After his recovery, Nichols got his first taste of undercover work. He was assigned to police the docks in Karachi, where he quickly learned how to fiddle with the paperwork on newly arrived supply crates, redirecting them from other army units to his own. Soon, mechanics in his automotive shop had all the tools and truck parts they needed, as well as “crates of other items of necessity to our unit and to ourselves.” His commanding officers were pleased and promoted Nichols to master sergeant. The lesson he learned on Karachi’s docks would serve him well in Korea: if you make the bosses happy, they won’t question your methods.
He returned to the United States in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end, but for only a few months, much of it spent in military hospitals. When he landed in New York in a C-54 army transport plane, he weighed eighty-seven pounds and needed weeks of treatment for dysentery and other lingering infections of the gut. Doctors also performed an appendectomy. Nichols did not consider leaving the army and going home to Florida. With his father dead, there was no family home to go home to. He learned from his brothers that his mother was still sleeping around in Hackensack—and sometimes South Florida—with a changing cast of no-account men. As a teen, Donald had never shown any romantic interest in girls; he certainly did not have one waiting for him. His brothers were scattered geographically, and when they got together, they did not get along. Judson, the second born and most congenial of the brothers, dropped out of high school to pick tomatoes up and down the East Coast. William, the third son, went to war and came home an alcoholic. He quarreled with his oldest brother, Walter Jr., a policeman in Hollywood, Florida, who suspected that William was sleeping with Walter’s wife, Fern. Walter Jr. and William would spend much of their lives not speaking to each other. “The Nichols brothers were an explosion waiting to happen,” said Donald H. Nichols, Judson’s eldest son.
Nichols’s first enlistment tour in the army ended in October 1945, when he was living in an army air base near Salt Lake City. But he gave no thought to leaving the military, reenlisting immediately and, in early 1946, shipping out to a B-29 bomber base on Guam, which put eight thousand miles between him and the wreckage of his family. He traveled to the Far East with heavy baggage: guilt about his father, loathing of his mother, and repressed confusion about his sexuality.
The police work Nichols had done on the docks in Karachi had piqued his interest in intelligence operations. He saw it as his best way out of the motor pool. When he learned that representatives of the army Counter Intelligence Corps were coming to Guam to interview potential agents, he applied and won a spot at a CIC training school in Tokyo. He graduated with a score of 98, the highest in his class, according to his autobiography, although there is no confirmation of this in his military record. In any case, as soon as he finished the three-month course, the army flew him to South Korea.
Chaos awaited him there. Rioters and police began killing each other in appalling ways in the autumn of 1946—disemboweling, beheading, burying alive. The American public took no notice of the fratricidal civil war that was taking hold. The political culture of Korea had been crushed by more than three decades of colonial servitude. From 1910 to 1945, imperial Japan dominated the Korean Peninsula and humiliated the Koreans. The mistreatment only worsened during World War II, when Koreans were forced to abandon their names, language, and religious shrines. Korean men had to fight for Emperor Hirohito; about two hundred thousand Korean women were forced to become sex slaves for his troops.
As a colonizer, Japan subjugated and industrialized Korea at the same time. It built state-of-the-art chemical factories, erected hydroelectric dams, and delivered electricity to major cities. It also increased food production and assembled the developing world’s best network of railroads, ports, and highways. But most of the food grown in Korea was exported and eaten in Japanese cities, while Koreans endured chronic hunger. Similarly, Japanese companies kept the profits from manufacturing. Four out of five Koreans had menial jobs, usually as tenant farmers. Most of the peninsula’s thirty million people were uneducated and landless.
The defeat of Japan in 1945 released decades of pent-up hatred—for the Japanese and for the well-heeled Koreans who had collaborated with them. The Korean people wanted a strong, independent government that would redistribute wealth and redress colonial injustices. The landless majority was attracted to the policies of the Left, which demanded comprehensive land reform and punishment of collaborators. The Korean Right was controlled and financed by a small number of wealthy collaborators seeking to preserve vested property rights. They championed an American-style, free-market economy that they intended to dominate.
When Nichols arrived in Korea, the Right had far fewer supporters than the Left. But the Right cloaked itself in anti-Communist rhetoric and paid young men to beat up leftists in the streets. Neither the Right nor the Left was open to compromise; both sides were eager to kill and willing to die. Disagreements were sorted out by mobs, arson, and assassinations.
Nasty as all this was, the Korean Peninsula had an infinitely more explosive and globally significant problem. In early maneuvers of the cold war, the world’s two most powerful nations had sliced Korea in half and were picking sides in the emerging civil war.
The Soviet Union occupied the North, the part with heavy industry and hydroelectric dams. The Russians rolled in on trucks in August 1945 and soon deployed about 100,000 troops in what would become the Soviet zone, later North Korea. The United States occupied the South, home to two thirds of the Korean population, most of the fertile land, and the capital, Seoul. Soon after the U.S. Army’s XXIV Corps arrived in September, there were 45,000 soldiers in the American zone, which would become South Korea.
Between them lay the thirty-eighth parallel, an entirely arbitrary border drawn after midnight on August 11, 1945, by two American colonels using a small National Geographic map. The Americans had divided Korea in the waning days of World War II because they feared, with good reason, that the Soviets would otherwise take the entire peninsula. To Washington’s surprise, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin honored the border and kept his army north of it. The U.S. government hoped division could be a temporary tool, one that would contain the Soviet Union above the thirty-eighth parallel and limit postcolonial chaos below it, as the Japanese were gradually rounded up and sent home. American officials promised Koreans a democratic government, but only in “due course,” after they showed enough political maturity.
In addition to being high-handed and insulting, American plans for the peninsula’s future were delusional. Division proved to be an irreversible blunder. The nonsensical new border squeezed the life out of Korea’s already anemic economy. Electricity stopped flowing south. Food stopped moving north. Store shelves emptied. Much more dangerously, division transformed a relatively insignificant postcolonial struggle between landed and landless Koreans into a proxy fight between superpowers.
From Tokyo, MacArthur sensed trouble. Days after American soldiers arrived in Seoul, he sent a top-secret cable to Secretary of State George Marshall: “The splitting of Korea into two parts for occupation by force of nations operating under widely divergent policies and with no common command is an impossible situation.”
No fool, MacArthur assigned day-to-day management of this emerging mess to a subordinate commander, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, telling him to “use your best judgment as to which action is to be taken.”
Hodge was a much-decorated hero of the war in the Pacific and an accomplished leader of men on the battlefield. He learned quickly and had good advisers. But he had no experience as an occupation administrator. Like nearly all Americans, he was ignorant of Korea’s colonial history and did not understand the reasons behind the civil war he was presiding over. During his first week in Seoul, this inexperience and naïveté showed. He was quoted by the press—inaccurately and out of context, American officials would later claim—as saying that Koreans were “the
same breed of cats” as the Japanese. He also said that, for the sake of efficiency, Japanese officials would be temporarily retained at their posts.
The general could not have struck a more discordant note. Koreans in the American zone howled that he was a racist and a dictator. Press coverage was scathing in Korea and the United States. The State Department and the Truman White House overruled Hodge and apologized. “The Japanese warlords are being removed. . . . The American people rejoice in the liberation of Korea,” Truman said in a damage-control statement hurriedly written by the State Department.
Hodge hustled the Japanese out of Korea. Within four months, nearly four hundred thousand of them were gone. But the damage had been done. Americans were perceived to have taken sides in favor of the landowners while turning their back on the landless poor.
This perception was largely correct, as the United States viewed political struggle in Korea through filters of paternalism and anti-Communist paranoia. MacArthur spelled out the father-knows-best role the Americans would try to play. “The Koreans themselves have for so long a time been down-trodden that they cannot now or in the immediate future have a rational acceptance of this situation and its responsibilities.” He argued that Left-leaning political groups in Korea “are being born in emotion.” The wise course, MacArthur wrote, was to embrace and empower the Right: “Some older and more educated Koreans despite being now suspected of collaboration are conservatives and may develop into quite useful groups.” MacArthur mentioned the “desirability” of importing Syngman Rhee, a U.S.-based Korean politician of the extreme Right.
The United States chose sides in Korea’s civil war while paying little attention to questions of social justice, economic equity, or majority will. It was a blinkered decision similar to those Washington would later make in Iran, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hodge was an inflexible anti-Communist who could not stomach the sweeping land reforms most Koreans wanted. In a cable to MacArthur, he said that events on the ground in Korea were forcing him into a “declaration of war” on “communistic elements.”
Still, Americans did not come to Korea to crush human rights. Hodge’s orders were to make Korea “a free and independent nation.” To that end, he pushed hard to create a governing coalition with participation from the Left and the Right. When they refused to find common ground, he came to hate extremists on both sides. In late 1945, the general, who was a self-lacerating writer, acknowledged his failures in a glum cable to MacArthur.
“The U.S. occupation of Korea under present conditions and policies is surely drifting to the edge of a political-economic abyss from which it can never be retrieved with any credit to United States prestige in the Far East. . . . Under present conditions with no corrective action forthcoming I would go so far as to recommend we give serious consideration to an agreement with Russia that both the U.S. and Russia withdraw forces from Korea simultaneously and leave Korea to its own devices and an inevitable internal upheaval for its self purification.”
North of the thirty-eighth parallel, there was no such hand-wringing among Soviet generals, no talk of giving up and going home. Much more quickly than in the South, hated pillars of Japanese colonial rule crumbled in North Korea. The generals did what Stalin told them to do. They gave power to compliant Koreans of the Left, while exiling, locking up, or executing everyone else. In the first weeks of occupation, Soviet soldiers ran wild, looting, raping, and terrifying Koreans. But after Stalin personally ordered the troops to “not offend the population,” the Soviet zone became much quieter and more manageable than the American-occupied South. Soon, Soviet-style reforms redistributed farmland, nationalized factories, and began teaching millions of poor Koreans to read. Many peasant farmers supported the reforms and grew more food. As the CIA and the State Department would soon secretly acknowledge, the Soviets got off to a much smoother start in Korea than the Americans did.
The Soviets chose Kim Il Sung, who had impeccable Communist credentials and genuine local support, to lead their puppet state. He was also handsome, charismatic, and young, just thirty-four when the Soviets first occupied northern Korea. He had been a captain in the Soviet army, although the Soviets kept that a secret. Instead, the generals celebrated and publicized his record as a Korean nationalist hero. Many Koreans already knew of Kim Il Sung. As a guerrilla leader based in northeast China in the 1930s, he had bedeviled the Japanese police, who put him on their list of most-wanted Communist bandits. By the end of World War II, he had become a legend. Some Koreans believed he could walk on water and make himself invisible.
Kim, of course, would prove to be much more than a Soviet puppet. For nearly half a century, he dominated North Korea as a self-proclaimed god. The publicists who wrote his autobiography called him “the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world.” He became the Great Leader, crushing dissent and sorting his people geographically based on his perception of their loyalty. Those he trusted were allowed to live in Pyongyang. Those he had doubts about were dispatched to the boondocks. Those he did not trust at all were taken away at night by his secret police to a gulag of concentration camps, which exists to this day. There, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have been starved, raped, murdered, and worked to death. Kim Il Sung created the only totalitarian state to be ruled by a family dynasty. Upon his death in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il seized power; his grandson Kim Jong Un took over in 2011.
In the 1940s, Kim Il Sung played the toady with calculated patience. He flattered and groveled before Stalin while scheming to seize control of the entire Korean Peninsula. During several secret trips to Moscow, Kim begged Stalin to provide him with enough arms, aircraft, and money to invade and defeat South Korea. At the same time, he found ways to relieve political discord in the North: Koreans who found themselves north of the thirty-eighth parallel did not have to put up with the Great Leader if they did not want to. For a couple of years after he took power, those who owned property or had a college degree or had collaborated with the Japanese were allowed to give up everything they owned and flee south. About two million of them did, bringing more confusion and dislocation into the already roiling politics of South Korea. Some who claimed to be refugees were in fact spies for Kim Il Sung, sent to support the leftists, discredit the Americans, and raise hell. Thanks to a bumbling and sometimes brutal U.S. occupation, they found fertile ground. They also gave the South Korean government the excuse it needed to jail, torture, and kill anyone suspected of being a Communist sympathizer.
When Nichols showed up in Seoul on June 29, 1946, grassroots disgust with the Americans was beginning to boil over.
A cholera epidemic had spread across the American zone, killing nine thousand Koreans. Inflation was rampant and unemployment soared as consumer goods disappeared from stores. The supply of electricity coming in from the Soviet zone declined with each passing month. As crimes against Koreans and their property rose, General Hodge warned his officers to crack down on the boorish and sometimes violent behavior of occupying American soldiers. Land reform had stalled. A shortage of fertilizer and floods had damaged crops, creating rice shortages. In one of his most ill-advised moves, Hodge ordered the Korean National Police to collect rice from farms and distribute it in cities. The police made a bloody hash of it, stealing rice, beating up farmers, and giving a propaganda gift to the Left.
Nichols reported to Sub-Detachment K of the 607th Counter Intelligence Corps, a three-man unit based at Kimpo airfield a few miles west of Seoul. From there, his and other counterintelligence units joined U.S. Army troops and Korean National Police in punishing perceived Communists, including farmers demanding land reform. They raided headquarters of the Farmers Union, Democratic Youth Alliance, and other leftist groups. They searched for and sometimes found evidence of an organized Communist effort to use the failure of the rice collection program to ridicule the United States. Handbills circulated by the South Korea Labor Party accused American sold
iers of raping pregnant women “based on their sense of superiority and racial distinction.” Sinister motives were seen in the chocolate bars GIs gave to Korean children. Invoking the Opium Wars in China, when Britain crippled the Chinese government by importing large quantities of opium, handbills in Korean said “sweet candy” was part of an American plot “to colonize Korea.”
Some recovered documents showed direct North Korean involvement. One message from Pyongyang said the Americans were “making use of Hirohito’s residue, and depriving people of their democratic claims and interests.” But reports written by American counterintelligence commanders tended to place all the blame for anti-American anger on North Korean “agitation.” This was self-serving nonsense. The Korean majority, landless and poor, wanted equality and opportunity—and they did not see it in the policies of the U.S. military command in Seoul.
In September, just as Nichols was getting his feet wet as an army agent, popular agitation gave way to mass violence. Koreans took to the streets to challenge the American occupation in what became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising. Strikes, marches, and riots erupted in almost every province in the South. A general strike idled a quarter million workers, and crowds of more than sixty thousand gathered in several big cities. The worst bloodshed occurred near Taegu, a city in the southeast, where mobs attacked and occupied the main police station and fought street battles with officers. Forty-four policemen and forty-three civilians were reported killed, many in gruesome ways. Police officers were impaled through the rectum and burned at the stake. Only when U.S. Army tanks arrived did the protesters retreat.