King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  “Walker lived in crisis,” wrote historian Fehrenbach. “His command decision had to be a never-ending series of robbing Peter to pay Paul. . . . He had to guess where the greatest peril lay, and guess correctly, for in war there is no prize for being almost right.”

  In fact, thanks to Nichols’s code-break operation, Walker did not need to guess.

  The Americans had “perfect intelligence,” recalled James K. Woolnough, then a junior commander in the Eighth Army in Taegu. “They knew exactly where each platoon of North Koreans were [sic] going, and they’d move to meet it. . . . This was amazing, utterly amazing.”

  Walker had “what every military commander around the world secretly dreams about, near complete and real-time access to the plans and intentions of the enemy forces he faced,” wrote intelligence historian Matthew Aid.

  Some of this intelligence came from Americans working desperately hard in Japan and the United States. The U.S. government might have been cryptographically clueless on the day of the invasion, but it quickly recovered. Using listening stations in Japan, American code breakers in Tokyo and Arlington, Virginia, discovered that the North Korean military communicated with easily breakable radio codes—and sometimes with no codes at all. Within a month, Americans knew everything the North Korean military was planning. Still, nearly two thirds of what they intercepted could not be turned into useful intelligence. For outside of Taegu, the Americans were crippled by a severe shortage of Korean translators. Another problem was getting intelligence to Walker in time for him to use it.

  While Nichols did not have the analytical talent or the equipment that was available in the United States and Japan, he and his large stable of Korean code breakers and linguists were far better positioned inside the war zone. They had speedy access to Walker and Partridge, via a short ride in Torres’s jeep. The decoded information that Nichols produced was also speedily circulated in Taegu because it was not “so over-classified that it was unusable,” according to officers at Fifth Air Force intelligence, which relied almost exclusively on Nichols for bombing information.

  When code breakers in Virginia learned in late August that North Korea was about to launch a major attack west of Taegu, there “appears to have been no mechanism” for their decoded information to reach Walker, according to the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. It said the general probably relied on intelligence reports from the team assembled by Nichols.

  Walker, though, never had a chance to explain exactly how much he depended on Nichols in Taegu. He was killed on December 23, 1950, when his jeep collided with a South Korean army truck. The general had always insisted that his driver go fast on crowded roads and he often stood up in his jeep, chest thrust out, steadying himself by holding on to a grab bar.

  Before Walker’s death, however, he made it clear that Nichols had helped save the Eighth Army, personally commending him for “his untiring efforts in procuring timely and invaluable information.” The South Korean government also gave Nichols credit for helping to save the Pusan Perimeter. By order of President Rhee, Nichols received the country’s second-highest military honor for valor, citing as the primary reason his work in obtaining and decoding enemy messages.

  Partridge and his boss, General Stratemeyer, began pushing aggressively in the summer of 1950 for Nichols to be promoted—and not just because of his code-break triumph. Nichols had begun to play such a pivotal role in the war that his low rank raised awkward and embarrassing questions for the Far East Air Forces: Why is the best intelligence officer in the region a lowly chief warrant officer? Why is this twenty-seven-year-old so important that he can snub and humiliate other officers? Don’t you have West Point–trained officers who are more capable than this middle-school dropout? By promoting Nichols, in just a few weeks, from chief warrant officer to lieutenant and then to captain, generals Partridge and Stratemeyer were rushing to keep up with the de facto authority that Nichols had grabbed amid the anarchy of the war’s first three months.

  Even before U.S. forces broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, Partridge was giving Nichols new responsibilities. In early August, he asked Nichols to locate and map airfields, supply dumps, and other enemy targets that could be bombed by the Fifth Air Force. With the help of South Korean intelligence officers, Nichols found forty-eight agents, plucking them out of the South Korean army, air force, and police and sending them for a week’s training in Japan. They were parachuted behind North Korean lines on August 23.

  “One Korean agent had the misfortune to break both of his legs in striking them on the horizontal stabilizer of the C-47 from which he parachuted,” said an air force history. “He was nevertheless able to convince a North Korean farmer to defect to the South and to carry him to safety. . . . Not only did the injured agent return safely, but he brought the important information of the whereabouts of an enemy fuel dump.”

  This heartening story, however, is not at all typical of what happened to agents Nichols recruited and sent north. Most of his agents did not return from that first mission and the pattern would recur again and again. “Nobody expected them to return alive,” said Kim Bok-dong, a translator who worked for Nichols in 1950. “It was as if they were being sent to be killed.”

  Several of the agents who beat the odds and managed to slip through North Korean territory were later killed by friendly fire as they tried to cross battle lines. Nichols would later tell his agents to “discard all their clothing and approach with their hands in the air,” which he claimed reduced losses. But the number of lives lost in parachute drops would remain staggering throughout the war. The toll stains the memory that many South Korean war veterans have of Nichols.

  “Nichols was very focused, but he sacrificed too many Koreans to accomplish his mission,” said Lee Kang-hwa, a retired general in the South Korean air force who fought in the war and knew Nichols. “It is very unfortunate that a lot of Koreans were sent to die.”

  Nichols was not the only American sending South Koreans to near-certain death. CIA operations during the war were “not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in that the number of lives lost and the amount of time and treasure expended was enormously disproportionate to attainments there from,” an agency review concluded years after the war.

  In the panicked summer of 1950, however, the losses were acceptable, at least to the Americans. The deaths certainly did nothing to hurt Nichols’s reputation among air force and army generals in Korea and in Tokyo. A measure of his rising status was the changed behavior of his prewar nemesis, General Willoughby. In April, Willoughby wanted Nichols out of Korea; by August, he wanted Nichols working exclusively for him.

  In mid-September, Willoughby was “about to absorb” Nichols and his code-break team, a possibility that horrified Partridge. “I strenuously oppose this move,” Partridge wrote in his diary. In the final months of 1950, Partridge referred five times in his diary to his turf war with Willoughby over Nichols. Panicked about what he should do to keep his best agent, Partridge even sought Nichols’s advice. Telling Partridge exactly what the general wanted to hear, Nichols said he was an air force man and wanted to remain an air force man. He seems to have used the tussle between the army and the air force to increase his own power. Nichols was “concerned especially with the Air Force’s side of the picture, while the others [were] concerned with the Army’s side,” Partridge wrote in his diary. “For this and other reasons, I am going to continue to oppose the absorption of Nichols’ unit.”

  Nichols wagered that he would have more resources and less supervision under Partridge than under Willoughby. It was a canny bet. Within six months, Nichols would take command of a special operations unit created especially for him (although the term “special operations” was not yet used in the U.S. military). He would also begin building spy bases on islands around North Korea. Willoughby, meanwhile, would soon be banished from the Far East Command and spend much of the rest of his lif
e sidestepping responsibility for his errors in judgment in Korea.

  CHAPTER 6

  Any Means Necessary

  For a couple of months in the autumn of 1950, the war seemed won. North Korea all but disappeared as a state as Kim Il Sung slunk away to hide in a bunker near the Chinese border. Freshly promoted, Captain Donald Nichols found himself poking around in the Great Leader’s abandoned residence in Pyongyang.

  After the victory at Inchon and the breakout from the Pusan Perimeter, South Korean and American forces pushed north to the North Korean capital and then to the Yalu River, which marked North Korea’s border with China. The North Korean army had collapsed, losing as many as 50,000 soldiers and nearly all of its Soviet-supplied tanks and armor. The Soviet ambassador in North Korea told Stalin that Kim Il Sung was confused, hopeless, and lost. Before fleeing Pyongyang, Kim sent an urgent cable to Stalin.

  “We consider it necessary to report to you about extremely unfavorable conditions for us,” he said. “The enemy’s air force, possessing about one thousand planes of various kinds, is not encountering any resistance from our side, and has full control in the air. It conducts bombing at the front and in the rear daily, around the clock.”

  By October, the Fifth Air Force had so thoroughly bombed North Korea’s major cities that it complained of “a scarcity of strategic targets” and sent home some B-29s and their crews. Thirty thousand tons of high explosives had been dropped with “devastating effects,” said the bombing commander, Major General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, in an autumn assessment of his work. “We came out prepared to burn down the cities in Northern Korea, to completely knock out their industrial potential, and to raise havoc with their transportation system,” he said. “All these things have been done.”

  Nichols hopscotched north with the victors, rushing to pull his spy network back together in Seoul and seed agents across the rubble of North Korea. Flying with Partridge, he returned to Kimpo airfield on September 19. A month later, he was in Pyongyang, searching Kim Il Sung’s house and offices. He and his men found seventy thousand documents produced by the North Korean air force that showed the location of previously unknown enemy airfields and supply dumps—all of which were soon bombed. In early November, Nichols moved his code-break team—still staffed by South Koreans and run by Cho, the North Korean defector—forty miles north of Pyongyang to Sinanju airfield. There, Cho and his men tried to intercept Chinese radio messages. But China was far more careful than North Korea, staying off the radio, unless it was to broadcast disinformation.

  The Chinese People’s Army was secretly moving into North Korea, traveling at night, using back roads and tracks in the forest. U.S. aircraft could not see these troops and code breakers could not track them. For the American forces that had surged into northern Korea, the bloodiest and most terrifying battles of the war were soon to come. There would be another round of intelligence failures, battlefield humiliations, and ignominious retreats. Just as MacArthur and Willoughby failed to expect a North Korean invasion in June, they failed to see the Chinese coming in October. And this time Nichols rang no alarms. He was as clueless as the CIA, which said on October 12 that “there are no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea” and “such action is not probable in 1950.”

  About the time Truman was reading these assurances, more than 30,000 Chinese troops were crossing the Yalu River southward into North Korea. Another 150,000 crossed over by the end of October. In a preview of what was to come, the Chinese engaged South Korean and American forces on October 25, bloodying them with mortars, Katyusha rocket artillery, and small arms. During this fight, the Americans and South Koreans captured and interrogated twenty-five Chinese soldiers who proved to be talkative. They told army and CIA interrogators that an offensive was under way and that many thousands of Chinese troops were already inside North Korea.

  “CIA officers in Korea had the temerity to cable Washington with the results of interrogations of the Chinese prisoners,” writes the intelligence historian Matthew Aid. The cables upset Willoughby, who reacted to the CIA agents in October much as he had reacted to Nichols earlier that year—by punishing the messenger. From Tokyo, Willoughby ordered that CIA personnel be kept away from army POW cages containing Chinese soldiers. The worrisome news about the Chinese incursion, though, did get through to Washington. The agency told Truman in the first week of November that nearly 750,000 Chinese soldiers were near the Korean border and about half of them could soon start “sustained ground operations in Korea.”

  At MacArthur’s headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Building in Tokyo, the new evidence did not change minds. MacArthur told the Eighth Army to push all the way to the Chinese border, predicting it would be the last offensive of the war. He said he would “get the boys home by Christmas.”

  America’s failure to grasp the mortal danger posed by the Chinese buildup was “one of the greatest, most persistent enigmas of the Korean War,” wrote Max Hastings, a military historian. He said that MacArthur and Willoughby “absolutely declined” to heed clear warnings of battlefield catastrophe. “They had created a fantasy world for themselves, in which events would march in accordance with a divine providence directed from the Dai-Ichi building. The conduct of the drive to the Yalu reflected a contempt for intelligence, for the cardinal principles of military prudence, seldom matched in twentieth-century warfare.” Matthew B. Ridgway, the general who would replace MacArthur in 1951, said that the Far East Command “knew the facts, but they were poorly evaluated. . . . It was probably in good part because of MacArthur’s personality. If he did not want to believe something, he wouldn’t.”

  Mao had begun warning MacArthur in late September, soon after the Inchon invasion. His government had tried to use diplomatic back channels to inform South Korea and the United States that if their troops pushed north of the thirty-eighth parallel, China would fight. The warning had nothing to do with affection for or loyalty to Kim Il Sung. Mao did not like the North Korean leader, believing him to be headstrong, doctrinaire, and a “number-one pain in the butt.” Still, Mao could not accept MacArthur’s demand for North Korea’s complete surrender and was unnerved by the prospect of an American-backed united Korea on his eastern border.

  To lead the fight against the Americans, Mao selected his most trusted general, Peng Dehuai, a hero of Communist China’s long civil war. General Peng met with Kim Il Sung, quickly sized him up as an “extremely childish” military mind, and elbowed him out of way. The Great Leader soon became a bystander in the war he had started. Under Peng, the counteroffensive would be a Chinese operation, assisted by what was left of the North Korean army, with air support from the Soviet Union. The Chinese People’s Army, with 300,000 troops in North Korea, attacked in earnest on November 25, overwhelming Walker’s Eighth Army on the west side of the peninsula. The ill-prepared Americans fell back from the border and abandoned Pyongyang, suffering 11,000 casualties as they fled 120 miles south to the thirty-eighth parallel. It was the longest retreat in American military history. In a cable to Truman, MacArthur said, “We now face an entirely new war.”

  In the mountains on the east side of the peninsula, the American defeat was only slightly less awful. As a Siberian cold front drove temperatures to −35 degrees Fahrenheit, the Chinese tried to trap and destroy the First Marine Division and the Army X Corps near a man-made high-country lake called the Chosin Reservoir. Thanks to superb marine leadership and gutsy fighting, Americans escaped the trap without catastrophic losses. But it was a major defeat and Peng’s forces would soon take back all of North Korea and more.

  Shortly before Chinese troops chased Americans out of Pyongyang, Nichols stole portraits of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il Sung from the Great Leader’s office. From behind Kim’s desk, he took “a huge, red, revolving, overstuffed chair.”

  The Chinese attack, along with the willful failure of MacArthur and Willough
by to see it coming, again revealed gross incompetence in the intelligence operations of the Far East Command. Complaints about Willoughby increased. After an army briefing in December, Ambassador Muccio grumbled to General Walker (who would die in a week’s time in his jeep) that “since long before the war started” there has been a “major battle between the various agencies” that collect intelligence. Muccio blamed it on Willoughby. A week later, Willoughby himself acknowledged the organizational chaos. He told the Far East Air Forces commander, General Stratemeyer, that the CIA, army intelligence, “and Captain Nichols should all get on the same team.”

  It would never happen. Partridge wanted Nichols to play exclusively for his team, the Fifth Air Force. After the Chinese entered the war, Partridge needed Nichols, his targeting information, and his unrivaled network of Korean contacts more than ever.

  The Chinese offensive humiliated MacArthur—and made him vengeful. He demanded that the gloves be taken off the American bombing campaign, which had already devastated population centers in North Korea. MacArthur wanted U.S. bombs to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea. He ordered the air force to create “a desert” between United Nations lines and the Chinese border. Before the Chinese intervention, the air force dropped only conventional explosives when it bombed North Korean cities and towns. But after the Chinese made him look like an old fool, MacArthur approved the use of incendiary chemical compounds like napalm. North Korean cities that had already been knocked to pieces by the first round of bombing were soon engulfed in flames. “In blind desperation,” war correspondent Homer Bigart wrote, “we tried to burn with napalm every town and village that might hide enemy troops and equipment along the mockingly empty roads coming down from Manchuria.”