Prisoner of Lies by Barry Werth

Author:Barry Werth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

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In mid-July, the Chinese announced the release of Bishop James Walsh, a sixty-seven-year-old Catholic missionary who spent twelve years in a Shanghai prison allegedly for spying and subversion. In 1958, Walsh had received a twenty-year sentence for plotting to “overthrow the new China.” Nixon, as vice president, had denounced the charges as “trumped up”—the same epithet Foster Dulles used to defend Downey and Fecteau but in Walsh’s case was accurate. Walsh confessed to sending money out of the country and helping US and Vatican interests in China, but the Chinese had made him out to be a ruthless, sinister spymaster. Beijing’s leniency sent a signal to Washington that waiving prison terms for other Americans still held in China might be open to discussion—a dramatic reversal of policy going back to 1955.

State radio also reported that another imprisoned spy, fifty-year-old Hugh Redmond, had committed suicide in April, slashing himself with an American-made razor blade. Beijing said officials had rushed “the culprit Redmond” to a hospital, but by then he had bled too much to be saved. Jack “didn’t believe that for a minute,” he later wrote. “[Redmond] had defied the Chinese so vehemently that they never even attempted to subject him to the innocuous political education classes. He was indomitable…. I assumed Redmond had died of a heart attack and that the Communists were embarrassed to admit that a prisoner in their care had died of illness. Somehow it did not occur to them that suicide was an even more damning indictment of their custody.”

The simultaneous disclosure of Redmond’s cruel fate—the Chinese sent an urn with his ashes to his family, but decades before DNA tests, the CIA had no way to determine if the remains in fact were his—tempered Kissinger’s elation about Walsh’s release, but he recognized the timing as “symbolic. It coincided with, and neatly counterbalanced, an announcement of the reopening of talks with the Soviet Union on the navigation of border rivers,” he wrote. China’s next diplomatic signal proved easier to misread. On October 1, Zhou led Edgar Snow and his wife to stand at Mao’s side at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, so as to be photographed together with Mao observing the annual anniversary parade. Kissinger would eventually realize that Mao was indicating that relations with the US now had his personal attention, but he lamented that “we had missed the point when it mattered. Excessive subtlety had produced a failure of communication.”

Nixon and Kissinger secretly had reduced the conduct of foreign affairs to a two-man operation, outmaneuvering, marginalizing, and keeping in the dark Congress and, most pressingly, Foggy Bottom, where the Taiwan lobby remained entrenched. Kissinger told Nixon that signals with the Chinese were “all very well” but a confidential line of high-level communication was urgent, especially in light of Mao’s accelerating overtures to the Soviets. In late October, Nixon met in Washington with Pakistani president Yahya Khan, who was about to travel to Beijing. He asked Khan to convey a personal message that he considered improved relations between the two capitals “essential.

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