CIA Never Learns From Their Mistakes

(AP/Boston Globe) – “The CIA had been ‘had,'” the late James Lilley, who helped train agent teams for insertion into China, wrote in his 2004 memoir, “China Hands.” There were no dissident communist Chinese generals to be found, and the Chinese on Taiwan and Hong Kong who sold the idea turned out to be swindlers, Lilley wrote.

“The whole program smacked of amateurism,” CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic says.

Donald Gregg, who came into the CIA with Downey in 1951 and had dinner with him the night before his ill-fated flight, faults those in the CIA who oversold the program.

“That was a wild and woolly, swashbuckling time in the agency’s history,” Gregg said in an interview. “There was pressure from presidents for regime change here and there, and it was a very damaging time.”

Several hours after the scheduled time of pickup, the CIA field unit received a message from the agent team, reporting that the snatch had been successful. However, when the C47 was overdue for its return on the morning of 30 November 1952, CIA worked with Civil Air Transport to concoct a cover story–a CAT aircraft on a commercial flight from Korea to Japan on 3 December was missing and, as of 4 December, was presumed lost in the Sea of Japan. Downey and Fecteau were identified as Department of the Army civilian employees. Meanwhile, the US military conducted an intensive search of accessible sea and land routes, with negative results. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Walter Bedell Smith signed letters of condolence to the men’s families, saying “I have learned that [your son/your husband] was a passenger on a commercial plane flight between South Korea and Japan which is now overdue and that there is grave fear that he may have been lost.”

By mid-December, CIA had made the official determination that the men were missing in action; however, within the Agency’s Far East Division, the strong feeling was that Downey and Fecteau, as well as the pilots, were dead at the scene of the intended pickup. With nothing other than the conviction that the Chinese Communists would have made propaganda use of the CIA men had either remained alive, the Agency declared Downey and Fecteau “presumed dead” on 4 December 1953. Letters to that effect were sent to the families under the signature of DCI Allen Dulles.