King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  “We were ordered to find the hangar at Mirim airfield and learn the type and number of aircraft,” Kim said. “Of course, it was impossible. We couldn’t get near the airfield and the two guys in my group ran off. I wanted to stay alive. But I also wanted to go back to South Korea and join the air force.”

  Kim said he made no attempt to spy on the airfield and focused instead on finding a more reliable guide to lead him safely back to South Korea. He found a woman who owned a rice-cake shop in Pyongyang, and she helped him return to the west coast, where he again walked across mudflats to an island controlled by the Americans. He turned himself in as a returning spy.

  “I was nervous that something bad was going to happen to me,” he said. “The investigators kept asking about the hangar at Mirim airfield—and I couldn’t answer.”

  For reasons that Kim did not understand, the South Koreans who worked for Nichols selected him for more spy training and transported him back to Nichols’s headquarters in Seoul. There he had a brief but unforgettable audience with the commander.

  “Nichols was really fat, with a huge, bulging belly. The Koreans called him ‘Neko, Neko.’ In his office there were all these yellow dogs and they barked at me. I didn’t even sit down. There was an American pilot in the office. I learned he was going to take me to a training camp. For the trip, Nichols gave the pilot a bundle of money. I don’t know how much it was. Nichols did not talk to me.”

  After two short flights and a boat journey, Kim arrived on Jebu, a west coast island where the South Korean air force operated a training camp. Most of the sixty trainees were volunteers from South Korea who would become noncommissioned officers in the air force. The rest were North Koreans or young men who did not belong to any military organization.

  Kim had become an agent-in-training for a future parachute drop over North Korea. His group of press-ganged spies, called Class C, was given American military uniforms without insignia, a pair of American-made military boots, and C rations, the U.S. military meals intended for soldiers far from mess halls or field kitchens. But they were paid nothing and had no rank, serial number, or identity card. “Officially, we did not exist,” Kim said.

  From May until September 1952, his training consisted mostly of running, often with a parachute strapped to his back. He learned how to fold the parachute quickly and how to mark coordinates on a map. Once during training, he smiled while saluting and was severely beaten by Koreans who worked for Nichols. When he reported that he had a stomachache, the Koreans again beat him.

  By September, Kim’s fellow Class C spies began leaving the island. They did not say good-bye or graduate. Every few days, a few of them simply disappeared. Kim suspected they had been selected for missions in the North. Rumors spread in the camp that South Korean instructors pushed terrified agents out of airplanes.

  “I decided my best chance of living would be to escape,” Kim said.

  With several others, he walked away at night across mudflats to the mainland. They found their way to the headquarters of the South Korean air force outside Seoul and, rather improbably, were allowed to tell their stories to General Kim Chung Yul, the air force chief of staff who had won his job with Nichols’s help. The general allowed the men to join the air force.

  Kim Ji-eok survived the war by working in a military hospital. After eight years in the air force, he found a job at a noodle restaurant owned by his aunt in Seoul—and that is where he was still working in 2015 when he told his story, at age eighty-two.

  “People call Nichols a hero, but I’m not so sure,” said Kim. “If he had sent me back again to North Korea, it would have been the end of my life.”

  In Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” Kilgore famously calls in a sortie of air force jets to firebomb the enemy.

  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” he tells his men as a coastal jungle explodes in flames that reek of gasoline. “Smells like . . . victory.”

  The movie, of course, is about Vietnam, where Americans dropped a staggering 388,000 tons of napalm between 1963 and 1973. The colonel’s deranged speech—together with a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of terrified Vietnamese children running from a napalmed village—secured napalm’s infamy in the annals of modern warfare. While Colonel Kilgore was a satiric fiction, there was nothing fictitious about the U.S. military’s twentieth-century love affair with the sticky, long-burning gel that melts human flesh. It was invented at Harvard in the early 1940s, and American bomb planners quickly sent it to war. About 20,000 tons were dropped on Germany. A napalm attack over Tokyo one night in March 1945 created a firestorm that killed about a hundred thousand people and turned fifteen miles of the city to ash. Bomber pilots recalled the smell of “roasted human flesh.”

  Yet the U.S. military did not fully appreciate napalm until it dropped 32,000 tons of it on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953. “Napalm was one of the ‘discoveries’ of the Korean War,” wrote J. M. Spaight, a British airpower expert in the 1950s. “[I]t was in Korea that its effectiveness as a stopping weapon was fully demonstrated. . . . But for [napalm] the United Nations force might have been bundled neck and crop out of Korea. . . .”

  A decade before Vietnam, Donald Nichols smelled victory in napalm’s flames. “Napalm Bombs have the greatest psychological effect on the people of North Korea, due to the lasting burning effect it has on whatever it comes in contact with,” he wrote in an air intelligence information report.

  Nichols’s song of praise was part of an American military chorus in Korea, where operations analysts for the Fifth Air Force “heartily endorsed napalm as the best single antipersonnel weapon” in the war. The Far East Air Forces listed napalm as its “first choice weapon against troops.” The Twenty-seventh Fighter Escort Wing, a U.S. unit that attacked Chinese troops in 1951, said napalm was its “primary weapon.” General Ridgway dispatched B-29s with napalm over Pyongyang on January 3 and 5, 1951, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground.” Altogether, the United States dropped nearly twice as much napalm on Korea as it did on Japan in 1945.

  In the early days of the war in Korea, when American soldiers were outgunned and fleeing south, napalm was the great equalizer. Even a near miss could generate enough heat to ignite fuel inside a T-34 tank. When Chinese forces surged south and attacked in human waves, napalm killed thousands and terrified many more. But the bulk of the napalm that the Americans dropped in the war was used strategically rather than tactically, which means it was used to set fire to cities, towns, and villages across North Korea.

  As the war progressed, the American definition of what constituted a reasonable military target in North Korea kept expanding. At first, Truman believed that attacks on targets that were not “purely military” could provoke a larger war with the Soviet Union. The White House resisted an early air force proposal to do a “fire job”—using napalm—on North Korea’s five major industrial centers. But after the Chinese intervention, American restraint disappeared and the fire job began in November 1950. It continued throughout the rest of the war. Bombing targets, for napalm and conventional bombs, included nearly every man-made structure in North Korea, as well as most human or animal activities that could conceivably be interpreted from a war plane as suspicious.

  “During recent days we have been carrying out attacks above the bomb line on any activities which might have military significance,” Partridge wrote in his dairy in mid-December 1950. “For example, we have been attacking all males who are carrying arms or who are moving about in a manner which indicates that they are [a] potential enemy. We are attacking any transportation and carts, animals capable of acting as beasts of burden. . . . Lately we have received through friendly sources, information that some of these attacks have been on people who were in some cases South Korean and in other cases, were entirely innocent. This is a matter of extreme regret, but I do not know how to direct selective attack
s without giving the enemy sanctuary over a wide area.”

  As the target list expanded, so did the use of napalm. One reason was the satisfaction pilots felt after dropping it. “When you’ve hit a village and have seen it go up in flames, you know you’ve accomplished something,” one pilot said. American fulfillment in using napalm in Korea sometimes exceeded its military utility, according to an air force survey of prisoners of war. The prisoners said that while they feared napalm, the most effective weapons were fragmentation bombs. “The Fifth Air Force’s preference for napalm as an antipersonnel weapon may not have been completely realistic,” the survey found.

  By the summer of 1951, with the war stalemated, the Far East Air Forces had more bombers and more napalm than it had targets. The imbalance forced Nichols to rethink what it meant to be a special operations commander. There would be no more code breaking, sabotage attempts, or salvage operations. His orders were to collect “information suitable for air target selection,” assess bomb damage, and determine the “psychological effects of air power on the enemy.”

  To that end, Nichols told his men to interrogate as many defectors and prisoners of war as possible. He recruited agents by the hundreds, and his training schools taught them how to slip into North Korea on foot, by boat, and by parachute. They were told to travel to their home regions, where they knew the lay of the land and had friends. After finding and mapping targets worth bombing, they were to slip away, preferably by walking across mudflats to an island where Nichols had a base. As Nichols’s operation moved into high gear in late 1951 and 1952, an acceptable loss rate for agents—caught and killed or simply bugging out—appears to have been 40 percent.

  Nichols also killed his own spies if he believed they were double agents loyal to North Korea. To smoke them out, he orchestrated elaborate cons. One particularly theatrical operation occurred when Nichols was building his island empire, according to George T. Gregory, an air force major who served as an executive officer under Nichols. As Gregory tells the story, Nichols was aboard one of his boats, transporting agents to the mainland, when “blinding beams of searchlights suddenly bathed them in white.

  “They were boarded and forced to line up with their hands behind their heads by the grim-looking men in North Korean navy uniforms,” Gregory wrote. “The North Koreans advised their captives that they were taking the ‘white foreigner’ [Nichols] with them, but would blow the ship and its crew of vile, traitorous South Koreans—American puppets—out of the water. Nichols was being led towards the enemy ship when one of the crewmen began screaming that he was a North Korean agent.”

  Nichols had found his mole.

  “The dummy Communist vessel, complete with North Korean Navy markings, sailor uniforms and Soviet guns, was planned and carried out by Nichols in its entirety,” Gregory wrote.

  Between 1951 and the end of 1952, Nichols doubled his production of air intelligence information reports, as the monthly total jumped from five hundred to about a thousand. “The increasing flow of reports made it necessary to work American personnel and indigenous translators and draftsmen in headquarters on frequent occasion at night and holidays,” according to a history of his unit.

  The official air force history of the war describes Nichols as the “most important single collector” of air intelligence for the tactical bombing of North Korea. His reports pinpointed hand-grenade factories, freshly dug caves, radio stations, parking lots, food warehouses, ammunition dumps, print shops, a paper factory, a zinc factory, locomotives, Russian officer quarters, Chinese troop concentrations, and an underground clothing factory dug into the side of a mountain. Many reports included finely detailed maps. In a report on an airfield in downtown Pyongyang, there were maps and drawings of electrical transformer stations, water supply lines, and an aircraft repair shop disguised among village huts.

  Bomb planners in Tokyo relied on Nichols’s reports. His targets were bombed with explosives or burned with napalm or both. In the final year of the war, when the air force was running low on targets, Nichols was called upon to help destroy a giant hydroelectric dam on the Yalu River. The Suiho Dam had been bombed several times but stubbornly continued to produce electricity. Nichols conceived of a plan to use covert agents who had grown up near the dam, and they were parachuted in as sleeper agents. Their mission was to find employment at the dam, establish trust, and use their inside access to produce “proper maps and annotated photos” for bombing attacks that would cripple the dam. At war’s end, the agents were apparently still establishing trust—or, more likely, dead. The dam survived.

  American bombs and napalm destroyed more of North Korea, in relation to its resources, than all the combined air attacks on Japan during World War II, including the atom bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the conclusion of the Far East Air Forces. The air force also believed that air attacks tipped the balance, forcing a crippled, traumatized enemy to the peace table. “We are pretty sure now that the Communists wanted peace, not because of a two-year stalemate on the ground, but to get airpower off their back,” General Otto P. Weyland, commander of the Far East Air Forces, said in 1954.

  The air force was so proud of its performance that it institutionalized the lessons learned in Korea and used them a decade later in Southeast Asia, where it carpet bombed and napalmed insurgents in Vietnam—and failed spectacularly to win the war. There were many who analyzed the bombing of North Korea and concluded that the air force had learned the wrong lessons. They found overwhelming evidence that bombing failed to stop “the forward movement of supplies” to North Korean and Chinese fighters.

  Even Nichols, who won accolades for his success in identifying bomb targets, was among those who doubted the utility of the air-delivered devastation. “To a certain extent you could say we wasted our bombs on the roads, bridges, railroads, tunnels, etc.,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “The enemy made a fool of us.”

  The enemy did so by transporting fuel, ammunition, and food in the same way that ants transport food to their colonies—in small quantities distributed among a large number of disciplined and highly motivated individuals. The North Koreans used an A-frame: a kind of backpack on stilts that was strapped to a man’s shoulders and had two wooden support sticks that dragged behind on the ground. With this primitive rucksack, Koreans could lug loads weighing up to 150 pounds.

  “I saw teams of hundreds and hundreds all equipped with their frames,” Nichols wrote. “These teams worked by night and slept by day . . . they usually dispersed themselves under trees and in and around mountains. Through this means the front line [Chinese] troops were well served and we could do very little about it; after all, our planes couldn’t strafe every man in North Korea.”

  In the end, American bombs did not stop the war; Stalin did, by dying. After the dictator’s death on March 5, 1953, no one who mattered in the Soviet Union wanted to prolong the expensive bloodshed in Korea. Within days, the Soviet leadership moved to work with the Chinese and seek “the soonest possible conclusion” to the war. Peace talks with the Americans suddenly turned serious.

  Stalin’s death was also a turning point for Nichols. His island empire stopped growing. By late May, the air force ordered him to remove his agents from islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea. By late July, the major combatants in the Korean War had signed an armistice. The thirty-eighth parallel was again the internationally accepted dividing line between the two Koreas and fighting stopped. Nichols would stay on in Korea, remain in command of a spy base, and continue to meet regularly with Syngman Rhee. But his spy career—and, as it would turn out, his life—had peaked. He was thirty.

  CHAPTER 8

  Famous in Pyongyang

  As the war wound down, Donald Nichols found himself exposed. North Koreans who read state-controlled newspapers and listened to state radio knew who he was and what he did for a living. He worried then—and for the rest of his life—about assas
sination. “He thought somebody was after him,” according to a nephew who lived with him in Florida after the war. “He was always paranoid.”

  Nichols had good reason to worry. He learned before the war that his name was on a North Korean list of American spies. During the war, he was mentioned in propaganda radio broadcasts from Pyongyang and Beijing. The bounty for killing him, depending on who told the story, ranged from $7.50 to $200,000. Nichols claimed in his autobiography that three attempts were made on his life; but two South Korean intelligence officers who served with him throughout the war remember only one, and that would-be assassin was caught and killed well before he could get to Nichols. After the war, in a one-of-a-kind show trial in Pyongyang, Nichols was named as a spymaster in an American-backed plot to overthrow Kim Il Sung.

  A transcript of the trial, printed in the Rodong Sinmun, the official party newspaper, mentioned him by name at least eleven times. Testimony identified him as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who worked for the Far East Command, who sabotaged and murdered Communists inside South Korea, and who infiltrated agents into high positions in North Korea in an effort to cause armed riots and topple the government.

  There was, of course, considerable truth in these charges.

  The show trial was a Kim Il Sung production that tried to blame his country’s dire postwar predicament on a dozen “anti-party traitors.” It also whipped up hatred of the United States, which was accused at the trial of secretly starting the war and masterminding an espionage plot—with Nichols as a principal plotter—that encouraged the twelve traitors to overthrow Kim.

  Kim Il Sung needed a diversion. His invasion of South Korea had achieved nothing, killed millions, and turned North Korea into a smoldering, starving ruin. His performance as a military leader had been inept and humiliating. He squandered early battlefield advantages by failing to resupply his invading army. Disastrously, he ignored warnings that the United States was planning a counterattack by sea at Inchon, which led to the destruction of most of his army. When Chinese forces rushed in to save his skin, Kim had to surrender control of the war to a Chinese general who called the Great Leader a fool and treated him like a child.