The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

  Kim Il Sung never spoke publicly about the loss of the MiG or about No’s defection. But he did retaliate, according to Captain Lee Un Yong, a North Korean air force flight instructor who defected to South Korea two years after No. General Wang Yong, the top commander of the North Korean air force, was demoted, and five of No’s air force comrades and commanders were executed, Lee said. Although he did not know the names of all five, Lee said one of those killed was Lieutenant Kun Soo Sung, No’s best friend.

  As for Uncle Yoo, there was never any information about his fate or that of his wife and children.

  V

  The Americans did not see him coming, although they insisted that they did.

  Soon after No shut down the engine on his MiG, an air force spokesman claimed that the control tower had guided the plane to a safe landing. The Associated Press reported that an “Allied officer revealed that a flight of Sabre jets met the Communist jet at the southern border of the demilitarized zone . . . and escorted it to Kimpo.” The report added that the plane had “apparently” been picked up by Allied radar and Sabres were dispatched to meet it. A MiG certainly would not approach the vital air base “without our knowing about it,” one officer told the AP.

  In truth, the Americans had been caught with their pants down and eyes closed.

  Just as No took off that morning from North Korea, the radar at Kimpo was turned off for maintenance. The Americans made no attempt to escort No’s MiG, intercept it, or shoot it down. Even the few American pilots in the flight pattern over Kimpo who caught sight of the distinctively snub-nosed, swept-wing interloper as it descended from the north did not recognize it as an enemy aircraft. None of them altered flight plans or alerted flight control. They did not realize what was in their midst until after No had landed and Dave Williams howled over the radio about a goddamn wrong-way MiG.

  Only then did the air base spring into action. As the MiG was towed, pilots and other airmen ducked into their hootches to grab cameras and swarmed the taxiway for photographs. They complained riotously when military police refused to allow them inside the hangar. With orders to make sure that No’s defection and his purloined MiG were kept secret, MPs demanded that pilots and airmen stop taking photographs. They confiscated cameras and exposed film. One officious security official charged up into the control tower, where “he warned us that we were to say nothing to anyone concerning the incident, practically threatening us with death if we did mention it,” recalled Wilfred M. Husted, an air-traffic supervisor.

  Efforts to keep the lid on failed almost immediately. After lunch that Monday, Husted returned to his tent, where airmen asked him what all the hubbub was about. Dutifully, Husted said nothing. He tried to change the subject by turning on the radio, which was tuned to Kilroy, the local Armed Forces Radio station. As soon as the radio warmed up, Kilroy told the world that a MiG-15 had landed at a U.S. Air Force base in South Korea.

  Inside the headquarters of the Fifth Air Force, a medical officer poked and prodded No for fifteen minutes, sampling his blood and impressing him by using a brand-new needle to do the job. No was then escorted to the commander’s office for an amiably empty encounter with General Anderson, who did not speak Korean and had no interpreter. After exchanging hellos, the general sat behind his desk while the pilot sat stiffly on a wooden chair. For half an hour, they wordlessly eyed each other as Anderson’s aides made an urgent call to Tokyo for interrogators and translators. Within an hour, ten of them were on a plane bound for Kimpo. Back in the general’s office, the silence was finally shattered when Major Donald Nichols, head of intelligence for the Fifth Air Force, burst into the room and introduced himself to No, using his pretty good Korean.

  Nichols was the T. E. Lawrence of Korea. One of his commanders, General Earle E. Partridge, called him “a one-man war” and “the most amazing and unusual man” he had ever met. Nichols, then thirty, drank too much, never wore a proper uniform, and was overweight. He was also the most effective American intelligence operative of the Korean War era. He had arrived in Korea in 1946 with less than three months of schooling as a spy. Before that he had been a motor-pool sergeant. Before that he had grown up on welfare in Florida, stealing farm equipment from neighbors and dropping out of school in seventh grade. Yet by traveling in disguise through North Korea and by using payoffs, extortion, torture, and an extraordinarily close relationship with President Syngman Rhee of South Korea and many other senior South Korean officials, he built a covert network of informers, guerrilla fighters, and high-level political contacts that operated throughout the war in both Koreas. Before the war started, his warnings were the first to predict Kim’s invasion of the South, although they were ignored at MacArthur’s headquarters. He controlled more than six hundred agents on both sides of the border, and his sources were often better than those of the Central Intelligence Agency or army intelligence.

  Russian warplanes were one of his passions. Nichols lured—and later interrogated—the North Korean air force pilot who defected in 1950 in an Ilyushin Il-10 airplane. Nichols risked his life and won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1951 by leading a mission behind enemy lines that photographed and brought home parts from a wrecked MiG-15. The following year he organized an even more successful mission that brought back the entire wreckage of another MiG.

  Now a North Korean pilot—fresh from delivering a battle-ready MiG, an item Nichols had been lusting after for years—was eager to talk. Nichols could hardly contain his excitement. He shot the breeze with the general for about ten minutes before saying to No, “Let’s go to my place.”

  They flew in Nichols’s helicopter to the compound of the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron on the western edge of Seoul. There, Nichols ran the show. Like Santa Claus, he handed out hundred-pound bags of rice on paydays.

  When they entered his office, a pack of mixed-breed dogs (No counted ten, including several huskies) got up and wagged their tails. The questioning could not officially begin until the interrogation team arrived from Tokyo. So they waited in Nichols’s office, where No petted the dogs and Nichols kept being called away for meetings. Nichols’s Korean assistant served No an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola, a beverage he had never heard of. He loved it at first taste. Years later, he would buy stock in Coca-Cola.

  Drinking his Coke, No heard, for the first time, about his $100,000.

  The major’s assistant mentioned that the U.S. government, in return for delivery of the MiG, would soon give No enough money to buy thirty-three brand-new American cars. No understood that this was an impressive sum of money, but he did not understand why the Americans would want to compensate him for an aircraft that happened to be his ticket to freedom. The Korean assistant did not explain. Like everyone else whom No would meet in the hours and days ahead, he assumed that the North Korean pilot had been lured to South Korea by Operation Moolah.

  Later in the morning, as the wait continued for the interrogators from Tokyo, Nichols sat down with No and informally questioned him. During their conversation, which was not recorded, the major casually declared, “You are a rich man now.”

  Nichols did not elaborate, also assuming that No had come for the money and knew the particulars of Operation Moolah. No was deeply confused by this talk of his being a rich man. He did not know what to say.

  On a completely different subject, Nichols asked him about an important general in North Korea.

  “Have you seen General Lee Whal?”

  No had indeed seen him—that very morning in North Korea.

  General Lee was the tall, wellborn, mustachioed officer who patted No’s shoulder and joked with him about not getting lost.

  Suppressing his wonderment about the reasons behind Nichols’s question, No related the details of their encounter.

  Nichols was delighted. He clapped his hands, described Lee as “my friend,” and said that he had sent him two letters.

  It woul
d be many years before No understood the scale of Nichols’s spying operation in North Korea, but this claim that the vice-commander of the North Korean air force was a friend of an American major did not come as a complete shock to No. Back in Manchuria, No had suspicions about the general. More than once, No had watched Lee elbow his way into the daily logistics of the air war, ordering MiGs to fly into airspace where Sabres were waiting to pounce.

  As No continued waiting for his interrogators, air force photographers insisted that he pose for propaganda photographs. For some pictures, he put on his Snoopy-style helmet, bulbous black oxygen mask, leather gloves, and parachute. For others, he gazed soulfully into the middle distance with his leather flight jacket partly unzipped. For still others, he was photographed from behind as he looked over his MiG.

  No looked like a defector from central casting. He was lean and handsome, with high cheekbones and a full head of thick black hair. He was twenty-one but looked younger.

  After the photographers finished, No’s flight suit was confiscated. He was issued air force fatigues and escorted to lunch at the officers’ mess, where he found the food to be inedible—bland and greasy. He could not help but compare it with the gourmet meals he had enjoyed in Manchuria with the honchos. The American pilots, though, were wolfing it down. At the officers’ mess, No could not even find water to drink, just tasteless powdered milk and coffee that was much too bitter to drink. American military food shocked his system; it took about a week before he could eat enough of it to make a dent in his hunger.

  After lunch, the intelligence officers arrived from Tokyo, and No’s interrogation began in a conference room at Nichols’s compound. Most of his questioners were college-educated Japanese Americans. Only one, a Korean American, spoke Korean. So the interrogation was conducted mostly in Japanese, which No still spoke fluently. The men asking questions were not like North Korean military officers or any Asians he had met. They were informal, plainspoken, compassionate, and direct. The one he liked best, Shigeo Morisato, later taught him English and became a close friend.

  For all their friendliness, his interrogators were relentless. Over two days, they grilled No about his personal life, the circumstances of his escape, the placement of North Korean air force units, the leadership and command structure of the air force, the location of airfields in North Korea and Manchuria, and on and on.

  Nichols personally wrote the report on No’s initial interrogation. The fifty-five-page document was a rush job: finished in three days, stamped “SECRET,” and kept secret for sixty years. It is, however, a remarkably thorough account of the equipment, leadership, training, and strategies of North Korean and Soviet air operations in Manchuria and North Korea during the war. As judged by his interrogators, No was a lucid, precise, and cooperative source. “He was able to recall,” the report says, “air units, personnel strength, structure, and number of aircraft assigned to respective units.”

  No explained the tormented mind-set of North Korean pilots, many of whom were undertrained in Manchuria and overwhelmed in combat.

  “Even after becoming full-fledged MiG-15 pilots,” Nichols’s report says, “they were kept under constant watch under a system of intra-unit surveillance whereby every pilot was required to report any suspicious speech or action of their own pilot friends.”

  No also explained the odd, erratic, and seemingly cowardly behavior of MiG pilots in the last years of the war, after the honchos had gone home.

  Question: “When a Sabre is attacking MiGs from the rear and there are two more MiGs behind and above the Sabre, why don’t those MiGs jump the Sabre?”

  Answer: “The reason for that is that they are afraid that, in turn, they will be jumped from the rear by other Sabres.”

  No was asked why a lone MiG pilot, when fleeing from Sabre fire, would “fire into the air without reason.” Drawing on his own experience, he answered, “Possibly to shoot up the ammo so that they could claim participation in combat, or maybe because of excitement the pilots ‘froze’ on the trigger and fired the guns involuntarily.”

  His interrogators were curious about what No knew about American fighter pilots preying on MiGs inside Manchuria—in violation of UN rules and orders from Washington.

  Question: “Did you ever hear about U.N. aircraft across the Manchurian border?”

  Answer: (Laughs) “Not only have I heard about it, but I have actually observed them personally.”

  As No tired, his interrogators gave him American cigarettes, which they said would help him think. No was impressed by the cigarettes, which were not rotten like the Chinese and Russian brands he had become addicted to. Before his first round of interrogation ended, a transcript shows that No was asked about the American offer of cash for his MiG. The interrogator seemed surprised by No’s ignorance.

  Question: “Did you know that the U.N. has offered a reward for MiG pilots escaping to U.N. airfields with their MiGs?”

  Answer: “I have never heard about it.”

  Question: “Didn’t you read the leaflets we dropped regarding the reward?”

  Answer: “No, I have never seen them.”

  In his report on the interrogation, Nichols seemed dubious that No had never heard about the reward.

  “Refugee stated, apparently in all sincerity, that all North Korean pilots had been prohibited from tuning in on South Korea radio broadcasts,” Nichols wrote. “He also declared emphatically that he had never seen any propaganda leaflet guaranteeing him any monetary compensation for a delivery intact of a MiG into U.N. hands. Therefore, refugee was ignorant, ostensibly, of the standing monetary offer made by the U.S.”

  When the interrogation ended at two in the morning, Nichols’s assistant escorted No to a small apartment where a futon had been placed on the floor for him. Bleary-eyed but jubilant, No lay down and reviewed all that he had accomplished in one day: flying clear of Kim Il Sung, escaping a dead-end future in North Korea, and finding safety in the West. As an unexpected bonus, the Americans had been kind to him, even complimentary. One interrogator told him that someday he could become president of South Korea.

  The Americans, though, had pestered him about reward money—what he knew and when he knew it—and they did not seem to believe his answers. It was irritating and confusing.

  When No awoke at 7:00 a.m., a morning newspaper had been placed next to his futon. He read a story about himself on the front page. In describing his escape, it explained what his interrogators had assumed he already knew: for nearly half a year, the Americans had been dangling dollars as bait for a MiG pilot to land at Kimpo—and a North Korean named No Kum Sok was the first to bite.

  No deeply resented the implication that he was more interested in money than in freedom. But at least now he could make sense of his interrogators’ questions. In No’s view, Operation Moolah had never tempted a single North Korean, Chinese, or Soviet pilot. To start with, the Americans had dropped their leaflets in the wrong place. They should have dropped them in Manchuria, where MiG pilots were based. Even if pilots had read the leaflets or heard the radio broadcasts, No believed, they would never have trusted the Americans enough to risk being shot down. Finally, he knew that Communist pilots did not understand how much $100,000 was worth. The reward would have been much more tempting, he thought, if the Americans had promised a good job in America.

  No also realized that it did not matter what he thought. His life—and his befuddling future as “Moolah Man”—was now in the hands of the U.S. government.

  CHAPTER 12

  Squeezing the Moolah

  I

  Thirteen time zones away from No and the MiG, the president of the United States was ticked off by Operation Moolah and its vulgar financial inducements.

  Eisenhower did not want the fighter jet and worried that its theft might undermine the fragile armistice in Korea. He believed the Russian-made aircraft should be returned to its rightful owner
as soon as possible, and to discourage other pilots from coming in from the cold, he wanted to cancel Operation Moolah. He also wanted to make sure that the North Korean pilot, whose name Eisenhower had yet to learn, would not blow the $100,000 on booze and broads. Better yet, he wanted to find a way to pressure the pilot to turn down the moolah altogether.

  Eisenhower never made these views public. But they echoed long and loud in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, where subordinates spent the next year trying to thread a needle: keeping the president happy while keeping reporters from learning that Ike, the outwardly genial general, wanted to pay out the reward money very slowly or not at all.

  Eisenhower had flown out of Washington early on Monday morning, September 21, before reports about the MiG and the defector reached the White House. While he was giving speeches that day in Massachusetts, his national security team met and decided that even though the Korean War had ended, the United States must honor the commitment made in Operation Moolah. They authorized the air force to announce in Washington that afternoon that the reward would be paid. Air force headquarters also sent a message to its Far East Command saying that Operation Moolah remained in effect and cash rewards for additional MiGs would be paid in the future.

  Eisenhower hurriedly approved his security team’s decision during a busy day of glad-handing in New England, but that night in Boston he had second thoughts.

  “I am sorry that I was not in Washington today to discuss the MiG incident with the entire staff,” he dictated in a personal and confidential four-page letter to his longtime adviser and confidant, Walter Bedell Smith. Smith, who had served Ike during World War II, was then undersecretary of state and had participated in the meeting at which No’s reward was authorized.

  “I realize that the recommendations sent to me had the unanimous support of my shrewdest and most knowledgeable advisers on such matters; however, I must confess I was not convinced,” Eisenhower wrote.