

If we unpack the why not, that can help explain the why. First of all, the value of the lives lost or jeopardized is negligible in the minds of the people coming up with these plans. And I guess you can say it’s a wartime mentality of the World War Two generation, now Korean War generation, that says look, we’re putting everyone’s lives at risk. We’re fighting a war. 

But you have an added layer of racism and simply Othering of Chinese lives. You see it globally, but I’m just more familiar with the cases in Asia, where Chinese lives, later Vietnamese lives, Asian lives don’t ‘count’ in the same way. And so putting at risk so many of these Chinese agents, there’s a certain ‘why not?’ attitude there. That’s the individual moral level. 

At the higher geopolitical level, it is still a head scratcher for me to puzzle out, aren’t they worried they’re gonna get caught? That would seem to be the big downside risk. Here you have the President of the United States saying, ‘We will not fight the Korean War outside of Korea. We are not sending our men into China. We’re not bombing on the other side of the Yalu River. And we’re certainly not taking the fight to the Soviet Union. And indeed, the reason we’re not taking on China is we don’t want to trigger World War III.’ That is the inner logic of what was called the ‘limited war’ that was being fought in Korea, very different from World War II. And that was also the public claim. So the risk here is that you’re going to be found out. And this is not a trivial thing that you are fighting in a country that you’ve said you’re going to leave alone. 

So when we turn to that part of it, their answer was still, ‘Why not?’ This gets into the second big point: along with the undervaluing of Chinese life, there’s also an underestimation of their Chinese adversary. They thought they could just fly basically monthly into China, and that their planes would be safe. And they also thought that they could cause serious trouble for Mao, and potentially even overthrow the communist regime, with these little paramilitary groups. The fact that they even had that logic and wrote that way in the paper trail indicates a pretty profound underestimation of why the Communist revolution succeeded, of the strength of the CCP, of how committed they were to building up their state, including their internal public security. According to most historical analysis, the CCP is popular, particularly during this moment in the early 1950s, and are much more popular than the Nationalists had been. All that, I think, is radically underestimated. 

Do you think that underestimation exists in U.S. attitudes towards China today?

Looking back from now, at an interim period, we can see these patches of time where the underestimation problem rears its ugly head again. I would say we’re not in a moment of underestimation currently. But we’re coming out of one and when I say we, I mean the American discourse around U.S.-China relations. The way that we’re processing the previous underestimation, however, seems to me to be creating its own problems. And by that I refer to the ’80s, the ’90s and into the early 2000s. There was an underestimation of the CCP’s strength, Andy Nathan called it its ‘authoritarian resilience’. If you go back pre-’89, and then again post-’89, there’s a lot of this basic underestimation of the capacity of the CCP, and the ultimate resilience of the system. That was very much an American-style projection of its values, its notion of the tides of history all swimming towards liberal democracy, our style of liberal democracy. 

I am watching this very much from afar, but it seems like now, the discourse in the United States is grappling with a slightly different problem: not underestimating the PRC, but rather grappling with the fact that ‘Oh, this thing isn’t going anywhere.’ In fact, it’s getting stronger, if anything, and what does that mean for us, for our security and our values, to use the language of the discourse. And that’s a very different problem than what they faced back in the early 1950s, because the sense of superiority was really profound then. At the big level of national powers, it was so clear to Americans in the early Cold War that we should worry about the Russians, but that we were way more powerful than the Chinese. 

One of your central arguments is about the connection between subversion abroad and repression at home. Can you explain that connection and how it relates to the story of Downey?

Well, thanks for asking, because that is the principal theme of the book. It’s not like I had a hypothesis that I tested, it was more it just kept hitting me in the face, slapping me on both cheeks, I would say, both the cheek of American history and the cheek of Chinese history.

…I worry watching some of these new congressional committees. Because it was precisely the role of Congress and McCarthy that created the most dangerous platform where things became inquisitorial.

In particular in this period of time, and I would hone in on the early 1950s, what you see is that the dynamic of subversion abroad and repression at home are almost like cylinders that are clicking in their different ways, but simultaneously, both in Mao’s China and in McCarthyite America. That’s what’s kind of extraordinary in a dark, even pathological way, about that moment. 

So if we start with the Chinese perspective, it’s the fear that they are being subverted. And in fact, they are, as my book documents. There are legitimate grounds for Mao’s fear of imperialist trained agents of subversion, running around his country, because he’s capturing some of them. I found the documents where Mao is getting the report on the Downey mission, and talking about all the other operations going on and here’s what we need to do about it. So there is a reality behind the fear. But Mao is then using that to generate the kind of repressive politics that become his trademark, that he will use to rule until his death. And so the first big mass campaigns, hallmarks of the Maoist era, are the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and then the Campaign to Eliminate Counterrevolutionaries. And those come in the Korean War context, with these active covert efforts being planned and then executed with CIA help. Mao is using that fear of subversion to unleash highly repressive coercive campaigns domestically. That will just keep playing out, with echoes today, in a kind of pathology in a Chinese context. 

If we switch over to the United States, we see not the same thing, but an unnervingly parallel universe in which the fear of subversive elements in the United States is generating a new form of repression in America, and that’s what we call McCarthyism. As a kid, I strangely was interested in Joe McCarthy, which I should stop admitting. Going back to my research as an eighth-grader, I did not know before just how central China was to McCarthy’s argument. What was called the “loss of China,” China going communist, was actually the wedge that he used in his opening campaigns, using his platform at the Senate to call up whoever he wanted, and interrogate them in a Spanish Inquisition style, using all of these paralegal means to assert some kind of guilt or treasonous intention. That whole McCarthyite model was directed initially on the China question — who lost China, who are subversives in our midst, the “enemies within” that are advancing communism and are the reason that the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War, and are the reason for anything going wrong in the Korean War? 

The first primary target of Joe McCarthy is Owen Lattimore, a China hand and scholar of inner Asia, who is dragged up before the Senate, spends years defending himself, and ultimately lives in a kind of self-imposed exile as an academic in England. And there’s a whole long list of those figures, of China scholars and experts, and also government officials who know China very well, who are marginalized or who are essentially forced out of government because of the McCarthyite campaign. And so that is where you see the subversion abroad/repression at home dynamic playing out in the United States. 

Do you see any echoes of this dynamic in the discourse among the China expert community in the U.S. today?

I’m generally a pretty sunny guy, and at this stage still optimistic on this one. I feel like we have not fallen back into the McCarthyite dynamics. I hope people will read the book as a warning of just how ugly that can get, but I think at this particular moment, the China community, the China hands of our day and China experts are actually doing a good job of having the argument, because there’s a public debate to be had. China policy was not easy in 1950. And it’s not easy in 2023. There are two sides or three sides to a lot of these questions. I have my own side, but I also recognize I need to keep listening and be in argument with the other side and at times I need to adjust, and at times they need to adjust. Despite the insanity of social media, that the group of experts and scholars are doing a good job of having a public argument without getting personal and politicizing it in a very toxic way that happened back then. 

But I worry. And I worry watching some of these new congressional committees. Because it was precisely the role of Congress and McCarthy that created the most dangerous platform where things became inquisitorial. I do think there’s an analogy here, the potential for what is now I think still a civil debate, to fall off a cliff and become something else is real. And we should be very wary of it. 

There are dire scenarios — scenarios we talk about more and more, I would say probably too much — where there’s actual military conflict at some level between the United States and China. That’s when I would really worry that we are quite suddenly catapulted back into 1951 style context for the policy debate, which is no longer polite or civil, to the detriment of the United States. The toxicity did not work out well for anyone.

Obviously we can’t gain a lot of insight into what is happening in terms of CIA operations in China today, but what would you want to know if you had full access?

The first thing I would want to know is, how good is the analytical work? That’s the stuff that no one makes a movie out of, but that is the primary mission of the CIA. What kind of assessments are they making? And how are they interpreting the deluge? I’m less interested in the deluge of information through whatever kinds of tricks we have to suck up secret intel. To me, the nub is okay, you’ve got this deluge, now make sense of it. What’s really going on? And these get into basic questions about Xi Jinping’s China — how does that really work? What are the dynamics? What’s it like when you’re sitting in the [Politburo] Standing Committee meeting, and there’s something no one really wants to talk about because they all know Xi’s not going to be happy? Who can bring that up? Or do they just pretend it doesn’t exist? 

It’s hard enough to do history of intelligence, which is great for novels and films, but historians actually kind of avoid it because the epistemological quagmire there is so deep.

I continue to find the protests that broke out last fall utterly fascinating, in part, because I’m not aware of a single person who predicted them. And so I would like to know, how are the analysts in the intelligence community, in the CIA, making sense of the protests? And what did Xi know before they happened? And what’s the after-action assessment in the Chinese government? 

Yes, I would love to know the answers to those questions, too. We have this sense of the CIA being all knowing, but is that true on China?

You just hit a wall there in terms of now. It’s hard enough to do history of intelligence, which is great for novels and films, but I think historians actually kind of avoid it because the epistemological quagmire there is so deep. I enjoyed it. But it’s humbling, and it’s a healthy reminder of staying humble as a historian in terms of what do we really know about the past? Let alone what do we know about now. 

But when something like this spy balloon suddenly appears on every TV screen and gets a week of wall to wall coverage in the U.S. — we don’t know anything, and the CIA may not know either. To go back to the operation at the heart of my book, the plane doesn’t come back on this mission in 1952. And everyone in the CIA, in the U.S. government, happily concludes, ‘Oh, it’s safely crashed somewhere because the Chinese didn’t embarrass us with it publicly.’ And so they come to that conclusion, from what I know, with unanimity, and then just kind of don’t worry about it and go on with their daily lives for two years. And two years later, suddenly, Beijing announces, ‘Oh, yeah, we caught these two CIA guys, they’re fine. They are in prison here, one has a 20-year sentence, the other got a life sentence. We also have the plane.’ 

The CIA is really blindsided because they had all come to this assumption that everything was fine. To your point about omniscience, because it’s done secretively, we can tend to overestimate how much they know. And then when they make public statements, we kind of give them the benefit of the doubt that they really know. But they may not.

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