The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  As important as China was in rebuilding North Korea, Kim focused his postwar importuning on Moscow.

  Only four days after the armistice, he outlined with impressive specificity the Soviet Union’s responsibility: sixty-two specialists must come at once to North Korea, he told the Soviet embassy. Within six months, he said, they must draw up plans to rebuild nearly all the industrial plants that the Americans had destroyed. The Soviet chargé d’affaires in Pyongyang, in passing along Kim’s demands, noted that the “fundamental calculations are based not on the maximal use of domestic resources but on receipt of maximum aid from the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies.”

  To maximize aid before socialist guilt petered out, Kim organized and led a six-member delegation that rushed to Moscow in mid-September, less than two months after the war ended. It proved to be a singularly lucrative nineteen-day trip, securing funds for reconstructing old factories and building new ones. He made contacts that would allow his government to tap into a steady stream of concessional trade, technology transfer, and military equipment over several decades. Kim also negotiated delays in repayments of loans.

  There was, however, a hiccup in the Great Leader’s harvest, one that embarrassed him and his Soviet patrons. While Kim was in Moscow, a late-model MiG-15 disappeared without explanation from North Korean airspace.

  In the cockpit was the youngest pilot in the North Korean air force.

  PART III

  FLIGHT

  CHAPTER 11

  Flying Clear

  I

  “I’m going to defect.”

  No spoke these words quietly—and in deadly earnest—to his best friend and fellow MiG pilot, Lieutenant Kun Soo Sung.

  No had been close to Kun since their first year together at the naval academy. They rode the same train to Manchuria to learn how to fly. They were both pretend Communists who during flight training had written and illustrated the Battle Gazette, the newspaper that flattered their commanders. Kun was a sponsor and key supporter when No joined the Workers’ Party. They survived nearly two years of dogfights over MiG Alley. Although they did not serve in the same unit, their commanders and fellow pilots viewed them as the closest of friends. If No defected, everyone would point a finger at Kun.

  It was a warm, sun-washed afternoon in early September, five weeks after the end of the war. They were out for a walk together in the countryside, well away from the bomb-cratered airfield at Kusong, a small town where they had been transferred.

  No had quietly teased his friend for years, telling him that someday he would fly away to South Korea. They understood it as a secret boast between young pilots who trusted each other—a rarity in the North Korean military.

  This time, though, Kun knew that No was not teasing, and he was frightened. North Korea enforced collective punishment for family and friends of wrongdoers. Nothing could be more wrong—more infuriating to the Great Leader and his enforcers—than stealing a MiG.

  “Don’t go,” Kun warned. “If you go, I am in trouble.”

  Now No felt scared. He should have kept his mouth shut. What if Kun reported him?

  As they walked together, No tried to switch gears, to make it seem as if he had been kidding. Breezily, he asked Kun to steal a MiG and escape with him. Just as casually, Kun said he would. They were clearly kidding each other now, and Kun sounded relieved. They knew they could never pull it off. They were assigned to different air force units, No to the Sixtieth Aviation Regiment, Kun to the Fifty-ninth. Coordinating a simultaneous escape in MiGs during peacetime was fantasy.

  The conversation wandered. Kun was obsessed with sex and his lack thereof. He asked No to walk with him to some nearby farmhouses. They could knock on doors, he said, and find girls eager to satisfy the heroic needs of fighter pilots. No let his friend go on alone.

  Back at the airfield, No convinced himself that Kun would not betray him; he was too good a friend. But No also realized that an awful price would be paid for what he was determined to do. Kun would be executed, perhaps along with many others. Still, there was no other way. It was not possible to run from North Korea with a clear conscience, not even for a young pilot with a dead father, no siblings, and a mother who was already safely out of the country.

  No put the consequences out of his mind. He had to think of himself. He was so set on escaping by this point that he had begun to dream about it nearly every night. In most of the dreams, he made it successfully to South Korea. In one he saw his mother. In another, he stood on a sidewalk in New York City gazing up at the Empire State Building, the top of which was enveloped in clouds.

  Though the war was over, the government was as paranoid as ever about its perceived enemies, and much of its paranoia was directed at veterans who had fought in the war on the North Korean side. In Kusong, while out walking with an air force security officer, No came across an old factory building packed with newly returned North Korean prisoners of war. They were filthy, emaciated, and sitting dejectedly on the floor. The security officer told No that there were South Korean spies among the returning POWs and the government could not be too careful. All of the former prisoners, he said, would be reeducated to cleanse their minds of what they had seen and learned in the South. Spies would be found and punished. Careful to show his devotion, No congratulated the security officer for his perceptiveness and agreed spies must be everywhere.

  II

  Kim Il Sung needed to put on a show. He needed to find, expose, and destroy a “wicked spy clique” working inside North Korea that would serve as a sensational and sustained distraction from his failed war. He also needed to excite a war-weary public by revealing new threats from a devious external enemy—the United States.

  The plot to overthrow him—the one supposedly finalized in the fall of 1952 in the living room of North Korea’s foreign minister, Pak Hon Yong—suited his needs.

  Kim knew early on about the plot being hatched by the so-called domestic faction within his government. Whether there was ever any real armed threat to his government has not been well documented, although it is clear that Pak Hon Yong and his supporters were genuinely sick of Kim’s leadership, and Kim feared they might be able to get rid of him. At a party plenum in December 1952, Kim delivered a long rant against the intrigues being cooked up by “factional elements.”

  His speech set in motion a trial for treason that began a week after the Korean War ended and lasted four memorable days. It would become an international media extravaganza. Inside the Supreme Court of North Korea, a few foreign reporters would be allowed to listen to astonishing confessions from recently arrested government and party officials. Their confessions implicated Eisenhower in fantastic schemes “to topple the Party and the State by means of armed revolt and sell the Korean people as colonial slaves to U.S. imperialism.” The confessions struck many observers as rehearsed, ridiculous, and coerced.

  “We must bear deeply in mind that if these factional elements are left alone, they will ultimately degrade themselves in enemy espionage,” Kim said. “All our Party members should further heighten their revolutionary vigilance and Party spirit, strictly keep watch over the actions of these elements and see that the factional elements did not move one step within our Party.”

  Arrests of “anti-party traitors” had begun in March of 1953, eleven days after Stalin died. Twelve members of the domestic faction were arrested, including Yi Sung Yop, minister of justice, who was said to be the coup’s chief organizer. Pak Hon Yong, who would have replaced Kim as leader had the coup succeeded, was also arrested and expelled from the party. But he was not among the twelve prosecuted so publicly in 1953.

  Before the trial began in August, Kim and his aides had done their homework, with the apparent coaching of Soviet advisers. The proceedings replicated the highly orchestrated pageantry of a mid-1930s Soviet show trial, when Stalin manipulated the levers of justice—judges, prosecutors,
defense lawyers, witnesses, and mass media—to convict and execute aging Bolsheviks who were getting in his way. Though Stalin was dead, the trial was proof that Kim Il Sung remained his eager and attentive disciple.

  The twelve were charged with planning a coup, sabotaging the underground Communist movement in South Korea, colluding with the Japanese, and spying for the United States. All twelve defendants pleaded guilty to everything.

  The coup’s purported mastermind, Yi Sung Yop, confessed he had a meeting in Seoul on June 26, 1950, with Harold Noble, a senior American political adviser to the U.S. military command. At the meeting, Yi said, Noble informed him of America’s plan for an amphibious assault on Inchon and instructed him to organize an uprising in Pyongyang. As foreign observers at the trial quickly established, however, Noble was not in Seoul on June 26. He was on vacation in Tokyo. The claim that MacArthur could have devised and circulated his Inchon plan one day after North Korea invaded to start the war was hard to swallow, as was the contention that an American political adviser would share a top secret plan with a Korean Communist.

  “Any notion of plausibility seems to have deserted the scriptwriters of the show trial,” writes the historian Andrei Lankov. All the defendants “played their roles obediently” with the persuasive assistance of “torture, blackmail, and false promises.”

  The trial unfolded like a Monty Python skit, with defendants enthusiastically explaining their crimes and welcoming the privilege of being executed.

  “I am a running dog of American imperialism,” said Yi Kang Guk, the former president of the General Commodities Importing Company at the Ministry of Trade, as he began his confession. He pleaded guilty to the absurd charge that in 1935, a decade before Kim Il Sung’s rise to power in North Korea, he had been hired in New York as an American spy.

  On the trial’s final day, all the defense lawyers took the stand to solemnly proclaim the guilt of their clients. The lawyer for Yi Sung Yop said, “Although he called himself a Communist, he has been an adherent of a petty bourgeois ideology, a person who could never overcome the influence of backward and reactionary bourgeois nationalism.”

  Yi himself took the stand to affirm the fairness of the trial. “I am grateful for having been provided with an advocate and for the opportunity to speak freely during the four days of the trial,” he said. “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.”

  All twelve defendants were found guilty of all the crimes the prosecutor (a pal of Kim’s from their time in Manchuria) had charged them with. Ten were sentenced to death; two received long prison terms. All their property was confiscated by the state. Several of the men facing death were not executed until two years later, when the supposed coup leader, Pak Hon Yong, was finally tried. Kim may have waited to dispose of Pak, whose populist support remained potent, until he had consolidated enough power to do as he pleased without challenge.

  For Pak’s trial, the Great Leader rolled back the ridiculous theatrics. Full-blown Stalinist show trials required months of planning, scriptwriting, and backstage preparation. International news coverage made them look farcical, which reflected badly on Kim’s judgment and smudged his desired image as a globally significant Communist leader. Pak’s trial lasted just one day. Press coverage was limited to summary accounts in government newspapers. He had no defense lawyer, having turned down the one offered by the government. Yet he confessed to all charges, including a ludicrous one that he had been an American stooge since 1919.

  Pak, though, was not as effusive a confessor as his supporters had been during their show trial. He told the court he did not know the details of the plot to overthrow the government, yet because the plotters were his close friends, he said he was responsible for what they had done. Pak was immediately sentenced to death, and his property was confiscated. This quick and not-so-showy method of eliminating enemies—while publicly connecting them to spy rings operated by the United States, Japan, and South Korea—would become a template for coming purges.

  In the years ahead, Kim’s propaganda machine cited “evidence” from the 1953 show trial. It was used to dramatize the Great Leader’s courage and cleverness in fighting and defeating Americans in the Korean War—even as traitors and spies surrounded him. As his official biographer enthused, “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!”

  III

  New orders in September 1953 sent No south by train to another bombed-out airfield. This one was at Sunan, a village on the northwest outskirts of Pyongyang. From Sunan, it was only ninety miles—less than ten minutes in a MiG—to the thirty-eighth parallel. He had never been stationed so close to South Korea.

  He reported to officers’ quarters inside a large stone church that stood oddly alone and undamaged amid a wasteland of bomb craters, rubble, and burned-out buildings. (American bombers had tried to avoid direct hits on churches.) In the days after No arrived at Sunan, mechanics and other air base workers pitched tents around the church.

  The concrete runway at Sunan was long enough for a MiG. It had been built a year earlier, though never used because of near-constant American bombing. With the war over, the concrete had been patched. Supposedly, it would safely accommodate jet fighters, but as No studied the runway, he was not so sure. It seemed too bumpy.

  Eighty MiGs in wooden crates had been smuggled into North Korea since the armistice, with at least sixteen arriving by train in Sunan before No did. The North Korean mechanics who had taken them apart in Manchuria and who put them back together had not been well trained for their work. They had done their work hurriedly, and they made mistakes. They removed wings before disconnecting fuel and hydraulic lines, which bent and flattened rubber tubing, increasing the risk of blocked fuel lines and faulty landing gear. The condition and maintenance of the reassembled MiGs were poor. Tires were bald, with cords showing through rubber. One of these planes was later described as “ridden hard and put away wet.”

  The reassembled MiGs sat on a dirt apron next to the runway at Sunan, which would later become Pyongyang Sunan International Airport, the country’s primary aviation facility.

  During the war, the latest-model MiGs were almost always flown by Soviet pilots, especially in the first two years. But in late 1952, after the Russian honchos had gone home, No and several other North Korean pilots were assigned the most advanced fighter, the MiG-15bis. It had a significantly more powerful engine than the model No initially flew. More important, it had an intuitive layout of instrument panel switches and a hydraulic control system, both of which made the plane much easier and safer to fly. On Sunday morning, September 20, base commanders at Sunan told No that Kim Il Sung had given orders for immediate combat readiness of the entire military. MiG flights, they said, would begin the following morning. They also said that because he was the most experienced pilot on the base, he would be the first to take off. He would fly alone, not in formation. He would not follow a lead pilot or have a wingman at his tail.

  These orders were far better than he had dared hope for. At the very least, he had expected to shake loose a wingman. He had a plan to do so. He would perform an aerobatic maneuver called an Immelmann, a high-speed, high-g, 180-degree change of direction. While flying due north, No intended to climb suddenly, execute half a loop, and fly upside down in the opposite direction. After uprighting his MiG, he would open up the throttle and hightail it for the thirty-eighth parallel.

  But now, it seemed, he needed only to take off and turn toward South Korea.

  From his training in Manchuria a year earlier, when his commanders planned and then aborted an attack inside South Korea, No had learned how to approach the American air base at Kimpo. He also knew exactly how much fuel he would need in a gas-guzzling MiG. To make sure he remembered,
he had taken the extraordinary risk of scribbling down map coordinates on note cards that he carried with him.

  The North Korean air force was in organizational disarray. Responding to the Great Leader’s orders, its commanders were frantic to get MiGs in the air. They had not yet developed flight protocols to make sure that pilots monitored each other in the air. But his commanders were not fools. Soon, No thought, his window of opportunity would close.

  In the morning, he would go.

  No had the remainder of one more day. He strolled with another pilot into a part of Sunan the Americans had failed to flatten. A few one- and two-story buildings remained standing, though their windows were broken and covered by tattered newspapers. Mules and oxen pulled wooden-wheeled wagons through narrow dusty streets. Residents dressed in rags and looked hungry. But on a warm and lazy Sunday, they were welcoming. Having heard no bombs in nearly two months, they seemed to believe the war was over. The two pilots found a restaurant made of unpainted plywood and ordered naengmyeon, a famous Pyongyang cold noodle dish made of buckwheat noodles, potatoes, sweet potatoes, boiled egg, vinegar, and mustard. As they ate, a middle-aged shoeshine man repaired and polished No’s lace-up leather flight boots.

  Captain Han Hak Soo, the officer eating noodles with No, was another classmate from the naval academy and a fellow MiG pilot but not a friend. Han had built his reputation on lies about how many American warplanes he had shot down. During a mission over MiG Alley, his fighter had come under heavy attack. Forty-six .50-caliber bullets punched holes in his MiG-15. After he managed to land safely, Han said that during a wild dogfight he had shot down three Sabres. No one believed his incredible claim except his commanders, who were desperate enough to dress up their dismal combat reports with American kills. For his bold lie, Han had been promoted to captain, named a battalion commander, and given a medal. As Han ate his noodles, he told No he was expecting another promotion soon.