King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

At that point, Nichols’s “very close friendship” with Rhee was probably perceived by the American embassy and the CIA as an unacceptable risk.

  “You have got to realize what a ticking time bomb Nichols was after the war,” said Michael Haas, a former air force colonel, special operations officer, and military historian who has examined Nichols’s career and written two books about covert military operations in Korea. “The problem was that his postwar connections with the senior echelons of the South Korean government posed a threat to U.S. policy on the peninsula. No administration in Washington, no American ambassador in Seoul, could ever be sure what Nichols was telling the South Koreans or what operations he might be running into North Korea. Neither, for that matter, could the CIA.”

  No documentary evidence of State Department or CIA involvement in Nichols’s dismissal has surfaced, and there is no hint of it in his military service record. But over the course of his long career in Korea, Nichols gave air force brass, U.S. diplomats, and senior intelligence officials plenty of reasons to sack him. Based on his assessment of the risk Nichols posed to American interests in Korea, Michael Haas suspects that high-level officials in the U.S. government made the call, quietly ordering Colonel Dunn to tell Nichols that it was time to go.

  CHAPTER 10

  Shocked

  The day after he received his derogatory report, Donald Nichols was relieved of command. He was also ordered to rebut Colonel Dunn’s evaluation and did so by composing twenty-five hundred words of carefully chosen, mostly apologetic prose.

  None of his previous commanders, he wrote, had cared about the clothing he wore on duty. “As long as I can remember my superior officers never spoke of this matter or made mention of it to the effect it interfered with my work.” Still, Nichols said he was happy to comply with Dunn’s order to wear a full-dress uniform once a month to inspect his men. Nichols said he had long ago disposed of a dog that had bitten people and had relaxed his “austere” policies on recreational use of jeeps in the motor pool. As for being “rather ‘Prussian’ in my ways,” Nichols acknowledged it was true, but said he had been trying for some time to be less so. As a result, “a certain degree of moral and emotional growth has been experienced both by myself and by the men in my command.” Finally, Nichols complimented Colonel Dunn on his fairness and pledged to be a better, more solicitous, more humane leader in the future.

  “I would like to state that my position as commander of the 6006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron has taught me much about many things and those corrective influences concerning myself will continue to be administered. Further, habits which tend to improve my outlook and mature my judgement [sic] in the various areas of human existence will be aggressively pursued.”

  His rebuttal reads like the argument of a confident career officer who expects contrition and flattery to soothe his boss’s ruffled feathers—and perhaps win him another intelligence command. But it changed nothing.

  After being replaced on July 27, 1957, he stayed in Seoul for a few months as a “commander’s representative,” apparently to help dismantle the covert unit that bore his name. Colonel Dunn was in a hurry. He ordered Nichols and his replacement, Captain James E. Kleinpeter, to attend a meeting on October 1 at the Bando Hotel in Seoul, where the American embassy had its offices. A plan was drawn up there to shut everything down. The fleet of boats Nichols had assembled for surreptitious travel north of the thirty-eighth parallel was given to the South Korean air force. North Korean uniforms, clandestine radios, and other special equipment were disposed of. North Korean currency and original copies of various stolen North Korean documents were sent to Japan. Agent training programs were canceled. The longtime senior Korean supervisor of Nichols’s unit was fired.

  At the Bando Hotel that day, the spy outfit known as NICK ceased to exist. In a sense, so did Donald Nichols. He returned to his base, where he ate alone in his quarters. Seven days later he vanished.

  “At breakfast, we heard that Mr. Nichols was spirited off the base in a straitjacket,” said William Bierek, the first lieutenant who worked for Nichols. “We were stunned because he had not shown one iota of mental illness. No explanation was given. Nothing more was said.”

  On October 8, 1957, Nichols was admitted for psychiatric evaluation at the 6407th Air Force Hospital in Tachikawa, Japan. Not far from Tokyo, it was a major treatment center for casualties from wars in Korea and Vietnam. When Nichols arrived, however, it was not immediately obvious to doctors that he was a casualty. There did not seem to be anything wrong with him.

  “He had apparently been referred because of what was described as unusual behavior while on duty in Korea,” according to his clinical record. But it does not say what that unusual behavior might have been. During his eleven years in Korea, none of his superior officers, including Colonel Dunn, stated or even hinted in biannual evaluations of Nichols that he had mental health problems or that he struggled to manage the stress of spying on North Korea.

  Psychiatrists at Tachikawa initially observed that Nichols was “oriented as to time, place, and person,” although he seemed “quite anxious [and] stated that he did not know the reason for the request for evaluation but later volunteered that there was a personality clash with his commanding officer.”

  As his involuntary hospital stay dragged on into its tenth day, Nichols grew angry, violently so.

  “This patient suddenly became disoriented, agitated, and broke a window with his fist,” his clinical record says. “Despite inclement weather, he ran outdoors with only his pajamas on and had to be returned to the hospital by several attendants. He was then transferred [from an open hospital ward] to the psychiatric ward where he was noted to be agitated, disoriented, and very aggressive.”

  Locked in the psych ward, Nichols spent his time pounding his fist against the wall. At one point, he picked up a chair and tried to smash it through the window of the nurses’ station. Doctors responded to his outburst by placing him on 400 milligrams of Thorazine a day. This, they said, “adequately sedated him.”

  Thorazine, a brand name for chlorpromazine, was the first effective antipsychotic drug. When Nichols was hospitalized in 1957, it had been on the market for only four years. But it had already revolutionized treatment of severely mentally ill patients who were considered hopeless and had been confined to nether regions of government institutions. Thorazine proved particularly effective in treating schizophrenia, a complex, long-term illness whose symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, and an inability to organize one’s thoughts. Prior to his arrival at the hospital in Japan, there was nothing in Nichols’s military service record or medical history to suggest he suffered from these symptoms. Nevertheless, air force psychiatrists diagnosed him as schizophrenic. For psychiatrists, nurses, and ward attendants, a major benefit of giving sizable doses of Thorazine to disruptive patients was that it made them sluggish and relatively easy to care for. That is how Smith, Kline & French, the American pharmaceutical company, initially marketed the drug to mental health professionals. “When the patient lashes out . . .” says a print advertisement from the early 1960s, “Thorazine quickly puts an end to his violent outburst.”

  This was true for Nichols in Japan, although his record says that even when heavily sedated, he was seething.

  About a week after he was first dosed with Thorazine, the air force decided Nichols needed more psychiatric treatment than he could receive in Japan. He was flown to Eglin Air Force Base Hospital, located near the western tip of the Florida Panhandle, arriving on October 28, 1957.

  A few days earlier, Nichols managed to send a letter to General Partridge, who was in Colorado commanding the North American Air Defense Command. He wrote that he was returning to the United States and asked his former boss for assistance in finding a new assignment. The letter did not mention that he was bound for more involuntary psychiatric treatment. Partridge wrote back immediately, sounded delighted to hear from
Nichols, and offered help in job placement.

  “Have your note announcing your return to the United States, and would like to know more about your future plans. There are several assignments in which you would do well, but I do not want to get into the act if you are already placed where you can be useful,” Partridge wrote on October 28, clearly unaware that on that very day Nichols had checked in at Eglin hospital. “It is my understanding that you now have some 17 years’ service and that you are anxious to fill the 20 necessary for retirement. Please let me know if this is correct and give me any other data which might be useful.”

  Nichols was placed in an open ward at Eglin, where air force psychiatrists made the same vague diagnoses as psychiatrists in Japan. “He gave the impression of suffering a chronic schizophrenic reaction without any really disturbing, acutely psychotic symptoms,” his clinical report said. At Eglin, Nichols continued to complain about his former commanding officer, Colonel Dunn. Examining psychiatrists wrote that he was “quite evasive” and attributed it to his “clandestine intelligence activities. . . . Any information that was obtained is weaned only after repeated interviewing and apparently considerable thought on his part to avoid giving any information that might possibly be classified.”

  As for his violent behavior in the hospital in Japan, Nichols explained that it was due to nightmares. He complained, too, about the accumulated stress of his spy work. He regretted that “quite a few of his men were lost.” He said he did not want to be locked up. He worried that North Korean assassins might be after him, but doctors noted that his “phobic type fears are apparently usually held in check.” He was not having hallucinations or delusions, he was oriented as to time and place, his memory was intact, and “his intelligence is probably at least average.”

  Nichols wrote again and again to Partridge during his first two months at Eglin. With each letter, he became more candid about his “predicament” and more desperate for help. His first letter from Eglin acknowledged he was a patient at the base hospital, but did not say he was in the psychiatric ward.

  “I am all mixed up at the moment on what I should do in the future,” he told Partridge. “I feel like I should fill out the 20 years for normal retirement, however, am not sure. Please advise me on what I should do. Sir; I can never work for officers like Col Dunn or Col Hull again.” Colonel Harris B. Hull had approved Dunn’s recommendation that Nichols be removed from command. In his letter, Nichols told Partridge that the colonels “are both the type where either you play politics or else. In my case it has been the or else, this is the reason that I am now in a spot.”

  Partridge did not immediately reply to this letter, the first to make the general aware that Nichols believed his removal from Korea and forced hospitalization were driven by his commanders’ political motivations.

  The longer Nichols was in the psych ward, the more he brooded about his sanity. According to his clinical record, he became apprehensive about returning to duty, feared the responsibilities of command, and “frequently felt as though he might be going out of his mind.”

  On November 1, five days after Nichols arrived at Eglin, his case was presented to a conference of the psychiatric staff. “It was their opinion this man was a deteriorating schizophrenic,” his record says. “He was obviously no longer of potential value to the service, and it was felt that he should probably be recommended for discharge or, rather, retirement.”

  Nichols was again put on Thorazine. This time, though, it was a far higher dose. A normal dosage at that time in a psychiatric hospital was 300 milligrams a day. In Japan, doctors gave him 400 milligrams a day. At Eglin, doctors who were struggling to keep him under control tripled the dosage to 1,200 milligrams a day. But it did not help. Nichols showed “only minimal improvement in his agitation and anxiety and some increase in [his] already considerable depression.” His condition spiraled downward. He was having trouble thinking and concentrating. “He became more and more withdrawn and subsequently even more agitated and more depressed,” his record states.

  When nurses and attendants could no longer handle him on an open ward, he was moved to a closed psych ward. With Nichols clearly worse off than when he arrived at Eglin, psychiatrists dialed back his dosage of Thorazine. On November 21, they convened another meeting: “The problem was discussed with the staff and it was decided he should receive a course of electro-shock treatments.”

  Invented in Italy in the late 1930s, electroshock became commonplace in psychiatric hospitals across Europe and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The treatment sends an electric current through a patient’s brain, causing epilepsy-like grand mal seizures that last from thirty seconds to two minutes. Some have compared the effect of electroshock to that of rebooting a computer and removing glitches. For reasons that were not (and are still not) understood, electroshock can alleviate symptoms for severely depressed, manic, and psychotic patients, as well as some schizophrenics. The beneficial effects are often immediate, but temporary. In many cases, years of maintenance treatments are prescribed.

  Like Thorazine, electroshock makes patients easier to manage, reducing the workload of psychiatric caregivers. During and after World War II, U.S. military hospitals adopted electroshock as a standard treatment for soldiers suffering from shell shock, now known as posttraumatic stress disorder. Electroshock was used—and sometimes misused—on thousands of GIs. Some psychiatrists used it to “treat” homosexuality. In the late 1950s, one army hospital outside Denver administered twenty to twenty-five electroshock treatments to nearly every soldier admitted to the psych ward.

  Electroshock, sometimes called electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT), was often used for the convenience of doctors and nurses, medical historians say. “ECT stands practically alone among the medical/surgical interventions in that misuse was not the goal of curing but of controlling the patients for the benefits of the hospital staff,” David J. Rothman, a medical historian at Columbia University, said at a National Institutes of Health conference in the 1980s.

  Electroshock did not last long as a standard treatment in military or civilian hospitals. Largely because of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the wildly successful 1975 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson, it disappeared from common American psychiatric practice for nearly two decades. In the movie, Nicholson won an Oscar for playing Randle P. McMurphy, a petty criminal who feigns mental illness to escape hard labor in prison only to end up in an asylum under the care of the stone-hearted Nurse Ratched. In a terrifying scene, Nicholson’s character is strapped to a bed by a scrum of white-coated attendants and given electroshock that flushes his face, convulses his body, and seems to sizzle his brain.

  The movie, together with the introduction in the 1960s of antidepressant drugs that seemed less barbaric, pushed electroshock to the fringes of psychiatry until the mid-1980s, when clinical evidence showed its utility in relieving severe depression. Famous American personalities, like talk show host Dick Cavett, said it saved their lives. But questions remain about electroshock’s effects on brain function, mortality, and long-term memory. Clinical evidence shows that it usually causes permanent memory loss for events that occurred immediately before, during, and after treatment.

  Nichols started with fourteen consecutive rounds of electroshock. Based on his clinical record, they probably began on Monday, November 25, and continued daily until Sunday, December 8. After that, his treatments were “more widely spaced.” He told his family he had a total of fifty electroshocks. Each began with a nurse smearing his right and left temples with a conducting gel and putting a rubber plug in his mouth so that he would not bite his tongue (although he told his brother he often bit his tongue). Each session ended with a savagely painful headache. Nichols showed “maximum improvement” after his eighth treatment, his record says. He then began to show “considerable organic confusion,” even as treatments continued.

  On December 4, w
ith ten shock treatments done and four more to go, Nichols managed to write again to Partridge. This time he did not blame his hospitalization on politics or on his bosses. He acknowledged his status as a psychiatric patient, but chose not to report his electroshock treatment.

  “Appreciate your concern for my predicament,” Nichols wrote. “At present I am in a psychiatric ward. . . . Having been sent here due to a near nervous breakdown, it is now obvious that I may receive a medical discharge. However, I’m not sure this is the best way to leave the service. Please advise me as to whether I should finish my twenty years and receive a normal discharge and retirement, or accept a medical discharge now.”

  When Partridge read the letter at NORAD’s command center in Colorado, it clearly gave him pause. His executive officer, Colonel Cecil Scott, wrote a note at the bottom of the letter, reminding his boss that he had already written to Nichols “on this subject.” Beneath that note, Partridge scrawled, “What now?”

  When Partridge failed to respond, Nichols sent him a Western Union telegram, dated December 19. It mentioned, yet again, that he was a patient at Eglin. Plaintively, it asked, “If you are ever down this way please stop in to see me.”

  The day after Christmas, Partridge replied: “I doubt that I will be able to journey in the direction of Eglin Field for some time to come but if I do get down that way, you may be sure that I will drop in to see you.

  “Meanwhile, I should like to suggest that you relax and accept the medical procedures which the doctors suggest for you. If by chance you are retired with a medical disability, you will be far better off from a tax point of view than you would be if you completed your 20 years of service. Thus, it appears to me that you are going to be the winner either way. . . . Please accept my best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year.”

  Nichols was given a convalescent leave over Christmas to visit his brother Judson and his family in Florida. While he was there, he told his relatives that he had been receiving shock therapy and that he would have to return to Eglin for more. “He said it was not health care,” his nephew recalled, “but that the government wanted to erase his brain—because he knew too much.”