Far from the glare of Hollywood lights, the CIA on Tuesday premiered a nonfiction film produced for the agency that recounts the mystique and the misery of a botched James Bond-like spy mission in China.
The film, which combines documentary footage and actors re-enacting events, is the first such movie in the spy agency’s history, but relatively few people are likely to see it. The CIA says it is for internal use only, although it granted an Associated Press request to attend the screening. The film documents one of the CIA’s more painful episodes, a failed attempt in November 1952 to recover an ethnic Chinese spy who was part of an agent team the CIA had smuggled into the Manchuria region of northeastern China several months earlier.
It was part of a much larger, long-classified covert action programme aimed at destabilising the revolutionary communist government of Mao Zedong. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the agent team had been compromised, helping the Chinese set a trap.
When an unmarked C-47 cargo plane with two CIA paramilitary officers aboard swooped low over the arranged pickup point, Chinese troops in hiding opened fire. The Chinese had known it was coming and planned an elaborate ambush. The plane burst into flames and belly-flopped in a forested area. The pilots, Robert Snoddy and Norman Schwartz, died. But the two CIA men, John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, survived and were captured, destined to serve two decades in Chinese prisons. The hour-long film, titled Extraordinary Fidelity, was directed by Paul Wimmer, who produced and directed a documentary on the September 11 attacks, Pentagon Under Fire.