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. John Delury.Illustration by Lauren Crow 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