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The inside story of a US spy in China’s release 50 years ago, and its lessons amid spy balloon row

China scholar Jerome Cohen recalls how he got the US government to admit John Downey was a spy, leading China to free him. It shows the folly of lying, he says

Reading Time:9 minutes

John Downey (right), a CIA agent imprisoned in China for more than 20 years, crosses from China into Hong Kong on March 12, 1973. The US government had long denied he was a CIA spy. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 7:15am, 12 Mar 2023

More than a month after an American military plane shot down an intruding Chinese balloon, much about this now notorious incident remains a mystery, and conflicting statements from the United States and China have led many observers to doubt the accuracy of claims voiced by one or both of the contending governments.

Was the Chinese balloon merely engaged in civilian weather information gathering? Had the US honestly denied the allegation that it recently sent more than 10 balloons to secretly spy on China? Should the world community trust anything said by rival governments in such an overheated context, anyway?

This is certainly not the first time that the reliability of conflicting statements made by these two powers has been doubted, and March 12 is an appropriate date for recalling perhaps the most notorious – and surely the most long-running – instance of the two countries’ clashing versions of reality.

On that date 50 years ago, Hong Kong reporters dashed to the Chinese border to meet John T. Downey, the confessed American CIA agent who had just been released after almost 21 years in a Communist prison.

John Downey (centre) crosses the border from China into Hong Kong on March 12, 1973. Downey was imprisoned in 1952 for spying for the United States, which it long denied. Photo: ISD

“Are you going to write a book?” one asked.

Downey replied: “What would it have? Four hundred blank pages?”