King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  During their chat, No was still flushed with adrenaline from his risky defection and did not fully grasp who Nichols was. But the pilot later realized he had read about the American spymaster named Nichols before his escape. In the spring of 1953, Nichols’s name had appeared in a secret Workers’ Party report that No, as a party member, had access to. The report, as No recalled, detailed accusations against Nichols that would later be made public in the postwar show trial of the twelve North Korean traitors.

  Nichols’s comments about being in contact with the vice-commander of North Korea’s air force were of particular interest because No had wondered for years about the general’s loyalty. For a top North Korean official, Lee Whal had an unusual background. He was the son of a wealthy landowner who had prospered in Korea under Japanese occupation and served as a military pilot for the Japanese during World War II. The North Korean regime did not normally trust individuals with such tainted backgrounds. Kim Il Sung ordered them killed. General Lee had apparently been given a special dispensation because he volunteered to train pilots in North Korea and donated his own property as facilities for pilot housing and education.

  No had firsthand experience that led him to suspect that General Lee was an American spy. On two occasions during the air war over MiG Alley, No had been part of fighter formations that were ambushed by U.S. Sabre jets whose pilots seemed to know precisely when North Korean air force MiGs were arriving and at what altitude. In No’s recollection, the first ambush occurred on January 25, 1952, when General Lee ordered sixteen MiG-15s—including one piloted by No—to fly at low altitude from their base at Dandong, in northeast China, into North Korean airspace. They were attacked immediately from above by American fighters, which shot down three MiGs. The second ambush occurred fourteen months later, on March 21, 1953, when sixteen MiG pilots—including No—took off from a base in Tonghua, China. The lead North Korean pilot in that formation contacted General Lee by radio during the mission, reporting that he and other pilots could see a huge cloud of vapor trails on the near horizon. Lee responded from the control tower, saying the vapor trails were probably from Russian or Chinese aircraft—and not to worry. Sabre jets soon attacked, shooting down two MiGs.

  “I had a strong belief at the time that General Lee Whal purposely guided our flights to the waiting American planes,” No said years later. The general’s possible links to Nichols and American military intelligence were apparently never made public.

  On the day of his escape from North Korea, the young pilot did not have the presence of mind to discuss all this with Nichols. Instead, No tried to be as cooperative as possible. When Nichols asked him to pose for propaganda photographs with the MiG-15, No did so, and news agencies flashed the pictures around the world. When a team of air force interrogators flew in from Tokyo, No answered nineteen hours of questions over two days, talking to the point of exhaustion.

  For the United States, No’s defection was a key intelligence windfall of the Korean War era. He delivered the first combat-ready MiG-15 that could be test flown. The air force rushed two of its best test pilots—Major Chuck Yeager (the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound) and Tom Collins (holder of a world speed record in a Sabre)—to the Far East to fly No’s plane. As important, No proved to be a uniquely valuable and well-informed eyewitness. During intensive interrogation—six hours a day, five days a week, for nearly half a year—he added rich new detail to U.S. suspicions about the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Korean War.

  The defection was also a grace note in Nichols’s life as a spy. It showcased his analytical skills—as well as his heart.

  Nichols personally wrote the first report about No’s defection. Finished in three days, fifty-five pages long, and kept secret for sixty years, it was a bravura piece of intelligence work. It shrewdly assessed the value of the secrets spilled by the fighter pilot and put them into a broader geopolitical context. The report used precise language, photographs, and drawings to fill substantial holes in American understanding of the conduct of China and the Soviet Union in the Korean War, as well as Kim Il Sung’s plans for postwar confrontation with the United States and South Korea. It won commendations for Nichols for “prompt, exacting action” from General Otto Weyland, commander of Far East Air Forces. In Nichols’s military service record, his group commander praised the report as an example of Nichols’s “foresight, initiative, willingness to accept responsibility, and his ability to improvise.”

  The Americans were eager to show off their prize defector, so eager that they scheduled a press conference for No on his second day in South Korea. Fortunately for No, he had another meeting with Nichols before he went in front of the press.

  “I was thinking of going to the United States but did not know who to ask about it,” No recalled. “Then, before I could even bring it up, Nichols met with me and emphasized that I would have a great future and good opportunities if I demanded to go to America. He specifically told me not to join the South Korean air force and to go to college in the United States.”

  Nichols gave No enough confidence to declare at the press conference that he wanted to live in the United States and study at a university—a declaration that appealed to the American press corps, which showcased his educational aspirations on front pages across the United States. Within a year, it came to pass. Agents from the CIA enrolled No as a freshman at the University of Delaware, where he earned a degree in engineering. He would become an American citizen, change his name to Kenneth Rowe, raise a family that spoke mostly English at home, and have a long career as a university professor and aerospace engineer with a top-secret security clearance.

  Many years later, in retirement and living in Daytona Beach, Florida, Kenneth Rowe credited the spy he drank Coke with for giving him guidance that changed the trajectory of his life. “By telling me to go to America,” he said, “Nichols sealed my fate.”

  When the United States, the Soviet Union, and China negotiated an end to fighting in Korea, Nichols’s most important intelligence source in South Korea, Syngman Rhee, fell into a near-paralyzing funk. The South Korean leader wanted, more than ever, to unify the peninsula under his control and put a stake through the heart of his nemesis, Kim Il Sung. The only way to do that, he believed, was with war. It was infuriating to Rhee that the new American president, Dwight Eisenhower, had accepted the permanent existence of a sovereign North Korea under Kim’s leadership. “You can’t cooperate with smallpox,” Rhee whined.

  Without a war, Rhee worried that he would lose his leverage with the United States. He feared the Korean people would view him as weak. He threatened, rather emptily, to fight on alone against China and North Korea. He organized mass rallies, demanding unification by force, and refused to accept the idea of peaceful coexistence with North Korea. His government staged a “spontaneous” protest by five hundred young schoolgirls who marched through the streets of Seoul in pigtails, waving white handkerchiefs, weeping, and screaming at the United States: “You are murdering our country. Why are you murdering our country?”

  When such histrionics failed to change American policy, Rhee tried to sabotage the emerging peace deal. On June 18, 1953, he released about twenty-five thousand North Korean prisoners of war from camps in South Korea. At that point in the armistice talks, Kim Il Sung’s negotiators had been demanding the return of all North Korean prisoners of war to North Korean territory. By releasing them in the South, Rhee hoped that the Communists would accuse the Americans of bad faith and break off negotiations.

  China and North Korea, however, were eager to end the war, and although they complained about the prisoner release, they did not walk away from the armistice deal. Rhee did succeed in infuriating the Pentagon, the State Department, and Eisenhower. More than ever, they came to see the elderly Korean leader as ungrateful, irritating, and dangerous. General Mark Clark, commander of the Far East Command, lamented having to wrestle with both Communists and Rhee i
n the peace talks, but said the “biggest trouble came from Rhee.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Rhee that American GIs had paid a high price in “blood and suffering” to save South Korea—and that Rhee had no right to waste their sacrifice by trying to torpedo the peace talks.

  But it was Eisenhower who delivered the most sustained scolding when Rhee visited the White House on July 27, 1954.

  “[W]hen you say that we should deliberately plunge into war, let me tell you that if war comes, it will be horrible,” the president said. “Atomic war will destroy civilization. It will destroy our cities. There will be millions of people dead. . . . If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate.”

  Rhee was neither intimidated nor chastened. The day after his combative meeting with Eisenhower, addressing a joint session of Congress, he advocated a new war to unite the Korean Peninsula. He suggested that South Korea should join forces with Taiwan to attack China—with support from the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

  Fearing that Rhee would act on these ideas, the U.S. military command in South Korea developed a secret contingency plan to impose martial law and arrest Rhee should he become completely unmanageable. Called Operation Everready, it had first been proposed in 1952, when Rhee had imposed martial law to intimidate political rivals, and was revisited in 1953, when he tried to sabotage the armistice.

  American officials, though, could not find a popular anti-Communist to replace Rhee, and they feared that a coup would spark resentment in South Korea. So Washington concluded it had no choice but to appease “the stubborn old fellow,” as Eisenhower privately called Rhee. In return for Rhee’s reluctant pledge not to start another war, the United States gave him massive economic aid, a mutual defense treaty, and modern weapons.

  The end of the war did little to weaken the symbiotic relationship between Nichols and Rhee. They saw each other regularly, according to air force records. Rhee’s government, in a postwar assessment of American spies in Korea, singled out Nichols for praise. It claimed he produced more accurate intelligence reports and trained better agents than the army or the CIA. For Rhee, the American spymaster remained a reliable backchannel to the U.S. military. For Nichols, the president, his generals, and his legions of Korean-speaking spies continued to be important sources of intelligence about North and South Korea. The air force was well aware of Nichols’s unique relationship with Rhee and approved of it—until higher-ups in the U.S. government changed their minds.

  PART III

  RUINED SPY

  CHAPTER 9

  Sacked

  After the war, Donald Nichols continued—for nearly four more years—to operate as an intelligence prince. His authority, autonomy, and the budget of his secret base in Korea were protected and funded by General Partridge, who returned in April 1954 to take command of the Far East Air Forces in Tokyo. Partridge pulled strings for his war-tested spy in Korea and in the United States.

  Nichols had returned to the States in early 1954 to take what he thought would be a brief vacation, as well as to attend a parachute instruction course at Fort Benning, Georgia. But while he was back, he was ordered to report for permanent assignment in Washington as an aide to the deputy chief of staff for operations in the air force directorate of intelligence. Nichols had no intention of sitting behind a Pentagon desk and pushing paper. Korea was the only place he felt respected and important. So when he heard that Partridge was returning to the Far East, Nichols wrote him and asked if they could speak by phone. He asked Partridge to bring him back—and the general was astoundingly quick to oblige. Three days after Nichols wrote his letter, Partridge sent a memorandum to his friend General Emmett O’Donnell, the former bomb commander in Korea who had recently become deputy chief of personnel at air force headquarters in Washington. “Although Nichols has been in Washington only a short time after completion of a tour in the Far East,” Partridge wrote, “he desires this reassignment [to Korea] and I feel it is in the best interest of the Air Force to have him reassigned again. . . .”

  After an absence of only three months, Nichols again took command of his spy base near Seoul. Partridge again had his back. If junior air force officers at the base complained about Nichols’s management style, as they often did, according to his military service record, Partridge took care of it.

  “I have the utmost confidence in your integrity as well as your ability, and you should know that you operate with my full understanding and support,” Partridge wrote to Nichols in the spring of 1955. His letter was in response to a personnel problem Nichols had with one of his former officers. While the exact nature of that officer’s complaint about Nichols was not spelled out, the general called the complainer a “loser” and encouraged Nichols to run his outfit as he saw fit.

  The Korean armistice had created a ragged peace and a demand for services that Partridge believed only Nichols could provide. The air war flared up in 1954–55, with brief but sensational engagements between American and Chinese fighter jets. North Korean ground fire shot down two air force planes, killing three American pilots and leaving a fourth missing in action. Cold war anxiety about the intentions of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, combined with State Department and White House anxiety about Rhee’s bellicose behavior, generated a substantial American appetite for spying north of the thirty-eighth parallel and inside Rhee’s government. Nichols’s men interrogated defectors and recruited agents for secret missions inside North Korea. They dispatched boats to deliver and retrieve spies and trained intelligence officers for the South Korean government. As a history of Nichols’s unit put it: “Although the operating of the Detachment will be somewhat hampered by the ceasefire agreement, its mission remains unchanged. It is contemplated that a continuing effort shall be exerted to uncover any and all intelligence information that would prove of value to the U.N. forces should hostilities commence again in Korea.”

  The air force reorganized its intelligence operation in Korea after the war. It eliminated Detachment 2, the special covert unit created for Nichols, as well as two other detachments of the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron—and folded them into the 6006th intelligence squadron, which also had covert responsibilities. Nichols survived the shake-up better than anyone. He was named commander of the 6006th squadron. While the Pentagon was cutting budgets across the board in Korea, Nichols’s unit continued to receive relatively generous funding. “It may be stated that the 6006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron was in better shape than it ever has been at any other time in its history,” Nichols wrote in 1955.

  Part of the reason was Partridge’s position as commander of Far East Air Forces. The other part was Nichols’s performance. He continued to reel in high-value, headline-generating North Korean defectors who revealed secrets about Kim Il Sung’s regime, which was rebuilding rapidly. When a North Korean air force pilot and his navigator escaped south in a Soviet-made Yak-18 trainer aircraft and landed at a South Korean air base on June 21, 1955, Nichols elbowed in and took control of the defection. He persuaded the South Korean air force, which had taken “technical custody” of the defectors and their aircraft, to hand over “actual custody” to him. Then Nichols took the North Koreans and their plane back to his base “for the purpose of expediting exploitation” of inside information about air power in the North. Within a week, Nichols began sending fresh intelligence and possible target data to air force regional headquarters in Tokyo.

  A few weeks before that intelligence coup, Partridge visited Nichols’s base, where the two wartime friends were photographed together for a final time. It was the general’s farewell visit. He had been promoted, this time to commander in chief of the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A year after Partridge’s departure, Nichols received what would be his last positive evaluation as an intelligence officer.

  “Major Nichols should be promoted to Lt. Colonel ahead of his c
ontemporaries,” it began. “He is an outstanding officer possessing great ability to accomplish tasks under difficult and unusual circumstances.”

  The July 1956 report went on to enumerate his character strengths and intelligence achievements. Among them were maintaining contact with key military and civilian leaders in South Korea, especially President Rhee, and predicting the outcome of South Korean elections more accurately than other U.S. intelligence agencies and diplomats. The report said Nichols “inspires” his commanders. It quoted General Laurence S. Kuter, the new chief of Far East Air Forces, who attended an intelligence briefing Nichols gave in Korea and was deeply impressed: “Nick is the type of man I would like to have come to rescue me if I were shot down in enemy territory.”

  Colonel Frank L. Dunn, the Tokyo-based commander of the 6002nd Air Intelligence Group and Nichols’s immediate commander, concluded the report: “Major Nichols is loyal, an aggressive individual who is outstandingly able to further US Air Force objectives under any conditions in which he may be assigned. He is particularly well suited to continue in intelligence activities and should be so assigned wherever his services are needed. He is an invaluable man.”

  Twelve months later, the “invaluable man” was sacked. Colonel Dunn, who had recommended in 1956 that Nichols be promoted, demanded in 1957 that he be relieved of his duties, removed from Korea, and sent back to the United States—never again to serve in a position “involving command of USAF personnel.”

  “During the past year official complaints have been leveled, letters have been written to Senators, and many allegations have been made against Major Nichols,” Dunn wrote in an officer efficiency report dated June 24, 1957. It mentioned “sworn testimony” that confirmed “unusual and abnormal conduct as a commander. . . .