Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China

"This book has many of the qualities of a spy novel , though it’s a true story. Delury is an academic historian whose dissertation was about Qing intellectual history. He’s an American China specialist, but he teaches at Yonsei University in Seoul. Since moving to Korea, he has added a whole new side to his expertise and comments a lot in the press on North Korea. He’s also very interested in the Korean War. He is, in short, another person who won’t pick a single lane and stay in it. This story is about an American secret agent who ends up in Mao’s China during the Korean War and is a prisoner there for a long time. Delury is ideally placed to write this tale because it moves between America, China, and Korea. Even more so because he studied at Yale, which figures centrally in the life of the main character in the book, John T Downey, who studies there before and ends up back in the area after his time in prison in China. Early in the book, Delury mentions that he was studying at Yale himself when Downey was living in the area and could easily have met him, but he didn’t. In this book, you learn a lot about Mao’s China, you learn about the Korean War, you learn about McCarthyism in America and even about the history of Chinese studies. All this is woven into this page-turner. Like Fragile Cargo , I think Agents of Subversion is a book that you can easily imagine being filmed, being turned into a television series or being discussed with gusto by members of a book club made up of history lovers. Yes. It’s a reminder of just how long the two places were cut off from each other. There are again all kinds of contemporary resonances that you can think about, though both Brookes and Delury are the kind of authors who trust the reader to make the connections themselves. We are now living in a time when China is again becoming less hospitable to foreigners. That’s not belaboured in the book, but it adds to the punch of the story. When I was reading it, I thought about the imprisonment of the two Canadians. They were clearly not agents of a foreign power, so there is a crucial difference, but there are interesting echoes between periods. The other reason I like this book is I do think we’re more used to imagining these Cold War spy stories linked to the Soviet Union and Britain and the US agencies. Just the fact that it’s about the China side is intriguing. The basic story is quite well-known, but it’s one of those things that goes in and out of consciousness and you think, ‘Oh yes, there was that.’ But there are many elements to the book I had no idea about, like the intersections between different figures. I learned a lot. Delury’s background as an intellectual historian shows through and there’s a lot about the ideas that were circulating about totalitarian states and modernisation. You even get cameos by some leading political theorists. It’s very interesting. Yes, George Kennan and Hannah Arendt. There are quite a few people who show up as characters who get swept up in the political tides of the time, including the China specialists. That’s another connection between my first two books: they’re stories that have strong characters in them. Even though they’re largely about events, you come away with a real feel for individuals."