The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  When No read about the decree in a newspaper, it did not change his plans. His father was dead, and he believed his mother was too. As for his Uncle Yoo, No had been careful never to contact him or his family. He did not trust or like his uncle, but he certainly did not want to harm him, his wife (the sister of his mother), or their children. He hoped that by keeping his distance, he would keep them safe.

  After six weeks of training, No and the other pilots returned to Dandong and waited for orders to attack Kimpo. The orders never came. The mission was canceled without explanation, and No could only guess what happened. He thought that the Soviet high command must have judged North Korea’s plan to attack American air bases too provocative and scrubbed it.

  II

  He guessed right.

  The airport attack proposed by Kim Il Sung was discussed by Stalin and the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, in Moscow during their meeting in August 1952.

  “The Korean comrades have asked about launching a new offensive,” Zhou told Stalin, quickly adding that the Chinese government thought it was a bad idea and had said as much to North Korea.

  Stalin agreed. He did not want to give the Americans an excuse to bomb Manchuria, nor did he want to introduce a complicating factor into the armistice talks with the Americans. Stalin did not want those talks to end the war, but neither did he want them to collapse, which might provoke the Americans into using their superior airpower to widen the war’s footprint—and perhaps drop nuclear weapons.

  The North Koreans “should not be launching either strategic or tactical offensives,” Stalin told Zhou. “They shouldn’t be launching any offensives.”

  Stalin, in effect, was ordering the Great Leader to twist slowly in the wind: do nothing, keep quiet, and endure North Korea’s continuing annihilation.

  And Kim’s response?

  He turned up the volume on North Korea’s official adulation of all things Stalin.

  “The Korean people look up to Marshal Stalin as to the sun—the savior of mankind, the benefactor of the Korean people’s liberation, our father,” said a page-one editorial published on May 22, 1952, in the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North Korean Workers’ Party. “We praise him with joy and song, and call on his name as the symbol of happiness and peace.” Similarly effusive editorial tributes to Stalin’s genius, wisdom, and countless tender mercies toward the North Korean people were published several times in the party newspaper throughout 1952.

  Kim’s decision to worship Stalin in public—even as Stalin privately betrayed him and the people of North Korea—was driven by political desperation. Throughout 1952, as the American bombing grew more savage, as Stalin and Mao shortened his leash, Kim struggled to reclaim the popularity he had lost in the war. He needed to rebuild his ruling party and the government’s shattered bureaucracy. He needed intelligence officers to identify rivals and police muscle to neutralize them. For these needs, Stalin—the backstabbing old bastard—was not at all helpful.

  But Stalinism was.

  So Kim began wrapping himself up in a full-blown Stalinist cult of personality. He had done this at times before the war, but now he pulled out all the stops. Buildings and monuments were commissioned in Kim’s honor. More and bigger photographs of him were printed. Idealized life histories were published. The party newspaper that sang Stalin’s praises also sang about Kim: “In his revolutionary activities and entire career, [Kim] has totally devoted his creative energies and genius to the cause of the freedom, independence, happiness, democracy, and peace of the fatherland.”

  “The focus on Kim became ever more conspicuous” in 1952, according to the historians Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee. “Kim was now being featured by official Party and state organs in a manner roughly parallel to the homage being paid Stalin in the Soviet Union.”

  For Kim to sell himself as Stalin-like, even as Stalin undercut him, was remarkable political theater. It also demonstrated Kim’s lifelong ability to take a punch, stay on his feet, and find a creative way to survive. It helped, of course, that his humiliations by telegram from Moscow and Beijing were secret. The world did not learn about them until the mid-1990s, after Stalin, Mao, Kim, and the Soviet Union were all dead. The people of North Korea have yet to hear about Stalin’s casual willingness to treat them and their Great Leader with contempt and indifference.

  In 1952, Kim needed to be creative—and wary.

  His bungled war had weakened his political grip and emboldened his rivals, the most worrisome of whom was Pak Hon Yong. A former newspaper reporter who spoke English, Pak had been by far the best-known Communist in Korea during the Japanese occupation. After the peninsula was divided and the Soviets installed Kim as leader in the North, Pak became a partner with Kim in running the new North Korea and steering it toward war. When Kim traveled to meet Stalin and plan the invasion, Pak went along as foreign minister.

  Yet Pak always retained his own political power base. He commanded the loyalty of Communists who had grown up on the Korean Peninsula—the so-called domestic faction. As the war went from bad to worse, members of this faction began to organize an effort to overthrow Kim and install Pak as leader. “Kim’s failure to unify Korea militarily gave rise to a conviction that Kim was indeed a puppet who had falsely claimed the leadership of the Korean Communist movement,” writes Kim’s biographer Dae-Sook Suh.

  In the fall of 1952, twelve of Pak’s supporters plotted in the living room of his house, although Pak was not home at the time. Pak’s most loyal friend, Yi Sung Yop, a former mayor of Seoul and minister of justice in Kim Il Sung’s cabinet, was in charge. Yi had trained guerrillas in South Korea and helped establish a military training school in the North. The Kumgang Political Institute taught party cadres how to organize and lead underground fighters. Nearly all its instructors, the staff, and even the kitchen help had grown up in the South and were loyal to Pak. The plot to overthrow Kim leaned heavily on the skills of officers from the institute, and by November 1952 Yi had begun putting together a unit of four thousand men, or at least that is what he was later accused of.

  The meeting in Pak’s living room was a final stage in coup planning. Its leaders even named ministers in the government that they envisioned would take power after Kim was ousted and, presumably, killed.

  III

  At air bases in Manchuria, No Kum Sok discerned a consistent pattern of behavior among North Korean air force officers who rose to senior positions of power and trust.

  They were fanatics, shouting Kim Il Sung’s praises and denouncing one another for insufficient loathing of the enemy. They joined the ruling Workers’ Party of North Korea and at party meetings turned fanaticism into performance art, the noisier the better.

  Having witnessed all this, No imitated it.

  He joined the party in 1952, at age twenty, with help and recommendations from two former cadets from the naval academy. One of them was Kun Soo Sung, No’s best friend and collaborator on the Battle Gazette, their flight school newspaper. In an autobiographical essay that accompanied his party application, No again lied about his father, saying he had been a loyal party member who admired the Great Leader. No assumed, apparently correctly, that records about his father had been destroyed by American bombs.

  The more No thought about defecting, the more fanatical he tried to appear. It was a way of self-medicating for his growing anxiety. When three thousand airmen and officers were assembled for a division meeting at Dandong airfield, No stood up and ranted against American imperialism. It seemed to impress political officers. They picked him to be a designated reader of statements released in the name of Kim and Stalin. While reading the words of the great Communists at public gatherings, No spoke loudly, gestured broadly, and tried to look as if he were deeply moved. This also impressed political officers. In July 1952, he was named vice-chairman of his battalion’s cell of the Workers’ Party. A month later, he was pr
omoted to senior lieutenant and became a flight leader for four MiGs flying out of Dandong. He won two medals—the Red Flag Medal, which many combat pilots received, and the Gold Medal, an award similar to the Distinguished Flying Medal, for having flown fifty combat missions.

  After joining the party, No perfected the art of public denunciation—and used it to protect himself from superiors he suspected might one day question his sincerity. Public denunciations were an aggressive North Korean variant of Stalinist criticism and self-criticism. Stalin preached that criticism was a core Communist principle that allowed the party to correct its excesses and fine-tune its service to the masses. Stalin also said that criticism could go uphill: the masses could criticize party bosses (not including him). But in practice, criticism and self-criticism were invaluable tools for extracting and compiling incriminating information about party members, which was later used as leverage for control, extortion, purges, and executions.

  For North Korean pilots in Manchuria, the nagging fear of being shot down by American Sabres was compounded by on-the-ground paranoia about each other. Like his fellow pilots, No worried about every word he said, even as he spied on his colleagues, looking for embarrassing missteps to denounce. The finger-pointing turned his stomach, but as vice-chairman of the party cell in his battalion he was obligated to do it energetically and with venom.

  The selfishness and blunders of senior officers became his focus. He criticized his battalion’s chief of staff, Colonel Chae Kil Yon, a non-pilot, for having a stove in his room while many pilots shivered without heat. He humiliated a prominent party member, Major Lee Choon Tuk, who got lost while flying in bad weather and crashed his MiG.

  “Comrade Lee outwardly appears to be a good Communist,” No said in a party meeting. “But this farce shows that he is a lazy man who does not care about his expensive equipment. Perhaps he does not hate the enemy enough or doesn’t love our glorious leader, Kim Il Sung?”

  By the end of 1952, No was disgusted with himself. He was not sleeping well and had become exhausted. He had been in the air force for more than two years without a day off. He worked from 5:00 a.m. to bedtime seven days a week. Unlike Russian pilots, who napped or partied in their barracks between flights, No was always burdened with party work. As vice-chairman, he had to represent his battalion at divisional party meetings. He organized pilots who spied and reported on each other. Every few months, he was allowed a quick trip into Dandong city, but rules prevented him from having a drink in a bar or chatting with a woman. Pilots had been warned that all women who spoke Korean were South Korean agents.

  IV

  Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and the Soviet Union’s interest in prolonging the Korean War died with him.

  China, too, wanted out. In Moscow for Stalin’s funeral, Zhou Enlai “urgently proposed that the Soviet side assist the speeding up” of armistice talks. The Soviets sent a special emissary to Pyongyang, where Kim “showed a clear aspiration for the most rapid cessation of military activity,” according to a Soviet Foreign Ministry memo.

  Two weeks after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union announced to the world that it had agreed with China and North Korea to seek “the soonest possible conclusion of the war in Korea.” A week later, the United States realized they were serious. The Communists accepted a previously ignored American request to exchange ailing prisoners of war—and then proposed a resumption of armistice talks that had been frozen for half a year. In Washington, the new American president, Dwight Eisenhower, was also willing to deal.

  It was not just Stalin who died in the Soviet Union. It was Stalinism. And the Kremlin’s next generation of leaders was happy to be rid of both. In Moscow, Stalin’s “Hate America Campaign” abruptly ended. Anti-American placards were removed from the streets. Radio Moscow conceded for the first time that the United States helped defeat Hitler. A meeting was proposed between the new Soviet premier, Georgi Malenkov, and Eisenhower to discuss the control of atomic weapons. The change in Moscow’s foreign policy was sudden, sharp, and sustained.

  In three years’ time, Khrushchev would astonish the world by denouncing Stalin as a vain and brutal despot. At a party congress, he said Stalin had murdered his political rivals and perpetuated his power by using fear, terror, and a phony cult of personality.

  For Kim Il Sung, Stalin’s death was a mixed blessing. The ghastly destruction of North Korea could finally end. An armistice would allow Kim to climb out of his bunker. Rebuilding could begin. No longer would Kim have to play the poodle to a distant and devious bully.

  Kim, though, could not stay in power without Stalinism. It suited the gangster instincts he had honed as a young man fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. It gave him the tools he would need to survive postwar power struggles. When the fighting stopped, Kim knew, his rivals would be bolder, and the North Korean people would want to know why he had failed to unite Korea. Like Stalin, Kim needed a cult of personality to whitewash reality. Like Stalin, he needed to dispose of wrong thinkers.

  With Stalin dead and Stalinism fading fast in the Soviet Union, Kim faced an existential threat. He hinted at the seriousness of the threat in the eulogy he published on the front page of the party newspaper five days after Stalin died. “The ardent heart of the great leader of progressive mankind has ceased to beat,” he lamented. “The very being of Korea has seemed to bow down.”

  Stalin’s death did not immediately end the war. An armistice would not be signed until July 27, 1953. In the intervening months, ground fighting continued, much of it pointless and bloody. A famous example was Pork Chop Hill, an exposed American outpost on the outer edge of UN territory. The hill had no strategic value. But Americans possessed it, and the Chinese wanted it. They attacked in late March and were driven back while taking control of a nearby hill called Old Baldy. They attacked again in April with about twenty-three hundred men, gaining control of the hill and then losing it as the Americans showered them with one of the most intense artillery barrages in history. To clear trenches, the Americans killed Chinese with hand grenades, flamethrowers, and hand-to-hand fighting. In early July, the Chinese tried again, with heavy casualties on both sides. After five days of fighting, Lieutenant General Maxwell Taylor decided Pork Chop Hill was not worth it. American soldiers quietly walked away.

  The U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, kept looking for new targets to blow up. In the month Stalin died, bomb planners located twenty dams around Pyongyang that controlled irrigation water for about half a million acres of rice. Because enemy soldiers ate rice, the fields that grew it could be classified as “war materiel.” Bombing the dams after the May planting season could wipe out an entire year’s crop and destroy a quarter-million tons of rice.

  “Attacks on the irrigation dams, it was believed, would produce useful psychological reactions, since farmers would tend to blame the war, and thus the Communists, for exposing their crops to attack and destruction,” said an air force staff study written in 1953.

  The Toksan Dam, about twenty miles north of Pyongyang, was hit first. Fifty-nine fighter-bombers attacked on May 13, dropping one-thousand-pound bombs that caused the earth-and-stone dam to collapse. A flash flood ripped across twenty-seven miles of river valley and spilled into the bombed-out streets of Pyongyang. Floodwaters knocked down five railroad bridges, destroyed seven hundred buildings, and inundated an airport. They also scoured out five square miles of prime rice crop. “The damage done by the deluge far exceeded the hopes of everyone,” reported the Fifth Air Force.

  Two days later, another dam north of Pyongyang was blown up, creating another flood that wrecked “field after field of young rice.”

  Air force generals worried that destroying food would trigger adverse press coverage.

  But the American press did not care. It ignored the attacks and then ignored North Korean government protests against “barbarous raids” on the civilian food supply. Instead, American reporters focused on the Americ
an fighter aces who in the final months of the war were shooting down MiGs in record numbers with almost no losses. Each MiG that the Americans shot down received more coverage than the flood-generating bombing raids.

  Fifteen days after Stalin died, the American government dreamed up another plan to pressure and annoy the Communists.

  They called it Operation Moolah. It was a bribe that offered $100,000 (worth about $900,000 today) to the first Russian, Chinese, or North Korean pilot to defect in a “modern, operational, combat-type jet in flyable condition,” which meant a late-model MiG.

  To advertise the bribe, the Far East Command sent two B-29s on an April night flight over the Yalu River. They dropped more than a million leaflets, explaining the offer in Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean. Fourteen radio stations in Japan and South Korea broadcast the offer into North Korea and China for a week. For good measure, in May the air force dropped another half million leaflets. The leaflets invited “all brave pilots who wish to free themselves from the vicious whip” of Communism to “proceed to Kimpo Air Base at 6,100 meters altitude and circle with his [landing] gear down.” After landing, the leaflet said, every pilot would be offered “a new and better life with proper honor in the free world.”

  The origin of Operation Moolah is murky. General Mark W. Clark, commander of U.S. forces in the Far East in the last year of the Korean War, writes in his memoir that a war correspondent came up with the idea while “communing with a bottle of brandy” and then wrote it into a fictionalized interview with an air force general. That piece of fiction found its way to air force headquarters in Tokyo, Clark said, where it was judged to have “merit” and then sent on to Washington for approval.

  The war correspondent Edward Hymoff, bureau chief in Korea for the International News Service, told a less romantic but more probable story. He said that on a flight to Tokyo in the fall of 1952 he had a long conversation with General Clark and mentioned his concept of offering a defecting MiG pilot a large cash reward and political asylum in the United States. “He wouldn’t have any worries the rest of his life, plus, he would be a rich man, tax free,” Hymoff said he told the general.