John Delury has written a beautifully constructed narrative history that moves back and forth between the US and the PRC. The focus is on the aggressive secret tactics designed by Washington and made operational by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. The goal was to destabilize the Beijing regime and at best replace the existing government with one that was led by Third Force Western friendly leaders like General Zhang Fakui. Beijing took the threat seriously and reacted in a proactive, paranoid fashion. Delury argues that Beijing's leadership effectively applied “paternalist terror” methods to quickly eliminate any hint of domestic opposition. To humanize an otherwise long and complicated tale of the CIA and American policy failures in China, Delury highlights the fate of John T. Downey. Downey was the CIA agent who was captured after being shot down in the mountains of Manchuria during a botched munitions and supply drop to local agents in November 1952. Downey rotted in a Beijing prison until 1973, when his freedom was part of the China opening negotiated by Nixon and Kissinger. Less well known is the compelling back story of the unrelenting lobbying campaign directed at both Washington and Beijing by Downey's mother, Mary, to free her son.

Interestingly enough, the details of the Downey story are not really told until chapter ten (of 16 chapters). Up to that point the book is about the birth of the CIA and the intellectual and academic context behind the American secret subversive effort to plant a Third Force in China. To fully understand the origins of the CIA's debacle, Delury argues that one must understand the larger picture, including the rise at the popular level of full-throated anti-communist paranoia (especially Chinese communism) by the late 1940s that accelerated into a witch hunt at the time of China's entry into the Korean War. This narrative moves to a climax in chapter six with details on the programme led first by Senator Joseph McCarthy and then Senator McCarran with “UnAmerican” congressional investigations of individuals in government and the media who “lost China,” like Owen Lattimore, John Fairbank and John S. Service, and organizations like the Institute of Pacific Relations. The story is not new, but Delury retells it well on the basis of a wide range of secondary sources. Ideologues like William Buckley and David N. Rowe, both connected to Yale, duelled in print and on the airwaves with moderate neo-liberal anti-communists from Harvard like Arthur Schlesinger, Fairbank and Lattimore. Ironically enough it was the latter (Fairbank and Lattimore) who successfully persuaded the Dulles brothers of the Eisenhauer administration to support a Third Force movement in the PRC. It was to be made operational by a newly created CIA. Delury usefully traces the rise in the 1940s of the CIA as an umbrella intelligence organization that combined a variety of internationally competing post-Second World War intelligence operations – including the Navy, the Army intelligence's OSS and the FBI.

An intriguing sub-theme throughout the book is the pitting of Harvard vs Yale China experts as advisers and participants in the build-up of the CIA and the Third Force movement. Fairbank and his brother-in-law, Arthur Schlesinger, were allied to Lattimore on the Harvard side. They were targets of the McCarthy–McCarran witch hunt. Downey on the other hand, as Delury repeatedly reminds the reader, was a 1951 Yale graduate (also Delury's alma mater). Perhaps Downey was persuaded to join the CIA's China crusade under the influence, as Delury suggests, of Yale academics like President A. Whitney Griswold, Kenneth Scott Latourette and David N. Rowe or William F. Buckley (class of 1950)? Where David N. Rowe is concerned, Delury makes especially good use of his personal papers.

Readers of the China Quarterly will not find much that is new in Delury's depiction of how the Chinese leadership reacted to and successfully foiled the CIA's secret infiltration campaign. He draws on the considerable existing secondary literature in English on the PRC political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s as well as the counter-intelligence manoeuvrings of Minister Lou Ruiqing and others. There is little use of Chinese sources. And surprisingly, Mao and Zhou's crafty intelligence czar since the 1940s, Li Kenong, merits only one sentence. The story of Zhou Enlai's overtures and attempts to soften US–China relations after 1955 is well told. Why was the successful testing of an atomic bomb by the Chinese in 1964 not mentioned – an event that is commonly thought to have shaken the Washington foreign policy establishment as a kind of wake-up call?

In short, Delury's book is a highly readable and entertaining guide to the failure of the CIA's obsessive disruptive mission in China during the 1950s as well as a window into the wishful thinking and out-of-touch nature of Washington's approach to the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s. Development of the Chinese political context has a lesser, background role in the book. The focus is on how Mao and Zhou outmanoeuvred the Americans. Finally, the pathos of Downey's 21-year captivity and its exploitation by both sides as a pawn in high-stakes diplomacy works well as a device to bring together the various narrative strands of the book.