China's Choreographed Detentions

Kortney Blythe greets the Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition at Los Angeles International Airport. (By Nick Ut -- Associated Press)

As he and fellow activists Michael McMonagle and Brandi Swindell were being forced to board an airplane bound for Los Angeles, they were escorted by five officers in civilian clothes.

"From the outside it looked like 'la-di-da, just some Americans with their Chinese friends,' " Mahoney said. But one of the officers had warned him as they entered the airport, "Don't make noise. Don't link arms."

The officers were the same ones who had threatened Mahoney and the others with jail a few hours earlier in the interrogation room. "You must leave the country now!" a male officer had barked after replacing a female officer who had been calmly taking the detainees' statements. "Leave now! You have to pay to go back!"

Mahoney said the sudden anger was like one end of a seesaw they had been on for about seven hours of interrogation, as officers were alternately sympathetic and harsh. Their mobile phones had been seized, and their requests to call the U.S. Embassy had been denied.

After 45 minutes of arguing about who would pay for tickets on the next flight out of Beijing, Mahoney stood firm and said the three would not pay for their deportation. A senior officer then abruptly ordered them loaded into a police van. "You are going to jail," he told them.

After they were put into the van, "no one said anything for about five minutes," Mahoney said. "We were trying to stay brave. We knew this fear was a drop in the bucket compared to what so many dissidents in China go through. We had the sense of things being completely out of our control."

After more than an hour of driving, including a stop at their hotel, where police searched their rooms and allowed them to take a few pieces of clothing in plastic bags, the three saw road signs indicating the van was headed to the airport.

A similar experience was recounted by Tibet activist John Hocevar, who was detained for protesting on Aug. 10. Hocevar and four others were also taken by police to KFC. "When we started to eat, eight people were taking photos of us," Hocevar said in a phone interview after he got off the plane in New York.

Hocevar said plainclothes officers had earlier rushed to prevent his group from hoisting a "Tibetans Are Dying for Freedom" banner across the street from Tiananmen. The protesters were quickly surrounded by the officers in an attempt to block them from view.

Hocevar shouted "Free Tibet now!" as he was dragged off the street into a tourist ticket office by a man wrenching his arm and repeatedly yelling "Shut up!"

A brief video capturing the detention scene, posted on YouTube, shows a Tibetan woman from Germany named Padma-Dolma Fielitz, 21, being dragged across the office floor like a mop as plainclothes officers try to pull a Tibetan flag from her grasp. Uniformed police officers separated her from the four other protesters and then herded Hocevar's group into a van, with two young women in plain clothes walking closest to the protesters.

"They were very conscious of appearances," Hocevar said. "There were no obvious signs of brutality."

About seven hours after being picked up, Hocevar and five others were marched to a plane to New York. Although they also refused to purchase tickets, police simply took their wallets, extracted their bank and credit cards, and used them to complete the purchases. "I have reported my card stolen to the bank," Hocevar said. "I will contest the charges."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling in Washington contributed to this report.