The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  Whatever conceptual mush juche would turn into, its literal meaning as self-reliance was spectacularly belied by the facts on the ground in North Korea in the mid-1950s. At that time, aid and loans from socialist countries financed more than 80 percent of the country’s imports. Juche notwithstanding, the Great Leader was a beggar. And he remained a beggar for decades because his priorities kept North Korea from building a sustainable economy. The country rarely generated enough growth to pay its bills. For nearly four decades, about half of the output from North Korean heavy industry was made possible by aid from Moscow. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, so did the handouts and so did North Korea’s economy.

  The juche idea, as implemented by Kim Il Sung, guaranteed that North Korea could never be self-reliant.

  III

  While No was helping Yeager and Collins test the MiG on Okinawa, the American government kept searching for ways not to pay the reward from Operation Moolah. In November 1953, as No began his second month of interrogations, Andy Brown asked No to star in another press conference in Seoul, where he would tell reporters that he did not want the $100,000. Brown vaguely explained that there had been some bureaucratic complications in arranging payment. He promised that the government would take good care of No once he moved to the United States.

  “This doesn’t mean you don’t get the money,” Brown said. “They will buy you a car and whatever you need.”

  No felt powerless to object. He had been sworn in on Okinawa as a U.S. government employee and was being paid $300 a month, which to him seemed like a fortune. With shopping privileges at the base exchange in Kadena, he could buy more clothes, food, and gadgets than he had ever imagined possible. He spent $250 on a fancy German-made Contax camera. He opened a savings account at the American Express office on the base. As for the reward money, No believed he was entitled to what the government had promised. But the Americans had taken charge of his life, and he felt they were taking good care of him. Compared with what it had been like in North Korea, life was great. But even if he had wanted to, he could not complain to the press. His whereabouts remained secret.

  Two days after No landed the MiG at Kimpo, Eisenhower told his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to pay the reward “under some sort of trusteeship.” The Departments of State and Defense chewed over that order for sixteen days. Then Dulles received a telephone call from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, who was worried that the Eisenhower administration would be “in trouble” if it did not pay the reward.

  Dulles replied that Eisenhower had become concerned about the embarrassing possibilities of giving so much money to a Red defector. The president, Dulles said, “hoped that it would be paid in some kind of trust so that it would not be blown on ‘wine, women and song.’”

  Wilson feared something much worse: bad media coverage.

  “The press has displayed continued interest in the payment of the reward,” he told Dulles. “Once secrecy is removed [about No’s whereabouts on Okinawa] it will not be practical or desirable to keep him from the press . . . [Reporters] might point out that his mother is a poor refugee . . . [The money] must be paid on a basis that can stand inspection by the press.”

  Dulles conceded the point. The two cabinet secretaries agreed that they would come up with “some kind of a thing that can be completely disclosed to the press.” By the time it reached No in Okinawa, that “thing” was Andy Brown’s request that No tell the world he did not want the money.

  After No agreed to do exactly that, he heard nothing for several weeks. Brown finished his temporary assignment as No’s handler and returned to his CIA office in Tokyo. In his absence, a revolving cast of U.S. government employees, civilian and military, American-born and foreign nationals, took turns teaching No how to think, speak, and eat like an American. He learned how to drive a jeep, write a personal check, and shop in a supermarket. He dined regularly at the homes of American families on the island. His stomach was trained to tolerate hot dogs and other American delicacies. At his first Thanksgiving dinner, he worried about the turkey, expecting it to taste like a tough old eagle, but discovered he liked it.

  Nearly all his hosts and handlers advised him to attend an American university, although they hotly disagreed about which one would be best. No learned of the surpassing excellence of Brigham Young University from Lieutenant Reid Clark, a Mormon Sabre pilot from Utah. Clark strongly urged No to stop drinking coffee, give up Coke, and go to church.

  No’s social circle included Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a Chinese-born translator and analyst who worked on Okinawa for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a CIA-funded group that translated shortwave radio broadcasts. Chin often invited No to his home for dinner and questioned him about his life in North Korea, his ongoing interrogation, and his living conditions on Okinawa. No liked Chin, whose English was excellent, but found him a bit too curious and thought he seemed more Chinese than American. His doubts proved prescient. Chin was convicted in 1986 of having spied for more than three decades for the Chinese government, and he committed suicide in an American jail cell. He was apparently spying for China when No dined at his house.

  For several weeks, No worried about the press conference at which he was supposed to reject the money. Brown then returned to Okinawa and told No that the generals in Tokyo had changed their minds, deciding that the U.S. government would look cheap if the press reported that No had been pressured to give up the $100,000.

  Brown, though, did not clarify how—or if—the reward would be paid.

  About a week later, No received a surprise crash course in money management, courtesy of the State Department, which dispatched a personal investment specialist from Foggy Bottom to Okinawa. The man, whose name No never caught, lectured No for several hours over three days. Through a translator, he told No that the reward was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he should not waste. The financial adviser did not mention Eisenhower or his concerns, but insisted that No be cautious in his investment decisions. Stocks, bonds, and interest rates were, at the time, a complete mystery to No; he had no idea what the State Department man was talking about.

  The headquarters of the Far East Command in Tokyo told the world on November 28, 1953, that No had been paid for Operation Moolah. A press release said he deposited his reward check in the American Express Bank on Okinawa. The military released a photograph of No standing at the bank’s counter in his blue suit, signing a deposit slip as an attractive young woman, identified as bank clerk Flora Swinford, looked on approvingly.

  “Lieutenant No has requested that the U.S. Air Force assist him in establishing a trust fund with the reward money for his education in the United States and for the care of his mother who is still in Korea,” the release said.

  No had made no such request. He did not know what a trust fund was. The air force had distributed the photograph and the press release in an attempt to stop reporters in Tokyo and Seoul—who still had no access to No on Okinawa—from asking any more questions about why the government had not paid the money.

  The check No deposited that day was given to him by his handler at the time, Lieutenant Clark, the Mormon who was working for the 6002nd Air Intelligence Service Group. The check, though, was a phony. After his trip to the bank, the balance in No’s account did not change. The air force never told him that his photo-op deposit was a sham.

  By the late spring of 1954, No had spent half a year under interrogation. The Americans were running out of questions, and he was itching to go to the United States.

  “His reading and writing ability in English was good,” according to an air force report, “with comprehension and speaking ability fair.”

  But he could not travel. The Americans had not offered him citizenship, and he did not have a passport. Under South Korean law, all defectors from North Korea are automatically citizens of the South and entitled to a passport. The government in Seo
ul, though, refused to give one to No. It insisted that the headline-making young pilot come back to South Korea and go to work for its air force.

  This was unacceptable to No. More than ever, he was obsessed with going to America. The Eisenhower administration, too, wanted him in the States, where it intended to parade him around as an anti-Communist hero. The Pentagon was negotiating an exclusive two-part, as-told-to story that would run in the Saturday Evening Post in October 1954 under the headline “I Flew My MiG to Freedom.” The CIA, meanwhile, had secured No’s admission in the fall as a freshman at the University of Delaware.

  South Korea, which depended on American aid for postwar reconstruction, was pressured to back down on the passport, and it did. No arrived in San Francisco on May 4, 1954, where he held a press conference and Universal Pictures featured him in a newsreel that was shown in movie houses across the United States. In the newsreel, the narrator said that No would return to South Korea after a year of studying in the United States.

  “Looking like an American Joe College in sports clothes and a porkpie hat, he smiled broadly and spoke to newsmen in fairly good English,” the Associated Press reported. “He said he would spend part of his reward money to study political science at the University of Delaware, part to support his mother who escaped to South Korea in 1950 and the rest to help rebuild South Korea.”

  But in San Francisco, No did not actually say the words reporters and the newsreel attributed to him. When he landed in the United States, he did not know how, when, or if he would get the reward money or what he would do with it. At the press conference in San Francisco, it was his official escort and translator, the army captain James Kim, who explained No’s supposed plans. Without No’s knowledge or approval, Kim answered reporters’ questions in ways that suited the public relations interests of the Eisenhower administration. No never intended to move back to South Korea or send money to help rebuild that country, and he never told the press that he would do so.

  CHAPTER 14

  Learning and Purging

  I

  A week after coming to the United States—more than eight months after he stole the MiG—No finally learned what the Eisenhower administration was going to do with his moolah.

  A bank vice president laid it out for him in the main office of Riggs National Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. At the time, Riggs was the leading bank in the nation’s capital. Eisenhower banked there, as did Vice President Richard Nixon, more than twenty previous presidents, and most of the city’s embassies and diplomats. Riggs later marketed itself as “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.” Its luster was eventually lost to scandals, mismanagement, and CIA-managed ties to unsavory governments, including that of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Riggs disappeared in 2005 after a bank merger.

  If No would sign the papers on the table in front of him, the banker said, then $100,000, tax-free, would be deposited in his name. There were a number of conditions. The money would go into a trust, and No would not have access to the principal, because the government worried he might spend it too fast and too frivolously. He would receive a onetime payment of $5,000 to help get him started in a new life, cover his housing, and pay school fees at the Newark campus of the University of Delaware. He would receive a monthly stipend of $250. The trust fund and its restrictions would remain in place for five years, with automatic renewal every five years unless No revoked it.

  No still did not understand what a trust fund was. As he listened to the banker, he concluded that the Americans were trying to chisel him. Confused, suspicious, and seething, he refused to sign, walked out of the world’s most important bank, and went back to his hotel room.

  No had gone to Riggs with a three-man entourage. They included Arvin E. Upton, managing partner of the Washington office of a prestigious New York–based law firm, LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae. Without No’s knowledge or consent, the CIA had hired Upton as his personal lawyer and financial adviser. No later had to pay for the services of the lawyer the CIA had hired. The government also billed him for his hotel stay in Washington and his first-class transpacific flight to San Francisco. The second man at the bank was a CIA agent named Tony Chaikowski. He came to the bank carrying a check for $100,000 to be deposited—if No signed the trust agreement.

  The third man was Captain Kim, the army escort and translator who had been with No since they left Okinawa. No had become friends with Kim, a gregarious Korean American who grew up in Los Angeles. Kim had come along when No flew from Okinawa to Seoul to see his mother in the fall of 1953. On their journey to San Francisco six months later, they stopped off in Guam, Wake Island, Manila, and Honolulu, where they had eaten well, visited tourist sites, and enjoyed each other’s company.

  Kim was someone No believed he could trust. He was not aware that the army captain had, during press conferences in San Francisco and again in Washington, put words in his mouth. In the Washington office of the U.S. Information Agency, where reporters were summoned when No arrived in the capital, Kim told reporters that No had “asked for a lawyer to set up a trust fund for the $100,000 he received for turning over the MiG.” No denies this. Kim also told the press that whatever money remained after No had paid for his college education and provided for his mother “would go to the Korean people,” which was not No’s intention.

  After arriving in Washington but before the meeting at Riggs National Bank, Kim had taken No up to Capitol Hill to introduce him to his high school classmate, House representative Joseph Holt, a Republican from Los Angeles and a longtime friend of Vice President Nixon’s. After shaking hands, Holt announced that they would visit Nixon at his office in the Capitol. No had not been expecting to meet someone so important. He was ashamed of how he was dressed: corduroy jacket, skinny tie, brown plaid pants.

  Nixon did not mind. He and No chatted amiably for ten minutes and had their picture taken together. No found Nixon to be friendly, dynamic, well-spoken, and surprisingly youthful, given that he was supposedly the second most important official in America. Nixon, then forty-one, asked what No planned to study in college. When No said political science, Nixon told him, “I hope you win all the elections,” and sent him on his way. Two decades later, when Nixon was impeached and resigned from the presidency, No felt sorry for him.

  While touring Capitol Hill, No was formally introduced at a House session and had a brief meeting with Speaker Joseph Martin, a Republican. He did not talk to Eisenhower that day or ever. For all his micromanaging of No’s reward money or perhaps because of it, the president never asked to meet with No.

  On the day of his unhappy encounter at Riggs National Bank, No went back to his hotel to brood about whether the U.S. government was trying to cheat him. He was free to grumble and complain. But he had very few, if any, options, other than to do what he was told. Cut off from his mother, he had no one to give him independent counsel. His friends, such as they were, were military officers and CIA agents. They were pleasant enough, but their loyalties were not to him. The only person No could talk to was Captain Kim, and Kim followed the government script.

  After two days, No was persuaded that the trust fund was not a trick, and he walked back to the bank. Kim came along, as did the lawyer hired by the CIA and the CIA agent with the check. No signed the papers. In the fall of 1954, after he began classes at the University of Delaware, reporters continued to ask about the reward money and suggested in news stories that it had not been paid, which irritated the CIA. Agents told No to make it clear to newsmen that he had the money and he was happy about how it had all turned out. The Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post all reported—without qualification—that No was richer by $100,000.

  No also began Americanizing his name, a process that would end with his becoming Kenneth H. Rowe. As a freshman at the University of Delaware, he was Kenny No. On the advice of the CIA, he briefly stopped talking to r
eporters, perhaps because the government had negotiated an exclusive with the Saturday Evening Post and it had not yet been published.

  “He lived up well to the ‘No’ part of his name,” said an Associated Press feature story that appeared in the New York Times in September 1954. “No pictures, no story, no comment.”

  II

  Kim Il Sung spent a lot of time on the road in the 1950s.

  North Korea’s economy and food supply depended on aid. To keep it coming, Kim had to travel to Communist capitals, flash his big smile, and remind comrades of the wartime suffering inflicted on North Korea by the Americans. By far the longest such trip was in 1956, when he traveled to eight Eastern bloc countries and visited Moscow twice. He was away for seven weeks, from the beginning of June to July 19.

  Dictators take a risk when they travel. Fear melts away. Discipline flags. Underlings get ideas. For Kim, the risk was particularly high in 1956, a time of food shortages and hunger in North Korea and of ideological ferment and political unrest across the Communist world. Stalin was three years dead, and Stalinism had become an embarrassment to nearly everyone except the Great Leader, who needed Stalinist repression as a shark needs teeth.

  Khrushchev had energized reformers with his famous February screed against Stalin’s “crimes” at a party congress in Moscow. Kim shrewdly declined to attend that meeting, but he could not (at that time) prevent many of his countrymen from noticing profound changes under way in the Soviet Union. The Kremlin was emptying the Soviet gulag, easing censorship, exploring “peaceful coexistence” with capitalists, experimenting with a consumer-led economy, and reinventing leadership as a collective enterprise. The cult of personality was passé. There would be no more godlike Stalins in Moscow. “Little Stalins” were being elbowed out of power in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. In every Eastern bloc country except Albania (which would become a special friend to North Korea), political prisoners had been released.