King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  In addition to needing Nichols to help carry out this “fire job,” the air force was desperate for his assistance in locating and rescuing the crews of downed aircraft, particularly B-29s. These big bombers and many other American planes were being picked off in the late autumn of 1950 at an alarming rate by a new Soviet-made fighter jet, the bat-winged, blazingly fast MiG-15. When it first appeared in the skies over the Yalu River—a patch of Chinese and North Korean airspace that soon became known as “MiG Alley”—the Americans had no aircraft that could compete with it. The MiG-15 climbed faster, flew higher, and was armed with bigger guns. Its 37-millimeter cannon fired a high-explosive, half-pound projectile that had a range of up to a mile. A MiG-15 pilot could squeeze off eighty rounds in less than five seconds. The fighter was nightmarishly effective against lumbering American bombers of the World War II era.

  By late November, about 400 MiG-15s took control of the skies over MiG Alley, chasing off U.S. bombers, protecting supply routes for China’s ground troops, and vexing the Far East Air Forces. The United States had no choice but to escalate the air war, rushing its best fighter jets, the F-86 Sabres, from the United States to Korea. The Sabres were the only American aircraft that could compete with MiGs. As the first all-jet air war got under way, MiG-15 fighter pilots were almost always Russian. They were Stalin’s best, imported from air bases near Moscow. Stalin ordered them to pretend to be Chinese. They wore Chinese flight suits and carried documents with fake Chinese names. Stalin even ordered them to speak Chinese on the radio when they flew over MiG Alley. It was an order they did not have the language skills to obey.

  So they spoke Russian on the radio as they shot down American aircraft, killing American pilots and crew members. When this information reached the White House, Truman chose not to tell the American people. He did not want to arouse populist sentiment in the United States for a larger war against the Soviet Union. Following Truman’s lead, the Pentagon lied about the all-jet air war, saying that the MiGs were being flown by pilots from China, which “almost overnight” had become a major air power. American fighter pilots were threatened with dismissal from the war zone if they mentioned a word about the air war with Russia. For many years after the war ended, American pilots remained silent about whom they had fought.

  As 1951 began, Seoul fell for the second time to Communist forces. More U.S. aircraft were being shot down, which necessitated risky rescue missions behind enemy lines. By February, the Americans were avoiding air combat in MiG Alley.

  It all added up to an urgent need for more and better spying, a need that could be met only by Donald Nichols. That, at least, is how Partridge saw it. So in the first week of January he went to his boss, General Stratemeyer, to discuss how to repackage Nichols, by giving him less administrative work and more power in the field. By then, Nichols was back in Taegu, where Fifth Air Force headquarters had again been forced to relocate and where he was spending half his time on paperwork.

  After the meeting with Stratemeyer, Partridge wrote in his diary that Nichols needed “some sort of independent status where he can use his talent for organization and for dealing with the Korean people.” Two days later, Partridge and Nichols played “hooky” from the war. Along with a small number of officers, they flew to Cheju Island to shoot birds. The hunt was a success, killing more than fifty fowl. Partridge does not say so in his diary, but it is likely he used his time with Nichols to brainstorm about a new kind of spy outfit, one designed specifically for Nichols.

  Its name was opaque: Special Activities Unit #1. After four months, it was changed to something even more opaque: Detachment 2 of the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS). In Korea, many airmen called it “Nick’s Outfit” or simply “NICK.” South Koreans called it “NEKO.” Whatever the name, nothing like it had existed before in the air force.

  Nichols was given open-ended authority to gather intelligence and conduct sabotage, demolition, and guerrilla operations behind enemy lines. The orders creating his unit explicitly limited his “administrative burden.” While Nichols was empowered to lead covert missions, other air force officers were ordered to shuffle his papers. In a highly unusual organizational move, Nichols no longer had to communicate through the normal air force chain of command. Instead of dealing with majors or colonels, he reported directly to General Partridge. In military jargon, it is called stovepiping, and it is intended to move sensitive information directly to a commander without being delayed or diluted. The decision to stovepipe showed how much Partridge and the Fifth Air Force needed Nichols—and how free Nichols was to wage a secret war.

  The first fifty-six men assigned to his unit came from the South Korean air force. The transfer was arranged by Partridge with General Kim Chung Yul, the air force chief of staff who owed his job to Nichols and who probably had no choice in the matter. The South Korean air force would soon be sending hundreds more of its officers and men to work—and die—for NICK.

  The sudden emergence of NICK among the competing U.S. intelligence operators in the Far East did not go down well with the CIA, which was beginning a period of global expansion and pushing to play a more important role in Korea. When Frank Wisner, chief of covert operations for the agency and a man with a volatile temper, visited Tokyo and heard that Nichols was commanding his own guerrilla army, “all hell broke loose,” according to Ed Evanhoe, a former army intelligence officer in Korea. “Wisner demanded to know what the air force thought it was doing forming air force-led partisan units. . . .” The CIA pushed MacArthur to issue a direct order to the air force to “stop all efforts” aimed at developing an independent guerrilla force. The words “sabotage” and “demolition” were deleted from Nichols’s mission directive. He was instructed to cooperate with the CIA and army intelligence. None of this, however, did much to rein in his power.

  One reason was the end of MacArthur in the Far East. The famous general was famously sacked on April 11, 1951. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President,” Truman explained years later. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals.” The firing also removed Willoughby from the Far East Command, sending him back to the United States, where he faced pointed questions about his competence.

  With MacArthur and Willoughby gone, Nichols could give Partridge and the Fifth Air Force exactly what they wanted; indeed, more than they could have hoped for. A week after MacArthur was fired, Nichols led a team of Koreans that wrested “information of inestimable value from the very grasp of the enemy.” He brought back parts, photographs, and technical specifications of the MiG-15. Along with the T-34 tank salvage operation for which Nichols won a Silver Star, the MiG operation was one of the most important intelligence achievements of the Korean War. But, as with the tank mission, during which Nichols might or might not have climbed inside a tank, there are two versions of what Nichols actually did during the MiG mission. In one version, he dodged bullets on the ground; in the second, he supervised the operation from the relative safety of a nearby air force cargo plane.

  In the version that is exhaustively detailed in air force citations, in Partridge’s diary, in Nichols’s memoir, and in air force–authorized stories that appeared in American magazines, Nichols appears as a man of action with ice water in his veins. He “coolly and efficiently photographed” the jet’s fuselage. To get at engineering secrets inside, he dismantled the MiG with hand grenades. He alone dragged the MiG’s horizontal stabilizer back to a waiting helicopter.

  “We were being shot at by small arms fire, heavy machine guns and flak all the way in and out, the rotor blades of the copter were hit,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “I never saw so much flak in my life. It was constantly around us from the time we hit land on the way in until we left land on the return trip. Upon arriving at the target area we found it under guard, I ordered the copter pilots to land a short distance from t
he downed aircraft. A few fast exchanges of fire ran the guards off. The only other encounter we had while on the ground was to keep our pilots from taking off and leaving us.”

  The second version comes from Yoon Il-gyun, who worked for Nichols during the war, who later became director of South Korea’s central intelligence agency, and who, as described earlier, also said that Nichols did not personally salvage a T-34 tank in 1950.

  As Yoon tells the story: Nichols organized and managed the MiG mission. In the weeks before a crashed MiG was spotted for salvage, he trained Yoon and seven other South Korean air force agents in parachute jumping. He taught them how to remove key parts from the jet, using hand grenades, if necessary, to blow apart sections of the aircraft that could not be quickly disassembled. He drilled them on swiftly transferring parts to a helicopter under simulated combat conditions. When a crashed MiG-15 was located in April behind enemy lines near the Chongchon River, Nichols, Yoon, and the other Koreans boarded a C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo plane to fly over the crash site. As Yoon and the other Koreans parachuted down to the crash site, Nichols stayed behind in the plane “to command the operation.”

  Asked why Nichols and the U.S. Air Force would exaggerate Nichols’s role in the mission, Yoon explained—once again—that it was routine during the war to “put all the achievements on one person.” Yoon said he never held it against Nichols. Quite the contrary, Yoon was one of several senior South Korean intelligence officials who invited Nichols back to South Korea in 1987 to celebrate his wartime spying triumphs. At a dinner during that visit, Yoon presented Nichols with a plaque thanking him for service that “led to the frustration and demoralization of the enemy.”

  The MiG salvage mission in April 1951 did much more than frustrate the enemy. It changed American assumptions about Russian backwardness in aerospace engineering. It demonstrated that the Soviets were keeping up with—and in some cases exceeding—Western innovations in jet-engine design, while “general workmanship appears comparable to practices used in the US and Great Britain.” The information Nichols found also triggered design changes in America’s comparable fighter, the F-86 Sabre. As the war dragged on, those changes gave the Sabre the capacity to outmaneuver and shoot down large numbers of MiGs. The Pentagon would also accelerate investment in fighter-jet development.

  The mission also electrified generals in the Far East Air Forces, especially Partridge, and boosted Nichols’s career. “This morning I went out to Nichols’s establishment to look at the parts of the MiG aircraft which he had recovered yesterday,” Partridge wrote in his diary. “He did a wonderful job and I am going to see that he is decorated for it. . . . It was a wonderful piece of work.”

  Partridge made good on his promise. Nichols won the Distinguished Service Cross, which is awarded for “extraordinary heroism” during combat and is the nation’s second-highest military honor. Partridge also rewarded Nichols by giving him more power, authorizing him to collect intelligence “by any means necessary.” Nichols now had his own secret army and he interpreted his orders as a “legal license to murder.”

  As his powers expanded throughout the spring and summer of 1951, Nichols remained in close touch with Syngman Rhee, meeting personally with the South Korean leader at least five times. On April 29, during a Sunday afternoon conversation with Rhee, Nichols passed on political gossip he had just heard from his commanding generals about the coming South Korean presidential race.

  At the time, Rhee was publicly claiming he would not run for reelection in 1952, and American generals, including Partridge and army general James Van Fleet, commander of the Eighth Army, were eager to influence who the next president might be. On Saturday, the day before he talked to Rhee, Nichols joined Partridge and Van Fleet for a “discussion of the Korean political situation,” Partridge wrote in his diary.

  In his meeting with Rhee the following day, Nichols reported that “the whole [U.S. military headquarters] and everybody is talking about nothing but the next election. . . . ,” said a letter written by Rhee’s wife, Francesca Donner. She described Nichols in the letter as her husband’s “very helpful” adviser and informant.

  Rhee soon changed his mind about retiring. To secure another term, he declared martial law and rammed through constitutional amendments that changed the way presidents were chosen in South Korea. No longer would the National Assembly, whose support Rhee had lost, select the country’s leader. Instead, there was a direct popular vote in 1952, which Rhee handily won.

  As Nichols’s authority expanded, so did his power to recruit young men. He needed hundreds of them to go behind enemy lines. But he also wanted a select few to visit him in the evenings in his private quarters, according to three South Korean veterans who worked for him in the 1950s. They said Nichols found these young men in the South Korean air force and army.

  “Young, good-looking airmen were invited into Mr. Nichols’s room and sometimes two of them visited him at the same time,” said Chung Bong-sun, the retired air force colonel who worked closely for Nichols as an intelligence officer.

  “Mr. Nichols sent a plane to get one airman who worked for me,” said Chung. “I asked him later, ‘What did you do?’ He told me he went to Mr. Nichols’s place and had good food and fun. He said Mr. Nichols hugged and kissed him.”

  It was widely rumored among Koreans who worked in Nichols’s unit that he had “some kind of sexual issue,” said Kim In-ho in an interview at his home in Seoul in 2015, when Kim was eighty-nine. Kim said he worked in the South Korean air force without rank for five years, during which time he was assigned to Nichols’s unit, where he helped train agents. Kim said that five or six young and good-looking soldiers visited the base regularly to see Nichols and it was rumored that they “took turns giving him hand jobs.” Kim said he never spoke to the soldiers involved.

  In South Korea in the 1950s, heterosexual contact between American servicemen and prostitutes was rampant, cheap, and widely tolerated by the U.S. military command. As a result, in the desperately poor years during and after the war, the majority of the nation’s prostitutes lived near military bases. But homosexual contact of any kind was a serious offense on any American base, as well as a cultural taboo.

  Exacerbated by cold war fears of “subversives,” homophobia peaked in the armed forces in the 1950s. The Pentagon distributed a memo in 1949 that unified and toughened regulations for all branches of the military. It said that there could be no “rehabilitation” of homosexuals or lesbians, that they were not permitted to serve in any capacity, and that “prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory.” It also urged careful investigation of suspected homosexuals.

  Yet what went on for years in Nichols’s quarters did not damage his command authority or his reputation as an officer. There is no hint of concern regarding his sexuality in his twice-yearly officer efficiency reports, which were written by his immediate superior officer. Those reports, during the war years, judged his conformance to air force standards of conduct to be “superior.” In his autobiography, Nichols said nothing about the young airmen brought to him in the evenings.

  As for the South Korean officers who worked with Nichols, they looked the other way. Nichols was a close friend of President Rhee—far too powerful and well connected to question. He had also won the loyalty of South Koreans who worked with him. “He was a very trusted man,” said Chung, adding that he personally trusted Nichols more than any other American.

  “He acted like a king during the war, but he was also an incredible spy,” said Kim In-ho. “He lay the foundation for espionage in South Korea. Without him, we would have lost the war.”

  In his autobiography, Nichols goes on at length about how he personally trained the young men he sent behind enemy lines. When he opened a parachute school in Taegu during the first year of the war, some of these men refused to jump. So he led by example, even though he had never had any training in parachute jump
ing. By war’s end, Nichols had jumped from nine different aircraft and helicopters on training and spy missions. The cumulative impact damaged his knees, forcing him, when he was in his fifties, to wear metal braces on both legs.

  “Without questioning the men as to why they didn’t jump, I took the chute off a man about my size, put it on, and told everyone to get back on the plane,” Nichols wrote. “I then told them that I had never jumped before, which I hadn’t, but that I was going to as soon as the plane got airborne and went over the [drop zone] and that everyone else had better jump or they were going to have to account to me personally why not, after the plane landed.”

  After the young men learned to parachute, Nichols sent them on suicide missions.

  “There is no sense in going into the feeling one gets when he sends a person on a mission knowing well—in many cases—that he will not return,” Nichols wrote. “I don’t believe I’m capable of explaining this feeling; all I can say is that it is terrible and one can never forget. However, some fool has to do this ugly job.”

  Nichols chose not to mention in his autobiography that a small group of Koreans—apparently alarmed at the high rate of death and disappearance among agents being sent behind enemy lines—physically attacked him late one night in the early spring of 1951. Details of the attack are sketchy, but it is clear that it occurred. “It was a kind of riot so big that it was difficult to put down,” said Serbando Torres, who was in a nearby building on the night of the attack. “Nick did not go in detail about why it happened, other than to say it was a disturbance.”