《谎言的囚徒》：被中国监禁20年的中情局特工
The Spy America Left to Rot
PRISONER OF LIES: Jack Downey’s Cold War, by Barry Werth
《谎言的囚徒——杰克·唐尼的冷战》(Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey’s Cold War)，巴里·沃斯著
At the height of the Cold War, C.I.A. pilots carried a silver dollar attached to a poison-tipped stickpin. Their handlers encouraged them, if their planes went down, to use the pin on themselves to avoid betraying their country.
在冷战的高峰期，中情局的飞行员会随身携带一枚银元，上面附有一枚毒针。上司鼓励他们，如果飞机坠毁，就把毒针用在自己身上，以免背叛国家。
Of course, not every spy heeded this advice. In the spring of 1960, the Soviet military shot down the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and captured him alive, leaving President Dwight D. Eisenhower caught in a quandary. His administration initially issued a false cover story but quickly regretted it. “When the world can entertain not the slightest doubt of the facts,” Eisenhower later recalled, “there is no point trying to evade the issue.” Less than two years after Powers was captured, he crossed the Glienicke Bridge from East Germany to freedom as part of a prisoner swap.
当然，并不是所有间谍都听从了这个建议。1960年春天，苏联军方击落了一架美国U-2飞机，活捉了飞行员弗朗西斯·加里·鲍尔斯，这让艾森豪威尔总统陷入了两难境地。政府最初发布了一个虚假的说法来试图掩盖，但很快就后悔了。艾森豪威尔后来回忆说：“当世人对事实没有丝毫怀疑时，就没有必要再回避问题了。”鲍尔斯被俘后不到两年，作为囚犯交换的一部分，从东德穿过格列尼克桥获得自由。
Yet amid the hubbub of Powers’s release, another American spy continued to languish, largely forgotten, in foreign captivity. Jack Downey, a Connecticut-bred and Yale-educated nephew of the singer Morton Downey, was 22 in 1952, when Chinese troops shot down his C-47 over Manchuria during the Korean War.
然而，在鲍尔斯获释的喧闹声中，另一名美国间谍继续在国外忍受囚禁，几乎被人们遗忘。杰克·唐尼是歌手莫顿·唐尼的侄子，出生于康涅狄格州，毕业于耶鲁大学。1952年，朝鲜战争期间，中国军队在满洲上空击落了他驾驶的C-47飞机，当时他22岁。
广告
Although Downey confessed his identity as a C.I.A. operative to his captors after 16 days, the U.S. government refused to acknowledge his mission for more than two decades. Downey would ultimately become the longest-held prisoner of war in American history, until President Nixon negotiated his release and Downey finally departed his cell in 1973 wearing a Mao suit and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap.
尽管唐尼在16天后向俘虏他的人坦白了自己中情局特工的身份，但美国政府20多年来一直拒绝承认他的任务。唐尼最终成为美国历史上被关押时间最长的战俘，直到1973年尼克松总统通过谈判让他得到释放，唐尼终于穿着中山装，戴着波士顿红袜队的棒球帽离开了牢房。
“Prisoner of Lies,” Barry Werth’s thoughtful and engaging narrative of Downey’s life and captivity, gallops along from Downey’s school days in the 1940s all the way through the rise of Donald Trump as a public figure in the 1980s. (Downey died in 2014.)
在《谎言的囚徒》中，巴里·沃斯对唐尼的生活和囚禁做了缜密而引人入胜的叙述，从唐尼1940年代的学生时期开始，一直到1980年代唐纳德·特朗普成为公众人物。（唐尼于2014年去世。）
Werth, the author of several other histories and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Scarlett Professor,” is an elegant writer, and a virtue of this book is that it situates Downey’s personal drama in the context of his times, which stretch across the American Century and beyond. It is a reminder of just how intertwined foreign and domestic policies can be; we see in detail how the populist xenophobia of the McCarthy era, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the student protests of the Vietnam War conditioned and confined the maneuvering of spies, diplomats and politicians.
沃斯是一个文笔优美的作家，曾创作多部历史著作，并以《斯卡利特教授》(The Scarlett Professor)入围美国国家书评人协会奖。本书的一个优点是将唐尼的个人经历置于他所处的时代背景中，这个时代跨越了美国世纪，甚至更远。它提醒我们外交政策和国内政策如何交织在一起的；我们在书中可以详细看到麦卡锡时代的民粹主义仇外心理、文化大革命的过激行为，以及越南战争期间的学生抗议活动如何制约和限制间谍、外交官和政治家的行动。
Werth’s book, which draws heavily on Downey’s own posthumously published memoir, shares something of the appeal of Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II survival story “Unbroken” — a tale of resilience in the face of almost unthinkable misfortune. Downey battled foot-long intestinal worms that writhed like cobras. He read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” all the way through seven times. The occasional games of badminton or quoits turned into hypercompetitive grudge matches into which he and his fellow prisoners channeled all their frustrations.
When he was first taken prisoner, he most feared that he would somehow lose his personality under the pressures of captivity. But he comes to recognize that in “the final analysis, you are what you are, and nobody can get to the deepest recesses of your soul.”
刚被囚禁时，他最担心的是在囚禁的压力下，他会以某种方式失去个性。但他逐渐认识到，“归根结底，你就是你，没有人能触及你灵魂的最深处。”
Other aspects of Downey’s story are far less uplifting. His mission — to covertly train a Chinese “third force” loyal to neither Mao nor the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek — was misguided from the start. The ignorance of the young men charged with this task was breathtaking. In 1950, when Downey heard the news that the Korean War had broken out, he and his friends asked each other, “Where the hell is Korea?”
唐尼故事的其他方面远没有那么令人振奋。他的任务是秘密训练一支既不忠于毛泽东也不忠于国民党领袖蒋介石的中国“第三势力”，该任务从一开始就误入了歧途。负责该任务的年轻人的无知程度令人震惊。1950年，当唐尼听到朝鲜战争爆发的消息时，他和朋友们互相询问：“朝鲜到底在哪里?”
Tactically, his mission’s exfiltration scheme was harebrained; it involved flying over a Chinese informant wearing a contraption made of aluminum poles and nylon rope, dangling a hook from the plane to catch the rope, then yanking the informant into the air, Werth writes, “like a marlin at the end of a fishing line.” Over the years, the C.I.A.’s efforts to penetrate mainland China through covert action of this kind were almost entirely unsuccessful.
从战术上讲，他所执行的撤出方案非常荒谬：它飞到一名中国线人头顶，线人穿戴着由铝杆和尼龙绳制成的装置，飞机放下一个钩子抓住线人身上的绳子，然后把线人拉到空中，沃斯写道，“就像钓马林鱼一样”。多年来，中情局通过这类秘密行动渗透中国大陆的努力几乎完全失败。
广告
Mao and his deputies were guilty of their own clumsy statecraft and spy work. Shortly before Downey flew his mission, Mao wrote to Stalin complaining — incorrectly — that American pilots had dropped “black flies, fleas and lice” on Chinese soldiers in North Korea. (“The American imperialists in Korea have systematically and deliberately disseminated the bacilli carriers,” he told his Soviet counterpart.) After Downey was captured and confessed, his Chinese interrogators revealed that they did not really understand the structure of the American intelligence apparatus. The C.I.A. was still in its infancy, and his captors found it difficult to grasp why the U.S. would operate a second intelligence agency separate from its military.
毛泽东和手下在国家治理和间谍工作方面也失误连连。在唐尼执行任务前不久，毛泽东写信给斯大林，（错误地）抱怨美国飞行员在朝鲜向中国士兵投掷了“黑蝇、跳蚤和虱子”。（“在朝鲜的美帝国主义者有计划地蓄意散布杆菌携带者，”他告诉苏联领袖。）在唐尼被捕并认罪后，他的中国审讯人员透露，他们并不真正了解美国情报机构的结构。当时的中情局还处于起步阶段，逮捕唐尼的人很难理解，为什么美国要在军方之外设立第二个情报机构。
What Beijing sought more than anything was an admission of guilt — an acknowledgment that Downey had indeed been a spy. Werth faults the “crusading Christian-nationalist” brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles, who headed the C.I.A. and State Department in the ’50s, for refusing to puncture the righteous outrage of the American public and admit Downey’s true role.
北京最希望看到的是唐尼认罪——承认自己确实是一名间谍。沃斯指责50年代担任中情局局长和国务卿的艾伦·杜勒斯和约翰·福斯特·杜勒斯兄弟是“基督教民族主义十字军”，他们拒绝承认唐尼的真实角色，不想让美国公众的义愤泄气，。
Only Downey himself comes across as sensible. “I think it’s just as well not to put in time trying to overthrow other people’s governments if you’re not in a state of war with them,” he tells a C.I.A. psychologist after his release. It is moments like these, above all, that provide a glimpse of Downey’s true character and courage.
只有唐尼本人表现得很理智。“我认为，如果你没有和别人处于战争状态，最好不要花时间去推翻他们的政府，”他在获释后对中情局的一名心理学家说。最重要的是，正是这样的时刻，让我们得以一窥唐尼的真实性格和勇气。
PRISONER OF LIES: Jack Downey’s Cold War | By Barry Werth | Simon & Schuster | 422 pp. | $30.99
《谎言的囚徒——杰克·唐尼的冷战》|巴里·沃斯|西蒙与舒斯特出版社|422页|30.99美元
