King of Spies Page 20

  “We called him ‘Iron Fist Don’ and he didn’t take no bull from anyone,” Wyatt said. “If he said ‘jump,’ his son Donnie said ‘how high.’ I think he weighed about 260 pounds, but he wasn’t that fat, just big. He kept telling my dad that he ought to make our customers stop smoking when they came into the shop. Sometimes he’d shout at them, ‘Put out your damn cigarette.’”

  Nichols, for all his irascibility, took to middle-class life in Brooksville. It was the closest he ever came to normality, and it lasted throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s. While he worked on his book, he bought real estate and rental properties in Hernando County and across central Florida, presumably paying with the cash he had carried from Korea to Mexico and back to Florida. He also bought a chicken farm and later sold it after failing to make a profit. His son Donnie attended Hernando High School and later bought a service station. Donnie was married in 1975, had two children in eight years, and became a business partner with his father, who in 1981 gave him power of attorney over all his affairs.

  Air force doctors had diagnosed Nichols in the 1960s as a diabetic at risk of heart disease. He needed daily insulin shots. In the 1980s, as his knees, damaged from wartime parachute jumps, caused more pain and his mobility decreased, Donnie invited his father to move in with his family. There, Donald Sr. often watched television with his granddaughter on his lap. He joined the Mormon church, made friends at VFW posts around Hernando County, and researched his family’s genealogical history. In Brooksville, Nichols let it be known that he was a retired colonel. Although he retired as a major in the air force, Syngman Rhee had bestowed on him the higher honorary rank.

  As it had been throughout his life, Nichols’s weight was a chronic issue and it continued to fluctuate wildly. He went on a watermelon-only diet in the 1980s, buying his melons from J. O. Batten, a Vietnam veteran and neighbor. “Colonel Nichols lost a hundred pounds eating my watermelons,” said Batten.

  Nichols even mended fences, for a time, with the air force. His former unit, the Office of Special Investigations, invited him to speak to cadets attending its academy at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Wearing leg braces, he spoke to students about spying in Korea. “I got the feeling he liked the attention,” said Edward C. Mishler, a retired air force historian. “He liked to be praised for what he did.” After a couple of visits, though, Nichols stopped coming to Bolling, apparently because he felt he was not getting the respect he deserved.

  His autobiography, How Many Times Can I Die?, was published in 1981. The book’s cover, the work of printer Bobby Meadows, was a drawing of a young, helmet-wearing airman against the backdrop of an American flag. In the drawing, blood drips from a corner of the airman’s mouth and runs down his left cheek. It did not look a bit like Nichols, but he liked it and mailed many books to relatives and friends. For more than a decade, few people, including his relatives, read or paid much attention to the book. It was dedicated to his father, whom he described lovingly, and to his wayward mother. He wrote that he had forgiven her, but also said, “I wished every day that she would come back, and swore in my heart that I would not welcome her if she did.”

  He was required to submit his autobiography for review by air force intelligence and did so in 1980. After it came back from the censors, he wrote in the book’s final pages that he was “well aware that there is much more that could have been included, but security dictated that some of this documentation was necessarily abbreviated.” The one detail in the book that aroused international attention—after it was discovered by a few Korean War scholars and journalists in the late 1990s—was Nichols’s description of the “unforgettable massacre” of civilians by South Korean forces that he witnessed near the town of Suwon. As noted earlier, Nichols knowingly lied in his book about the location of this mass killing, which he had actually witnessed near the town of Taejon. Still, his powerful eyewitness description found its way into a series of investigative Associated Press articles about civilian killings during the Rhee era and into a number of scholarly articles and books.

  The autobiography did nothing to disturb the contented obscurity of Nichols’s life in Brooksville. People there knew he had served in Korea, but not much more. He was silent about his dismissal from the air force, his electroshock treatment, and his diagnosis of mental illness. No one had heard about the charges of indecent assault in Fort Lauderdale. Drifting through middle age, Nichols enjoyed a long season of freedom from his past. As he wrote in the final pages of his autobiography, “The years in Brooksville have brought a new dimension to my life.”

  The tranquillity of those years was shattered on Sunday, June 23, 1985, when Nichols’s son lost control of an ultralight drag-racing airboat traveling at seventy miles an hour on Lake Kissimmee, about two hours southeast of Brooksville. The boat went airborne and Donnie was thrown through a protective cage into the airboat’s big propeller. He was pronounced dead on the lakeshore at age thirty-two.

  For his father, Donnie’s death was unbearable. “It was like popping a balloon; he went downhill fast,” said Steve Wyatt, his friend at the print shop. Donnie’s daughter, Lindsay, was seven at the time of her father’s death. She remembers that afterward, her grandfather seemed lost. “The light went out of his life,” she said. After Donnie died, conflict arose between Nichols and his son’s widow, Linda. He moved out of their house and rented an apartment nearby. Nichols decided the time had come to write a will. The brief, rather bitter document denied inheritance rights to his estranged adoptive sons but aimed to protect his war medals, saying that none of them should “ever be sold, destroyed, traded or given away to anyone.”

  An unexpected invitation helped Nichols break out of his depression. His former intelligence comrades from the South Korean air force, many of whom had become rich businessmen or powerful members of the South Korean government, contacted him and offered to pay his expenses for a visit to Seoul in March 1987. They wanted to celebrate his service during the Korean War. It was an honor that Nichols had long felt was his due, and one that he had never received from the U.S. Air Force. He had not been back to South Korea since his involuntary departure thirty years earlier. He eagerly accepted.

  En route from Tampa to Seoul, Nichols changed planes in Minneapolis. While waiting for his next flight, he invited his nephew Donald H. Nichols, the defense attorney who had lived there for many years, to come out to the airport. When his nephew spotted him, Uncle Don was sitting all alone in an empty part of the terminal. His hair had turned white. He was much more obese than he had ever been in the 1960s. Somehow he had squeezed into his old air force dress uniform. The front of his uniform jacket was covered with ribbons and medals from the Korean War.

  “He told me about how he was going to meet all these bigwigs in South Korea, very important people,” Nichols’s nephew recalled. “It was all about what he was going to do. He was very proud. I don’t remember that he asked me anything about my life.”

  When Nichols landed in Seoul, more than a hundred of his former South Korean colleagues met and cheered him at the airport. (Nichols later told a Florida newspaper that eight hundred well-wishers were there.) His visit was covered by Korea’s national television news and as well as major newspapers and magazines in Seoul. Stories said that the South Korean government had awarded Nichols medals for valor and described him as a close friend of Syngman Rhee. At that time, the Korean government had not yet investigated mass killings of civilians during the Rhee era; those inquiries began a decade later, in the late 1990s. Nichols’s witnessing of those killings and his longtime friendships with murderers like Kim “Snake” Chang-ryong were not public knowledge. At one of many dinners held for him, a banner behind the head table read “WELCOME BACK!! MR. NICHOLS, HERO OF KOREAN WAR.” During his four-week stay, Nichols slept at Kimpo (now called Gimpo) Airport, the former air base where he had worked as a spy. With no bed there big enough for him, his comrades chipped in to have one built.


  After Nichols returned home, the St. Petersburg Times, then Florida’s second-largest newspaper, learned about the hero’s welcome he had received in Seoul and wrote a flattering article describing him as the father of “a key part of South Korea’s espionage network.” The story was accompanied by two photographs of Nichols, one with a plaque he brought home from Seoul, the other with his miniature 16-millimeter spy camera. It was the biggest splash of positive publicity he ever received in the United States.

  Nichols’s long stretch of relative normality ended in the summer of 1987, when his decades of predatory behavior finally caught up with him. He was sixty-four.

  Two weeks after the “hero’s welcome” story was published in the St. Petersburg Times, he was arrested at home. Three teenage boys, aged thirteen to fifteen, had complained to Brooksville police that Nichols masturbated in front of them in his apartment, while urging them to do likewise. They said he threatened to hurt them if they told their parents. The arrest did not come as a complete surprise to some people in Brooksville. “Colonel Nichols was always around younger boys,” said J. O. Batten, the veteran who sold him watermelons. “There had been talk.”

  This time, press coverage was punishing. LEWD ACT CHARGED AGAINST DECORATED VET said a banner front-page headline in the Brooksville Daily Sun-Journal. Four days after his arrest, Nichols was still in custody. Police said his victims and their parents were “in fear of their lives.” Nichols was reported to be under a suicide watch.

  Coverage in the St. Petersburg Times, which needed to set the record straight about a local resident it had just lionized as a war hero, dug deeper. In addition to describing what the boys had gone through in Nichols’s apartment, the newspaper looked closely at police records and found another molestation claim in Brooksville. It involved Nichols and a twenty-three-year-old man who had been a friend of Donnie’s. The friend claimed Nichols abused him when he was eleven years old. Instead of going to the police, the young man had tried to extort money from Nichols. He showed up at a family memorial service for Donnie at Brooksville Cemetery demanding twenty thousand dollars in return for remaining silent and not going to the police.

  Alicia Caldwell, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, reached Nichols by phone. He told her nothing much had happened with the three boys in his apartment. The whole business, he said, was not his fault: one of his accusers, a boy of fifteen, had asked him questions about sex and encouraged Nichols to fondle himself, which he did. “Because he encouraged me,” Nichols told the newspaper. “I thought I was teaching him something. . . . I will admit to one instance.”

  This was not a persuasive argument at the Hernando County Courthouse. In late 1987, facing a humiliating and expensive trial, as well as near-certain conviction, Nichols pleaded nolo contendere to two felony counts of lewd and lascivious behavior in the presence of a child under sixteen. He was fined five hundred dollars, required to go into counseling as a sex offender, ordered to pay counseling costs for his victims, and sentenced to two years of “community control,” a kind of house arrest. It banned him from any contact with children without the supervision of another adult.

  When he was arrested in Fort Lauderdale in the 1960s, Nichols had received the support of his brothers and extended family. His kin believed in him then. But when sex charges surfaced again in 1987, relatives kept their distance. “I think the second criminal thing turned the whole family against him,” said his nephew.

  Community control did not go well. Nichols was arrested six months later for having unsupervised young boys in his home. The county prosecutor demanded he be sent to prison for three years. A judge agreed. But before Nichols could serve time, the same judge declared him mentally incompetent, and he was admitted to a private psychiatric hospital in nearby Tampa. Donnie’s widow, Linda, whom he had named as the executor of his will, declined to become his guardian. In 1989, the psychiatric hospital in Tampa told the Hernando County court that Nichols would have to go elsewhere.

  Nichols was then sent to the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he was confined to the psychiatric ward. He hated the place. It made him depressed, according to court documents. With the help of John G. Jones, an ex–military friend from Hernando County who had agreed to become his guardian, Nichols devised what would be his last tactical plan: he would move back to central Florida and build a house near Jones, who would assist in his care and pay for it with Nichols’s money. In a court hearing, financial records were presented showing that he had land and liquid assets worth $275,000, about $500,000 today. While Nichols remained in the psych ward, the “home plan” triggered motions and lawsuits that found their way, after three years, to a Florida appeals court. Among those who objected to his release was his daughter-in-law, Linda. Her lawyers argued that Nichols should stay in the hospital in Tuscaloosa because the home plan would diminish his medical and psychiatric care while draining his bank account.

  Joining her in objecting to Nichols’s release was the prosecutor back in Brooksville. He told the court that Nichols was “a pedophile who posed a danger to the children of Hernando County.” If Nichols was found to be mentally competent and returned to Florida, the prosecutor said, the state of Florida would insist that he go to prison for three years. If he was deemed mentally incompetent, the prosecutor said, he must be locked up in a state psychiatric hospital.

  Nichols turned sixty-nine on February 18, 1992. His health had declined in the hospital in Tuscaloosa. He had lost weight, his memory deteriorated, and he could not be understood on the phone. He needed help getting in and out of bed. On May 20, an attendant found him on the floor of his hospital room. He was unconscious after an apparent stroke. He remained unconscious in intensive care until June 2, when he was pronounced dead.

  EPILOGUE

  A Spy’s Grave

  In A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan explains the American debacle in Vietnam through the life and death of John Paul Vann, a flawed hero of the war. Sheehan begins with Vann’s grand funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. A horse-drawn caisson carried the coffin of the gallant and brilliant soldier who, in Sheehan’s words, had tried to “redeem the unredeemable” war. There was a marching band, an honor guard, and a parade of important mourners, a Who’s Who of the Vietnam era. It included senators and spies, antiwar crusaders and prowar columnists, senior generals blamed for losing Vietnam, and Vann’s ex-wife along with her five fatherless children. “It was a funeral to which they all came,” Sheehan wrote. “Those who had assembled to see John Vann to his grave reflected the divisions and the wounds that the war had inflicted on American society.”

  Few came to the funeral of Major Donald Nichols. He was buried in Brooksville three days after he died, with only his son’s widow, two young grandchildren, and a handful of others in attendance. Most of his relatives did not know he was gone until months later. His death occasioned no coverage in the national press. Obituaries were brief in central Florida newspapers: a couple of sentences about his service in Korea. Nothing about sex crimes. Nothing about his “magnificent” and “impossible” achievements as a spymaster. The tragic arc of his life, from South Florida ragamuffin to King of Spies to serial pedophile, was unknown. As far as anybody understood at the time of his death, Nichols was just another worn-out and troubled veteran who had faded away.

  Yet in its invisibility, his passing was as symbolically rich as the pomp and ceremony that marked the state funeral of John Paul Vann.

  In life and in death, Vann had shone a spotlight on the conduct of his war. He wanted Americans to understand the folly of their military leaders. While his war was a singular tragedy for the United States, it was a tragedy performed in public. Vietnam sparked riots, but it also taught lessons that changed the conduct of the American military. The war’s impact was even more profound in the hearts of millions of Americans who never again would trust so blindly in their government.

 
As for Nichols, his unnoticed death was of a piece with his undigested war. Most Americans never debated, let alone understood, the causes and conduct of the conflict in Korea, even though it killed GIs at a far faster clip than the Vietnam War did. Did it make sense for the United States to draw an arbitrary line across Korea, igniting war without end on the peninsula? Should the United States have passively acquiesced as Syngman Rhee’s men murdered tens of thousands of South Koreans who might or might not have been Communists? Was it not just counterproductive but immoral for the U.S. Air Force to flatten every population center in North Korea with bombs and napalm?

  Because questions about Korea went unasked, blunders in military strategy and errors in statecraft were not examined. Soon they were repeated. After the air force bombed and burned North Korea, it did the same thing in Vietnam and Cambodia, with the same unsatisfactory and morally reprehensible results. After the United States empowered and unleashed Rhee in South Korea, it repeated the strategy in many parts of the world, installing and supporting “anti-Communist” leaders in Africa, South America, and the Middle East.

  Ignorance about the Korean War has also led to the cartoonish, ahistorical understanding many Americans still have of contemporary North Korea. They know that a family of clownish-looking dictators named Kim has created a hermit state armed with nuclear weapons. They know that it is wildly belligerent toward the United States. But most do not know that the fears of North Korea’s isolated citizens are firmly rooted in history: they are afraid that Americans might once again raze their country. Thanks to the bombs and napalm dropped by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, the Kim family is able to stoke anti-American hatred and perpetuate its rule, all while telling a terrifying, fact-based story that most Americans have never heard.