The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seal is displayed in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, United States on August 14, 2008. (AFP)

A recently published book that narrates the stories of two CIA officers highlights the success of the People's Republic of China in botching several operations by the US intelligence agency targeting Beijing, Covertaction magazine explained in a report.

Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China details the experiences of CIA agent Downey and Fecteau, who were locked up behind bars for 19 years after Chinese authorities captured them in November 1952 after a failed covert mission in China's Changbai Mountains, which lies close to the country's border with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The two agents were part of a unit that prepared Chinese Third Force teams in Manchuria, as they worked on an insurrection against the ruling Communist Party in China.

A substantial portion of the Chinese agents were former Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party) fighters, who the CIA was working to push as a "democratic" third-party alternative to the CCP and the Guomindang.

This came after Jieng Jieshi, a US-backed leader of Guomindang, was believed to be a political embarrassment among American liberals who sought to create another belligerent force in China.

Out of a James Bond movie

Downey and Fecteau were on board a Douglas C-47 Skytrain operated by the CIA's Civil Air Transport to retrieve a Chinese agent, Li Junying, who was supposed to link up with other teams meant to instigate a counter-revolution against the late leader Mao Zedong.

Li took off to Hong Kong after the Chinese Communist Party defeated Jieng in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China. He had been recruited by the CIA into the clandestine Third Force and then transferred to a secret base on the island of Saipan for paramilitary training and then transferred to a CIA facility near a US Navy airfield outside Tokyo.

The two CIA agents planned on extracting Li via a device that involved a hook snagging a line between two upright poles stationed on the ground below. Needless to say, the idea did not work.

In practice, as the CAT-47 approached the Sandao Gully and Downey and Fecteau saw a triangle of fire which was Li's ground signal for the American agents to go ahead with the mission. However, it was not Li who was waiting for the incoming aircraft, rather, it was troops of the People's Liberation Army who had discovered Li's plans.

The troops later opened fire on the plane and grounded it, killing two CAT pilots and injuring Fecteau and Downey, who were captured by the PLA.

The CIA after-action report said that its operatives "had been turned immediately after being dropped into China" adding that the mission was a trap, marking the first day of the longest-known imprisonment of American intelligence officers by a foreign government.

The agents were interrogated for five months and held prisoner for 19 years, where they allegedly endured difficult living conditions, solitary confinement, and physical and psychological abuse.

The CIA tried to cover up its botched operation in China, saying that the two disappeared on a commercial flight from Japan to Korea and staged a rescue operation in the area of the fake crash scene. Fecteau was eventually released in December 1971, while Downey was released on March 1973, after US President Richard Nixon visited China to normalize relations.

Anti-imperialists defeat CIA ploys in China

The story of Jack Downey's journey into the CIA was emblematic of the zealous anti-communist political culture prevalent during the early Cold War. Downey's experience at Yale University, an institution with deep missionary ties to China, and his belief in it as a bastion of liberal values, played a significant role in his decision to join the CIA. He was one of approximately 100 classmates who signed up for the Agency in 1951, either seeking better odds of survival in the Korean War, or drawn by the allure of the secret agent popularized in Cold War America's culture.

CovertAction Magazine says that Cold War liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John King Fairbank, and Owen Lattimore conceived the idea of a "Third Force" as a democratic alternative to both right-wing authoritarian governments and its anti-imperialist enemies like the Communist Party of China. This notion aimed to promote a liberal "democratic" government and socialist "free market" economic system which aimed to privatize sectors and allow multinational companies to set up facilities in the country.

To implement this vision, the CIA recruited individuals, primarily ex-Guomindang officers, for covert operations into China under the Third Force initiative. The operations included aerial surveillance, commando infiltrations, and paramilitary covert actions in regions like Taiwan, Burma, and Tibet.

However, the Third Force faced significant challenges. Many agents sent on subversive missions were captured or killed, indicating the operations' high risks and major failures as well as the success of PRC in facing US ploys in China.

One prominent figure recruited into the Third Force was Zhang Junmai, also known as Carsun Chang, a protege of Ching dynasty reformer Liang Qichao. Chang's writings and manifesto advocated overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party and establishing a liberal "democratic" government. The CIA provided financial support for Third Force groups trained at a secret CIA camp in Saipan, from where they were parachuted into China for spy missions, including terrorist acts and sabotage.

The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Mao, responded by establishing a nationwide surveillance infrastructure to combat subversive activities. This surveillance included numerous checkpoints and household registration systems.

The aggressor plays the role of a victim

Jeremy Kuzmarov, the managing editor at CovertAction Magazine, highlights the hypocrisy of the US administration's rhetoric, "depicting it [China] as menacing and threatening and casting it as an aggressor."

However, as Kuzmarov points out, the US has been engaged in a long history of subversion, seen in multiple covert CIA operations and failed insurrections in the country, that date back to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Earlier in 2021, President Xi Jinping warned that "the Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us….Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of Steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people."