King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  Nichols stayed.

  “I was a loner,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In a disorderly advance to the rear, the loner follows the withdrawal leaving a path of destruction of millions of dollars of aircraft and other supplies. . . . I appointed myself the job of destroying what others had left behind: buildings which contained classified material, aircraft, vehicles, communications equipment. . . . I used gasoline, hand grenades and small arms to do most of the destroying.”

  But Nichols was not a loner. Serbando Torres stayed with him, risking his life and winning a Bronze Star. “If he was the only American,” asked Torres, “where the hell was I?” Torres did not see Nichols destroy anything in Seoul other than his office files.

  Anxiety turned to mass hysteria in the streets of Seoul on Tuesday, the third day of the war. Rhee and senior ministers in his government fled south by train. Ambassador Muccio and his remaining staff evacuated in a convoy later that morning. Some South Korean military leaders had fallen back to Suwon, a city twenty-one miles to the south, to organize an effort (which failed) to stop the North Korean army before it could cross the Han River.

  Nichols and Torres also fled to Suwon on Tuesday morning, but American officers there immediately ordered them back to Seoul. They returned in separate jeeps, with Nichols in the lead. An air force history of Nichols’s spy unit, which Nichols wrote, says the two men spent the remainder of Tuesday destroying radio equipment and a C-54 transport plane at Kimpo airfield. Torres said that account is fiction.

  “We just waited around,” he said. “We never went near Kimpo [ten miles outside the city] and we didn’t destroy anything. We drove to American dependent housing, which was deserted, and bedded down for the night. Around two in the morning, we were told that the North Korean army was just outside the gates of Seoul. We said we better skedaddle.”

  Back in their jeeps at 3:00 a.m. on day four of the war, they drove toward the Han River, inching through streets choked with panicked families fleeing by truck, bicycle, oxcart, and on foot. In Seoul, there was only one highway bridge over the half-mile-wide river. Nichols and Torres had not heard the explosion that earlier in the night destroyed part of the bridge.

  The South Korean army, without announcing it to Seoul citizens, had planted 3,600 pounds of TNT on the southern side of the bridge. Intended to stop North Korean tanks, the explosion was disastrously ill timed, killing between 500 and 1,000 civilians and soldiers who were crossing it while trapping 30,000 South Korean soldiers on the north side of the river.

  Nichols and Torres abandoned their jeeps near the Han River and walked in darkness toward the damaged bridge, where they could see shattered vehicles and mangled bodies. In his autobiography, Nichols said he was surrounded by “blood, guts, and powder.” In a night of chaos and panic, he described himself as singularly heroic.

  “I was the only American there at the time, all others had evacuated. I stayed there as long as I could—until the enemy was within small arms firing range. I obtained a small boat, permitted others to get in, jumped in the water, held on to the back of the boat and kicked like hell in an effort to get to the other side in as short order as possible. The boat was loaded so heavily that the top edge was only two or three inches above water level—had anyone sneezed or moved the boat would have turned over. In those days CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) agents carried a metal badge, much like one carried by our policemen, this was used as a means of identification. I lost mine while crossing the river. . . .”

  Nichols overstated his heroism once again. He was not the only American on the wrong side of the river that night. In addition to Torres, there were at least thirty others from the KMAG advisory group—and four American journalists—who were also trying to flee Seoul.

  As Torres recalled the night, there was no enemy fire in the vicinity of the bridge, only the anguished cries of Koreans desperate to cross the river. Torres fired his carbine into the air to get the attention of South Korean army engineers in a small boat out in the middle of the Han. They quickly came to the riverbank when they heard the two Americans shouting in English and in Korean. Within minutes, the boat picked them up, together with Nichols’s dog, Brownie, a mutt that would stay with him throughout the war. Frantic Korean civilians pushed and shoved, fighting with one another to get aboard, and several of them fell into the Han. But the boat was never dangerously overloaded and Nichols did not jump in the water or kick like hell to propel it across the river; the boat had an outboard motor. The crossing was quick and uneventful. Nichols did not get wet, although he did lose his CIC badge. Within a few hours of their escape, Seoul fell to Kim Il Sung’s invading army.

  To Torres, Nichols’s version of the river crossing was amusingly self-glorifying, but it got the most important thing right. “Nick wasn’t afraid of a damn thing,” he said. “He was so fearless in that war you could say he was crazy.”

  From the south side of the river, Nichols and Torres hitched a ride to Suwon, where American commanders were scrambling to find bomb targets. After meeting with his contacts in Rhee’s security apparatus, Nichols came up with three targets in Seoul—the main railway station where troops from the North were concentrating, a motor pool where thirty North Korean tanks were supposedly parked, and a seized radio transmitter already broadcasting North Korean propaganda. Nichols annotated the targets on Korean maps of the city and sent them by plane to the Far East Air Forces headquarters in Tokyo. The next morning, two U.S. B-29s bombed Seoul’s railway station, where a large number of North Korean troops were reported killed and wounded. “The most ground information we ever had” in the early days of the war was “a map of Seoul and the location of the North Koreans in Seoul as sent by Mr. Nichols,” said Lieutenant Colonel O’Wighton D. Simpson, deputy for intelligence at the Fifth Air Force.

  Nichols’s self-aggrandizement does not negate his superb performance in the first months of the war. General Stratemeyer, head of Far East Air Forces, quickly promoted him from lieutenant to captain and wrote in his diary that Nichols had “performed the impossible.”

  Five days into the war, on June 30, American and South Korean forces retreated south from Suwon. Enemy tanks rolled in on July 2. In the intervening days, Nichols snuck back into Suwon with a unit of South Koreans and destroyed American planes left behind at the airfield. Two weeks later, in the first of the fifty airborne reconnaissance missions he participated in during the war, Nichols volunteered to fly at low altitude in an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft over Pyongyang, where he spotted eighteen Soviet fighter planes. His intelligence led to “a highly successful strike” for which he was awarded the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two days after that he saved the life of the deputy chief of staff of the Korean air force, whose jeep had careered off a road and flipped over in a swamp. Nichols was awarded the Soldier’s Medal for heroism not involving actual combat with the enemy. About a month into the war, in the southern town of Taegu, Nichols was wounded and won a Purple Heart after leading a patrol of South Korean soldiers who stopped a larger North Korean unit trying to infiltrate Taegu airfield.

  In early August 1950, with the North Koreans relentlessly pushing south and the Americans in disarray on the ground, Nichols went after big game—Russian-made T-34 tanks. The U.S. military viewed these World War II–era tanks as North Korea’s most lethal weapon, saying they were “largely instrumental for the many casualties and setbacks suffered” in the first weeks of war. The North Korean invasion was led by 150 T-34s, and through July, American and South Korean forces struggled to stop them, often dying in the process. Standard 2.36-inch bazookas were useless against them, as was cannon fire from American light tanks. Air attacks had also failed to stop the tanks.

  Nichols learned on August 3 that two T-34s had been disabled behind enemy lines. An air force citation says that he rushed there with four Korean assistants:

  Fully aware of the extreme danger involved, he advanced beyo
nd the front lines, crawling through intense cross fire. Reaching the disabled tanks, Captain Nichols discovered that enemy tank crews and other enemy troops were less than 40 feet distant. Despite the threat of imminent discovery, and equipped only with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, Captain Nichols removed all nomenclature plates, vital operation parts, technical manuals, the complete radio, and several 85 millimeter shells. He further determined by evaluation the vulnerable points where the tank could successfully be attacked. Although removal of this equipment necessitated several arduous trips of nine hours’ duration under increasingly hazardous conditions, Captain Nichols continued, unmindful of his personal safety. When one of his assistants was wounded by mortar fire, Captain Nichols, at the risk of his life, evacuated him to friendly lines.

  Nichols won the Silver Star, America’s third-highest military honor, for “conspicuous gallantry” in obtaining “essential” intelligence for the war effort. The weakness found in the rear armor of the tank—an opening for a vent that cooled the engine—was soon exploited by air force fighter jets, which began killing T-34s. Nichols claimed in his autobiography that his tank salvage mission “caused a change in the war. . . . The morale of our troops went up and instead of retreating, we started—for a change—to stand our own ground.”

  Nichols, again, overstated the impact of his work. When the U.S. Army shipped in larger tanks and more powerful rocket launchers in the late summer and fall of 1950, it also destroyed plenty of Soviet tanks. Yet the importance of the T-34 salvage mission was undeniable: air force attacks with rockets and napalm became a highly effective way of destroying T-34s.

  There is a question, though, about what Nichols actually did on the ground during the tank mission. He seems to have exaggerated his personal bravery. Like several of the other “impossible” missions Nichols received medals for in the initial weeks of the war, the tank operation had few independent eyewitnesses. The citation for his Silver Star seems to be based on accounts that he alone provided; the wording echoes his autobiography. There is, however, an independent version of what happened during that mission. It comes from a highly reputable, high-ranking South Korean officer who was on the scene. Yoon Il-gyun was assigned to work for Nichols in the early summer of 1950 when he was a major in the intelligence section of the South Korean air force. He would later become a general and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, now called the National Intelligence Service. In a memoir published five decades after the war, Yoon wrote that Nichols never climbed into the T-34. Instead, he and Nichols waited at a safe distance from the damaged tank as two Korean volunteers camouflaged themselves, crawled to the T-34, and climbed inside.

  “They were reading documents inside the tank and getting changed into North Korean uniforms and having a cigarette. I was astonished by their courage to be able to grab everything inside that tank. . . . Based on an analysis of our obtained information, a conclusion was made that napalm would be effective.”

  Yoon discussed what happened during the tank mission in an interview for this book in Seoul in 2015, when he was ninety. It was “understandable,” he said, that Nichols’s Silver Star citation would be exaggerated, because that was standard procedure during the war. He explained that American officers involved in planning a mission were always honored for its success, regardless of what they did on the ground. Throughout his time in Korea, Nichols’s craving for ribbons, honors, and medals did not go unnoticed by the U.S. Air Force. An evaluation of his effectiveness as an officer in 1955 found that his “desire to have his performance recognized by decoration” soured his standing among his own men. Seven years after he was pushed out of the air force, he requested the complete text of all his awards and decorations. In his will, he insisted to his heirs that his medals “cannot ever be sold, destroyed, traded or given away under any circumstances other than in case of an extreme emergency.”

  Even so, Yoon said he believed Nichols fully deserved his medal and that the tank mission was a tide-shifting event in the war.

  The first weeks of the North Korean invasion were among the most catastrophic in the history of the U.S. military. Some infantry units were gripped with “bug out fever,” as GIs ran for their lives at the first sign of an attack. Many were poorly armed, ill trained, overweight, and overwhelmed. “I saw young Americans turn in battle or throw down their arms, cursing their government for what they thought was embroilment in a hopeless cause,” wrote Marguerite Higgins in the New York Herald Tribune.

  For those who fought, the numbers of dead, wounded, and missing soared on all sides. By August 1, American losses had risen above 6,000. In the South Korean army, a staggering 70,000 men were missing. North Korea, too, paid an enormous cost for the ground that it gained, losing 58,000 men in the first five weeks of the war. The North’s army, initially dismissed by MacArthur as likely to run at the mere sight of American soldiers, earned a reputation for toughness, discipline, and cruelty. They handcuffed American prisoners of war and shot them in the head. As grim details about the fighting became known in the United States, the initial flush of patriotic fervor turned to dread.

  The huge losses on all sides during the invasion summer—captured in newspaper dispatches and detailed over the years in books—have long framed Western understanding of the Korean War. Yet there is another story of cruelty and killing that took place in Korea that summer, one that the United States and South Korea covered up for more than half a century.

  The government of Syngman Rhee used the invasion as an excuse to slaughter—in just a few weeks—tens of thousands of South Korean civilians, including women and children, who it suspected were Communists or who happened to be in jail when war broke out. They died because Rhee and others in his government feared they might join or help the Korean People’s Army. The massacres were conducted by South Korean police and army forces—often as American servicemen watched, taking photographs, and sometimes writing reports. MacArthur was informed of these “deeply disturbing” executions, but viewed them as “an internal matter” for the South Korean government and took no action.

  In the first week of July, Nichols witnessed and photographed one of the largest of these killings, near the city of Taejon. He was a party to the cover-up that grew out of it, making no attempt to alert his commanders, write a report about it, or send his photographs to Far East Air Forces headquarters. He waited thirty-one years—until publication of his autobiography—before describing South Korea’s role in an “unforgettable massacre.” Yet even then he knowingly misstated where it occurred so that his book would not challenge official U.S. versions of what happened near Taejon.

  “Trucks loaded with the condemned arrived,” he wrote. “Their hands were already tied behind them. They were hastily pushed into a line along the edge of the newly opened grave. They were quickly shot in the head and pushed into the grave. An efficient group of personnel followed; their [.]45[-caliber] pistols could hardly miss the fatal head shots from 2-3 feet away of the ones who were still kicking. . . .

  “The worst part about this whole affair was that I learned later that not all the people killed were communists. The Koreans weren’t taking any chances, and didn’t have the time or transportation to move the prisoners South. So, rather than leave them behind for the enemy, they emptied all jails in Suwon and surrounding areas and did away with them. . . .”

  Although he specifically cited Suwon in his autobiography, the atrocity Nichols witnessed did not occur there. It occurred about seventy miles south of Suwon in a valley near the town of Taejon, to which American forces, including Nichols and Torres, had fled by the first week of July. Nichols himself confirmed this in a handwritten letter that described “the 1800 I witnessed SK forces executing in valley outside Taejon.”

  The location of the killing is crucially important because the U.S. government publicly denied early press accounts of a South Korean massacre near Taejon in early July, calling them a “fabricatio
n.” Later in the war, after the bodies of several thousand South Korean civilians were found there in shallow pits, the U.S. Army blamed all the killings in Taejon on North Korean forces. That false claim found its way into the official army history of the Korean War, which was published in 1992 by the army’s Center of Military History. At Taejon, the history says, “American troops soon discovered that the North Koreans had perpetrated one of the greatest mass killings of the entire Korean War.”

  Nichols said he was the only foreigner at the July massacre, but this, too, was false. Documents and photographs show that other American intelligence and military officers witnessed the killing. On-the-ground reports from the CIA and army intelligence said the South Korean government ordered and carried out the executions as an act of revenge ordered by the “top level” of Syngman Rhee’s government. These chilling reports, though, were stamped “secret” in Washington in 1950. They were then filed away in government archives, where they stayed hidden for more than four decades. To maintain the cover-up, the South Korean government intimidated families of massacre victims around Taejon; for decades, they were afraid to talk. It was not until 2005, fifty-five years after the massacre, that an investigation into the incident was allowed as part of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At that time, South Korean policemen acknowledged killing civilians in Taejon. “Even at point blank range some were not killed outright,” said Yi Chun-yong, then a prison guard. “I shot those who were still alive and squirming.” Yi did not regret killing convicted Communists, but said that there were many who were killed who had nothing to do with North Korea or with communism. “I wonder,” he said, “what kind of people led our nation who allowed them to be executed as well.”

  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that senior officials in the South Korean government had approved the killings, that American officers witnessed it, and that Rhee was probably aware of it.