King of Spies Read online

  As Rhee assumed the presidency, full-scale guerrilla war spread across much of South Korea. This explosion of violence and killing marked the de facto beginning of war in Korea, many historians have concluded. Tens of thousands of Koreans in the South were already dead—killed by their own government—before the Korean War “officially” began in 1950, with the invasion from the North. Yet the savagery and death toll of this war was largely invisible in the United States in 1948 and 1949—and remains so today. The lack of American interest was a function of who did and did not die. As historian Allan R. Millett discovered, only three Americans were killed in the partisan fight, while estimates of the Korean dead range from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand. Millett has described it as the invisible war that preceded the forgotten war.

  The Communist-led insurgency was indeed lethal. It killed more than seven thousand South Korean policemen, soldiers, and paramilitary fighters. But Rhee’s forces fought back viciously and disproportionately, often massacring women and children. Some of the fiercest fighting and worst atrocities occurred on the mountainous South Korean island of Cheju, where the guerrilla war began in April 1948. Forces loyal to Rhee razed villages across the island. Of the twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand people who were killed or wounded there, about 85 percent were victims of the police, the military, or vigilante youth groups.

  A snapshot of the carnage has emerged from survivor accounts: Rhee’s men surrounded the island village of Gyorae before dawn on November 13 and started to burn houses. Soldiers shot villagers trying to escape the fire and threw their bodies into the flames to destroy evidence.

  “When soldiers came to burn down my house, I begged them to spare our lives,” a villager named Yang Bok-cheon testified. “But the soldier pushed me down and pulled the trigger; the bullet went through my side and made a big hole—about the size of an adult’s fist—in my daughter’s thigh, who was on my back. Immediately, my son rushed toward me screaming, ‘Mom!’ Then, the soldier fired a gun at my son. I can still clearly remember soldiers saying to each other, ‘The little bastard is not yet dead!’ My son’s heart protruded through the skin since he was shot on his left chest. They were not human.”

  This hideous civil war—one that is seldom mentioned and has never become part of America’s understanding of Korea—was Nichols’s training ground. He traveled to the countryside to watch government executions. He was a regular attendee at torture sessions in Seoul. In the words of John Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, Nichols became “especially close” to the Korean National Police, which took the lead in interrogating, torturing, and executing suspected Communists. On at least one occasion, Nichols delivered a truckload of U.S. rifles to the Korean National Police, according to Kim Bok-dong, a translator who worked for Nichols for four years.

  “As an active, circulating agent in the villages of South Korea, I witnessed many executions of espionage, sabotage and guerrilla warfare personnel,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “The people to be executed were brought in by truck, unloaded and stripped of any usable clothing. Then each was tied to a wooden post. A piece of paper with a black dot was pinned to each man’s/woman’s chest to make a target. Wooden coffins were brought up and placed beside each victim to be executed. With no ceremony, the order began: Ready . . . Aim. . . . !! The people were shot, and their remains placed in the coffins. The rough-hewn coffins were loaded and hauled off to destinations unknown.”

  Working “in conjunction” with the Korean police, Nichols said he became “an expert interrogator with a real feel for asking the right questions at the right time.” During these interrogations, he said he “had to maintain an air of detachment—even approval” as he witnessed various methods of torture. Several U.S. intelligence officers said there was no need for Nichols to bloody his own hands: the Korean National Police had been extensively trained in torture by the Japanese. Nichols often sat in on waterboarding, during which interrogators strapped a suspect to a tilted board, covered his nose and mouth with a cloth, and poured water over the cloth to simulate drowning. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the CIA used waterboarding on terror suspects, calling it “enhanced interrogation,” even as the State Department described the procedure as “torture.” Nichols said waterboarding caused “slow drowning and much pain. The victim told the interrogator anything that he wanted to hear—false or otherwise.”

  Nichols waited with South Korean torturers while a naked man—hip-deep in water—stood out of doors in freezing weather until he “told us what we had to know.” Nichols observed several naked suspects who were tied down on tables and “burned repeatedly on their testicles with lighted cigarettes.” He said he also witnessed a latter-day crucifixion: the suspect was wired to a wooden cross and subjected to electrical shocks until he “began to scream the answers we were seeking.”

  The capture and execution of senior anti-Communist leaders in the field was often confirmed by cutting off their heads and sending them to Seoul, Nichols wrote. The heads were preserved in gasoline cans. A photograph of Nichols with one of these heads—taken by a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer—confirms his story. In the photo, Nichols joins several other men on the roof of South Korean army headquarters in Seoul to inspect the head. Other army photos taken that day by the same photographer show the head being pulled out of the bucket and held up by its hair. The head apparently was that of Kim Chi-hoe, a guerrilla leader.

  “I have seen these things,” Nichols wrote, “and I have survived in spite of the memories.” Nichols did not let qualms about the morality of torture disrupt his intelligence work. “In most cases I did not approve of their methods,” he wrote, “but I will say that you could obtain whatever information they possessed in short order.”

  By 1948, Nichols had moved his counterintelligence unit from Kimpo airfield to a separate compound about a mile from the base. There, he and his men had more privacy and flexibility in interrogating suspects, recruiting agents, and entertaining high-level visitors from the South Korean government. Nichols lived in a Japanese-made two-story house; his office was on the first floor and he slept on the second. The U.S. Air Force by then had become a separate service of the military, and the counterintelligence unit Nichols led was absorbed in 1949 into the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which had been created to root out corruption and mismanagement inside the air force. Nichols, though, had no interest in that mission. As commander of District 8, Office of Special Investigations, he focused on breaking up Communist cells in South Korea and rounding up recent North Korean defectors and refugees for interrogation at his compound. As an “adviser” to the South Korean coast guard, which was funded by the U.S. military, he used its men to seize and interrogate North Koreans who traveled south by boat.

  “By this time, our unit was really moving in ‘high, very high’ South Korean government circles,” Nichols said in his book. “By late 1948, we were being visited by high-ranking South Korea government and military officials seeking advice on one matter or another. . . . It became a snow-balling operation. The more we knew—the more we could come to know.”

  These claims are mostly true, according to Serbando J. Torres, who worked directly for Nichols as his clerk-typist for more than three years, starting in September 1948. In addition to typing thousands of his intelligence reports, Torres lived with his boss in air force quarters and came to regard him as a close friend.

  The son of a cannery row laborer, Torres grew up in Monterey, California, where he dropped out of high school to join the Army Air Corps, which sent him to Korea. He was nineteen when Nichols invited him to come live at his compound, where they often ate dinner together and where Torres learned how friendly his boss was with the president of South Korea.

  “Nick went over to see Syngman Rhee rather often,” Torres recalled. “There was a close relationship there. Nick also became friends with the president’s wife [Austrian-born Francesca D
onner] and he would talk about both of them. Nick once recommended to Rhee and his wife that there should be a presidential unit citation given to American servicemen in Korea. Rhee and his wife thought it was a good idea and Nick had me write the citation up. After one of his visits to see the president, Nick told us that Rhee wanted him to be his personal air force adviser.”

  This boast was also true. On June 7, 1949, Rhee wrote an unusual letter to John Muccio, the American ambassador. It said that the South Korean government—“with great concern and sincere interest in more rapidly developing its Air Force”—wanted Nichols (then twenty-six) to serve as the “advisor to the President on Air Affairs.”

  By that time, nearly all American military personnel had been withdrawn from Korea. Ambassador Muccio thought it over for ten days and then replied in a letter: “Mr. Nichols will be able to advise you on air matters.”

  But Rhee was not satisfied. The president worried that his young American friend might be transferred elsewhere—a worry that almost certainly was planted in Rhee’s mind by Nichols himself. So two months later Rhee wrote another letter to the ambassador.

  “I have received information that circumstances have arisen which may cause Mr. Nichols to leave Korea,” Rhee wrote. He asked “once again” that Nichols be allowed to stay on in the country and become his personal adviser on air affairs.

  There is no record that Nichols asked his superiors in the air force if he could or should take the extraordinary step—as a low-level noncommissioned officer—of becoming a personal adviser to a foreign head of state. He simply did it. In meetings with Rhee, he strongly urged the creation of an air force that would be separate from the South Korean army. To lead it, he recommended a South Korean lieutenant colonel who had become a close friend. Kim Chung Yul was a regular visitor to Nichols’s compound, where the two men often walked arm in arm and greeted each other with hugs and kisses.

  Nichols’s recommendations became government policy when Rhee created the air force and named Kim Chung Yul as its first chief of staff. Kim would go on to become ambassador to the United States and prime minister of South Korea. In his memoir, Nichols describes his role as air force adviser as “one of the most important aspects of my Korean saga. This was an [sic] unique operation which I alone negotiated.”

  As Nichols was advising Rhee to create a separate air force, the American military was insisting that South Korea did not need one. American generals repeatedly told Rhee and many officials in his government that the United States was “in no way committed to support a Korean Air Force with advisors or materiel.” They also said that South Korea “was utterly incapable of supporting an air force.”

  But there is nothing in Nichols’s military service record to suggest that he was disciplined for urging Rhee to do precisely what the U.S. government did not want done. In the late 1940s, no one in the Far East Command in Tokyo seemed to understand how close Nichols was to Rhee. In spite of all the unrest, Korea was still a sideshow. MacArthur and his generals were still not paying attention.

  For years, Rhee granted Nichols unusual influence over how the air force operated—in ways both large and small. Nichols made certain that his longtime houseboy, Cho Boo-yi, became a noncommissioned officer in the air force. Nichols sent North Korean defectors to the air force with orders that they should be given commissions as officers. Later on, as Nichols’s empire expanded, he took command of hundreds of South Korean air force officers and airmen. They came to work for him at various bases during the war and later at his sprawling compound outside Seoul.

  Why would the president of South Korea keep a young, low-ranking American intelligence agent in his back pocket for more than a decade? It is impossible to know for sure. Rhee never publicly explained the relationship. South Korean government documents from that era have been lost or remain secret. Still, there are two likely reasons.

  First, Rhee was comfortable working with Americans and expert in manipulating them. Fluent in English, he had been immersed for most of his life in the culture of the United States. Several of his key advisers in Korea were Americans, although they were much older and far better educated than Nichols. Rhee’s press adviser and principal hagiographer was Robert T. Oliver, a speech professor at Penn State. Rhee recruited Millard Preston Goodfellow, a former deputy director of the Office of Special Services (OSS), to help buy additional arms. And James H. Hausman, an army lieutenant colonel who was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, was the single most influential officer in shaping the South Korean army. Rhee also kept in contact with a number of right-wing Republicans in Congress, using them to pressure the State Department.

  A more urgent reason for Rhee’s friendship with Nichols was the president’s hunger for American military hardware—tanks, heavy artillery, and fighter aircraft. Rhee seemed to believe that Nichols could help him get it.

  In the summer of 1949, after nearly four years of troubled occupation, the United States pulled the last of its combat troops out of South Korea. Only five hundred American military advisers remained in the country as part of a newly created Korean Military Advisory Group, known as KMAG. After Rhee’s personal request—and with the approval of the Far East Air Forces and Ambassador Muccio—Nichols and six of his agents were placed on indefinite duty in Korea and attached to KMAG.

  Cynics said the acronym KMAG stood for “Kiss My Ass Good-bye.” The joke grew out of South Korea’s military weakness compared to the North. For as the Americans withdrew, they decided not to leave behind armor, artillery, or late-model military aircraft. The Truman administration had decided the weapons were needed elsewhere. The president’s advisers also worried that Rhee, whose forces had been skirmishing with the North Koreans for months along the thirty-eighth parallel, would use heavy weapons to mount a preemptive invasion.

  This was not an idle fear. In the fall of 1949, Rhee wrote a warmongering letter to Robert Oliver, his American press adviser.

  “I feel strongly that now is the most psychological moment when we should take an aggressive measure . . . to clean up the rest of them in Pyongyang. We will drive some of Kim Il Sung’s men to the mountain region, where we will gradually starve them out. . . .”

  In the letter, Rhee asked Oliver to persuade the American public and the U.S. government “to give us all the material backing that we need.”

  The Soviet Union had by then pulled its own army out of North Korea, but it left behind more than enough armor and artillery to support an invasion. In Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung made no secret of his desire to grab the whole of the Korean Peninsula. In Moscow, he assured Stalin that an invasion could be successful within a few days. As Stalin warmed to the idea of an attack that would embarrass the Americans, he dispatched new shipments of military equipment to North Korea, including scores of late-model military aircraft. He also sent a large contingent of military advisers who helped the North Koreans develop an invasion plan and trained the Korean People’s Army to use Soviet equipment and weapons.

  Because the Americans had not provided South Korea’s army with armor and heavy artillery, Rhee believed (correctly, as it turned out) that in the event of an invasion his country would be unable to defend itself. In late 1949, he begged the White House, State Department, and Congress to reverse course and send him aircraft and other hardware. As Rhee’s alarm increased, his police funneled more and more intelligence to Nichols. The reports chronicled the military buildup in North Korea. Rhee’s police, army, navy, and air force also brought recent North Korean defectors and refugees to Nichols’s compound, where they described the North’s feverish and well-supplied preparations for war.

  As Rhee clearly intended, Nichols and his men began to churn out reports that documented the muscular rise of the Korean People’s Army. They detailed huge shipments of Soviet military hardware, reported on the forced evacuation of civilians from North Korean borders areas where troops were massing, and described concentrations of Soviet-
made tanks just north of the thirty-eighth parallel.

  Other American intelligence groups based in Korea, including army intelligence and a nascent CIA group, were writing similar reports. But Nichols often had more details, especially about the construction of new military airports and the sudden appearance in North Korea of late-model Russian-made aircraft. His analytical reports were elegant and persuasive, and some were illustrated with excellent maps. In one special report dated February 11, 1950, Nichols explained that new North Korean airfields had been constructed just north of the border in a straight line—a position that made sense only in the event of an offensive strike. If they had been built for defensive purposes, Nichols noted, they would have been positioned throughout the North.

  This report caught the eye of General Stratemeyer, commander of Far East Air Forces. He cabled the most alarming excerpts from it directly to the air force chief of staff in Washington:

  “Believed significant ‘on the scene report’ as district commander’s judgment and intimate knowledge of situation is excellent. Salient points follow: Ever growing civil unrest and present political situation in Korea tends to assure forthcoming civil war in Korea is inevitable. Air power of north Korea will play important role in overthrow of south Korean Govt. District commander also advised recently his belief that situation would be too hot for American personnel. . . .”

  The cable rang alarm bells among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at the State Department. A meeting was convened in March at the State Department. Its focus: Who the hell is Donald Nichols and does he know what he is talking about? It was agreed at the meeting “that action should and will be taken to determine what basis there is” for his claim that war is “inevitable.”