The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  What upset him was “the ethics of the case.” He fretted in his letter that keeping the MiG, paying the reward, and continuing to promise cash for MiGs would violate terms of the truce that ended the fighting. He also viewed the payment of bribes for aircraft as a tired old warfare trick that was beneath the dignity of the United States—and not likely to lure in any more MiGs.

  “If we are to win the propaganda war—and I think it most important that we do—we have to be alert for every opportunity to produce unusual results,” he wrote. “The normal and the routine are not good enough, and I do not for a moment believe the defection of this one North Korean will encourage any others to come in.”

  During World War II, when he was supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower had had personal experience with defectors absconding in airplanes. His command gave the French several American-made P-40 ground-attack aircraft, and two French pilots flew them to German-occupied France. In his letter to Smith, Eisenhower mentioned the irksome matter of the P-40s, noting that “these incidents are so scattered and so infrequent as to have little significance.”

  The president wrote that if MiGs “start coming in to us by the hundreds, I will eat crow, but knowing the Communists I would gamble that there will be little if any more of this. Their methods of punishing people through torturing families are too well known and too effective to give rise to any great hope that we are going to wreck the Communist Air Force in this fashion.”

  Eisenhower, who came from a poor Kansas farm family and had always lived on his military salary, was not pleased to authorize a large payment of taxpayer money for property stolen from a foreign government. Still, he reluctantly agreed in the letter he wrote from Boston “that we had to pay the $100,000 in this case.”

  Keeping the MiG was another matter. “We are not anxious to have this one,” Eisenhower wrote. “And certainly I cannot see why we want any more of them.” He also suggested that Operation Moolah be “withdrawn” and that the “Communists [be notified] that we had no interest in the MiG plane, and if they wanted to send a pilot down and take it back, that would be all right with us.”

  The advantages of these actions, he wrote, would be that the United States could “stand before the world as very honorable people, maintaining that while we had not been guilty of real violation of the Armistice, we were anxious to avoid any implication of violating its spirit . . . If we get accused of violating the spirit of the Armistice, and this argument makes any headway with neutrals and even some of our friends, I think we will experience a defeat in this so-called psychological warfare.”

  The president closed by telling Smith, “This note is for no official action whatsoever. I am merely trying to put my personal thoughts before you.”

  That no-action proviso would be ignored in the coming days and months. The president had put his druthers down on paper, and the president’s men were eager to please.

  On No’s second morning in South Korea, the U.S. Far East Command had not yet been apprised of Eisenhower’s views. This was largely a function of time zones. When the president dictated his letter on Monday night in Boston, it was already Tuesday morning in Korea.

  Having heard nothing to the contrary from Washington, air force officers in Seoul were of the opinion that the stolen MiG and its pilot constituted a great victory in America’s propaganda war against Communism. They decided to put No on immediate public display—at a press conference in Seoul.

  But before they showed him off to reporters, they decided he needed some coaching. On one especially touchy subject, they coached him to lie. A well-dressed American in civilian clothes (whose name No never heard) asked if he had ever seen American fighter jets in Chinese airspace. Of course, No replied, he had seen many Sabres shoot down MiGs on takeoff and landing from Manchurian airfields. The well-dressed man said that if a reporter asked about these incursions in Manchuria, No must say he had seen nothing.

  II

  In Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung knew exactly how he was going to transform his wrecked country into “a glorious socialist power.” He would follow Stalin’s strategy from the 1930s and bet the future on heavy industry. To that end, the money he had extracted from his Communist brethren was spent on iron, steel, and chemical production. As Kim imposed his will, the largest single branch of North Korean industry became machine building. New factories, many of them turnkey imports from countries like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, began churning out diesel motors, electrical instruments, and machine tools.

  “Comrade Kim Il Sung, with his unbounded love for the country and the people, could no longer tolerate a continuation of Korean backwardness,” his official biographer wrote. “Why should not the people, who endured so many sufferings and fought so heroically, live in a country more developed and more advanced than others? The Great Leader made up his mind to give the Korean people . . . a first-rate culture which would be the envy of the world’s people.”

  He wanted it done fast, a blitzkrieg to industrial modernity. Visiting a bombed-out brick factory soon after the cease-fire, Kim said that rebuilding the site using “ordinary methods of construction” would take five years, “but if you think of factory reconstruction as a battle and attack it, you can get it completed within two months.”

  Some of North Korea’s extraordinary growth in the 1950s was due to Kim’s ability to inspire—and compel—sustained unpaid labor from his people. Every able-bodied citizen, soldier and civilian alike, was forced to repair streets and remove debris. “Reconstruction was, in a sense, war by other means,” writes Charles K. Armstrong, a historian of the era, noting that Kim and his Manchurian partisans understood governance only through the prism of their own blood-soaked lives: guerrilla war, conventional war, and Stalinist control.

  Yet the imperious wrongheadedness that defined Kim’s command of the Korean War soon reappeared in his leadership of the reconstruction war. In his rush to build heavy industry, the consumer economy—food, clothing, and household goods—was largely an afterthought. He tended to ignore basic infrastructure and worker training. His first three-year plan made no mention of building paved roads. His government neglected maintenance and improvements to hydroelectric dams and the Japanese-built power grid, a mistake that in decades to come would leave much of North Korea in the dark. As new factories were built, the top-down planning system did not make provision for training enough young technicians to operate or maintain them.

  The most misbegotten of Kim’s early postwar planning schemes was for agriculture. The war had killed a high percentage of the country’s male farmers; about three-quarters of postwar farmworkers were women and children. “It is a quite common scene that 6–8 women are dragging the plow in the knee-deep water of the rice stubble,” a Hungarian diplomat reported. The Great Leader made a bad situation worse by hurriedly collectivizing nearly all the country’s farms. Rice and grain production stalled and then declined.

  Within a year of the war’s end, bad weather, farm collectivization, and a policy of forcibly confiscating rice from farmers led to severe food shortages, which the government tried to hide. In a foretaste of what would become North Korea’s chronic “eating problem,” Kim had to ask China and the Soviet Union for emergency food aid.

  III

  Lies were nothing new to No Kum Sok. Had he not been an experienced and convincing liar, he would never have been in a position to steal a MiG. Moreover, the Korean War, as he witnessed it unfold, was made of lies. The Soviet Union lied about its pilots fighting over MiG Alley. Kim Il Sung lied about who started the war and then lied about who won it. If anyone dared tell the truth about how catastrophically Kim managed the war, he was imprisoned or killed.

  So when the Americans at Kimpo instructed him to lie about the Sabres he had seen in Manchuria, No understood what they wanted. In any case, he felt he had no choice.

  Just before he left the American intelligence compound to travel t
o the press conference in central Seoul, No had another talk with Major Nichols. The spymaster told him to get out of South Korea and settle in the United States. Learn English, go to college, and become somebody, Nichols said.

  Ever since he was a boy studying his father’s picture books about America, No had wanted to do as Nichols advised. During his first day of interrogation, he had been unable to think of a way to ask how or if he could travel to the United States. Now, with a green light from the intelligence chief, he decided to insist at every opportunity on going to America.

  No had never witnessed a Western-style press conference, yet he was not particularly worried about what it would be like to star in one. He assumed it would be an orderly affair: a handful of friendly newsmen chatting with him in an office, as he had done with air force interrogators. But as he sat between two security guards in the backseat of a light blue Chevrolet sedan, with sirens blaring and lights flashing while his motorcade pushed through crowds in the war-shattered streets of Seoul, he began to get nervous.

  Though the Korean War had ended, news from Korea—about freed prisoners of war, truce violations, and unearthed bodies from secret mass killings—continued to dominate foreign news dispatches in American and European newspapers. A large American and international press contingent remained in Seoul. For these reporters, the defection of a Communist MiG pilot was the juiciest story in weeks. It had military, diplomatic, and strategic implications—and a wonderful human-interest core. More than two hundred journalists wanted to photograph the North Korean and find out why he had swiped a MiG. They packed the press conference, which was held in a building where many correspondents lived. When No was ushered into the room by a large African American air force sergeant holding a submachine gun, row upon row of television lights stunned him. Wearing U.S. Air Force fatigues, a peaked fatigue cap that was several sizes too small, and North Korean underwear, he stood at a table loaded with microphones. He spoke slowly through an interpreter, choosing his words carefully and struggling to contain his fear.

  For an hour and a half he answered questions and made global news. He was the first defector since the end of the war and the first eyewitness to explain publicly that Soviet pilots had trained North Koreans like himself to fly MiGs. He described how legions of Soviet pilots had participated in air-to-air jet combat against Americans throughout the Korean War. He also explained, again as the first eyewitness to speak to the Western press, that North Korea was currently bringing in warplanes from Manchuria in violation of the armistice.

  Asked if North Korean leaders believed war would start again, No replied, “Yes, they do, and they are preparing for it.” He also said Kim Il Sung’s government continued to tell his people that the Korean War was not over “in order to keep them working hard.”

  What “startled reporters” most at the press conference, according to a United Press dispatch, was No’s statement that he had heard nothing about Operation Moolah. While he said that he was “very glad” to learn about the reward money, he found it impossible to say how he planned to spend it.

  “After a pause and alternately grinning and wetting his dry lips, casting his eyes downward at his shifting feet, he said, ‘I don’t know,’” the New York Times reported.

  No was much more eager to talk about where he hoped to live and study. Echoing the advice he had just received from the spymaster Nichols, he told reporters that he hoped to go soon to the United States and attend college.

  Asked about his family back in North Korea, he said he had none except for his mother. “She is somewhere in South Korea. But I don’t know where and I don’t know how to find her.”

  Another reporter asked about the photograph that No destroyed after jumping down from his MiG. “Was it your girlfriend?” the reporter asked.

  It was a photograph of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, No said. His answer was apparently not what reporters were interested in. The girlfriend angle was better copy, and most news accounts of the press conference omitted any mention of Kim Il Sung.

  As instructed by his American handlers, No did lie.

  In response to a question about American warplanes north of the Yalu, he said he had not seen any.

  If he had told the truth, if he had detailed the extraordinary frequency and relative ease with which Sabres shot down MiGs over Manchuria in the last year of the war, his press conference would not have been a propaganda coup for the United States. Reporters would have written about American pilots ignoring United Nations rules and disobeying direct orders from Washington.

  Instead, No’s performance was a propaganda home run. Reporters focused on North Korea’s smuggling of warplanes. “Reds Breaking Truce,” said a front-page headline in the New York Times. Nearly every story around the world focused on how shocking it was that the North Korean pilot did not know—or claimed not to know—about the reward money.

  No returned by motorcade to Nichols’s compound for another marathon interrogation. In the days, weeks, and months to come, there would be hundreds of these sessions, and in all of them No impressed his interrogators, according to air force documents.

  “He was most cooperative and in no way obnoxious,” wrote Colonel Jack H. Bristow, an air force staff surgeon who questioned No. “He was not sullen and at the same time not boisterous. He did not appear to be bored with the interview, but on the other hand seemed to derive a certain amount of satisfaction from answering the questions put to him. During the interview he appeared to be quite relaxed and smiled and laughed occasionally as the situation dictated. He showed no signs of nervousness or apprehension, but rather gave one the impression that he felt secure in his present position.”

  Before the questions ended on that second day, again at 2:00 a.m., No learned that he would be granted political asylum. If he wanted, he could live in the United States. He also learned that he would be leaving Korea in the morning.

  The day after No defected, the air force announced in Seoul that his MiG had been dismantled and loaded on a cargo plane and was bound for the United States. The New York Times reported that it would be subjected to an “exhaustive technical study” at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

  The air force told No, just before he boarded a military plane at Kimpo, that he was headed for Tokyo for more interrogation.

  Neither statement was true. On September 23, the MiG and its pilot were transported separately and secretly to Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, the American-controlled Japanese island about a thousand miles south of Tokyo.

  Also in secret, the air force urgently located and immediately dispatched two of America’s best pilots to Okinawa. Major Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier and the legendary test pilot who would become the hero of The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe’s book and the Oscar-winning movie), was called away from Edwards Air Force Base in California. Captain Tom Collins, a test pilot who had just set a new world speed record in a Sabre, was plucked from Wright-Patterson, along with his boss, Major General Albert Boyd, also a test pilot.

  General Boyd waited until they were over the Pacific before telling Yeager and Collins why they had been ordered to take a very long, hush-hush flight in a C-124 transport aircraft.

  “Boys,” he said, “we are going out to fly a MiG-15.”

  Boyd’s briefing covered these points: The truce that ended the Korean War is shaky. If fighting starts back up, Americans could duel again against MiGs. So your orders are to test-fly this stolen fighter as if it were a brand-new aircraft and learn everything possible about its speed, handling, strengths, weaknesses, and fighting capabilities. You’ll have to work fast because if the Commies say they want the MiG back, we have to return it within forty-eight hours.

  Before he finished, Boyd had bad news for Yeager.

  “I want Tom to be the first one to fly it,” Boyd said, “because, Chuck, you have had enough firsts.”

  Yeager, who
hated to be second at anything, groaned.

  The cargo plane bound for Okinawa was loaded with instruments and testing equipment from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. Besides Boyd, Yeager, and Collins, the passengers included engine experts, hydraulic specialists, aerodynamicists, and intelligence analysts who had been waiting for years to examine a combat-ready MiG.

  All of this had been set in motion by the reactions and overreactions of advisers scrambling to please Eisenhower. It would have been easier, safer, and far cheaper to transport the MiG back to the Air Technical Intel Center in Ohio. But Ike wanted to return the MiG to its rightful owner in a timely fashion, so the Pentagon opted for field-testing during the rainy season on a semitropical island whose only advantage was a location six thousand miles closer to North Korea than Dayton, Ohio.

  No went to Okinawa (rather than Tokyo, where his interrogators were based) to be available, when needed, to help Yeager and Collins understand how to fly a MiG.

  Back in Washington, Walter Bedell Smith seemed stung by the president’s criticism of his initial decision in “the matter of the MiG.” In a memorandum for the president, Smith tried to explain his thinking and then proposed a face-saving way for the administration to get out of paying No.

  “So that you will not think too ill of my judgment,” Smith wrote, “I was consulted and expressed an opinion only in the matter of the payment of the $100,000, which, as you know, I felt should be paid, as the good faith of the United States was involved.”

  Having said that, Smith explained that he would “try to arrange to have the pilot reject the $100,000 on the basis that his action was because of his own convictions and not for money.” To keep the pilot from grumbling, Smith said the government could make him a “ward” of the National Committee for a Free Asia, which was secretly funded by the CIA. Smith said the committee “will give him the technical education he wishes and provide for his future to the extent of the reward which he would otherwise have received . . . I feel that there is real propaganda value in this.”