This was precisely what Eisenhower wanted to hear. When he read Smith’s memo, Eisenhower scribbled at the bottom, “Now we’re clicking.”
The CIA took over management of No Kum Sok when he flew away from Seoul. His agency handler, dressed in a light brown suit with a red tie, sat near No on the plane leaving Kimpo but did not introduce himself until they landed on Okinawa. The reason for the unannounced change of destination was safety, said the CIA man, who spoke Korean with a Russian accent and called himself Andy Brown. This, of course, was not true. The reason was Eisenhower.
After landing at Kadena Air Force Base, No and Brown rode in another Chevrolet to a guarded compound on the south end of Okinawa. The compound included about forty newly built bungalows. The one that became No’s for his first nine days on the island was the most luxurious house he had ever slept in. It was painted bright yellow and had two bedrooms—one for No, one for Brown. There was a living room, a family room, and a spacious kitchen. The refrigerator was stocked with eggs, bacon, milk, ham, and soft drinks. When he first saw the bungalow from the Chevy, No saw what seemed to be thin horizontal bars on its windows and began to worry that he was about to be locked up. They turned out to be venetian blinds.
No’s handler called himself Andy Brown. But his real name was Arseny Yankovsky, and, as the CIA later concluded, he might have played on both sides of the Korean War. Born in Vladivostok in 1914 to a rich, landed, and aristocratic family, Yankovsky had led a life shaped by revolution and war. The Bolshevik Revolution forced his family out of the Russian Far East into Japanese-occupied northern Korea, where White Russians hunted tigers and took their holidays on the seacoast. In the mid-1940s, the defeat of Japan and the Soviet occupation of North Korea again uprooted the family. Many family members were arrested, and some were sent to Siberia, where they died. But Yankovsky escaped south in 1948, walking across the thirty-eighth parallel and finding his way to Seoul. American intelligence was eager to hire a savvy operative who had contacts in the North and spoke Korean, Russian, Japanese, and English. As a Tokyo-based employee of the CIA, Yankovsky metamorphosed into Andy Brown and built a network of Korean agents. When the war began, he sent them to North Korea by air, land, and sea to gather military intelligence.
Most of his agents, however, were caught and executed. So many died so quickly that Brown came under suspicion as a Soviet double agent. As part of the CIA’s mole hunt in the late 1950s, when Brown had moved to Washington, he was quietly fired by the agency, which then helped find him a job in the Far East as a public relations man for TRW, the aerospace firm. He lived in Tokyo and San Francisco until his death in 1978. His family has insisted that the CIA betrayed him, that he hated Communism, and that he was never a Soviet agent.
It would be several years before No learned Yankovsky’s secrets. On Okinawa, he only knew what Andy Brown told him. On their second day together on the island, Brown told No to take a lie-detector test and never tell anyone that he had been ordered to take it. No agreed and was hooked up to the wires of a mysterious machine. Brown apologized for the unpleasant questions he was about to ask. They included the following.
“Have you ever had sex with a man?”
No truthfully answered that he had not.
“Do you drink alcohol?”
Trying to make a good impression, No lied. The machine caught him.
Brown laughed and congratulated No.
“Men are supposed to drink,” he said. “If they don’t, they’re not men.”
The rest of the test seemed to please Brown, as well as the other intelligence people who reviewed its results. No kept silent for forty-three years about the lie-detector test because of Brown’s warning, and because he felt honor-bound to protect America’s secrets.
Brown suggested that No change his name to Kenneth so that Americans would not have to call him Kum Sok. He agreed and learned to answer when people called him Ken and Kenny.
After the polygraph, he settled into a grueling routine of interrogation and language training. Four hours a day, five days a week, for six months he answered questions from a rotating cast of specialists serving in the air force, army, and navy. He tried his best to help the people he hoped would soon be his countrymen, but as the interrogations dragged on, his patience ran thin, especially when he was asked niggling questions that he could not answer, such as the thickness of runway concrete at airfields across North Korea and Manchuria. When the day’s interrogations ended, English lessons began, also four hours a day, five days a week.
Some interrogations became field trips, as when an air force instructor-pilot went up seven times with No in a two-seat Lockheed T-33 Thunderbird jet trainer to find out how good a pilot the North Korean was.
His control of the throttle “was very smooth,” and he was “capable of flying the aircraft in a satisfactory manner,” the instructor found. But No was “an extremely cautious pilot, taking great care to keep from situations that might get him in any unusual attitude such as stalls . . . or that might lead to flight in bad weather.” The air force concluded that his training was “definitely inferior” to that of the American pilots he had fought against. As a combat dogfighter, the air force concluded, No had received training that was “entirely inadequate for a strong offensive or defensive air force . . . That No could have destroyed any [enemy aircraft] the test pilot considered doubtful.” This secret assessment was never passed on to No, but it more or less squared with his own evaluation of his chances when engaged in aerial combat with an American pilot flying a Sabre.
No became depressed on Okinawa. Partly, it was the long hours of interrogation; the Americans were nice but unremitting. Mostly, it was post-traumatic stress. Though he had stopped pretending to be a Communist, he still feared he would be found out as a faker and executed. He knew his fear was irrational, but it would not go away. He lost his appetite. He lost weight. He became anxious, especially about English. He was afraid he would never learn it, and furious that his best chance to master the language as a schoolboy in North Korea had been thwarted by Soviets and Kim Il Sung. Although he would eventually learn to speak English much better than Korean, his anger at being denied the language as a boy never went away.
Days after No and Brown moved into the yellow bungalow, they heard on Armed Forces Radio that No’s mother was alive and looking for her son. Andy Brown translated the English broadcast: She had turned up at a South Korean army base in the southeastern city of Daegu, where she had been living for nearly three years. She had seen her son’s photograph in the newspaper and wanted to be reunited with him. As proof, she showed the army officers a childhood photograph of No. She had lots of them. Among the few possessions she had managed to take with her as she fled North Korea was a family photo album.
No was overjoyed, as were U.S. Air Force intelligence officials. They soon turned No’s reunification with his mother into another anti-Communist propaganda triumph, complete with a press conference in Seoul; a photo op with the South Korean president, Rhee, at his presidential mansion; and a custom-made navy blue double-breasted suit for No.
An air force transport plane flew No back to South Korea. But instead of taking him straight to his mother, the air force took him to the press conference.
The first question came from a South Korean reporter. He asked where No had found such a fine and fancy blue suit. Feeling vaguely ashamed, No said the Americans bought it for him.
After a few more questions, during which No again emphasized his eagerness to move to the United States, the air force sprang a made-for-media surprise. No’s mother walked onstage. She was dressed for the press in traditional Korean garb, with a white blouse and a long white skirt. Cameras rolled as mother and son saw each other for the first time in four years. She was forty-two years old. No thought she looked older. He refrained from embracing her in front of the press. He would always resent how the American government milked publicity from w
hat should have been a private moment. As for his mother, she seemed, at first, not to recognize the young man in the blue suit. She turned away for a moment, then studied his face and said, “My prayers have been answered.”
When the press conference ended, No assured his mother that they would have dinner together that night. Then he was whisked away in a limousine to meet President Rhee, who told No that if he moved to the United States, he must return to South Korea and fight for Korean reunification. That night, in a private dinner at a hotel, No talked with his mother for about four hours and gave her $200 worth of South Korean currency. The Americans had given him the cash, with instructions that he give it to her.
Following orders, he left Seoul—and his mother—the next morning, boarded a transport plane back to Okinawa, and resumed his routine of interrogation and English lessons.
CHAPTER 13
Right Stuff and Fake Stuff
I
It was late evening inside the big hangar at Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, where American mechanics had put the MiG-15 back together. The test pilot Tom Collins, fresh from Ohio, sat in the cockpit. No leaned in toward Collins while standing on the fighter’s left wing and explained the function of each switch and gauge on the instrument panel. Because No was speaking Korean, Andy Brown leaned into the cockpit while standing on the right wing, translating No’s instructions into English. At least he tried to. His grasp of airplane lingo was not good. When Collins was finally satisfied that he understood what a gauge was for, he wrote down its functions in English on a strip of white tape and stuck it to the instrument panel. It was slow work.
As the three men labored on past midnight, they heard footsteps on the hangar’s concrete floor. Chuck Yeager, dressed in his flight suit, had come to say hello. He jumped up on the MiG’s right wing.
“Does he know who I am?” Yeager asked Collins, pointing at No.
“I don’t know,” Collins replied.
“Well, ask him,” Yeager snapped.
“You ask him,” Collins snapped back.
Yeager spoke to Brown.
“Will you tell him that I am Major Yeager and I am the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound?”
Brown tried his best, but he mangled it.
No had no awareness of Yeager’s remarkable achievements as a World War II fighter ace or test pilot. He had never heard of the man. His CIA handler was of little help. Brown had never heard of Yeager either.
Yeager leaned into the cockpit and pointed to the Mach indicator on the instrument panel.
“Tell him I am the first man to fly faster than Mach 1.”
Brown again did his best to translate terminology and concepts that he did not really understand. This time, though, a clear meaning jumped the gap between English and Korean. No’s face lit up.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “you are Dr. Mach!”
Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist and philosopher, first predicted and described the shock waves generated when a projectile reaches supersonic speed. No had learned about Dr. Mach in Manchuria during flight training. It slipped his mind that Dr. Mach, as of 1953, had been dead for thirty-seven years.
When the translation of No’s excitement at meeting the great Austrian professor reached the great American test pilot, Yeager’s face flushed. In his frustration, he, too, forgot that Mach was dead.
“No!” Yeager said. “Dr. Mach is very old and has a beard.”
Again, No was puzzled.
Yeager then laughed, jumped off the wing, and walked away.
Collins, No, and Brown returned to the painstaking work of translating a MiG instrument panel into English.
After that awkward encounter, Yeager proved himself in No’s eyes to be a gracious and curious man, not at all cocky or full of himself, exceedingly hardworking, and brave beyond belief. He and Collins both listened carefully to No’s advice on how to fly the MiG. The pilots were under strict orders to steer clear of politics when talking to No. They could only ask him questions about technical and practical matters related to flying the MiG. As far as the world knew, No was not on Okinawa. He had “been taken under the wing of the top-secret Central Intelligence Agency at an undisclosed location,” said a story in the New York Times.
Sometimes Yeager took No’s advice, as when the North Korean explained the suicidal risk of intentionally putting the MiG into a spin. No told Yeager and Collins that in the event of a spin, they should push the control stick as far forward as possible toward a white line painted on the instrument panel. No warned that that alone would probably not be enough to save their lives. If the MiG does not recover after three spins, No told them, eject.
Perhaps because they had only one MiG, both pilots refrained from spinning it. “The Koreans probably lost more pilots spinning than from American guns,” Yeager wrote. “So, spin testing was a big no-no.” Collins put it this way: “Frankly, we lost our guts and didn’t spin it.”
But goosing the MiG to make it fly faster than the speed of sound—which No told them could not be done and which he advised against because the plane would be uncontrollable as it approached Mach 1—was irresistible to Yeager. He took the fighter up to fifty-five thousand feet for what he intended to be its first supersonic flight. From previous tests, Yeager knew that the plane pitched up its nose as it approached Mach 1. So he flipped the plane upside down and descended full throttle at a forty-five-degree angle. The MiG’s aerodynamic tics wrenched it down into a nearly vertical dive.
The ride, as No had warned, was awful.
“The airplane was buffeting very bad,” Yeager said in a postflight report that the air force kept secret for decades. None of the controls functioned, except for the throttle. “I was just riding; I couldn’t any more guide it than I could a house. I kept going down. I didn’t bother to use the dive brakes and kept full power on it.”
At thirty thousand feet, the bucking MiG reached Mach .98, believed to be the fastest speed any MiG-15 had ever been flown.
Collins, flying a Sabre, had gone up with Yeager that day and was following him down. Seeing Yeager helpless, Collins managed to catch his eye and motioned with his right thumb, a signal for his colleague to eject.
Yeager ignored him.
At eighteen thousand feet, the MiG hit denser air. Suddenly it was shrouded in condensation. Yeager could not see anything when the MiG “started pulling out [of the dive] slowly by itself.” At twelve thousand feet, it disappeared into storm clouds. At three thousand feet, Yeager was finally flying level, and he followed Collins back to Okinawa, where they landed in a blinding rain.
After eleven test flights, the verdict from Collins and Yeager was that the MiG-15 accelerated very nicely and had a high rate of climb, which made it a “usable weapon for high-altitude interception of bomber aircraft”—precisely what the honchos had done while shooting down B-29s.
But the test pilots also found that the plane’s “handling qualities and Mach number limitations make it an inferior fighter-to-fighter weapon.”
No had told the air force as much before Yeager and Collins began risking their lives. Forty-one years after that test, Collins and No met for an Operation Moolah reunion. Collins said then that No “gave me confidence . . . I always felt he was trying to do his very best to tell me about the airplane.”
When the flight tests finished on Okinawa, air force mechanics again took the MiG apart and engineers studied its components in granular detail. Just in case the North Koreans or the Soviets asked for the plane back, the disassembled fighter was kept on Okinawa for five months. Having heard nothing from the “rightful owners,” the air force brought the MiG to Wright-Patterson in early 1954 for two more years of test flights, many of them flown by Collins. After it was damaged in a hard landing in 1956, the fighter was donated to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, where it remains on display next to a Sabre.
While Americans were testing the MiG that North Korea never acknowledged losing and did not want back, the Great Leader made public what his mythobiographers would later describe as his “immortal work of genius”: the juche idea.
In a speech to party propagandists on December 28, 1955, Kim introduced the term juche, which means self-reliance. At the time, he was trying to distance North Korea from Soviet and Chinese influence. He needed nationalist window dressing for his continuing efforts to isolate and destroy Korean politicians with Soviet and Chinese backgrounds.
“We are not engaged in the revolution of another country but in our Korean revolution,” Kim said. “Therefore, all ideological work without exception must be subordinated to the interests of the Korean revolution.”
The Great Leader claimed in his memoirs that he first came up with the juche idea when he was seventeen and being held in prison in Manchuria by the Japanese. At times, he could be quite specific about what juche meant, saying that it means “solving one’s problems for oneself on one’s own responsibility under all circumstances.”
But what was most brilliant about the juche idea was its ambiguity. The meaning seemed deliberately muddy. It was an infinitely adjustable ideological instrument that could be tuned and retuned over time to suit the Great Leader’s autocratic needs. Juche reassured Koreans that they had once and for all overcome the humiliations of Japanese colonialism. Juche told the world North Korea would never again be a plaything of the great powers. As the cult of Kim grew more solipsistic and delusional, juche became an “assumption that Korea is the center of the world.”
The juche idea, as it mutated, became what the Korea scholar Brian Myers has called a “jumble of banalities” that is dull, evasive, and hard to understand: “It recalls a college student trying both to stretch a term paper to a respectable length and to discourage anyone from reading it through.” As such, juche became a decoy designed by Pyongyang to prevent the outside world from seeing the Kim family’s true ruling ideology, which Myers describes as “paranoid nationalism” built on “an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview.”
The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot Page 22
