“This failed covert mission was kept quiet for decades. The captured spies, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, spent two decades in grim Chinese jails, often in solitary confinement. Fecteau was released in 1971 and Downey in 1973.”

General Charles Willoughby, a hard-line anti-Communist, who had served as General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence from 1940 to 1951, had chosen in 1950 to ignore the obvious signs that China would intervene in the Korean War, even as 250,000 troops massed in Manchuria.

Records from the CIA show that of 212 Third Force agents dropped into China during the Korean War period, 111 were captured and 101 killed. In other words, not a single one succeeded.

In his memoir, Downey put it bluntly: “I had been sent to fight for a country I didn’t know, to train guerrillas whose language I didn’t speak; I had been shot down on a flight I wasn’t supposed to be on and sentenced to life in prison for sticking a pole out of an airplane.”