The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  It was a nerve-racking year for Kim. Before he arrived in Moscow, his own ambassador to the Soviet Union, Li Sang Jo, sabotaged Kim’s trip by meeting with Soviet Foreign Ministry officials, dishing dirt about Kim’s out-of-control cult of personality, and suggesting it be passed on to Khrushchev.

  “Everything is decided by Kim Il Sung alone,” Li complained. “The people around Kim Il Sung fawn over him.”

  Kim’s government was giving propaganda a bad name, the ambassador added.

  “Day after day this propaganda tries to convince the people of the considerable increase in their standard of living, which in reality isn’t there,” Li said. “As a result, the people might stop believing such propaganda, which is divorced from reality, and it can cause irritation and unrest.”

  Reality was indeed grim. Hungry North Koreans had been leaving farms in search of food; hospitals were treating malnourished people for eating grass.

  One thing that particularly irked Li—and which he repeatedly complained about to the Soviets—was Kim’s fantasy rewrite of history, which had turned a national museum on the history of the Communist revolution in Korea into a museum on the mostly made-up history of the Great Leader.

  “When the participants of the revolutionary movement in Korea see that all the efforts are ascribed to one man, Kim Il Sung, they have a feeling of bewilderment,” Li said.

  When Kim arrived in Moscow two months later, his ambassador had poisoned the Communist well. The party’s Central Committee scolded Kim for “improper behavior.” Soviet officials, including Khrushchev, ordered him to roll back his cult of personality. Having come to Moscow for handouts, Kim was in no position to push back. He conceded the “correctness of the comradely advice in the presence of fraternal leaders.”

  When he returned home in July, de-Stalinization had spread, infecting the Central Committee of the North Korean Workers’ Party. North Korea had not yet been sealed off from the outside world. Foreign newspapers were on sale. News about anti-Communist uprisings in Eastern Europe was printed in the Korean-language press. Government officials in Pyongyang met relatively freely with diplomats from the Soviet Union and China, and Koreans who had lived in those countries were particularly attuned to reforms going on elsewhere. Some of them could no longer bear the Great Leader, and they thought even less of his thuggish and ill-educated partisan buddies, who, they complained, were taking all the best government jobs.

  “Kim Il Sung’s personality cult has obtained an intolerable character,” said Yi Pil Gyu, head of the Department of Construction in Kim’s cabinet and a former fighter in China for Mao. It was July 20, 1956, a day after Kim returned from Europe, and Yi was sitting inside the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, telling the acting Soviet chargé d’affaires, A. M. Petrov, that he and other Central Committee members “consider it necessary” to force Kim to change his ways. Yi said that he and other disgruntled cadre members would use “sharp and decisive criticism within the party” or, if need be, “forcible upheaval.”

  Petrov was a sympathetic listener, having watched as Kim’s farm policies caused the food crisis. The Soviet diplomat had told a Hungarian colleague that Kim “is surrounded by bootlickers and careerists . . . Whatever is said by the leader, they accept it without any dispute.” Petrov believed that Kim’s cult of personality was “a primary and decisive factor in every mistake” made by the government.

  Yi and other malcontents—several of whom had briefed Soviet diplomats on what they were up to—decided to take on the Great Leader at a plenum of the Central Committee in August. Nothing so brazen had been attempted before. They accused Kim of concentrating too much power in his own hands. They denounced the incompetence of his guerrilla cronies and charged that his policies were starving the masses.

  Kim had excellent spies and was not taken by surprise. The majority of members on the Central Committee were his loyalists and had been prepped to vote against whatever the critics might propose. By most accounts, the challenge amounted to little more than harsh words and never came remotely close to using or even advocating the use of violence to implement change. Nonetheless, Kim crushed those who dared grumble. Some were expelled from the party; others were arrested. In weeks, months, and years to come, nearly everyone who participated in the “August group” (along with anyone suspected of anti-Kim thoughts or sympathies) was purged from the government and, in many cases, executed without trial. To save their necks, many Koreans with Chinese and Soviet backgrounds fled the country.

  As Kim’s official biographer explained, the events of August 1956 “failed to disturb Comrade Kim Il Sung . . . Rather, it was the traitors to the revolution who had reason to be terrified . . . Foolishly enough, treacherous people were frantically engaged in efforts to organize clandestine intrigues in order to destroy the Party and the revolution.”

  Moscow and Beijing were not happy when they learned that Kim had not kept his promise to behave more “correctly.” They particularly did not approve of his persecution of Soviet- and China-born Koreans for advocating reforms that were being pursued across the Communist world.

  In a move without precedent, the Soviet Union and China sent a joint delegation to Pyongyang to straighten Kim out. It was Mao’s idea, according to one Soviet official. Mao “began to complain about Kim Il Sung, saying that he was such and such a person, that he had launched that idiotic war, that he was a mediocrity, and that it was necessary to dismiss him.”

  The two men leading the delegation were, by any measure, formidable.

  From Moscow came Anastas Mikoyan, a wily Bolshevik who had managed to thrive under Lenin and Stalin and then helped Khrushchev write the fiery speech that branded Stalin as a murderer. Mikoyan had become a post-Stalinist fixer, the go-to guy for dealing with big egos in small countries. Over the summer he had been in Budapest, where he helped remove from power a presumptuous “Little Stalin” named Matyas Rakosi. He had also been to Warsaw with Khrushchev to push Stalinists out of power and install a leader more suitable to the Kremlin. Mikoyan had close blood ties to the Soviet military-industrial complex. His brother helped design the MiG.

  From Beijing came Peng Dehuai, the famous Chinese general who loathed Kim and whose army had saved North Korea from the Americans. Throughout the Korean War, Peng had shown contempt for what he saw as Kim’s incompetence and childish behavior.

  When they arrived at the train station in Pyongyang, Kim did not come to meet them. He knew they were trouble. As he later told an Albanian diplomat, “Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai, etc. [arrived] with bad intentions to meddle in our internal affairs.”

  That meddling compelled Kim to de-Stalinize himself and North Korea—or so it seemed for a short time.

  Under the watchful eyes of Mikoyan and Peng, Kim was pressured to convene another plenum of the Central Committee in September, at which he agreed to un-purge the people he had just purged in August. He also agreed to refrain from wholesale purges in the future.

  For a few months, Kim kept his word. Many of his harshest critics got their jobs back. There was a noticeable thaw in censorship. But Kim reneged on a promise to publish an account of his incorrect behavior as it had been exposed at the party plenum in September. He never allowed the North Korean people to know that two powerful men had come to Pyongyang from Moscow and Beijing to put him in his place—or that he had agreed to do as he was told.

  The Soviet and Chinese archives have not yet revealed why Mikoyan and Peng did not simply sack Kim and replace him with someone more malleable and less Stalin-like. Historians disagree as to whether the delegation was ever authorized to do so. A reason for the delegation’s indecision seems to have been Mikoyan’s unfamiliarity with East Asia and Korea. He had no understanding of the country and no connections in Pyongyang. Unlike in Hungary, there were no street demonstrations by which to gauge the unpopularity of Kim’s government. The North Korean People’s Army had made sure of that.

 
Kim was also lucky.

  He was bailed out in October 1956 by a bloody revolution in Hungary, where protesters took de-Stalinization to its logical conclusion. In a spontaneous nationwide uprising, the Hungarians toppled the Soviet-imposed government, organized themselves into militias, and tried to force Soviet troops out of the country. This was not the kind of reform Khrushchev had in mind. After hesitating briefly, he and other Kremlin leaders crushed the uprising. Soviet forces killed more than twenty-five hundred Hungarians. A new chill gripped the cold war, and reform froze across the Communist world.

  The Great Leader could not have been more pleased. He now had the perfect excuse for sticking with Stalinism. There would be no risky “revisionism” on his watch. By the end of 1956, Kim’s Propaganda Department boasted, in effect, “I told you so.” The Hungarian government fell, it said, because naive comrades had foolishly followed the Soviets’ reform agenda off a cliff, rather than wielding the tried-and-true tools of Stalinism, including a cult of personality.

  As important to his survival was the widening split between China and the Soviet Union. Kim’s patrons in Moscow and Beijing had begun to bicker and would continue to do so for decades. The Soviet Union and China still gave Kim loans and weapons, food and fuel, and they still bought his country’s shoddy goods. But never again would they work together to try to roll back his appetite for cruelty, vengeance, and murder. As he later explained to a visiting Albanian, “Those who [had] the intention of cutting off my head . . . were forced to leave empty-handed and the right remains with us.”

  III

  In a photograph taken on the steps of a campus building at the University of Delaware, Kenny No is a twenty-two-year-old freshman, impeccably dressed in a white shirt and tie, sitting with four other students. He looks younger than the others, and he looks happy. But the picture is not representative of his first years in the United States, which were lonely and difficult. He found it all but impossible to reconcile the trauma of his wartime past with the calm of his on-campus present. His placid days of study ended with fitful nights of dreaming about betrayal and death.

  He also worried constantly that he would flunk out and be forced to leave the United States. He had told Richard Nixon he would study political science, but that was a fib. The calculus and physics he had studied back in Hungnam Chemical College—combined with his facility for mathematics and his experience as a pilot—made engineering much easier than political theory. Back in the naval academy in North Korea, he had been allowed only two hours a day for study, which was never enough time to master his course work. But at the University of Delaware, he could study as many hours as his dark moods would allow.

  He struggled mightily with American English. To nail down slang, he memorized by rote the meaning of phrases that made no logical sense: “throw the book at him,” “get a kick out of it,” and “look up a girl.”

  During his third year of college, after he had more or less conquered English, No accepted an invitation to travel to Niagara Falls to deliver a speech to the Aero Club of Buffalo. There, he ran into the air force captain Cipriano Guerra, the Sabre pilot who watched No land his MiG the wrong way at Kimpo and who was the first American to shake his hand. After their speeches, No learned that Guerra—fearing MiG guns—almost killed him with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. The fighter pilots laughed about the misunderstanding and talked on and on about flying, fighting, and war. The trip to Buffalo launched a lifelong avocation for No and introduced him to a group of American peers who understood what it meant to go to war at six hundred miles an hour. He met air force fighter pilots all over the United States for dinners, conferences, and visits to flight museums (especially the one in Ohio that houses his MiG). The pilots embraced him as one of their own, and they became close friends.

  Having enjoyed his velvety rides in a Chevrolet on Okinawa, No bought a new two-door turquoise Chevy from a Delaware dealer for $2,250. He haggled over the price for two weeks. CIA agents, who kept watch over him at college, congratulated him for getting a good buy. No became friends with several of these agents, who tended to be older men in their forties and fifties with wives and kids. They invited him to their homes and introduced him to their families. He stayed in touch with many of them after they retired from the agency, and he attended their funerals.

  While agents from the CIA were good to him, the agency itself refused to help No secure permanent residence status in the United States or become a citizen. The agency told him that the federal government did not want to upset the South Korean government, which wanted No to come back there to live. So every six months he had to renew his visitor visa. After nearly two years of wrestling with red tape at the immigration office, No went to the home of a favorite professor, Dr. John Munroe, head of the history department, to ask for help. Delaware is a small state, and the professor was friendly with the politicians who ran it. He picked up the phone and called the U.S. senator J. Allen Frear Jr., who a week later introduced a bill that said, “No Kum Sok (also known as Kenneth No) shall be held and considered to have been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence.” The Senate and the House quickly approved the bill, Eisenhower signed it, and No’s visa problems were over.

  Becoming an American citizen was not as easy. No had spent half a year telling his life story to American intelligence agencies, but immigration examiners insisted on rehashing much of it, including why he had joined the North Korean Workers’ Party. The long, mind-numbing process dragged on for six years. In 1962, he finally became a citizen.

  Before he had sorted out his own immigration status, No began trying to bring his mother to the United States. Her request for a visa was denied because she was poor and could not prove that she intended to return to South Korea. Two attempts by Delaware lawmakers in the House and the Senate to pass bills to bring No’s mother to the States failed.

  Her dilemma was resolved by the Hungarian Revolution, the same uprising that helped Kim Il Sung keep his Stalinist teeth.

  By gunning down people in the streets, the Soviet crackdown in Hungary triggered a refugee crisis in central Europe. To help out, Congress passed the Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957, which admitted twenty-nine thousand refugees who had faced persecution in Communist countries. Most were Hungarians, but North Korean refugees also qualified. With the help of the State Department and congressmen from Delaware, No’s mother was the first person to arrive in the United States under the new law, and her reunion with her son was deemed newsworthy enough to be filmed and shown in a newsreel in American movie houses. No met her in Seattle, escorted her to a welcoming ceremony in Washington, and then brought her back to Delaware, where he was about to graduate with a degree in engineering and go to work for the DuPont company in Wilmington.

  Not long after No’s mother arrived, she began searching—as Korean mothers compulsively do—for a suitable wife for her son. With the help of two Korean-born Catholic priests, she found a young South Korean woman who would soon become Clara Rowe. She was born in Kaesong, a city near the border that separates the two Koreas. During the war, her family was trapped in Seoul for three months under North Korean army occupation. Her older brother was taken to the North and never heard from again. But she, her mother, and two younger siblings were liberated by American marines and taken to Pusan, where they lived until the end of the war. There, she found a job with Catholic Relief Services, an American charity, which provided her with connections that allowed her family to emigrate to New York City in 1958. She was working for Catholic Relief Services in an office on the sixty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building—the skyscraper No had seen in his pre-escape dreams—when she was introduced to her future husband.

  While making wedding plans in 1959, No heard from Andy Brown (a.k.a. Arseny Yankovsky), the translator and CIA agent he met on Okinawa. Brown had moved to Washington and was still working for the CIA, although he would soon be fired on suspicion of being a Soviet
double agent. He invited No to come down to Washington for the weekend, where they met on a Saturday morning at the Lincoln Memorial.

  At lunch, Brown congratulated No for being such a successful defector. Then Brown uncorked his own incredible life story as a White Russian on the run, which No was hearing for the first time. He described his flight from the Reds in the Russian Far East and again from North Korea after Soviet troops marched in. He told No that he killed a Russian soldier with a hammer and changed into the dead man’s uniform as part of his escape to South Korea.

  When Brown finished his tale, he asked No about the reward money from Operation Moolah and invited him to travel to Taiwan, where No could invest in several surefire business opportunities. As he listened, No remembered the advice Brown had given him back on Okinawa: beware of Americans who could be thieves. Brown seemed not to know that the reward money was in a trust account and would remain there for years. Kenny No politely ignored the offer and never again saw Andy Brown.

  EPILOGUE

  I

  When Kim Il Sung outmaneuvered his would-be overseers from Moscow and Beijing in the autumn of 1956, he was still a youngish dictator, just forty-four. He enjoyed another four decades of vigorous good health, during which leaders in China and the Soviet Union (later Russia) did nothing to contain his increasingly preposterous cult of personality or stop him from using Stalin’s tool kit of repression. After the Korean War, the United States maintained a large military presence in South Korea, about twenty-eight thousand troops in 2014, as deterrence against another attack from the North. Washington tried and mostly failed to restrain Pyongyang’s development of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons. But the U.S. government paid little attention to what Kim did to his own people.