No Kum Sok, age five, riding his tricycle. No’s father, who worked for a large Japanese company, had shopping privileges at a company store.
No, age seven, with his father on the first day of elementary school in April 1939. No’s father died of cancer in 1949, when his son was seventeen.
No’s mother wearing furs in a studio photograph taken in the early 1940s. After the Soviets entered Korea in 1945, his parents struggled financially, selling many of their possessions.
Kim Il Sung in Manchuria in the late 1930s, around the time he became an effective anti-Japanese guerrilla leader and a legend to many Koreans.
Kim in a propaganda painting depicting his guerrilla forces in snowy Manchuria. By 1941, his fighters had been crushed by the Japanese, and he fled to the Soviet Far East.
Kim with his first wife, Kim Jong Suk, in an undated photo. She was a guerrilla who fought the Japanese in Manchuria in the early 1940s and followed him to the Soviet Union, where they married.
Kim Il Sung with his wife and infant son, Kim Jong Il, who was born on a Soviet Army base in 1942. Kim Jong Il succeeded his father in 1994 as the leader of North Korea.
South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, greets General Douglas MacArthur near Seoul in August 1948, shortly after Rhee was elected to lead the U.S.-sponsored government.
MacArthur devised the amphibious invasion at Inchon, which devastated Kim Il Sung’s army in September 1950. But MacArthur’s misjudgments and insubordination led President Harry Truman to fire him the next year. This photo was taken in 1944 after U.S. forces liberated the Philippines.
Senior Lieutenant No Kum Sok, age twenty-one, after landing a North Korean MiG-15 at Kimpo Air Force Base in South Korea on September 21, 1953.
No in his flight suit on the day he landed in South Korea. Hours after he climbed out of his MiG, U.S. Air Force photographers asked him to pose in the suit and oxygen mask.
© 2014, The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.
No’s theft of a Soviet-built fighter jet, long coveted by the U.S. government, and his arrival at a U.S. air base in South Korea triggered banner headlines around the world.
Fearing a Communist air attack that might destroy the stolen MiG-15 before it could be examined, the U.S. Air Force quickly hid it in a hangar and disassembled it for shipment out of South Korea.
F-86 Sabre fighter jets, photographed in November 1952 at Kimpo Air Force Base, were the only American warplanes that could challenge MiGs in dogfights during the Korean War.
Chuck Yeager, shown here in 1947, was the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. He was sent to Okinawa to fly the stolen MiG.
No’s MiG was transported to Okinawa, where it was repainted and secretly tested in the fall of 1953 by Yeager and other top American test pilots.
On Okinawa, where No was interrogated for six months in 1953–54, he became friends with Shigeo Morisato, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and English teacher.
To convince the press that it had paid a promised reward for the stolen MiG, the U.S. Air Force staged this photo of No depositing $100,000 in a bank. The check was a fake; the money was later put into a trust fund for him.
No chatted with Vice President Richard Nixon in his office on Capitol Hill in May 1954. Nixon wished No good fortune in running for political office.
No in June 1954 at the University of Delaware, where he studied engineering. Known on campus as Kenny No, he was admitted to the university with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1954, No worked for several months for the Voice of America, speaking out against Communism and describing his new life in the United States.
No worked hard to find a way to bring his mother to the United States. She arrived in Washington, D.C., in November 1957 and lived near her son until her death in 2004.
After No became an aeronautical engineer named Kenneth H. Rowe, he married Clara in 1960 in New York City. His mother played matchmaker, selecting Clara, an immigrant from South Korea who worked in the Empire State Building.
Rowe and his family in December 1986 in Daytona Beach, Florida. From left, Edmund, Bonnie, Kenneth, Clara, and Raymond.
Kim Il Sung ruled as dictator until his peaceful death in 1994 at age eighty-two. In this undated propaganda photo, he poses on Mount Paektu, the highest peak in Korea and the sacred mountain of his revolution.
Kim Jong Un, grandson of the Great Leader, tours an air force unit in March 2014. Kim Jong Un became the third dictator in the Kim dynasty in December 2011, after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.
Rowe on the beach near his home in South Daytona, Florida, in April 2014. In his early eighties, he often attends conferences with American fighter pilots and does sixty pushups a day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Out of the blue, Kenneth Rowe telephoned me at my home in Seattle in November 2012. He said he had just read my book about a North Korean prison camp escapee, and asked if I had ever heard of No Kum Sok and the MiG he stole from North Korea in 1953. I had not and told him so. He laughed a little and suggested I should be better informed.
After a few weeks of remedial education, which included reading his 1996 memoir, A MiG-15 to Freedom, I called him back and apologized. I asked if he would allow me to tell the story of his defection in a book that also chronicled the rise of Kim Il Sung and explained the ferociousness of U.S. Air Force bombing during the Korean War. He liked the idea and agreed to help. Rowe is a patient man with a phenomenal memory. Both traits were sorely tested in writing this book, and I am grateful for his constant support.
A few months before Rowe contacted me, the U.S. government decided to declassify a large cache of air force intelligence reports on No Kum Sok. They had been kept secret for fifty-nine years. Rowe did not know that they existed. It is good to be lucky. The documents proved essential in jogging his memory, unearthing new details, and confirming his story.
Luck would have meant nothing, though, without an assist from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The reports were in two dusty boxes, part of a huge and sketchily catalogued series of air force intelligence records from the Korean War. Timothy K. Nenninger, chief of the textual records reference branch at the archives, and reference archivist Eric van Slander found them and made them available to me. Before they did their detective work, Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, put me in touch with the Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero, who manages the National Archives. Ferriero expedited my request. Also invaluable was the help of Joseph S. Bermudez, who made available his collection of declassified air force documents about No Kum Sok, his flying skills, and air force testing of the purloined MiG.
The fog of lies, disinformation, and propaganda surrounding Kim Il Sung’s rise to power has lifted in recent years because of work by scholars and researchers with access to government archives in Moscow and Beijing. They have found (and translated into English) diplomatic cables and transcripts of personal conversations that detail the role of Stalin and Mao in enabling Kim’s invasion of South Korea and in saving him from his incompetence. I am deeply indebted to this scholarship, much of which is available online from the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. My primary guide to these sources has been Kathryn Weathersby, who has done groundbreaking research on the Korean War in the Soviet archives and is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She generously shared her papers (published and not-yet published), her expertise, and her time. Adam Cathcart, a lecturer at the University of Leeds and expert in many things Chinese and Korean, jump-started this book by telling me where to look for sources and scholars, giving me a box of books that turned out to be essential, and offering encouragement. In trying to understand Kim Il Sung, I am deeply indebted to the res
earch, analyses, and clear writing of a legion of eminent experts on Korea, including Andrei Lankov, Shen Zhihau, Evgenijy P. Bajanov, Natalia Bajanova, Balázs Szalontai, Bradley K. Martin, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, Xue Litai, James F. Person, Charles K. Armstrong, Bruce Cumings, Alexandre Y. Mansourov, Robert A. Scalapino, Chong-Sik Lee, Adrian Buzo, Sydney A. Seiler, Dae-Sook Suh, Hongkoo Han, William Stueck, and B. R. Myers. I had access to the work of these scholars thanks to the University of Washington Library and its extraordinary collection of books on North Korea. I also want to thank Sidney Rittenberg for telling me what Mao thought of Kim Il Sung.
To understand the air war in Korea, I am indebted to the work of Robert Frank Futrell, Conrad C. Crane, Douglas C. Dildy, Warren E. Thompson, Xiaoming Zhang, Igor Seidov, James Salter, John Darrell Sherwood, and Kenneth Werrell. Also helpful were U.S. Air Force veterans from the Korean War, including John Lowery, Jim Sutton, and James K. Thompson.
At the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, the archivist Valoise Armstrong located presidential memoranda that astonished Rowe by informing him of Eisenhower’s role in Rowe’s long struggle to secure his “moolah.”
When I first traveled as a Washington Post reporter to South Korea, my guide and mentor in Seoul was Don Oberdorfer, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and my former colleague at the Post. He took me under his wing, introduced me to important people, and encouraged me to dig into the story of North Korea.
It is also high time for me to thank David Maraniss, whose steady excellence has given me a model to try to follow. For the same reasons, I thank Tom Kizzia, Chip Brown, Bob Woodward, Ted Gup, Michael Getler, David Hoffman, Rick Atkinson, Bill Keller, Joe Lelyveld, Susan Chira, Stephen Engelberg, Ben Bradlee, Leonard Downie, Robert Kaiser, Phil Bennett, Fred Hiatt, Jackson Diehl, Glenn Frankel, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Hamilton, and Donald E. Graham. I also thank Sheila Kowal, an extraordinary reader.
To my agent, Raphael Sagalyn, and my editors, Kathryn Court and Tara Singh Carlson, your support and wisdom have been essential.
And, of course, above all, thanks to Jessica, Lucinda, and Arno.
Seattle, 2014
TIME LINE
1905: Japan takes control of Korea
April 15, 1912: Kim Il Sung born near Pyongyang
1920: Kim’s family moves to Manchuria to escape the Japanese
1929: Kim expelled from eighth grade and jailed in Manchuria for anti-Japanese activities
1930: After release, Kim, seventeen, joins guerrillas fighting the Japanese
January 10, 1932: No Kum Sok born near Hamhung in northeast Korea
February 18, 1932: Japan tightens grip in Manchuria, creating puppet state
1934: Kim arrested by Chinese Communist partisans in a bloody anti-Korean purge
June 4, 1937: Kim becomes a legend in Korea by leading a guerrilla raid against Japanese police in the Korean border town of Pochonbo
July 7, 1937: Japan declares war on China
1941: Hounded by the Japanese, Kim retreats to the Soviet Far East and joins the Soviet army
August 10, 1945: Japan offers surrender after A-bombs destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Soviet troops enter Korea
August 11, 1945: The United States draws an arbitrary line dividing Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel, creating North and South Korea
August 28, 1945: Soviets stop invasion of Korea at thirty-eighth parallel as Stalin accepts a divided Korea
September 1945: Kim quietly slips back into Korea as a captain in the Soviet army
October 22, 1945: The Soviets introduce Kim in Pyongyang as the new leader of North Korea
February 22, 1948: Sixteen-year-old No attends a speech by Kim and decides to be a “No. 1 Communist” until he can flee the country
January 1949: No’s father dies, and his mother becomes a street trader
March 7, 1949: In Moscow, Kim asks Stalin if he can invade South Korea
August 1949: No enrolls at the North Korean Naval Academy, hoping to avoid infantry service
April 1950: Stalin approves Kim’s invasion plan and tells him to talk to Mao
June 25, 1950: North Korea invades South Korea
September 15, 1950: MacArthur launches Inchon invasion, cuts Kim’s army to pieces
October 1, 1950: No starts flight training in Manchuria
October 13, 1950: For one day, Stalin orders Kim to abandon North Korea because Mao has opted not to fight the Americans; Mao then changes his mind and sends Chinese troops into Korea
October 19, 1950: UN forces occupy Pyongyang
November 1950: First clashes between Chinese and U.S. forces; Kim loses control of war to the Chinese general Peng Dehuai
December 1950: The Chinese push the Americans out of North Korea
January 4, 1951: The Americans flee Seoul for a second time
March 1951: The Americans retake Seoul and fight back to the thirty-eighth parallel
March 1951: No begins MiG training with Soviet pilots
July 8, 1951: Peace talks begin
October 1951: As a new MiG pilot, No encounters Kim at Uiju airfield
November 1951: With air war over MiG Alley raging, No enters combat against Americans, flying a MiG-15
April 1952: The Manchurian sanctuary for Communist aircraft collapses as U.S. fighters secretly cross border
March 5, 1953: Stalin dies, as does the Soviet and Chinese desire to prolong the Korean War
July 27, 1953: Armistice signed; uneasy peace begins
August 1953: Kim stages a show trial of his political enemies, consolidates power, and collects money from the Communist world
September 21, 1953: No Kum Sok takes off in a MiG-15 from North Korea
May 4, 1954: No Kum Sok arrives in San Francisco
NOTES
Introduction: Players and Game
“the sun of mankind and the greatest man”: Kim Il Sung, With the Century (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1996), 7:lv.
Kim’s government seized and redistributed farmland: Large landowners held about 60 percent of land in North Korea in 1945. See Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 1:342n57.
“Younger people throughout North Korea”: “Political Information: Public Opinion and Discontent in North Korea” (U.S. Central Intelligence Group Intelligence Report, Sept. 1947) (declassified Jan. 6, 2001).
“All this proves that we can build”: Kim Il Sung, Works (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984), 4:140–41.
“The Americans,” he said, “will not risk a big war”: Kathryn Weathersby, “Should We Fear This? Stalin and the Danger of War with America” (working paper 39, Cold War International History Project [CWIHP], Washington, D.C., July 2002), 9–11.
By the end, about 1.2 million soldiers had been killed: Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population (Spring 2005): 154.
“We were bombing with conventional weapons everything that moved”: Jon Halliday, “Air Operations in Korea,” in A Revolutionary War, ed. William J. Williams (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1993), 168n64.
A Soviet postwar study of American bomb damage in the North: Author interview with Kathryn Weathersby, who examined the study in the Soviet Archives in Moscow. Feb. 7, 2013.
the official population of the country declined during the war by 1,311,000: Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister, The Population of North Korea (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992), 32. The authors had access to statistics from the North Korean Central Statistics Bureau.
“Over a period of three years or so, we killed off”: Quoted in Richard Rhodes, “
Annals of the Cold War: The General and World War II,” New Yorker, June 19, 1995, 53.
But politicians in Washington found that to be “too horrible”: Quoted in Bruce Cumings, “Korea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats,” Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec. 2004, citing Curtis LeMay oral history, April 28, 1966, John Foster Dulles oral history collection, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
In North Korea’s version of history: In 2013, a decade after historians found overwhelming documentary evidence in the Soviet Archives that Kim Il Sung and Stalin together orchestrated the invasion that started the Korean War, North Korea continued to insist otherwise. “All the facts go to prove the falsity of the U.S. assertion that the Korean War was started with ‘southward invasion’ by [North Korea],” concluded a dispatch in the official Korean Central News Agency. See “Remarks of Those Who Provoked Korean War Refute Rumor About ‘Southward Invasion,’” Korean Central News Agency, June 27, 2013, http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2013/201306/news27/20130627-18ee.html.
A United Nations commission of inquiry has found that guards in the camps commit “unspeakable atrocities”: United Nations, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (summary), Feb. 7, 2014, 12.