King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  Kim Gye-son, who claims to have worked for Nichols’s unit in the 1950s, described the attack in testimony posted on a Korean War blog. He said six angry agents burst into Nichols’s quarters intending to kill him. Nichols responded with gunfire, according to the post, and shot three agents to death at the scene. The other three were court-martialed.

  A notable participant in the incident was Lee Kun Soon, the North Korean pilot who defected to South Korea in a Soviet aircraft in 1950 and whom Nichols then hired. On the night of the attack, Nichols shot Lee twice but did not kill him. In his account of what happened, Lee said it was all “a misunderstanding” amplified by alcohol.

  “Nichols must have thought it was a serious matter,” Lee said in an account published in 1965 in a South Korean air force collection of war memories. “Maybe he thought we were there to hurt him. Later, he testified that he shot me out of self-defense because he didn’t want things to get complicated.”

  Remarkably, the late-night shootout does not warrant any mention in Nichols’s service record—a telling indicator of his near-total autonomy as a military officer and spymaster. His officer efficiency report for the first six months of 1951, written by a colonel who was supposedly supervising his performance, says only that Nichols performed during that period in ways that were “audacious yet level-headed” and “spirited but tactful.”

  By the spring of 1951, no one seems to have been supervising or reviewing the day-to-day activities of his unit. His orders were to report directly to Partridge, the general who was running the entire air war in Korea. Only the general was responsible for “direct control” of what Nichols did.

  In addition to the gunfight in his quarters, there were a number of bizarre and violent episodes involving Nichols that never appeared in his military service record or in air force histories of his spy units—at least, not in those that have been declassified. Nichols had the authority to send individuals on flights over North Korea and drop them behind enemy lines—and he appears to have used it to punish those who angered him.

  “When we were in Taegu on the first retreat in 1950, there was an incident that upset Mr. Nichols,” recalled Chung, the South Korean air force intelligence officer. He said that two young South Korean generals who were friends of Nichols—one of them was Lieutenant General Chang Sung-hwan, who became air force chief of staff in the 1960s and died in 2015—were arrested in a bar by a South Korean military policeman. “The MP interrogated them and hung them upside down by a rope,” Chung said. “When Mr. Nichols found out about this, he put the MP on a plane and dropped him off in a parachute over North Korean territory. I never saw the MP again.”

  The MP’s disappearance was not an exceptional event, according to Lee Kun Soon, the North Korean defector whom Nichols shot during the 1951 attack on his office. Lee said Nichols had a reputation that terrified many Koreans. “He was headstrong. He didn’t care for human rights,” Lee said. “When he didn’t like someone’s face, he put that person in a parachute and sent him off to North Korea.”

  Nichols went along on some of these flights. Jack A. Sariego, who served as an airman second class under Nichols during the war, said he accompanied Nichols on an L-4 observation plane that took a North Korean colonel, a prisoner of war, out for a flight over the Han River. When the plane reached an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet, the North Korean officer, who was not wearing a parachute, was pushed out. He was last seen splashing into the river.

  “Nick was livid!” Sariego wrote in an e-mail. “He decided to take the captured Colonel on a Joy Flight.”

  The colonel had been suspected of killing several young Chinese soldiers who were prisoners of war and also worked as houseboys for air force officers.

  In his autobiography, Nichols described several of the “methods” he developed to eliminate “dangerous or untrustworthy agents.” These included “bail him out [of an aircraft] in a paper-packed chute; dump him off the back of a boat, in the nude, at high speed; give him false information plants—and let the enemy do it for you.”

  There were no regulations governing his “cloak and dagger” work, which Nichols said he “played by ear.” Citing an order from his commanding general, Nichols said Partridge gave him a “blank check.” One letter from Partridge written nearly two years after the Korean War ended does support Nichols’s contention that the air force gave him a free hand: “The work that you are doing is quite unusual and to be productive must at times be carried out along lines which you deem appropriate regardless of what the regulations would say about the matter—if there were any regulations. . . .”

  CHAPTER 7

  Empire of Islands

  War stopped rolling up and down the Korean Peninsula in the late spring of 1951. To a substantial degree, it was because President Truman had finally found a general whose ego did not prevent him from commanding the limited war that the White House wanted to fight.

  General Matthew Ridgway was fifteen years younger than MacArthur, far less vain, far more focused. He singlehandedly changed the war by firing incompetent senior officers, restoring the morale of the Eighth Army, and breaking the momentum of the Chinese army. A brainy battlefield tactician who led airborne troops in the D-day invasion, Ridgway deployed artillery with savage efficiency and slaughtered wave upon wave of Chinese infantry. “The ground situation is excellent,” Partridge noted in his diary. “We are killing Chinese by the tens of thousands and no enemy can take this punishment for long.”

  Unlike MacArthur, Ridgway was willing to accept the reality of a divided peninsula. He turned a humiliating retreat into a sustainable stalemate. His forces pushed the Chinese and the North Koreans north of the thirty-eighth parallel. By summer of 1951, the war was more or less back where it started. As fitful peace talks began, combatants on all sides dug in for what would be two more years of fighting. On the ground, it came to resemble the trench warfare of World War I. In the air, all-jet dogfights raged over MiG Alley. Elsewhere, American B-29s continued to pulverize North Korea with bombs.

  It was during this standoff, as the American public grew weary of the war and stopped paying close attention to it, that Donald Nichols spread his spymaster wings. It was the most magnificent season of his life. He became a name brand among American spooks jockeying for power, funding, and clandestine glory. There was army intelligence. There was the CIA. There was NICK.

  In February 1951, the intelligence unit created for Nichols—Special Activities Unit #1—did not yet amount to much. It was just him and three air force sergeants, plus a handful of Koreans on loan from the South Korean air force. He ran it from a temporary office in a temporary base in Taegu, where Americans had fled during the Chinese offensive. But by the end of 1952, Nichols commanded a sprawling spy empire—Detachment 2, 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron—with fifty subdetachments. Seven of his bases were in South Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel. The rest were “north of the bomb line” on small, close-in islands along the east and west coasts of North Korea. Reporting to Nichols were 52 U.S. Air Force officers and airmen. More important, he controlled more than 900 Korean agents and fighters, including 178 Korean air force officers and enlisted men. A history of Detachment 2, which appears to have been written to please Nichols, describes his outfit as “an organization of tremendous proportions” that far exceeded the dreams he had upon arrival in Korea in 1946.

  Nichols, the seventh-grade dropout, became an educator. He built schools to teach interrogation techniques, parachute jumping, and agent survival skills. He presided over the writing of an interrogation handbook, which focused on identifying targets to bomb in North Korea. He created a map project, which allowed interpreters to pinpoint target coordinates. To communicate with his expanding operation, he built a radio network. To move men between islands, he assembled a small navy, begging, scrounging, and stealing vessels that ranged from skiffs to sailboats to a ship for landing tanks. Several of his boats
were rebuilt wrecks dug out of mud in the Han River. Others were stolen from Chinese fishermen near the North Korean border with China. A few were purchased or built to order with air force funds.

  For errands, Nichols kept a helicopter at his headquarters. For money, he hired a Korean counterfeiter and bought a printing press. In tall cabinets behind his office desk, he stored bundles of cash, both counterfeit and real. In premission meetings with agents, he liked to reach back, grab a bundle or two of cash out of a cabinet, and toss them in the air. If agents caught the money before it hit the floor, he laughed and sometimes threw more.

  The frozen front lines of a stalemated war were precisely what enabled Nichols to build an empire. His interrogators promptly moved into the large, semipermanent camps constructed by UN forces for refugees and prisoners of war. They grilled thousands of North Koreans, seeking fresh intelligence for bombing missions. Then they selected able-bodied young men and forced them to return to North Korea on spying missions.

  Nichols’s archipelago of occupied islands, which formed a kind of horseshoe around North Korea and was defended by UN air and naval forces, simplified the logistics and reduced the risks of infiltrating and extricating agents. At night, in groups of two or three, they went ashore in small boats or crossed mudflats on foot at low tide. The islands, which were also used by army intelligence outfits and the CIA, served as collecting stations for North Koreans on the run. They were screened by island-based NICK agents, and if deemed useful as potential spies, they were transported to Seoul for training.

  It took Nichols months of trial and error to figure out what types of missions he could pull off without losing most of the agents he sent off to North Korea.

  In the spring of 1951, with a blank check from Partridge for covert ops, Nichols tried his hand at commando-style sabotage. He trained fifteen South Koreans as guerrillas. He taught them how to blow up bridges and outfitted them with Korean People’s Army uniforms, complete with forged identification cards, counterfeit currency, and PPSh submachine guns, a Russian-made weapon that Stalin shipped by the tens of thousands into North Korea.

  Nichols put together an ambitious mission for his guerrillas. After parachuting into North Korea at dawn on June 1, their orders were to find and blow up two railroad bridges. Between the bridges, Nichols hoped, they would trap an enemy train, which would be an easy target for fighter-bombers of the Fifth Air Force. The fifteen were then to locate what was left of a nearby crashed MiG-15. (This was the same MiG carcass that Nichols’s team had partially salvaged on April 17, in the mission that he might or might not have participated in on the ground.) If his agents spotted remaining useful parts of the jet, “they were to put them on ox carts and proceed to the west. There, they were to steal a boat and sail to the island of Cho-do,” where Nichols had a base.

  This ambitious plan failed before it began. Chinese troops captured Nichols’s agents as they parachuted in. They were interrogated and presumably executed, except for one who escaped. Yet this failure did not stop Nichols from organizing an even more complicated operation on enemy turf.

  On July 20, he went after the wreckage of another MiG-15 that had crashed in coastal mud flats off the west coast of North Korea. In aerial photographs, the fuselage of this downed fighter appeared substantially less damaged than the one that went down and caught fire in April. The air force hoped to recover an unburned, undamaged instrument panel for analysts at the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

  To fetch it, Nichols organized a multinational, interservice salvage operation involving an army landing ship equipped with a salvage crane, a British Royal Navy destroyer for fire support, fighter planes from a British aircraft carrier to provide low cover, and Fifth Air Force fighters to ward off MiG-15 attacks. The army landing ship’s arrival was timed to a thirty-foot tide that lifted the ship high off the mudflat to allow its crane to grab the crashed jet’s fuselage.

  Remarkably, it worked. Thanks to Nichols, for the first time in the war, American aircraft experts were able to examine the intact cockpit and instruments of a Russian fighter jet that was shooting down American pilots and airmen. The avionics of the enemy’s best aircraft were now in U.S. hands.

  By the summer of 1951, under air force regulations, it was long past time for Nichols to go home. He had been based in Korea for five consecutive years, rarely taking home leave or vacation. Moreover, he faced a reset of his senior bosses. In May, General Stratemeyer suffered a major heart attack and retired. In July, General Partridge returned to the States, where he took a new job in Baltimore, Maryland, as director of the Air Research and Development Command. On his way out of Korea, he invited Nichols and Torres to join him, telling them that the work at the research base would be interesting and safe. In Baltimore, Partridge focused on improving the performance of the F-86 Sabre jets that were dueling with MiG-15s.

  “We were expecting Nick to come with us, but he changed his mind,” said Torres, who jumped at the chance to get out of Korea. “I think Nick realized that if he had come to Baltimore, he would have just been another junior officer. In Korea, he was the commander of his own intelligence unit.”

  Nearly every year, Nichols had to write to his immediate supervisor and justify his continued deployment in Korea. In those letters, he always played his ace: he was a close personal friend of President Rhee and an associate of other powerful men who controlled South Korea. He was much too valuable to be sent home.

  “I am aware that current regulations do not provide for an additional extension of overseas duty without return to the [United States],” he wrote in 1950. “But I believe that I can contribute much more to the Armed Forces if retained in my present capacity. Since my assignment to Korea in June 1946 I have developed sources of information on a level which enables me to furnish a continuous and increasing flow of intelligence reports which are of considerable interest to commanders concerned.”

  Every year his commanders overruled regulations and approved his stay. In late 1951, when his request was approved, his bosses added a sweetener, promoting him to major. A month earlier, his operation had been expanded again, as the Fifth Air Force authorized “the establishment and building of an organization large enough to capitalize on the tremendous opportunities existing in the intelligence collection field.” These “tremendous opportunities” were the coastal islands on the east and west coasts of North Korea. Nichols steadily gained access to more of these islands in 1951 and 1952, each time opening another NICK subbase.

  It had become almost impossible to move agents back and forth across the dug-in front lines of the mainland war, and spies who parachuted into North Korea were almost always caught and killed. So the islands, by default, became preferred conduits “for infiltration and exfiltration of friendly agents.” This meant, in addition to building and staffing his island bases, Nichols needed to recruit more North Koreans who were willing to return home to spy—or who could be pressured into doing so.

  One North Korean whom Nichols forced to become a spy was Kim Ji-eok.

  He was nineteen in the second year of the war and living on a farm about ten miles west of Pyongyang. To avoid conscription into the Korean People’s Army, he had found a job with the state railways, but there was little work because so many tracks had been destroyed by American bombs. When the government forced Kim Ji-eok to do farm labor instead, he feared the bombs and napalm that had destroyed 75 percent of Pyongyang and continued to fall in and around the capital. He thought his chances of surviving the war would be better if he could sneak south and find his aunt and uncle in Seoul. He hired a guide who promised to lead him through the front lines, but on a pitch-black night near the front in April 1952, the guide became lost and then disappeared. Kim walked on alone. At daybreak, he found himself on the west coast, where mudflats led toward small, rocky islands.

  An American patrol boat spotted him and took him to near
by Yongmae Island. Kim believed he was lucky. “I thought the Americans would set me free,” he said. “I was expecting to meet my uncle.”

  Instead, they handed him over to South Korean airmen who worked for Nichols. They fed him salty soup and kept him in a house with ten others who had fled North Korea. One by one, each was interrogated about why he wanted to live in South Korea and what he knew about North Korean military bases, particularly air bases, flight patterns, and airplane hangars. Apparently satisfied that he was not a spy, Nichols’s men transported Kim to Inchon by boat and then by truck to Seoul, where he was dropped off at a former girls’ school in a downtown neighborhood called Anguk-dong. Nichols had taken over the two-story, nineteen-room building and made it his headquarters.

  Kim’s interrogation continued there. He was ordered to detail the location of military bases near his home. He worked with mapmakers to draw diagrams of his home and the surrounding neighborhood. “I did not know about any military installations,” Kim said. “I was so disappointed because I had heard so many good things about South Korea and because I had paid all the money I had for a guide.”

  His interrogator had news for Kim that was even more distressing.

  “He told me I must go back home. He wanted me to find Mirim Airport [a military airfield near Pyongyang] and get information about it,” Kim said. “He also told me that if I didn’t go back, he would send me to prison. If I completed the mission, he promised I could join the South Korean air force. That was something I wanted. I believed that if I became an airman, I might be able to bring my family to Seoul.”

  After Kim agreed to return, he received two weeks of training. Then he and two other North Korean defectors who had become reluctant spies were taken by boat back to the west coast of North Korea. Walking at night to avoid the Americans’ daytime bombing attacks, they traveled eighty-five miles over twenty days to the outskirts of Pyongyang.