The Little Red Podcast · Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim

Little Red Podcast x Face Off

March 31, 2026·34 min·2 clips

How Iran gave China the CIA's covert communications system and over 20 US informants died.

November 1952 is where Face Off starts. The United States is five years into the Cold War, anti-communist rhetoric is running hot, and the Korean War is heating up. Two young CIA agents, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, fly from Japan toward northern China to bring home a Chinese operative working for the CIA. Jane Perlez gives the story its spy-story pull, but the episode is not just chasing atmosphere. She frames it through John Delury, author of Agents of Subversion, and Nigel Inkster, the former MI6 Director of Operations. The bigger question is how early covert war in China connects to the current struggle to understand what China's top leadership is doing. Inkster focuses on surveillance, including face recognition, and describes a technical network that makes in-person covert work extremely hard. The harder part is that this did not begin with modern systems. Beijing already had observation posts tracking movement between ring roads and passing along sightings. Neighborhood monitors could register someone's presence and even control access to a padlocked phone. The point lands quietly: Western intelligence has long been up against a political system built to hide decisions, not only a surveillance state with better tools. That secrecy also turns inward. Inkster says Chinese officials can be caught off guard because they often do not know what is happening either. The Communist Party comes across as deliberately opaque, with even top leadership filtered through guarded internal systems. The CCP general office is described as running its own intelligence operation. Face Off closes by pointing to a later discussion of China's worsening economic outlook and what it may mean for U.S.-China relations.

As heard by us

A 1952 CIA disappearance becomes a brisk guide to why China's inner politics remain so hard to read.

A Cold War spy tale gives this Face Off handoff its charge: John Downey and Richard Fecteau fly from Japan toward northern China in 1952, on a CIA mission to retrieve a Chinese operative, then vanish for 20 years.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for a spy story about the CIA's covert war in China.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Little Red Podcast