While the air force was extremely helpful in opening up a large number of files about Nichols, it continues to block access to many others. At the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, there are index cards identifying hundreds of air intelligence reports written by Nichols in the run-up to the Korean War. According to the index cards, many of these reports detail North Korea’s military buildup before its invasion of South Korea, together with the role played by the Soviet Union in supplying arms, aircraft, and training. When I asked to see these prewar reports, archivists could give me only near-empty boxes of file folders, each of which contained a single sheet of blue paper labeled “access restricted.” That restriction, which normally does not apply to government documents that are more than fifty years old, was imposed by the air force in 2011. It did so to protect information that “would reveal the identity of a confidential human source or a human intelligence source,” according to an official at the archives. No other explanation was available. So far, my efforts to obtain bulk or individual declassification of these historically important documents have failed.
In his autobiography, Nichols does not boast about—or even mention—his creation of the Korean code-break team that helped the U.S. Eighth Army defend the Pusan Perimeter in 1950. The decoding operation was perhaps his most important wartime achievement and it is confirmed in now-declassified documents published by the National Security Agency, the air force, and the South Korean government, all of which are cited in the endnotes of this book. But I never would have known to search for those documents without the advice of Serbando Torres, who served with Nichols for three years in Korea. Twenty years old when the war started, Torres was part of the code-breaking operation and an eyewitness who kept photographs, documents, and letters. He was well placed to correct the many instances in which Nichols exaggerated and distorted his wartime experience, while confirming and explaining his real achievements. Nichols asked Torres to help with research for his autobiography in 1969, but Torres was then serving in the air force and declined. When I reached Torres in 2015, he was retired and eager to help me tell Nichols’s story. We met at his home near Baltimore and spoke on the phone several times a month for the better part of a year. Torres died after this book was completed. By then, he had read the manuscript twice and told me in a letter that it was accurate, as far as he knew.
Nichols compartmentalized his life and kept secrets from nearly everyone. My numerous interviews with his nephew Donald H. Nichols and his niece Diana Carlin, who were teenagers when they lived with their uncle in Florida after the war, opened some of those secret chambers. They saw the bricks of cash Nichols brought home from Korea and stored in a freezer. They knew, too, about his flight to Mexico as a fugitive from sexual-assault charges in the 1960s. But Nichols hid the exact nature of those charges from his family and friends. In the fall of 2016, when I was nearly done writing this book, I found previously sealed criminal court records on sex charges in the Broward County Courthouse annex in Fort Lauderdale.
During the Korean War, more than 90 percent of the men Nichols commanded were Korean. In my efforts to find and interview these primary sources in Korea, I was assisted by Seoul-based journalist and researcher Yoonjung Seo. She helped me locate men—now in their eighties and nineties—who worked with Nichols before, during, and after the Korean War. When I traveled to Seoul, she translated for interviews; she also conducted her own interviews. The South Korean consulate in Seattle also assisted in locating some of these men.
Two retired South Korean air force officers were particularly important in providing insights and new information about what Nichols did and did not do in Korea:
Retired general Yoon Il-gyun, a South Korean air force intelligence officer who later directed the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (now the National Intelligence Service), worked with Nichols during the war and traveled with him on many missions. In interviews for this book and in his own books and other writings, Yoon explained that Nichols planned and supervised key intelligence missions that succeeded in salvaging crucial parts of a Soviet MiG-15 fighter and a Soviet T-34 tank. But Yoon also said Nichols was not actually on the ground and in harm’s way during these operations, which won Nichols, respectively, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star. Yoon’s eyewitness version contradicts official U.S Air Force accounts of these missions and raises questions about whether Nichols should have been awarded America’s second- and third-highest military honors for valor.
Retired colonel Chung Bong-sun, who worked for Nichols for nearly a decade, provided eyewitness details about the large sums of money that Nichols controlled and literally threw at his agents. Chung also explained how Nichols’s close relationship with Syngman Rhee gave the American spymaster extraordinary power and influence inside the South Korean government. Chung said, too, that he carried out Nichols’s orders to transport young Korean airmen to Nichols’s private quarters for sexual encounters.
In researching the Korean years of Donald Nichols, U.S. military records and State Department documents were by far the most credible and important primary sources of written information. But the Syngman Rhee Presidential Papers at Yonsei University Library in Seoul also contain important and previously unnoticed documents (presidential appointment entries and a letter from Rhee’s wife, which are cited in this book) that confirm the relationship between Nichols and Rhee. It seems likely that Nichols’s close involvement with the Korean National Police, the South Korean army, and Rhee generated even more revealing primary source documents that are kept in the archives of the South Korean security forces. These records, though, have not yet been made available to researchers.
NOTES
EPIGRAPHS
“Ask yourself: Is there a man”: Donald Nichols, How Many Times Can I Die? (Brooksville, FL: Brooksville Printing, 1981), 132.
“How long can we defend”: John le Carré, “To Russia, with Greetings: An Open Letter to the Moscow Literary Gazette,” Encounter, May 1966, 3–6.
INTRODUCTION: The Spy Who Came in from the Motor Pool
promoted in India to master sergeant: Nichols’s military service record says he was a master sergeant—a rank typically held by an enlisted man with seventeen years of service—when he left India at the age of twenty-two with less than five years of service (part 2, 4); the USAF released his service record from the National Archives in St. Louis to the author on March 14, 2016, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Also, an article in the Post Review, a base newspaper at the Army Air Corps base in Kearns, Utah, says Nichols became a master sergeant at age nineteen, which made him one of the youngest master sergeants in the army at the time; article quoted in Nichols, 108; also see Nichols, 86–95.
his team of Korean cryptographers: This is detailed in chapter 5, “Code Break Bully.”
called him “magnificent”: These superlatives come from air force general Earle E. Partridge, commander of the Fifth Air Force in the first year of the Korean War: in a signed photograph given to Nichols, date unknown, family collection; Partridge war diaries, vol. 2, April 18, 1951, IRIS 126019, 168.7014, Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA), Montgomery, AL; Partridge in Air Force Oral History Program, April 25, 1974, IRIS 01019869, 567, AFHRA; Partridge in Nichols, 6; Partridge in “Air Interdiction in World War II, Korea and Vietnam,” Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC, 1986, 50.
His officer efficiency reports: Nichols’s military service record, part 3, 1–27.
“only one of his kind”: Ibid, part 3, 21.
Quick tempered and pushy: Author interviews with retired USAF master sergeant Serbando J. Torres, Baltimore, MD, 2015–16. Torres worked and lived with Nichols for three years before and during the Korean War. Interviews in person in Baltimore and by phone.
up to 260 pounds: Nichols’s weight is mentioned in his 1957 officer efficiency evaluation. Nichols’s military service record, part 3, 3.
“No K
orean could match”: Author interviews with South Korean air force colonel (ret.) Chung Bong-sun, Seoul, South Korea, November 4–5, 2015.
Unlike the agency’s very best: See Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 15–125.
he was astoundingly unschooled: U.S. Census 1940, Hollywood, Broward County, Florida; roll: T627_577; 1B; enumeration district: 6-36.
“big pay day”: Nichols, 56.
shaving cream up to his: Author phone interview with Raymond Dean of Craig, OK, October 3, 2014. Dean served as an air force supply sergeant in Korea under Nichols in Detachment 2, 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS), from 1952 to 1953.
wads of it: Author interviews with Nichols’s niece Diana Carlin by phone in Greensboro, NC, and his nephew Donald H. Nichols in Webster, WI. Interviews took place on multiple dates in 2015 and 2016.
cash on a coffee shop: “25,000 in Sack Leads to Jail,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1967, 3. Details of the fugitive life of Nichols are in chapter 11, “Adrift and Accused.”
“an invaluable man”: Colonel Frank E. Merritt, Air Force Oral History Program, December 8, 1977, IRIS 01028635, 17, AFHRA; Partridge, AF oral history interview, 1974, 567; Partridge quoted in “Air Interdiction in World War II, Korea and Vietnam,” Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC, 1986, 50.
“performed the impossible”: George E. Stratemeyer, “The Three Wars of Lt. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer,” ed. William T. Y’Blood, Air Force and Museum Program, 1999, 197, https://archive.org/stream/TheThreeWars/TheThreeWars_djvu.txt.
“justifiable exception” to military policy: Stratemeyer cable to USAF HQ, October 1, 1950, in Balchen report note cards, part 1, IRIS 1031199, AFHRA.
called him “Mr. Nichols”: Author phone interview with Ronald F. Cuneo, October 24, 2015. A retired air force corporal, Cuneo lives in Hypoluxo, FL, and served under Nichols in 1953.
more than seven hundred agents: “History of Detachment No. 2, 6004th AISS,” Far East Air Forces (FEAF) History, vol. II, tab 36, November 1953, 53, AFHRA.
agents who parachuted over: Interview with Brigadier General (ret.) Kim Chong-sup, last commander of South Korean AF Office of Special Investigations, conducted by Christine E. Williamson, USAF Office of Special Investigations historian, Seoul, South Korea, February 28–March 3, 2000, 2. On file at USAF, Office of Special Investigations HQ, Andrews AFB, MD.
“They knew it meant lives”: Nichols, 132.
air force, which Nichols helped: Details on the role Nichols played in helping to create a separate South Korean air force are in chapter 2, “Rhee and Son.”
Nichols gave rice to: Author interviews with several U.S. and South Korean officers and enlisted men who worked for Nichols during the war.
he threatened those families: Nichols, 135.
“a pretty body”: Ibid., 133.
fabricated a self-serving story: Yoon Il-gyun, Korea-U.S. Joint Espionage Secrets—6006th Unit (Paju City, South Korea: KSI Publishing Group, 2005), 23–27; also, researcher Yoonjung Seo interviewed Yoon in Seoul, August–November 2015. Medal episode is described in depth in chapter 6, “Any Means Necessary.”
he embellished his achievements: Author interview with Torres, who said Nichols “dreamed up a lot of baloney.” These exaggerations are detailed throughout this book, especially in chapter 4, “Dark Star.”
“the King of U.S. spies”: Jung Byung-joon, Clashes on the 38th Parallel and Formation of War, 6th ed. (Kyoha-eup, Paju City, South Korea: Han Cheol-Hee Publishing, 2014), 658.
Stalinist-style show trial: This is detailed in chapter 8, “Famous in Pyongyang.”
bounty on his head: Dean E. Hess, Battle Hymn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 139.
suspect was summarily shot: Author interview with Chung.
dogs joined him for meals: Nichols’s military service record, part 3, 2.
Nichols never disputed: The 1950 killing of 5,000 to 7,000 South Korean civilians near Taejon is blamed exclusively on North Korean forces in the official American history of the early stages of the Korean War; see Roy Appleman, United States Army in the Korean War: South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, June–November 1950 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1992), 587–88. Historical understanding of the mass killings near Taejon in 1950 has been complicated because there were two rounds of them. Nichols witnessed the first and by far the largest mass killing in July, when South Korean forces shot several thousand South Korean civilians who had been held as suspected Communists in local jails. The second round of killing occurred in and around Taejon after September, when retreating North Korean forces killed at least 40 American soldiers and several hundred South Korean troops. See chapter 4, “Dark Star,” for details on this massacre and Nichols’s role.
South Korea refused to investigate: Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, “Summer of Terror: At Least 100,000 Said Executed by Korean Ally of U.S. in 1950,” Asia-Pacific Journal 6, issue 7, no. 0 (July 2, 2008), first published by the AP, May 18, 2008; see also AP Web site for documents, photos, and videos, http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/korea_masskillings/index.html?SITE=AP.
“one of history’s great men”: Nichols, 113.
“He demonstrated considerable”: Nichols’s military service record, part 6, 16–20.
“trying to destroy my memory”: Author interviews with Diana Carlin and Donald H. Nichols.
would have been thrown out: Nichols’s military service record, part 6, 12.
“With Uncle Don”: Author interview with Diana Carlin.
“How did I, an uneducated”: Nichols, 136.
“I was a fifth wheel”: Ibid., 163.
ranks of the “living dead”: Ibid., 132.
“the graveyard of an image”: Ronald Steel, “The Man Who Was the War,” New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1988.
air force credited Nichols: Robert Frank Futrell, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–1953 (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, 1983), 502.
population of the country: Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister, The Population of North Korea (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992), 32. Authors had access to statistics from the North Korean Central Statistics Bureau.
General Curtis E. LeMay: General Curtis E. LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command during the Korea War, in “Strategic Air Warfare,” ed. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC, 1988, 88, https://www.scribd.com/document/50163700/Strategic-Air-Warfare; http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/afhistory/strategic_air_warfare.pdf.
widely regarded as a war crime: For details on U.S. Air Force bombing of North Korea, see Blaine Harden, The Great Dictator and the Fighter Pilot (New York: Viking, 2015), 6–7, 66–70. Also see Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routledge, 2006), 83–121.
“add sparkle to tedious histories”: Kenneth P. Werrell, Sabres over MiG Alley (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 94.
he praised him without qualification: John Dille, Substitute for Victory (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 45.
“better left un-detailed”: Nichols, 111.
“founding fathers” of its covert: Diane Putney, “Air Force HUMINT 40th Anniversary,” U.S. Air Force Special Activities Center booklet, Fort Belvoir, VA, undated.
“In peacetime, you lock”: Author phone interview with Herb Mason at Hurlburt Field, FL, October 21, 2015.
CHAPTER 1: Nichols of Korea
ascendancy in Arabia: Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 3.
“sideshow of a sideshow”: Ibid., 4.
“substitute for World War III”: William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.
“pron
ounced lack of interest”: Nichols’s military personnel record, part 3, 27.
He often ate dinner alone: Letter to author from William Bierek, February 2, 2016. As a first lieutenant in the air force, Bierek served under Nichols in Korea in 1957.
it is a “natural tendency”: Nichols letter to Partridge, May 27, 1955. From Personal Collection of Earle E. Partridge, January 1, 1954, to January 1, 1959, IRIS 126058, AFHRA.
Nichols rarely read a book: Author interview with Donald H. Nichols.
“Everyone has a skeleton”: Nichols, 117.
“Have Fun in Japan”: Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953 (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 28, 989n49.
“gonorrhea, diarrhea, and Korea”: Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, speaking in Korea to newly arrived troops, November 1947, quoted in Paul W. Edwards, Korean War Almanac (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 26.
“article of faith”: Ed Evanhoe, Dark Moon (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 3.
bathed naked in the kitchen: Author interviews with Donald H. Nichols and Diana Carlin.
Nichols often spoke disparagingly: Author interviews with Torres. He recalled several occasions when Nichols said he “hated” women. He said it was because his mother abandoned him and his brothers.
he threatened to kill himself: Author interviews with Donald H. Nichols and Diana Carlin.
give the place more swank: The WPA Guide to Florida: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s Florida (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984 repr.), 320.
shoveled chicken manure: Nichols, 36–38.
his “psychopathic” bingeing: Ibid., 34.
Donald had nice green eyes: Author interview with Diana Carlin. Nora Mae Swengel was Carlin’s mother. Nora Mae later married Judson Nichols, Donald’s older brother.
“I am sorry I had”: Letter from Walter Nichols Sr. to Private Donald Nichols, October 28, 1940, family records.