The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

“The airplane was buffeting very bad”: Ibid., 10.

  Yeager could not see anything when the MiG “started pulling out”: Yeager and Janos, Yeager, 263; Collins, Operation Moolah.

  the plane’s “handling qualities and Mach number limitations”: “These USAF Pilots Flew the MiG,” 6.

  “We are not engaged in the revolution of another country”: Baik, Kim Il Sung Biography, 2:479.

  he could be quite specific about what juche meant: Yuk-Sa Li, ed., Juche! The Speeches and Writings of Kim Il Sung (New York: Grossman, 1972), 157.

  juche became an “assumption that Korea is the center of the world: Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 404.

  a “jumble of banalities” that is dull, evasive, and hard to understand: B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010), 46–47.

  At that time, aid and loans from socialist countries financed more than 80 percent of the country’s imports: Van Ree, “Limits of Juche,” 57–58.

  about half of the output from North Korean heavy industry was made possible by aid from Moscow: Ibid., 69.

  Two days after No landed the MiG at Kimpo, Eisenhower told his secretary of state: Memorandum of conversation with the president, Sept. 23, 1953; Meetings with the President 1953, White House Memoranda Series, John Foster Dulles Papers, Eisenhower Library.

  Then Dulles received a telephone call from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson: Memorandum of telephone conversations, prepared in the secretary of state’s office, Oct. 9, 1953, Korean files, box 54, Dulles Papers, Eisenhower Library.

  “The press has displayed continued interest in the payment”: Ibid.

  Dulles conceded the point: Ibid.

  “His reading and writing ability in English was good”: “Handling of North Korean Defector, No Kum Sok,” 1.

  “I Flew My MiG to Freedom”: No Kum Sok, “I Flew My MiG to Freedom,” with Martin L. Gross, Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 9, 1954, 19, Oct. 16, 1954, 36.

  No arrived in San Francisco on May 4, 1954: Universal newsreel, vol. 27, no. 567, May 6, 1954, MCA/Universal Pictures Collection, 1929–1967, National Archives, College Park, Md.

  “Looking like an American Joe College in sports clothes”: Associated Press, “Pilot Who Stole MiG Will Aid South Korea,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1954, 19.

  Chapter 14: Learning and Purging

  Its luster was eventually lost to scandals: Terence O’Hara, “Allbrittons, Riggs to Pay Victims of Pinochet,” Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2005, A1; Timothy L. O’Brien, “At Riggs Bank, a Tangled Path Led to Scandal,” New York Times, July 19, 2004.

  Kim told reporters that No had “asked for a lawyer”: Associated Press, “Ex-MiG Pilot Arrives in Washington,” Washington Post, May 6, 1954, 3.

  Kim also told the press that whatever money remained: Ibid.

  “He lived up well to the ‘No’ part of his name”: Associated Press, “Korean Who Delivered MiG for $100,000 Starts as Delaware University Freshman,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1954, 3.

  “Little Stalins” were being elbowed out of power: See Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). This book is a detailed, well-sourced account of Kim’s defeat of reform in the 1950s and establishment of what Lankov calls “national Stalinism.”

  In every Eastern bloc country except Albania: Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 80.

  “Everything is decided by Kim Il Sung alone”: “Report by N. T. Fedorenko on a Meeting with DPRK Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Li Sang Jo, 29 May 1956,” cited in James F. Person, “New Evidence on North Korea in 1956,” CWIHP Bulletin, no. 16 (Spring 2008): 471.

  Reality was indeed grim: Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 65.

  “When the participants of the revolutionary movement in Korea”: “Report by N. T. Fedorenko on a Meeting with DPRK Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Li Sang Jo, 29 May 1956,” Cited in Person, “New Evidence on North Korea,” 477.

  The party’s Central Committee scolded Kim: Lankov, Crisis in North Korea, 77–78.

  He conceded the “correctness of the comradely advice”: Person, “New Evidence on North Korea in 1956,” 448.

  Yi said that he and other disgruntled cadre members would use “sharp and decisive criticism within the party”: Yi Pil Gyu, “Memorandum of Conversation with the Head of the Department of Construction Materials Under the Cabinet of Ministers,” July 20, 1956, cited in Person, “New Evidence on North Korea in 1956,” 479.

  The Soviet diplomat had told a Hungarian colleague: Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 72.

  As Kim’s official biographer explained: Baik, Kim Il Sung Biography, 2:550–551.

  Mao “began to complain about Kim Il Sung”: Lankov, Crisis in North Korea, 138. Lankov quotes from his interview with V. V. Kovyzhenko, a Korea specialist for the Soviet Union who traveled to Pyongyang in 1956 with the joint delegation that criticized Kim. Lankov cautions that Kovyzhenko did not attend the meeting with Mao when the Chinese leader supposedly said these words.

  As he later told an Albanian diplomat, “Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai”: Husan Alimerko (Albanian ambassador to North Korea), “Memorandum of Conversation Between Kim and Myftiu Manush,” Oct. 4, 1961, trans. Enkel Daljani, cited in James F. Person, “‘We Need Help from Outside’: The North Korean Opposition Movement of 1956” (working paper 52, CWIHP, Washington, D.C., Aug. 2006), 2.

  But Kim reneged on a promise: “Memorandum of Conversation Between Soviet Chargé d’Affaires V. I. Ivanov and Chinese Charge d’Affaires Chao Ke Xian,” Oct. 26, 1956, cited in Person, “‘We Need Help from Outside,’” 82.

  The North Korean People’s Army had made sure of that: Person, “New Evidence on North Korea in 1956,” 460.

  The Great Leader could not have been more pleased: Ibid.

  “Those who [had] the intention”: Person, “‘We Need Help from Outside,’” 2.

  Epilogue

  suspected of being “hostile and reactionary elements”: Lankov, Crisis in North Korea, citing Soviet archival record of a 1959 conversation between the diplomat V. I. Pelishenko and Pang Hak Se, minister of interior under Kim, 182.

  Hundreds of thousands of “wrong thinkers” and their families: David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2012), 25.

  Guards have license to murder, rape, starve, and torture prisoners: See ibid.; Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14 (New York: Viking, 2012); Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Kim Yong, Long Road Home (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

  Kim also created a caste system: Robert Collins, “Marked for Life: Sungbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System” (Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Washington, D.C., 2012), http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Songbun_Web.pdf.

  This forced labor was tacked on: Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 121.

  Cartoonish histories of Kim and his partisans in Manchuria became required texts: Lankov, Crisis in North Korea, 205.

  An estimated thirty-four thousand monuments: Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 20.

  He had at least five palaces: Ibid.

  When he traveled, his aides brought along a special toilet: Ibid.

  emotional and intellectual lives around “burning loyalty to the Leader”: Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung, 70–71.

  The growth, called a hok in Korean: Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2003), xii.

  “I have never seen a public figure so fat”: Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 245–46.

  He ordered the killing of his uncle Jang Song Thaek for “dreaming different dreams”: “Report on
Enlarged Meeting of Political Bureau of Central Committee of WPK,” Korean Central News Agency, Dec. 8, 2013.

  calling for “absolute trust, single-minded unity, and monolithic leadership”: Ruediger Frank, “Some Thoughts on the North Korean Parliamentary Election of 2014,” 38 North (blog), March 14, 2014, http://38north.org/2014/03/rfrank031414/.

  “The United States and other hostile forces, ignoring our magnanimity and goodwill”: “North Korea Leader Warns of ‘Very Grave’ Situation,” Agence France-Presse, Apr. 2, 2014.

  the U.S. Air Force responded by flying nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers: Jethro Mullen, “U.S. Says It Sent B-2 Stealth Bombers over South Korea,” CNN, March 28, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/28/world/asia/korea-us-b2-flights/.

  “I thought everything was going well”: Gene Rector, “Father of Man in Apparent Murder-Suicide Defected with MiG After Korean War,” Macon Telegraph, Sept. 24, 2008, 1.

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