King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  The quiet passing of Donald Nichols occasioned no examination of his behavior in Korea or the blinkered acceptance of it by his commanders. Nichols’s battlefield achievements—assembling a team of code breakers that helped save the U.S. Eighth Army in the Pusan Perimeter, identifying weaknesses in Soviet-made tanks and fighter jets, and finding thousands of bombing targets behind enemy lines—altered the course of a major war of the twentieth century and saved an untold number of American and South Korean lives. For this, he deserved his medals. But his closeness to Syngman Rhee made him, at the very least, a passive accomplice to atrocities that occurred before and during the war. He attended mass executions of South Korean civilians, trained the murderous Korean National Police, and regularly sat in on torture sessions. While there is no documentary evidence or eyewitness testimony showing that Nichols personally took part in mass killings or torture, he acknowledged that his career benefited from the intelligence that torture extracted. If he had interfered “in the methods our Allies used during interrogation,” Nichols said, “a good source of information would have dried up.” In much the same way, Nichols was compromised by his closeness to Rhee. It gave him exclusive information, high-level contacts, and an inside-the-palace cachet that thrilled his commanders, who rewarded him with promotions, power, and autonomy. But the price of his proximity to the president was blindness. He did not see—or did not care to see—Rhee’s criminal excesses or his incompetence. Nichols convinced himself that Rhee was “a great Democrat” and a “deeply trusted leader of the South Koreans.”

  In the confused early days of the Korean War, when the air force was utterly dependent on Nichols for expertise, he was allowed, even encouraged, to operate outside the normal military chain of command. When he got into a bloody shoot-out with agents who feared that Nichols would send them to die in North Korea, his behavior did not raise eyebrows: the gunfight in his own quarters with his own men never entered his military service record. When he pushed suspected double agents out of boats or aircraft, commanding officers in the air force did not know or did not care.

  At moments in his autobiography, Nichols raised questions about the morality of his behavior, even if he was not honest or rigorous in examining it. He knew, for example, that he needed tighter supervision, complaining that he “received absolutely no training.” He was unequipped, he said, to manage what he called his “legal license to murder.”

  “Who should have this kind of authority?” he wrote. “Perhaps, if I had the benefits of higher education, an education which included something of philosophy and an understanding of life and man and their inter-relationships with morals, honor, and duty, it would be easier for me to assay our wartime conduct. . . . I was a small cog in a big machine, the one that had to do a lot of dirty work for higher headquarters.”

  Why was a poorly educated, minimally trained American agent allowed to befriend—and serve the interests of—a foreign head of state? Who allowed him to work for years with South Korean enforcers who sent severed heads to Seoul to demonstrate their loyalty? Who allowed Nichols to push people out of planes? To send hundreds of South Korean agents to their deaths in the North? There are no answers for these questions, in part because no one outside the Far East Air Forces knew enough about Nichols to ask them—until more than a quarter century after he was dead.

  Nor is there an easy explanation for Nichols’s decades-long pattern of secretly abusing young men and boys. The hospital-based psychiatric care Nichols received in the air force failed him—and the boys he later victimized in Florida. According to his clinical record, air force psychiatrists—between lockdowns, heavy doses of Thorazine, and multiple rounds of electroshock—never made much effort to explore his family history. They diagnosed and treated a “schizophrenic” who did not exist. They failed to notice or help the sexual predator who did.

  Nichols put a lot of time, thought, and subterfuge into his final resting place.

  He and his son Donnie are buried on opposite sides of a large, lichens-stained granite cross with NICHOLS engraved on it. The monument is easy to find in Brooksville Cemetery, a tidy, town-owned graveyard shaded by live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. On the spring morning I spent beside the grave, a tendril of moss, swaying in a warm breeze, caressed the top of the family headstone.

  Nichols acquired the plot, which has enough space for six coffins, in 1976. He was then fifty-three years old, and eight years had passed since his acquittal in Fort Lauderdale for abusing boys; their anguished depositions were safely sealed away in Broward County court archives. He had established himself as a respectable parent in Brooksville, where he served as chairman of the Hernando County school board’s comprehensive plan steering committee. By then, his marital status had also changed, at least on official records. Instead of being single, he was a widower. The change appears on Veterans Administration paperwork he filled out in the latter years of his life. He seems to have decided to become a widower while he was writing the autobiography that chronicled his wartime marriage to Kim In Hwa.

  In Brooksville, as Nichols worked on his autobiography in the late 1970s, he arranged to have the marriage set in stone. Purchasing the monument for his future gravesite, he instructed that KIM HWA be engraved just to the right of DONALD. (Her death date was also added; his was left blank to be filled in later.) Between their names, the engraver added the word MAMA, an apparent reference to one of Nichols’s favorite dogs. Soon after the monument was placed in Brooksville Cemetery, Nichols photographed it, and the photo appears on the final page of his autobiography, enshrining his seemingly normal heterosexual marriage and the sentimental ideal that he would one day rest beside his beloved wife. An undated photograph of a young Korean woman whom Nichols identified as Kim Hwa also appears in the book, as does a photo of his dog Mama.

  Nichols provided Brooksville Cemetery with a metal box, eighteen inches wide, forty-eight inches long, that he said contained the cremated remains of his late wife. This vault was set in concrete next to the space reserved for him. But the cemetery has no information about when her remains might have been transferred from South Korea to Florida or, indeed, if her ashes are in the vault. “I have no clue what’s in it,” said Mike Hughes, manager of the cemetery. “It is kind of odd.” It seems unlikely the transfer ever occurred. In 1953, when Kim Hwa supposedly died in childbirth, cremation was viewed in South Korea as an affront to Confucian values. It was extremely rare, especially for a supposedly married woman.

  A second stone marker on the Nichols plot also signals the spymaster’s sleight of hand. Engraved on it are the names of his mother, Myra, and father, Walter—even though the two never reconciled and neither is actually buried there. When Walter died in Broward County in 1940, his relatives paid to have his body transported to New Jersey for burial in a family plot. Myra remarried at least once, becoming Myra Wolf. She died with that name in 1978 in a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, and was cremated in nearby Delray Beach. “I don’t know what is under the headstone, to be honest with you,” the cemetery manager said.

  By uniting his parents on a stone near his grave and by engraving the name of his potentially nonexistent “wife” on his own headstone, Donald Nichols concocted a happy and conventional ending to a life that was tormented and strange. It satisfied his father’s frustrated longing for a loving wife. It reconnected him to a mother he always hated but never stopped needing. It created an enduring tableau of Nichols as a devoted husband and family man.

  In his autobiography, Nichols asked: “How does one de-train the mind of a trained agent?” In his case, it seems it could not be done.

  He played one last spy trick in the graveyard. On the granite cross that stands over his grave, he hid the part of his life that was most important to him and to the country he served. The monument bears no reference to the U.S. Air Force. It does not mention his rank. It forgets the Korean War.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First,
a special acknowledgment to Kurt M. Marisa, a retired air force colonel who served as an intelligence officer in South Korea. He took an active interest in this project, opened doors in the air force bureaucracy, and helped connect me with air force veterans who knew and worked with Donald Nichols. Without Marisa’s help, this book would have taken far longer to complete.

  Michael E. Haas, also a retired air force colonel, was the first historian to examine Nichols’s career in depth. I contacted him in the early, middle, and final stages of this book and each time he generously shared his scholarship, his insight as a former special operations commander, and his understanding of how the military bureaucracy functioned during and after the Korean War. He referred me to other experts and took time to read, correct, and improve an early draft of this book.

  Members of the Nichols family were essential in making it possible to research this book, particularly Donald H. Nichols, who welcomed me into his home in Wisconsin, and Diana Carlin, who, in addition to granting many interviews, shared scores of family photographs. Both read and corrected early drafts. Their brother, Paul W. Nichols, also told me stories about his uncle. I’m grateful as well to Nichols’s granddaughter, Lindsay Morgan, who met with me in Brooksville, Florida, and shared family photographs, letters, and her grandfather’s medals.

  Serbando J. Torres, the former air force sergeant who is often cited in this book, allowed me to see Nichols as Torres saw him during the Korean War, when Nichols was his immediate superior, close friend, and housemate. Torres spent many hours steering me through the factual minefield that was Nichols’s military career. As we worked together on this book, he and I became friends. I am sad to write that he died on January 30, 2017. He was eighty-seven.

  Other air force veterans of the Korean War who knew Nichols and shared memories include William Bierek, Ronald Cuneo, Raymond Dean, Jack Sariego, and Rowan Raftery. I also thank retired air force command historian Herb Mason and Edward J. Hagerty, a history professor at American Military University. Several retired officers from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations helped me understand that unit and Nichols’s role in it. They include Dick Law, Ed Mishler, and Gene Mastrangelo.

  For previously unseen Korean War–era photographs of Nichols, I am indebted to Frank Winslow, a former Army Signal Corps photographer who took pictures of Nichols in and around Seoul before the North Korean invasion.

  A small legion of men and women at the National Archives and the Air Force Historical Research Agency spent many hours helping me find documents and photographs. In particular, at the archives in College Park I want to thank Eric van Slander, a reference archivist, and Timothy K. Nenninger, chief of the textual records reference branch. Both of them suggested new directions for research and provided contacts that helped me obtain Nichols’s military service record from the National Archives in St. Louis. There, the chief of archival operations, William Siebert, personally located Nichols’s service record and directed me to the air force officials who were authorized to release it. At the personnel headquarters of the air force in San Antonio, Sharon Hogue helped start the Freedom of Information process.

  At the Air Force Historical Research Agency in Montgomery, Alabama, Maranda Gilmore located previously unreleased documents about Nichols, and Forrest Marion directed me to a rarely viewed official history of Nichols’s spy unit. Senior archivist Archangelo DiFante expedited the declassification of several documents. At the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, chief archivist James W. Zobel directed me to useful documents about General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence. To understand the use of electroshock treatment in the military in the 1950s, I was greatly assisted by two psychiatrists who are experts in the subject, Dr. Edward Shorter in Toronto and Dr. Max Fink in St. James, New York. Thanks, too, to the University of Washington’s library system in Seattle, which greatly simplified my research by having nearly every important work on Korean War history on its shelves.

  The South Korean part of my research was made possible by Yoonjung Seo, a Seoul-based journalist and researcher. She located Korean War veterans, dug through archives, found obscure online links to Nichols, and translated everything from North Korean newspapers to sit-down interviews. I also want to thank South Korean war veterans who granted interviews. In Seoul, they include Yoon Il-gyun, Chung Bong-sun, Kim In-ho, Lee Kang-hwa, and Kim Ji-eok; and in Riverdale, New Jersey, Kim Ok-sung.

  For reading drafts of this book and offering corrections and suggestions, I thank my friend and former Washington Post colleague Glenn Frankel and Allan R. Millett, a specialist on the history of the Korean War and Ambrose Professor of History at the University of New Orleans. As she has done in the past, Sheila Kowal also read this book and offered helpful suggestions. Any errors of fact or judgment, of course, are on me.

  This is my third book related to Korea and I’m very fortunate that the principal editor for all them at Viking has been Kathryn Court. At Viking, Lindsey Schwoeri also edited this book and improved it considerably, and Gretchen Schmid helped pull its many pieces together. Literary agent Raphael Sagalyn nursed this project along from conception to completion—and came up with the book’s title.

  Thanks to my daughter, Lucinda, and son, Arno, who have had no choice during their childhoods but to learn about the history of the Korean Peninsula. Above all, thanks to my wife, Jessica Kowal. She encouraged me to write this story and, as an adviser, editor, and shrewd encourager, greatly improved it.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  Donald Nichols was a flagrantly unreliable narrator. His autobiography, How Many Times Can I Die?, is marred by self-flattering exaggeration, outright lies, and numerous omissions of critical events in his life. Yet his 1981 book is also an essential source that explains where he came from: a troubled Depression-era family and a poisoned relationship with his mother. His account of his early years is supported by family letters and my interviews with his relatives and military colleagues. The autobiography also includes extensive and credible accounts of torture and mass execution as practiced by Syngman Rhee’s security forces. I was dubious about Nichols’s description of working in a clandestine world that included severed human heads—until I found a U.S. Army photograph of him standing beside one. There are also passages in his book that tell painful truths about his own emotions, particularly the heartbreak he felt when he came home from Korea, left the air force, and joined the ranks of the “living dead.”

  My introduction to Nichols, though, was not his autobiography. It was a series of interviews with the former North Korean fighter pilot who became Kenneth Rowe. I was writing a book about Rowe and his 1953 escape from North Korea when he told me about his unforgettable meetings with a swaggering, Coke-swilling American spy who was astoundingly well informed about the inner workings of the North Korean air force. Besides being beefy and gruff, Rowe said, Nichols was a good listener and genuinely empathetic.

  After hearing this, I located a previously unreleased intelligence report in the National Archives that Nichols had written about his debriefing of the North Korean pilot. The report was accurate, analytically sophisticated, and well written. It impressed me and made me wonder: Who was this mysterious overfed American intelligence operative? How did he manage to work as a spymaster for eleven years in South Korea? What happened to him?

  In the three years since I began asking those questions, my research has focused on archival records, court documents, and interviews with surviving Korean War veterans in the United States and South Korea, as well as with members of Nichols’s family and U.S. experts on military intelligence and covert operations.

  In the United States, the primary source of written material for this book was Nichols’s military service record, which I requested from the air force under the Freedom of Information Act. The previously unreleased 191-page document fundamentally changes historical understanding of Nichols’s military career. The record contains biannual evalu
ations of Nichols’s performance as an officer throughout his years in Korea, the clinical record of his psychiatric treatment in air force hospitals in Japan and the United States, and extensive narrative citations for the many medals that Nichols won. It also includes copies of two prewar letters from President Rhee to American ambassador Muccio in Seoul, asking that Nichols be allowed to stay in South Korea and act as a personal adviser to Rhee on air force matters. These letters are perhaps the strongest primary source evidence of the highly unusual relationship that developed between Rhee and Nichols.

  At the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA) in Montgomery, Alabama, I used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of embassy letters and air force documents that revealed a previously unknown attempt by army general Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, to toss Nichols out of Korea two months before the start of the Korean War. Other documents declassified upon my request at AFHRA detailed the improbable starring role that Nichols played in the first months of the war, as his commanding general in the Far East Air Forces hurriedly promoted him and boasted in cables to Washington of his special relationship with Rhee. These documents show that just because Nichols bragged shamelessly about being a very important intelligence agent, it didn’t necessarily mean he was exaggerating.

  The unusually close relationship between Nichols and General Earle E. Partridge is documented in Partridge’s personal correspondence, his diary, and two rounds of oral history interviews that were conducted by the air force in the 1970s. Most of these sources are archived at AFHRA, although one key letter from Partridge was found only in Nichols’s military service record.