by Ted Gup
In June Redmond wrote his wife telling her that he had met someone new in prison and was going to marry her upon his release. It was a pathetic and desperate ploy to smoke out the truth. “Naturally this is not true,” Redmond confided in his mother, “but I thought that she might at least in anger write me an honest account of her activities if she thought I intended to marry someone else. After all I have been a prisoner more than eleven years so I don’t know any women.”
Ruth Redmond was torn. She feared that telling him the truth might be the coup de grâce. Withholding it any longer would drive him even deeper into depression.
In June 1962 she wrote Redmond all that she knew of Lydia. The truth was that Lydia had divorced her son in Mexico years earlier. On June 21, 1960, Lydia, then thirty-two and working in a clerical job at Georgetown University, had married a man ten years her junior. His name was Gerasimos Koskinas. He was an immigrant from Greece who made his living as a driver. It had been a civil ceremony at the Arlington County Courthouse in Virginia. On the marriage application Lydia had listed her place of birth as Harbin, China. The maiden name she gave was unfamiliar to the Redmonds or to those once assigned to her case at the CIA.
But within two years that marriage, too, was troubled. It was not until September 1962 that, according to Hugh Redmond, Lydia finally wrote and spelled it all out—the Mexican divorce, her marriage to a younger man, the problems surfacing in her new marriage. There was even a suggestion that he come to her aid, that he challenge the Mexican divorce on the grounds that he had been unaware of it. Such a protest would nullify the divorce and subsequent marriage. But Redmond wanted no part of it. He was devastated.
A few weeks later, in an effort to bring his spirits up, Ruth Redmond arranged, with the cooperation of the CIA, to visit her son in China a second time. Even as one arm of the Agency helped her make travel arrangements and secretly channeled funds to her, the rest of the organization was engrossed in matters even more grave.
At noon on October 19, 1962, Ruth Redmond crossed into mainland China for her second visit. World tensions were never higher. The Cuban missile crisis had begun five days earlier.
Ruth Redmond was permitted four visits with her son. The first of these was on October 22—the very day that President Kennedy went on television to announce to the nation both the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the U.S. quarantine of shipping to that island nation. On her way to the prison that day she saw Chinese militia conducting exercises in the public parks. From every building hung banners that declared “Cuba Yes, Yankee No!” The frail sixty-year-old cafeteria worker from Yonkers found herself in an alien and hostile land readying itself for a nuclear Armageddon.
But even that sobering reality did not prepare her for what awaited her at the prison. In the intervening four years since she had last seen her son, he had gone from a young and vital man to one whose face was now prematurely creased with age and worry. His right eye and cheek were afflicted with a nervous twitch or spasm—a tic she would call it. His lower right eyelashes were missing. Distraught over his condition, she pleaded with the Chinese to allow her to extend her stay an extra day so that she could be with her son on his forty-third birthday. They refused. So she gave her son his birthday gift a day early. It was a wristwatch, a way to measure the passage of time in lieu of any other.
In their final meeting Hugh Redmond seemed curiously upbeat. He repeatedly used the phrase “when I get home,” not “if I get home.”
A year later Ruth Redmond returned for yet another visit. This time she detected what she called “a vacant look in his eyes.” Twice he had been taken to the infirmary for treatment of a condition he was not allowed to mention. His clothes appeared to be falling off of him. When she handed him a new pair of shoes, the guards laughed. They knew his routine, that he would walk fifteen miles a day, pacing about in his tiny cell. But if the walls of the prison seemed to be closing in on him, his intellectual limits were receding. He had taught himself Chinese, Russian, French, and Spanish. As soon as he mastered one language, he would go on to another, fearing that the ennui of prison life would otherwise catch up with him. He asked his mother to send him a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And as she was about to leave, he told her he had but one dream—to come home.
For a time after that, his letters came at the rate of one a month. Most contained lists of books he wished to read—The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, by Dimitri Merezhkovsky; The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone; The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. But by 1966—with the eruption of China’s Cultural Revolution—incoming letters were increasingly censored, or confiscated in their entirety. Packages no longer arrived. The war in Vietnam was raging and America was seen as the incarnation of evil. Hugh Redmond, its agent, would be made to shoulder the full weight of that animosity.
One of the last letters he received brought news that his mother had suffered a stroke. She was now fragile and birdlike, paralyzed on her left side, and barely able to speak. Redmond wrote his sister suggesting that she make flash cards with one hundred of the most common words to try to teach his mother how to speak again. He also asked that she be provided a typewriter and be taught to peck with one finger. His mother’s letters had been a vital link to the world beyond his cell.
But even then, Redmond could steel himself and show flashes of humor to console his mother. On December 7, 1966, he wrote: “I had an accident a few days ago. Sitting reading, I suddenly sneezed, (a sneeze that Dad would have been proud of.) It would have shaken the bats off the rafters in the attic if I had been in the coal bin. When I stood up I saw that it [his belt] had broken, snapped right in half, so now I have to use a piece of string to hold my pants up . . . I don’t know what my waist size is. That depends on the time of the year. Sometimes I am not an eagle’s talon in the waist, other times I barrel up with a banker’s bulge.”
Years passed without a letter from Redmond. Occasionally diplomats in Hong Kong would report unconfirmed sightings of him from missionaries and businessmen recently released from Chinese prisons. Some described a man who fit his description but who appeared to be too old to be Redmond.
In the spring of 1968 Ruth Redmond sent a letter to Chinese Premier Chou En-lai pleading with him to provide some information of her son. “If he is ill or unable to write would you not relieve a concerned mother’s mind by having the prison authorities inform me of his condition,” she wrote. There was no reply.
In August 1968 the CIA, working through Yonkers attorney Sol Friedman, hatched a final desperate plan to win Redmond’s release. After years of refusing to offer a ransom for Redmond’s freedom, the Agency concluded that there was no other alternative. It devised an elaborate scheme designed to keep the Agency’s role a secret and to maintain the decades-long denial of any connection between Redmond and the CIA. With Friedman’s help it would appear that thirty-two anonymous sponsors had contributed money to a fund aimed at winning Redmond’s release.
If pressed for the sources of those funds, Friedman stood prepared to provide the names of leading sports figures and celebrities of the day. Among those who had apparently consented to appear as donors and lend their names to the ruse were baseball great Jackie Robinson, and boxer Rocky Marciano, and even an NFL coach. The Agency would provide $1 million.
Advertisements of the ransom were placed in capitals around the world, wherever the Chinese had diplomatic representatives. But apparently unaware of the CIA plan, the U.S. Treasury Department, in August 1968, issued a warning that it would be illegal for an American citizen to transfer money to China without a special license. Undaunted, Sol Friedman, then chairman of the Yonkers Citizens’ Committee for the Release of Hugh Francis Redmond, went to The Hague and Paris in mid-November 1968 to meet with diplomats and others close to the Beijing regime, hoping to pique an interest in exchanging Redmond for cash. There were no takers and the plan was abandoned. Two more years of absolute silence followed.
On
July 10, 1970, the Chinese issued a press release from Shanghai that contained two simple statements of fact. The first was that that day they were releasing James Edward Walsh, a seventy-nine-year-old Catholic bishop whom they had been holding for twelve years. For an instant the U.S. consulate’s office in Hong Kong was jubilant.
Then the consular staff read the second part of the message and were staggered.
On the evening of April 13, 1970, according to the Chinese, Hugh Francis Redmond had slashed himself with an American-made razor blade. He had severed “the artery of the medial aspect of his left elbow and the arteries of his wrists and mortally wounded himself.” The Chinese said they had rushed Redmond to the hospital but that it was already too late. He had lost too much blood to be saved.
Redmond had lived nineteen of his fifty years behind bars.
Even in death, Redmond was branded by the Chinese as a “United States imperialist spy.” He had, according to the state-run New China News Agency, been sent to carry out “espionage sabotage in Shanghai, Peking and Shenyang and thus committed grave crimes.” The Chinese said Redmond’s body had already been cremated and that the Red Cross had been instructed to “inform the culprit Redmond’s relatives of his death.”
A cable from the Chinese Red Cross asked that no more letters or packages be sent to him. There was no explanation for the three months that had elapsed between Redmond’s alleged suicide and the announcement of his death. At 10:30 A.M. on July 30, 1970—even as an exhausted and unshaven Bishop Walsh was released—an urn said to contain Redmond’s ashes was turned over to representatives of the American Red Cross.
It happened on the same Lowu Bridge where, three times before, Redmond’s mother had crossed from Hong Kong and the New Territories into mainland China. The handover of the urn that midsummer day was otherwise unremarkable, part of the routine monthly exchange in which Red Cross representatives passed on food parcels destined for American prisoners held in China. Three days later the Redmond family asked that Hugh Redmond’s ashes be returned to the United States. The urn was shipped by air to New York.
Redmond was finally on his way home.
For the Chinese it had been a brilliant but cynical ploy, releasing the aging bishop at the same time that they announced Redmond’s death. In newspapers and radio reports nearly everywhere but Yonkers, the freeing of Bishop Walsh eclipsed news of Redmond’s death. The Chinese had held Redmond for longer than any other American prisoner. They had interrogated him, subjected him to prolonged isolation, and attempted in every way they knew to break him. Yet now, by veiling news of his death in the announcement of Walsh’s release, they were being praised for showing compassion. At the State Department many interpreted the release of Walsh as a gesture to the West, an invitation for improved relations.
President Nixon, already anxious to improve ties with China, later met with Bishop Walsh at the White House. The talking points were supplied by the office of Henry Kissinger, special assistant for national security affairs. At the meeting no mention was made of Hugh Redmond.
But at Langley and in Yonkers there was anger and disbelief. Why would Redmond, having endured nineteen years of imprisonment with unbending defiance, suddenly capitulate and take his own life? Why had the Chinese waited three months to tell anyone of his death? And why had they been so eager to cremate the body, if not to conceal the actual cause of death?
None of this made much difference to Ruth Redmond. She was now seventy-two, the victim of three disabling strokes, the last and most devastating of which occurred on April 30, 1970—two weeks after Hugh’s death. She was now confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed on her right side, and barely able to speak. For three months she had been living at the Hudson View Nursing Home. She was no longer able to recognize even her closest friends.
On Monday morning, August 3, 1970, Yonkers said good-bye to Hugh Francis Redmond. All flags were lowered to half-mast. The funeral cortege, escorted by six policemen on motorcycles, left the Flynn Memorial Home at 10:15 A.M. and headed for the Church of St. John the Baptist. Along the way, it paused in front of the Hudson View Nursing Home on Ashburton Avenue. As the funeral procession passed by, a frail old woman in a wheelchair could be observed waving to the procession from the window of the sunporch. It was Redmond’s mother. She was described that day as “dressed in a soft pink nightgown under a cotton robe, her hair coifed and a tinge of rouge upon her cheeks and lips.” Weighing a scant eighty pounds, she watched with dry eyes. It was whispered by those familiar with Ruth Redmond’s suffering that it was a blessing she was in her condition. The stroke had dulled her mind and memory, sparing her the final pain of her son’s death. What passed before her window that morning might just as well have been a slow-moving parade.
Some who lined the street saluted as the procession passed. In the church two hundred mourners listened as Rev. Bernard Quinn read the eulogy. “After his long life of suffering and serving God, Hugh Francis Redmond has begun his eternal life in heaven.” In the sanctuary the urn containing his ashes was covered with a white linen doily.
Four former mayors—all who had been in office through the nineteen years of Redmond’s imprisonment—served as honorary pallbearers. Redmond’s friends, middle-aged men and women who had not seen Redmond since their youth, gathered in the church. Sol Friedman, who had headed the Yonkers civic group campaigning for Redmond’s release, gave the graveside eulogy. “Today,” he began, “we bury the ashes of Hugh Redmond. For certain, no one can ever bury the indomitable spirit and courage of this man . . . Never once could the Chinese government extract a confession of an admission of guilt from him.”
After a final blessing, the silence was shattered by a four-gun salute from the color guard of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7. A bugle wailed “Taps,” and a perfectly folded flag—the one that now gathers dust in a nephew’s cellar—was presented to Redmond’s sister.
His ashes were buried in a silver and lead urn on a hillside in Yonkers’s Oakland Cemetery beneath a modest granite tombstone featuring a cross and wreath. The inscription reads: “His Country Above All Else.” Next to him lay his father, Hugh Redmond, Sr.
Three years later his mother was buried beside him.
Neither the CIA nor the Redmond family was ever persuaded that Redmond had committed suicide. Nor was there any way of proving that the ashes were actually those of Hugh Redmond. Testing them would have revealed nothing except perhaps that they were of human origin.
Redmond’s death alarmed the Agency and put new urgency into efforts to free Fecteau and Downey, who had spent eighteen years in prison. There were reasons now to be hopeful. Even as Nixon prosecuted the war in Vietnam, he sought rapprochement with China. In March 1971 he lifted passport restrictions on travel to that country. On April 6 the Chinese invited the U.S. table tennis team to the mainland, in what came to be known as Ping-Pong diplomacy. Years of glacial hostilities were rapidly melting away.
What might Redmond have thought if he could have known that in July 1971—a year after his death—Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger, would secretly visit China and agree to share sensitive intelligence reports with Premier Chou En-lai? Might he not have wondered what had been achieved by his years of refusal to admit he was a spy? And what had the Agency to show for so many sacrifices in its covert war against that country? Beijing would claim that of some 212 Chinese agents who parachuted into the mainland in the early 1950s—with CIA help—half had been killed, the other half captured.
Fecteau was luckier. On December 13, 1971—two months before Nixon’s scheduled trip to Beijing—he was at last released. He was flown to Valley Forge Military Hospital in Pennsylvania. There he was placed under observation and given a battery of medical tests. The Agency dispatched Ben DeFelice and one of its psychologists to the hospital. Fecteau, then forty-three, had never been outgoing or gregarious, even before his capture. But after years of solitary confinement, he was painfully withdrawn. DeFelice was there not only to assist hi
m in dealing with bureaucratic matters but, perhaps more important, with Fecteau’s emotional reentry.
Just three days after Fecteau’s return to the United States, DeFelice got permission to take him on a drive through the surrounding countryside and towns. Fecteau had never before seen a shopping mall. He was bedazzled by the colors and contours of cars. They stopped for a burger at a fast-food restaurant. It was all so new, so alien to Fecteau. Afterward, DeFelice scribbled down some notes of the experience. He called it his “Rip Van Winkle piece,” after the fictional character who slept for twenty years and awoke an old man, his wife dead, his daughter married, and the portrait of King George replaced by that of George Washington. So it was for Richard Fecteau. His infant twins were now women, and he had missed the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.
One pleasant surprise awaited him. The puny salary he thought was due him had grown, after years of Agency investments and promotions, into a hefty sum. Fecteau declined sizable offers from publishers and movie studios to tell his story, fearing it might jeopardize his Agency colleague Downey’s chances for release. Fecteau later remarried his first wife, Margaret, and became assistant athletic director at Boston University.
On February 21, 1972, Nixon arrived in China for his historic meeting with Premier Chou En-lai and Chairman Mao Zedong. In the very city where Hugh Redmond rotted away in prison, the two leaders issued a joint statement on February 27, known as the Shanghai Communiqué, agreeing to normalize relations.
A year later, in February 1973, Nixon held a press conference. The last question asked was about Downey. At the Agency Downey’s friends were convinced that the question was planted and the answer rehearsed. Nixon seized—if not created—that opportunity to finally acknowledge what the Chinese had known for two decades: that Downey was a CIA operative. That was all that the Chinese had been waiting for.
