FOIAWEAR — EXTRAORDINARY FIDELITY / The Snatch Pickup 1952 Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 059

EXTRAORDINARY FIDELITY — on the evening of 29 November 1952, two young CIA paramilitary officers, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, boarded a C-47 with a parting instruction from the ground crew: “If you get shot down, don’t tell ’em you’re CIA. Tell ’em anything, but don’t tell ’em you’re CIA.”

The mission was a snatch pickup, a manoeuvre the Agency had never carried out before: the aircraft would fly fifty feet above the ground while a hook beneath it caught a line attached to a harness worn by the agent they had come to bring out, jerking him into the air to be reeled in. They reached the drop zone after midnight in near-full moonlight and snow. Anti-aircraft fire came up through the floor of the cabin. They had flown into a trap. The aircraft crash-landed, and the two Civil Air Transport pilots, Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy, were killed.

Downey and Fecteau were taken to Shenyang and held in solitary confinement, interrogated for hours a day for two years before being tried in 1954. Fecteau was sentenced to twenty years and Downey to life. CIA told their families they were dead so the families could collect insurance. The Agency kept promoting them, put their pay into escrow, and lobbied for their release for nineteen years. Fecteau came home across the Lo Wu Bridge in December 1971; Downey followed in March 1973, more than twenty years after the crash. A British officer on the far side of the bridge threw him a salute. In 2013 both men received the Distinguished Intelligence Cross.

The QR code on the front opens the source: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/extraordinary-fidelity-two-cia-officers-imprisoned-in-china/ — the CIA’s own account of the mission and the twenty years that followed.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717, 6.1 oz garment-dyed cotton, S–4XL. Front print only; plain back. Artwork approximately 10 × 10 in, QR approximately 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Colours: the shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the cut-paper silhouette in warm bone on Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy and Pepper, and the same shape struck in black with a crimson tail fin on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green and Chambray.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, tumble dry low. Do not iron the print directly.

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