The air force credited Nichols, more than anyone else, with finding bomb targets in North Korea. That U.S. bombing campaign, which continued for three years, destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns. Napalm and conventional explosives razed 85 percent of its buildings. The North Korean government never released numbers on civilian deaths, but the population of the country officially declined during the war by 1,311,000, or 14 percent. General Curtis E. LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the war, guessed that American bombs killed even more: about 20 percent of the North Korean population, roughly 1,900,000 people. Americans would never pay much attention to these deaths, but outside of the United States the bombing was widely regarded as a war crime. It still resonates as Yankee genocide inside North Korea, where the Kim family dictatorship endlessly warns that the Americans will come again with bombs and fire and death.
While Korea would become “the forgotten war,” Americans would not forget Donald Nichols. They never heard of him. Not from their government, not from the press, not in the 1950s, not for nearly half a century.
With the help of his autobiography and some archival records, military historians pieced together scattered fragments of his career in the 1990s, usually in book chapters and articles written for intelligence specialists and published by the Naval Institute Press or the Air University Press. In some of those partial portraits, he was presented as a working-class war hero, an alcoholic pirate, or a two-dimensional rib tickler. An otherwise excellent book on the air war in Korea calls him “one of those colorful, larger-than-life, bold, and outlandish characters that occasionally appear and add sparkle to tedious histories.” None of these historians learned how the U.S. military ended his career. And only one Korean War–era journalist, John Dille, a writer for Life magazine, seems to have understood his significance as an intelligence operative. Dille, though, disguised Nichols’s identity, calling him “Bill.” After interviewing Nichols in Seoul, he praised him without qualification, writing that “Bill” was “responsible, more than anything else” for America’s success in Korea.
Nichols was more candid. He acknowledged that his years in Korea were steeped in civilian blood. In his autobiography he described himself as a “thief, assassin, judge, jury and executioner.” He said he wrote the book as “an expiation, an apology to a multitude of unnamed men, women, and children whose sufferings and deaths related to events in my life.” But it spells out little of what he apologized for. His exploits, he wrote, were “better left un-detailed for reasons of sensitivity, as well as for security.” The air force, in some ways, has followed suit. In an unusual and obdurate insistence on secrecy, it continues to classify and withhold documents related to spy operations that Nichols led more than sixty years ago. In the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, hundreds of intelligence reports written by Nichols have been pulled off shelves since 2011 at the request of the air force and replaced with blue sheets of paper stamped “access restricted.”
An internal air force publication described Nichols as one of the “founding fathers” of its covert operations. Yet the air force has given no awards in his name. No buildings, streets, or schools are named after him. His photograph is not displayed at the Air Force Special Operations Command headquarters at Hurlburt Field in Florida. Instructors there do not tell their students about him. Herb Mason, the command historian at air force special-ops headquarters, used to mention Nichols in intelligence lectures. But several years ago he stopped, deciding it was best to say nothing about the spy who came in from the motor pool.
“We couldn’t tell his whole story, so I chose not to bring him up anymore,” said Mason. “As far as I know, the air force has never even considered an honor for Nichols. He had a dark side. In wartime, he was the guy you want on your team. In peacetime, you lock him up.”
In King of Spies, I have tried to unlock Donald Nichols and, for the first time, tell the story of his life and legacy. Drawing upon his previously unreleased military service record, his psychiatric treatment notes, newly declassified air force documents, Syngman Rhee’s presidential papers, unsealed civilian court records, private letters, and interviews with family members and his former intelligence colleagues in the United States and South Korea, the book reveals an American intelligence commander who was a fearless war hero and a postwar outlaw, a special-ops innovator and a shameless liar, a self-invented spymaster and a sexual predator who succeeded for years in covering his tracks. Nichols was the best and the worst kind of American warrior: ferocious, creative, and unbreakable. Yet he was oblivious to the rules of war and wasteful of human life. The air force gave him an astonishingly long leash and allowed him to play whatever role he chose—until it suddenly and secretly jerked him out of Korea, incorrectly diagnosed him as severely schizophrenic, and pushed him out into civilian life. Nichols never detailed the full scope of his wartime triumphs; neither has the U.S. military. His achievements were too closely linked to atrocities, too twisted up in allegiance to a foreign autocrat, too tainted by what happened after he was sent home. As such, his extraordinary and tragic story was allowed to sink into the murk of America’s forgotten war—until now.
PART I
MOST VALUABLE SPY
CHAPTER 1
Nichols of Korea
To understand the improbable rise of Donald Nichols, it is useful—up to a point—to think of him as a supersized American version of T. E. Lawrence, the diminutive British military officer who became known as Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas Edward Lawrence was a lowly second lieutenant assigned to intelligence in Cairo in 1914 when he united fractious desert tribes, led an Arab revolt that defeated the Turks, and helped Great Britain win World War I. Lawrence and Nichols were both in their twenties when they performed their respective miracles. Both were cheeky, creative, and skilled at wringing personal power out of chaos. They were also natural leaders, brave, and wonderfully lucky under fire. Their adversaries—the Turks and the North Koreans—repeatedly failed to kill them. Though Lawrence was an Oxford-trained scholar, an archaeologist, and a translator of the classics, his ascendancy in Arabia, much like Nichols’s in Korea, was largely rooted in good timing.
Lawrence arrived in the Middle East in 1910, four years before World War I, when the Great Powers were not yet paying attention to the region. It was, as Lawrence said, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” His early arrival gave him time to master Arabic, understand fundamentalist Islam, learn how to survive in the desert, acquire a nuanced firsthand understanding of the region’s geography and trade routes, and make personal contacts with key tribal and political leaders. When war came, Lawrence was better prepared than any other Englishman.
Nichols’s sideshow was the Korean Peninsula in the mid-1940s. Except for a few hundred Protestant missionaries, who had been proselytizing and teaching there since the late nineteenth century, few Americans traveled to or knew anything about the place. There were no important American commercial interests in Korea. After Nichols was sent there in 1946, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared it to be of “little strategic value.” The focus of postwar American interest in the Far East was Japan, where General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of American forces in the Pacific, had become shogun. In the late 1940s he was using his nearly unlimited authority to reinvent the country as a peaceful, productive, and democratic ally of the United States. MacArthur succeeded in this mission beyond all expectations. Korea is less than forty miles from the westernmost islands of Japan, but it existed on the dim edge of MacArthur’s lordly attention span.
Everything changed in late June 1950 when North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union, launched a massive armored invasion of its U.S.-supported neighbor to the south. The exceptionally bloody three-year war that followed drew combatants from twenty nations on six continents. About 1.2 million soldiers were killed. The number of civilian dead has been estimated at 2.7 million. For the first and only time in history, American fighter pilots
faced off in jets against Russian fighter pilots. The Korean War, as historian William Stueck wrote, “served in many ways as a substitute for World War III.” Yet the states that were fighting and financing it chose to corral the chaos, keeping nearly all the death and destruction inside the borders of the Korean Peninsula, a geographic space about the size of Minnesota.
Like Lawrence, Nichols arrived early for his war—four years early. He had no way of knowing what lay ahead. Nonetheless, he worked relentlessly to get ready. He traveled widely, sometimes in disguise. He made powerful friends. He taught himself the local language.
But similarities between Lawrence and Nichols go only so far. Lawrence was angered and embarrassed by Britain’s colonial ambitions in the Middle East. More scholar than spy, more diplomat than soldier, he was a paradoxical man, painfully shy but also a brilliant self-promoter. In Arab garb and riding a camel, he posed for photographs that made him an international celebrity.
Nichols was no scholar, no diplomat, no seeker of fame. In South Korea, he was invisible outside the world of military intelligence. Even in that world he avoided cocktail parties and crowded receptions. An evaluation of his performance as an officer said “he has a pronounced lack of interest in social activities and this might tend to limit his growth potential to [spying].” He often ate dinner alone in his compound and dressed in a way that attracted little attention. “One who has been engaged in intelligence work for years subconsciously strives to stay in the background,” Nichols later wrote in a letter to his commanding general, saying it is a “natural tendency that is difficult to overcome.”
Nichols rarely read a book and did not acquire a nuanced historical understanding of Korea. He paid little attention to the news. A streetwise hustler, he had a good ear for language, although he was not nearly as proficient in Korean as Lawrence was in Arabic. Instead, Nichols excelled in bare-knuckle bullying. “I soon learned one of the most effective ways to control high level politicians is through a state of fear,” he wrote. “Everyone has a skeleton to hide. Find out what, where or who it is, and you have your man more or less under control.”
Unlike Lawrence, Nichols did not aspire to shape the fate of nations or challenge the policies of his government. He played the anti-Communist cards his government and Syngman Rhee dealt him. He made his generals look good. In return, they gave him the keys to his own spy kingdom.
After World War II, most American servicemen were desperate to go home. From Austria to the Philippines, tens of thousands of them marched and protested, sometimes violently, to speed up the pace of demobilization. Within two years, nine out of ten had returned to the States, where they stashed their uniforms in the attic and rejoined civilian life. Between 1945 and 1947, the number of U.S. military personnel plummeted from more than 12 million to fewer than 1.6 million.
For American officers and enlisted men who remained overseas as postwar occupiers, the place to be in the Far East was Japan. Even a private could feel rich and eat well there. It was safe. Soldierly responsibilities were few. “Shack girls” were abundant and affordable; easy money could be made on the black market. Back in the States, “Have Fun in Japan” was an army recruitment pitch.
Korea was seen as a hellhole. Soldiers and airmen stationed there complained about the stink of human excrement, which was used to fertilize rice paddies. Housing was limited, food bad, roads poor, and weather extreme, with harsh winter winds that blew in from Siberia and sweltering summers punctuated by long bouts of rain. Mud brown was the color of a GI’s life in Korea. For American troops lucky enough to be stationed in Japan, an American general said there were only three things to fear: “gonorrhea, diarrhea, and Korea.”
Losers, it was said, were posted there. “It was an article of faith in the U.S. Army officer’s corps that assignment to Korea was one short step away from being cashiered out of the service,” wrote Ed Evanhoe, a combat infantryman and later an army intelligence officer in Korea. “Few of the better army officers volunteered. . . .”
Nichols saw it differently.
For him, anywhere the army sent him was an improvement on the life he had known growing up. His family was operatically dysfunctional. Back in Hackensack, before his mother left the family, she bathed naked in the kitchen sink and had sex with male suitors in the living room while his father, Walter, a postman, was out delivering the mail. His mother’s behavior haunted him all his life. During the Korean War, Nichols often spoke disparagingly of women, explaining to his men that it was because his mother had abandoned him.
Walter Nichols left New Jersey in 1933 and took his four boys, including ten-year-old Donald, to South Florida, but he could not find work and would not get over the collapse of his marriage. He brooded for years over his gallivanting wife and periodically beat his sons. Once, while sharpening knives in the kitchen, he threatened to kill himself, but only after he had slit his boys’ throats.
When Miami proved too expensive, Walter took his sons to the low-rent outskirts of Hollywood, Florida, a resort town that had been carved out of mangrove swamps and salt marshes during a real-estate boom in the early 1920s. Its developers had tried to give the place more swank than other upstart coastal resorts by bringing in titled Europeans, hiring tennis champions, and building a “tailor-made” city of shops, hotels, and apartments in white and pink stucco. The Nichols family lived on the bleak, sun-blasted fringes of all this in a shack with a tar-paper roof, no running water, and walls black from kerosene smoke. The boys rarely had money for soap. Most of their food and clothing throughout the 1930s came from the Salvation Army and from government assistance. To help his father put food on the table, Donald, starting as a preteen, shoveled chicken manure, picked fruit, pumped gas, and burglarized neighbors. Still, there was rarely enough food and he often went to bed hungry. Chronic childhood hunger, he would later say, was the cause of his lifelong struggle with obesity and his “psychopathic” bingeing on Coke and chocolate.
Donald attended elementary school in the nearby town of Dania, usually without bathing and sometimes without shoes. As the youngest boy in his family, he wore hand-me-down pants that often had holes in the rear end. He had no underwear. He believed his classmates saw him as white trash and was quick to take offense. When a sympathetic classmate, Nora Mae Swengel, who thought Donald had nice green eyes, gave him four pencils, he broke them in half and threw them on the floor. Often, though, he had to swallow his pride; he begged a dentist to fix a toothache. Nichols dropped out of school when he was fourteen and found full-time work as a dishwasher in the Hollywood Beach Hotel, an expensive resort that served roast beef, tenderloin, and other delicacies that he had heard about but rarely eaten. The best part of his $2.50-a-day job was returning home with the half-eaten scraps of rich tourists. Nichols joined Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a jobs program during the Depression, and helped build federal parks in the Florida Keys. At seventeen, after three years of mixing low-wage work with petty crime, he concluded that he could “only find hope in the big pay offered by the United States Army.”
After he enlisted in the spring of 1940, his father lived alone and struggled to pay his boardinghouse rent. Walter wrote mournful, self-pitying letters to his youngest son, an army private at MacDill Field near Tampa. The letters, which arrived once or twice a week, begged for money and complained about a life that was “nothing but trouble.” After Donald sent money, his father wrote back with passive-aggressive pleas for more: “I am sorry I had to write you for that $5.00. I had to have it for my room rent. . . . Even now I have to get a day’s work so that I can eat.”
Besides money problems, the letters wallowed in uxorious torment. Walter was unable to forget and unwilling to forgive his flamboyantly unfaithful wife, whom he called “Peanut.” His letters surely must have tormented Donald, who was reading them in an army barracks in his first months away from home. In one letter, Walter asked Donald, who rarely saw or communicated wit
h his mother, to somehow bring Peanut back to him. “I need her now,” he wrote. “I want her and you can help me by writing her a nice letter. Call her and she will be tickled to death.”
In another letter, Walter mentioned that his sons Judson and Bill had seen Peanut in bed with another man. “I wanted her but have changed my mind,” he wrote. “I am going to divorce her as soon as I get the money. To hell with her now.”
Walter did not divorce his Peanut. In the late autumn of 1940, at age fifty-three, he died pining for her. Doctors blamed a bad heart. The three eldest boys blamed their mother. Army private Donald Nichols, still seventeen and still based in Tampa, blamed himself. “My biggest regret in life is, has always been, and will always be, that of leaving my Dad when he needed me,” he wrote. “I should have remained with my Dad. He died of loneliness, nothing else.”
Nichols shipped out to the Pacific war zone in January 1942, a month after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Trained as a carburetor repairman, he was assigned to a sprawling army motor pool in the South Asian port city of Karachi, where he helped keep thousands of trucks on the road to Burma. The trucks carried men and supplies to war zones in China and Southeast Asia. While there were no battle casualties in Karachi, large numbers of army mechanics succumbed to malaria and intestinal disease. The army could not keep up with the corpses that needed to be prepared for a long voyage home. “Our higher brass evidently forgot that people were going to die,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. So he volunteered to become an embalmer. Working in the motor pool during the day and in a morgue at night, he was soon exhausted, became deathly ill, and was hospitalized for several weeks.