King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  The trial rewrote this embarrassing history by spinning a largely fictional narrative that cast Kim as a commander who outsmarted backstabbing Korean comrades and scheming Yankees. Evidence at the trial purported to show that America sneakily started the war and that North Korea won it, thanks to Kim’s brilliant generalship and his uncanny skill in catching traitors. As one of Kim’s hagiographers summarized his achievements: “To have successfully fought U.S. imperialism, the strongest enemy, while spy cliques were entrenched in the Party and carrying out their intrigues! How great is Comrade Kim Il Sung!”

  Publicized slavishly by state media and covered by a small contingent of foreign correspondents, the trial replicated the hollow pageantry of Soviet show trials of the 1930s. It was carefully rehearsed, lethal in its consequences, and unintentionally risible, part Stalinism, part Saturday Night Live.

  “I am a running dog of American imperialism,” said Yi Kang Guk, a defendant who had worked in North Korea’s ministry of trade. “I thank you for giving me an opportunity to die after making my confession.”

  Each defense lawyer declared that his client had been proven guilty. Every defendant confessed enthusiastically to treason, admitted to being an American spy, and embraced the fairness of his sentence while welcoming the confiscation of his property. The court found everyone guilty on all charges presented, with ten men sentenced to death and two to long prison terms.

  “I am grateful for having been provided with an advocate and for the opportunity to speak freely during the four days of the trial,” said Yi Sung Yop, the former North Korean minister of justice who was accused of masterminding the planned coup against the Great Leader. “Whatever punishment I am given by the trial, I will accept with gratitude. Had I two lives, to take them both would have been too little.”

  Historians who have examined transcripts of the trial believe that the absurd confessions were the likely result of torture, blackmail, and false pretrial promises. Much of the testimony was wildly implausible. A case in point was the claim that Harold Noble, an American diplomat, met in Seoul with one defendant on June 26, 1950, the day after the North Korean invasion. Noble supposedly told defendant Yi Sung Yop about the secret U.S. plan for the amphibious invasion at Inchon. It was an impossible claim because Noble was not in Seoul that day; he was on vacation in Tokyo. And on June 26, the United States was still struggling to understand news about the invasion; Americans had no plan then for a counterattack at Inchon. “The evidence presented in the trial documents is hardly convincing,” concluded Dae-Sook Suh, the most widely respected of Kim’s biographers.

  Yet the trial made a case against Nichols that appears to have been based on deep North Korean knowledge of his career as spy. All twelve defendants in the trial were longtime Communists from the southern half of the peninsula. Before moving north to join the government of Kim Il Sung, they were leaders of the South Korean Workers’ Party, which was one of Nichols’s primary targets for infiltration, sabotage, arrests, and executions.

  Paek Hyong-bok, one of the accused traitors and a former South Korean police investigator, testified that he had taken orders and three thousand American dollars from Nichols. The orders, Paek said, led to the arrest and murder of a hundred officials in the South Korean Workers’ Party. While the numbers are probably exaggerated, the gist of the accusation rings true. By his own admission as well as abundant documentary and photographic evidence, Nichols worked for years with South Korean police to dismantle and destroy South Korean Communist organizations, particularly the Workers’ Party. In his memoir, Nichols wrote that he had planted “a small number of agents” in the party hierarchy by 1947 and that they helped him sabotage its operations and arrest senior members: “During 1948 and 1949, we broke up numerous commy cells in S.K.”

  All of this raises an obvious question. Because Nichols, an active-duty air force intelligence commander based in Seoul, was accused by name of being an American spymaster and a murderer during an internationally publicized trial that had no precedent in North Korea, why wasn’t the accusation publicized by members of the large international press corps then in Seoul?

  Based on available archival evidence, none did, at least in the English-speaking world. Nichols’s links to spying in North Korea were never mentioned in major American newspapers—at the time or ever.

  There are four likely reasons. First, Nichols excelled at being a nobody in Seoul. Throughout his time in Korea, he kept away from parties and dinners that might attract journalists; his name meant nothing to them. Second, even if reporters had asked questions, press officers in the air force would have refused to discuss intelligence operations. Third, reporters had little to no direct access to Nichols, who lived on a closed and secret base outside the city. Finally, and probably most important, Kim Il Sung’s show trial was ludicrous on so many levels that few Westerners took it seriously enough to try to distinguish facts from farce.

  Despite his notoriety in Pyongyang, Nichols’s name did not bubble up in scholarly Western accounts of the trial until two decades after the war. Even then, when his name appeared in a respected two-volume academic history titled Communism in Korea, eminent historians Robert Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee seemed unaware of the pivotal intelligence role Nichols played in the Korean War. During the show trial, they wrote, it was “impossible to separate truth and half-truth from total falsity in the myriad of charges. . . .”

  Nichols’s personal life in Korea was even murkier than his life as a spy. According to his military service record, he worked too much to even have a personal life. In his first seven and half years in Korea, Nichols took less than thirty days’ leave, wrote Colonel Eugene G. Cook. “Such devotion to duty, to his unit, and to his mission is unparalleled. During this time he was on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

  In his autobiography, Nichols wrote that he did find time to fall in love, get married, and have a son, but the details he offers in the book do not entirely make sense or are contradicted by other witnesses. Available evidence suggests he may have invented a wife and a biological child—years after leaving Korea.

  He wrote that his Korean wife, Kim In Hwa, died while giving birth to Donald Nichols II on February 18, 1953. Yet if he had a wife then and if she died on that date while giving birth to his first and only child, it would have been a ghastly and unforgettable coincidence. For Nichols was born on February 18. In his autobiography he does not note that he lost a wife and gained a son on his own birthday. It is an improbable omission—a signal that he probably was fabricating a story.

  Nichols was mostly vague about his family in his book, writing that “there is much that could be said about In Hwa; our marriage, her death. However, I elect to keep those secrets to myself.” No government records of his marriage, his son’s birth, or his wife’s death could be located in Seoul, Taegu, or Inchon. Even if they once existed, many records of that era have been lost or destroyed, and South Korean privacy laws make it all but impossible to attempt a record search.

  Nichols’s extended family was never certain that Nichols was the birth father of Donald “Donnie” Nichols II, who was sent from Seoul to Florida to live with one of Nichols’s brothers in 1955. “We all thought that boy was adopted,” said Nichols’s nephew Donald H. Nichols, who was a teenager when the boy came to Florida. “Donnie was part Caucasian, but did not look anything like my uncle Don, not in the big ears, or the big nose, not in any facial features. If he was my uncle’s son, not many of his genes passed through.”

  For many years, Nichols told government agencies and his family that Donnie was adopted. In a petition of naturalization that he filled out in Miami, Nichols wrote that he was the boy’s “adoptive parent.” He told the same thing to air force doctors in 1957. In occasional conversations with his brother Judson’s family in the 1960s, he sometimes hinted that he was the boy’s father. Those hints would gel over time into a firm claim that Donnie was his “blood son.” S
till, in a letter to his air force friend Torres that he wrote more than a decade after returning to the United States, Nichols referred to Donnie as one of “3 adopted Korean children” he brought home after the war.

  As for Nichols’s marriage in Korea, even less is clear. His book, most of which is written in tough-guy prose, is uncharacteristically saccharine in describing his wife and recounting his marriage.

  “I was privileged to know her only three years before she left for Heaven. . . . Even in the midst of war, terror, hunger and uncertainty, we were happy. She gave me everything. . . . [I]n 1951, I had held my wife’s hand while I told her of the beauties of Florida where I would be taking her as soon as we were successful in freeing her people and her homeland. She was seven years my junior—I loved her dearly. Her physical beauty, outstanding as it was, did not compare with the spiritual and moral qualities contained within that soul which would never live to see the United States. . . .

  “If I could write prayers, I would write one of thankfulness for the brief period during which I was privileged to know and enjoy the exquisite presence and love of my beloved wife. Then I would write another of thankfulness that because of her astute and noble dedication to womanhood and motherhood, she somehow saved our son, Donald.”

  Nichols never explained where or how he met Kim In Hwa. He does say that she was born and raised near Seoul, that the wedding was “one of the proudest moments of [his] life,” and that his bride was nineteen when they were married on January 12, 1951.

  That wedding date, however, is highly unlikely. The war was then at a fever pitch, with Chinese forces advancing across Korea and the Joint Chiefs of Staff announcing that it might not be possible to hold the peninsula indefinitely. Having taken Seoul a week earlier, the Chinese drove UN forces out of Inchon on the day of Nichols’s purported wedding. In a bloody infantry engagement with the Chinese in the city of Hoengsong, about seventy miles east of Seoul, the Eighth Army suffered more than two thousand casualties.

  In the preceding weeks, the entire command structure of the U.S. military in Korea, including Nichols and Torres, had been forced to retreat south, back to the city of Taegu. There, Nichols and his men were under intense pressure to find more and better bombing targets to help the army stop the Chinese. During that time, Nichols lived in an intelligence compound just outside Taegu, together with a small group of American and South Korean officers and airmen. Torres recalls the tension and intense workload of the period, but remembers nothing about his boss getting married.

  “Nick never mentioned anything about it to anybody, as far as I know,” Torres said. “He slept at the compound every night. We never saw him with a woman and if he spoke about women, he said he didn’t like them. The part of his book about marriage is pure fantasy.”

  When Nichols returned to Florida in 1957, he told air force doctors he had “never been married.” In conversations with his family and a letter to Torres, he did not mention a marriage and did not describe himself as a widower. Donald H. Nichols, the nephew who briefly lived with Nichols after the war, is certain that his uncle was gay.

  “Uncle Don was a closeted homosexual in a macho world,” he said. “In those days, he was what we all called a ‘confirmed bachelor.’ Not once did he mention women. Even when we were around pretty girls in a store, he didn’t look at them. In the family we thought his mother had screwed him up so much that he never had a normal relationship.”

  A niece, Diana Carlin, who lived with Nichols in the late 1950s and again in the mid-1960s, said he never brought women to the house. “He had some men friends over, but they were the kind of men who made my mother uncomfortable. They were not the kind of people you find in our church.”

  Staying in the closet would not have been unusual for a proud ex–air force officer. And a fictional marriage—especially one that ended years ago in a distant war zone with the death of a saintly woman—could have been helpful to Nichols. It would explain why he was a single father. If Nichols did invent his marriage, it would not surprise relatives who knew him after the war. “My uncle was quite special and you never quite trusted him,” said his nephew Donald H. Nichols. “A faked marriage? The guy was always up to something.”

  Seven weeks after the armistice was signed, Nichols revealed how deeply his spy operation had penetrated the command structure of the North Korean military.

  His disclosure of sources and methods occurred in his quarters at Oryu-dong, his sprawling hillside compound about forty minutes by jeep from downtown Seoul. Nichols had moved his spy base there in early 1953 to get away from the crowded city and have more elbow room for training agents and interrogating North Koreans. The base at Oryu-dong was fronted by an orphanage and a local police station. It had a parade ground, a tailor’s shop, a photo shop, and a headquarters building. Airmen and officers lived in Quonset huts on opposite sides of the mess hall. Nichols lived alone in separate and more spacious quarters halfway up the side of the low mountain valley.

  It was there that Nichols told some of his secrets to a fighter pilot named No Kum Sok, a senior lieutenant in the North Korean air force. Hours earlier, Lieutenant No, twenty years old, had defected to South Korea in a MiG-15. In photographs taken that day, September 21, 1953, No wore a rakish leather flight jacket and looked like someone who might be chosen to play a fighter pilot in a movie. He was lean and handsome, with high cheekbones, bright eyes, and thick black hair. Nichols was not photographed that day, but it is safe to assume that, as always, he bore no resemblance to a cinema spy. His beefy frame was packed into a dark green uniform with no markings. The pilot from North Korea thought Nichols dressed like the high-ranking Soviet officers he had known in China, where foreigners were not allowed to wear insignia on their uniforms.

  The conversation between the American spy and the North Korean fighter pilot took place after No Kum Sok had pulled off one of the most celebrated thefts of the cold war. Shortly after nine on a clear and crisp Monday morning, No had taken off from Sunan airfield near Pyongyang in a battle-ready MiG-15 bearing the markings of the North Korean air force. Seventeen minutes later, he had landed in South Korea at Kimpo airfield, then the busiest U.S. military air base on the Korean Peninsula. He landed the wrong way on an active runway and nearly crashed head-on into an American Sabre jet that was landing at the same moment from the opposite direction. The terrified American fighter pilot shouted over the radio, “There is somebody landing the wrong way! It’s a goddamn MiG!”

  The pilot’s shout reverberated around the world. RED MIG-15 BROUGHT TO SEOUL said a banner front-page headline in the Washington Post. Similar headlines appeared on the front pages of nearly all the major newspapers, except those in China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The news embarrassed and infuriated Kim Il Sung, who happened to be in Moscow begging for financial assistance. The defection handed the United States a sensational and unexpected propaganda victory, along with a late-model and long-coveted piece of advanced Soviet aerospace technology.

  After the MiG had safely come to a stop on the tarmac, and after the air force determined that its pilot wanted to defect, No was driven in a jeep to the office of the commander of the Fifth Air Force, Lieutenant General Samuel E. Anderson. Because Anderson spoke no Korean, he and No waited together in an uncomfortable silence.

  It took Nichols twenty minutes to get there. He jumped in the helicopter he kept on standby at his nearby spy base, flew to Kimpo, and burst into Anderson’s office. Without saluting the general, Nichols spoke excitedly to No in Korean. After ten minutes, Nichols announced, “Let’s go to my place.” They boarded his helicopter, flew back to his compound, and hurried to his private office.

  There, No was alarmed by a growling greeting party of ten mixed-breed dogs, including several large huskies. On Nichols’s order the dogs calmed down and wagged their tails. No remembered, too, the office refrigerator, which contained nothing but large bottles of Coca-Cola. Nichols suggest
ed they each drink a bottle. No had never tasted a sugary American soft drink before, but as soon as he tried it, he found he loved ice-cold Coke. Years later, he would buy stock in the company.

  Nichols encouraged No to take a seat in the large swivel chair behind his desk. This may have been the chair Nichols stole from Kim Il Sung’s office in Pyongyang during the first year of the war. The pilot declined, believing that the American should sit in his own chair to conduct his duties.

  Nichols then got down to business. He asked if No knew other MiG pilots who might want to defect in a fighter jet. When No said that he did know one, Nichols strongly urged him to write that pilot a letter.

  “How will you deliver the letter?” No asked.

  Nichols assured him that he had his ways. No immediately wrote a letter to his best friend and fellow pilot, Kun Soo Sung. Many years later, No learned that Kun, along with four other air force comrades and commanders, was executed soon after his defection. He never learned if his letter was intercepted or played any role in the executions. Nichols also asked if No was acquainted with General Lee Whal, vice-commander of the North Korean air force. No was stunned by the question. That very morning, he and the general had exchanged pleasantries on the tarmac before No took off in the MiG. No explained this to Nichols, who clapped his hands in delight.

  “General Lee is my friend,” Nichols told the pilot. “I wrote him two letters.”