Though Nichols chose not to, a number of other American officers did report mass killings by South Korean forces in the summer of 1950, and their graphic descriptions compelled American generals and diplomats to complain to Rhee. On August 10, army sergeant Frank Pierce, a military police investigator for the First Calvary Division, watched South Korean police kill about three hundred civilians, including some women and at least one girl of about twelve. The method was similar to what Nichols witnessed: police with rifles fired one shot into the back of the heads of victims who had been lined up along the lip of a shallow canyon.
“It was noted in several of the shootings that due to poor aim of the weapon, the prisoner was not killed instantly, but it was necessary for several other shots to be fired,” Pierce wrote. “[I]n some cases the mercy shot was not administered, and at about three hours after the executions were completed, some of the condemned persons were still alive and moaning. The cries could be heard coming from somewhere in the mass of bodies piled in the canyon. . . .
“Extreme cruelty was noted from the Military Policemen to the condemned persons such as striking them on the head with gun butts and kicking them for no reason. The Commanding Officer of the execution group stated that the prisoners were killed as they were ‘spies.’ No other information was given.”
Two weeks after this report was written, Ambassador Muccio met with Syngman Rhee, told him about the “irregularities,” and received the president’s promise that he would do “everything possible” to stop them from happening again. Though the pace slowed after the summer of 1950, civilian killings continued.
In his autobiography, Nichols wrote that it was “atrocious” to watch the executions. He said he tried to stop them, but “gave up when I saw I was wasting my time. . . . Sometimes I think I’d rather have gone with the dead and gotten it over with quick and easy—then I wouldn’t have these terrible nightmares.”
Much as his memories—mass executions, torture, and severed heads—might have haunted him, Nichols remained silent. He had a career-based motive to do so. He surely knew that if Rhee and his senior security men suspected him of passing on such information to the U.S. command, then his special access to the president could disappear.
On the day he witnessed the massacre at Taejon, he casually mentioned it to Torres.
“He told me they were slaughtering all these people, but it didn’t seem to bother him that much,” Torres said. “At the time, if he had wanted a report done, I would have typed it up. But I don’t think he wanted it known.”
CHAPTER 5
Code Break Bully
By early August 1950, North Korea had taken nearly 90 percent of South Korea’s territory. Bedraggled American and South Korean forces had fled to the southern end of the peninsula, where they clung to a patch of land that was barely fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. The port of Pusan, the sole major city not yet controlled by Kim Il Sung, was at the southern end of this toehold, which became known as the Pusan Perimeter. It was there that Lieutenant General Walton “Johnnie” Walker, commander of the Eighth Army and the senior American commander in Korea, announced that U.S. forces would stand or die.
Walker was a short, pudgy, plainspoken Texan whom the press often likened to a bulldog. During World War II, while leading an armored corps across France and Germany, he earned a hard-charging reputation not unlike that of his famous mentor, General George S. Patton. But by the summer of 1950, Walker was sixty. Some generals in Tokyo and Washington believed he had lost a step. MacArthur had flown into the Pusan Perimeter on July 27 and told Walker that withdrawal was no longer an acceptable strategy. The upshot of that visit was the most eloquent statement ever attributed to Johnnie Walker:
“There will be no more retreating. There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan, a retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight until the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together.”
Walker’s rhetorical flourishes played well in newspapers back in the States. But many GIs inside the Pusan Perimeter heard it as an absurdity—a Kafkaesque command to “stay and die where you are.” Under Walker’s leadership, the soldiers had staggered south in July, absorbing one humiliating defeat after another. Thousands of them were sick with dysentery and respiratory infections. Bad food, bad water, and lack of sleep had caused battle fatigue that left many unable to control their fear and unwilling to fight. They did not understand why they were in Korea. They certainly did not see why they should be willing to die, as Walker said they must, to defend the little bit of it that was left. In This Kind of War, historian T. R. Fehrenbach described Walker’s infantrymen as “exhausted, dispirited, and bitter.”
Donald Nichols was there, too, having fled south from Taejon in mid-July before North Koreans took it with tanks and infantry. He and Torres set up an intelligence office in a two-story house in a residential neighborhood of Taegu, a refugee-swollen town of four hundred thousand people located roughly in the center of the Pusan Perimeter. Because roads and rail lines came together in Taegu, it had been chosen as the temporary seat of the South Korean government and as Korean headquarters for the Eighth Army and the Fifth Air Force.
There were frequent outbreaks of fighting to the north and west of the city. Nearly every night, as Torres recalled, he and Nichols heard the thud and whistle of artillery shells and saw flashes from explosions. Like Walker’s infantrymen, Nichols had been forced to retreat south again and again. Yet he was anything but exhausted, dispirited, or bitter. His war had been exhilarating, winning him praise, medals, and promotion. Now, in Taegu, he had a new trick up his sleeve: a team of code breakers who would cement his status as an invaluable spymaster.
Among the hundreds of North Korean defectors Nichols had interrogated before the outbreak of war, there had been one who fled the North with stolen codebooks from the Korean People’s Army. His name was Cho Yong Il, and Nichols’s discovery of him would prove to be a key to halting the North Korean offensive. Cho had been a private in the Japanese army and a merchant seaman with the Soviet navy. Until he defected from North Korea in 1949, he was a radio operator and cryptographer for Kim Il Sung.
Before the war, when Nichols first learned of Cho’s expertise as a North Korean cryptographer, he arranged for Cho to meet his friend Kim Chung Yul, chief of staff of the South Korean air force, which Nichols had recently helped create and over which he exercised considerable influence. “Nick was always thinking ahead,” Torres said. “He told the South Koreans to hang on to this guy. He also told Cho to train a team of cryptographers.”
By anticipating a need for code breakers in Korea, Nichols was light-years ahead of the rest of the American intelligence community. The cryptographic resources of the United States—such as they were—had ignored North Korea. The secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, issued a top secret order in 1949 that created the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), which would evolve into the National Security Agency, today’s global data-vacuuming leviathan. But when North Korea invaded in 1950, the agency’s code-breaking capacity was hobbled by budget cuts and warped by a near-exclusive focus on the Soviet Union. The agency had one self-taught Korean linguist, no Korean typewriters, and no Korean dictionaries. Under Johnson’s order, each branch of the military was supposed to create a unit for “tactical” code breaking in the field. But these, too, were poorly funded, understaffed, and had no expertise in the Korean language. They also feuded endlessly with one another. When it came to cryptography and Korea, the Americans were helpless.
As instructed by Nichols, the South Korean air force commissioned Cho Yong Il as a second lieutenant and put him in command of a radio intercept station on the outskirts of Seoul. His unit started work on June 1, 1950, which gave
them three weeks on the job before North Korea seized the capital.
Though Cho had to abandon much of his equipment, he made it safely to Taegu in early July, where he and his men set up five radio positions and began monitoring them with three receivers. His unit could intercept and understand North Korean army radio messages because the North, in what would prove to be a disastrous blunder, had not bothered to change its rudimentary radio codes. Cho’s stolen codebooks allowed his team of cryptographers to decipher everything they could hear.
By this time, Nichols had set up his shop in Taegu, where he made himself the chief provider of targets for the Fifth Air Force. He was delighted to learn that Cho was decrypting North Korean radio codes—so delighted that he commandeered the lieutenant and his entire code-break team. “I was ordered by Mr. Nichols to move our equipment and members to his house,” Cho said. “This I could not refuse.”
Cho and his code breakers moved into a high-walled residence directly across the street from the building where Nichols lived and worked with Torres. Beginning on July 17, 1950, more than two thousand intercepted and decoded messages were hand carried to Nichols’s house, where interpreters translated them into English. They arrived at all hours of the day and night. Whatever the time, Nichols had given standing orders for either Torres or Sergeant Russ Bauer to type them up immediately and jump in a jeep to deliver the intel.
“It was top priority and I delivered the messages to General Walker’s Eighth Army and to General Partridge’s Fifth Air Force,” Torres said, referring to army and air force headquarters in Taegu. “We had the feeling we were doing really important work. Of course, we were saving our butts, too. Those North Koreans were right outside our back door.”
These intercepted radio messages allowed the air force to find and pound North Korean tanks, supply lines, artillery installations, and troop concentrations, which impressed Partridge and confirmed his faith in Nichols’s “genius.” Generals Walker and Partridge began working closely together inside the perimeter. Partridge himself piloted a single-engine, two-seat T-6 surveillance plane that took Walker out on battlefield surveys. It was relatively safe because the Fifth Air Force had total air supremacy.
Having tapped a vein of intelligence that pleased the two most powerful American generals in Korea, Nichols pushed aggressively for more code breakers, more linguists, and more radios. He persuaded the South Korean navy to move sixteen of its cryptologists into the building across the street from his quarters, where they worked at the same table with Cho’s men. Nichols also joined forces with South Korean code breakers working with Walker’s Eighth Army.
After building his code-break fiefdom, Nichols ferociously guarded it. He did not want other American spy agencies horning in and stealing his glory. The first outfit to try was the Air Force Security Service, the cryptology arm of the air force that was separate from and, in theory, superior to Nichols’s seat-of-the-pants code-break team. In late July, it sent First Lieutenant Edward Murray from Japan to Taegu to find local linguists and set up a radio intercept unit in a mission code-named “Project Willy.” Murray arrived in a transport aircraft and brought along a trailer full of new radio equipment.
Nichols refused to cooperate with Murray in any way, declining to lend him a single linguist. As a result, Murray “didn’t have the Korean personnel to get any results,” said Lieutenant Colonel O’Wighton D. Simpson. “It became obvious that Mr. Nichols, who was an independent operator, I might add, was the best source.”
Two weeks after Murray arrived in Korea, Partridge ordered him back to Japan. As for Murray’s equipment—Nichols kept it all.
“The breathless nature of Nichols’s coup left [Murray] spinning,” said a top secret history published in 1995 by the National Security Agency. “Murray’s mission became entangled in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of American cryptology.” Back in Japan, Murray complained bitterly about Nichols and “a severe jurisdictional battle ensued, encompassing command organizations in the United States, Japan, and Korea.”
Murray won—or so he thought. He returned to Taegu on August 12 armed with “a letter of authority” from air force general Charles Y. Banfill, deputy for intelligence with the Far East Air Forces. “Lt. Murray is proceeding to Korea to assume overall direction of Project Willy,” said a message that summarized his new and expanded authority. “[Nichols] is being relieved of this function with all equipment, personnel, and documents to become Murray’s responsibility and he will direct all activity.”
Nichols, on his own authority, decided that the orders were insufficiently explicit. He was “still unwilling to relinquish control,” according to the NSA history. Five days later, the Fifth Air Force again ordered Murray out of Korea.
This time, though, Nichols threw Murray a bone, allowing him to depart with North Korean codebooks and technical information, which he used in Japan to set up a code-break team. Two years after Murray’s double dose of humiliation, the Air Force Security Service commissioned a study to find out what had happened and why. It concluded that the early code-breaking history of Korea was a “struggle for empire” that Nichols won; he made himself a “king” and sold his fellow Americans “right down the river.”
Nichols picked the perfect moment to become the king of code breaking.
The Pusan Perimeter, more than any other area the Americans had tried to defend in Korea, was defensible. It had natural barriers against invaders: rugged mountains to the north; a major river, the Naktong, to the west; and everywhere else, the sea, which was controlled by the U.S. Navy.
West Point–trained infantry and armor commanders knew how to fight in such a place, with clear battle lines, allies at their flanks, and reserves in the rear. They also had a major logistical edge. Inside the perimeter there was a modern and relatively well-maintained network of roads and railways, a legacy of Japanese colonial rule that meant they could quickly move troops, ammunition, and other supplies to where they were needed most. As important, the American war machine was finally beginning to hum. In the late summer and fall of 1950, more well-trained soldiers and marines, tanks, and artillery arrived at Pusan with each passing week. As South Korea’s only deep-water port, Pusan could accommodate thirty oceangoing ships at a time.
There was even a psychological advantage to being trapped: it concentrated the mind. “Bug out fever” abated because for an infantryman, the only real choice was to dig in and prepare to fight or die. When Walker said there would be no more retreat, one regimental commander noticed a change in the behavior of his men: “a greater amount of earth came out with each shovelful.” In a prophetic editorial in late July, the New York Times said a turning point in the war was at hand. “For five weeks, we have been trading space for time,” the Times said. “The space is running out for us. The time is running out for our enemies.”
As the Americans resupplied, the Korean People’s Army struggled to keep its supply lines from collapsing. American control of the air and sea all but stopped the North’s efforts to move large shipments of food, fuel, and ammunition. Mechanical and maintenance problems, along with napalm air strikes made more deadly by the intelligence discoveries of Nichols and his team, had slashed the number of battle-ready T-34 tanks from 150 to about 40. Lacking doctors, drugs, and medical facilities, injured North Korean soldiers began to die of treatable wounds.
Although combatants on both sides were unaware of it, a fundamental shift had taken place. The number of troops on the ground had swung to the advantage of the Americans and the South Koreans. By August, North Korea’s 70,000 troops faced a combined American and South Korean force of 92,000 soldiers and marines. The imbalance would soon get much worse for North Korea. MacArthur was getting ready for a massive counterattack. At Inchon, about thirty miles west of Seoul, he was preparing an amphibious landing that on September 15 would insert 70,000 American troops into the middle of the peninsula, where they could cut supply
lines to North Korean forces besieging the Pusan Perimeter.
General Walker knew he did not have to hold the line forever—just long enough. When the North Koreans tried to punch a hole in the Pusan Perimeter, Walker had to be ready to fill the hole and punch back. As he admitted in early August, if the North were to focus all its forces, create a single gaping hole in the line, and then drive “straight and hard for Pusan,” he could not stop them.
No such punch ever came.
North Korea squandered its greatest advantage. It ignored a fundamental battlefield tactic of concentrating power. The failure was typical of Kim Il Sung. He was a sloppy war planner and an incompetent battlefield tactician. His only real experience as a commander had been leading a few hundred guerrillas—armed with knives and rifles—in hit-and-run strikes against Japanese police in the 1930s. He had bragged to Stalin that the war in South Korea would be won in a few days, but he did not know how to sustain an armored invasion force for a longer fight and his subordinates were afraid to question his judgment. In his hurry to invade South Korea by the end of June, Kim declined to wait for eighty-nine additional T-34s that Stalin would send him in July and August. They would have doubled the number of tanks in his initial invasion, allowed Kim to attack with three armored divisions instead of just one, and increased his chances of a crushing victory in the Pusan Perimeter. His generals, as they faced the perimeter, chose to divide their ten armored divisions and strike from four locations. It diluted their strength, giving Walker a fighting chance.
Moving his men on trains, borrowing men from one regiment and lending them to another, and hustling newly arrived weapons and fresh troops to where they were most needed, Walker managed—just barely—to beat back the Korean People’s Army. The Pusan Perimeter held. American and South Korean forces withstood a half dozen major assaults. Walker’s reputation was rehabilitated. The Fifth Air Force knew where to strike behind enemy lines and did so with more than fifteen thousand sorties between late June and mid-September. U.S. napalm and bombing attacks caused catastrophic shortages of ammunition. After the success of MacArthur’s Inchon landing, some North Korean divisions lost 80 percent of their soldiers.
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