King of Spies Page 7

  On the night before and the night after his successful hunt, Partridge dined in Seoul. The guests at these two dinners gave him what he later described as his first introduction to South Korea. He encountered “all the ones necessary to know in the top of that government.” At the first dinner, he met Ambassador Muccio, the head of the South Korean air force, and Nichols. At the second, he met Rhee. Nichols must have made a good first impression: in the year that followed, Partridge would single out the young chief warrant officer as the most valuable intelligence man in the Far East.

  Partridge was then nearing fifty and perhaps saw something of his younger self in Nichols. Neither of them owed their rise to economic privilege or family connections. While the general’s childhood was less squalid than that of Nichols, it was similarly scarred. Without money for college and without a mother (who died when he was fifteen), he had joined the army at eighteen and his first war was unglamorous, digging ditches in France during World War I. Partridge had managed to bootstrap himself into a remarkable military career, winning an appointment to West Point, becoming perhaps the best aerial machine gunner and bomb dropper in the Army Air Corps, and helping to lead the bombing of North Africa, Sicily, and Germany during World War II. Partridge was “incautious with his own life.” Flying in a one-seat propeller-driven fighter aircraft—and ignoring antiaircraft fire—he routinely accompanied bomber groups on missions over Germany. En route, he critiqued the formations and made his own assessments of bomb damage. In the last year of the war in Europe, he was promoted to major general, given command of the Third Bomb Division, and led bombing campaigns that created firestorms in German cities like Hamburg, killing tens of thousands of civilians.

  Like Nichols, Partridge had no patience with “any rule that stood in the way of a good idea.” To get more bang from each mission, he ordered his men to pack B-17 bombers with two thousand more pounds of bombs than they were authorized to carry. And while he said that he personally believed that bombing civilian populations was “useless, useless, foolishness,” he never hesitated to follow orders. “If the powers say bomb the city,” he said, “you bomb the city.” During the war in Korea, Nichols and his agents would be the general’s primary source of targeting information as the Fifth Air Force bombed every city in the North.

  In appearance and manner, Partridge was nothing like Nichols. Reed thin and carefully dressed, he was soft-spoken and self-effacing. Like many generals of his era, he lived like an aristocrat, golfing, playing squash, and shooting birds at every opportunity. But he did not put on airs. He judged junior officers by their performance rather than their pedigree. A character appraisal by his boss in the Far East Air Forces, General Stratemeyer, said Partridge was “not bound by convention or past concepts but retains an open mind and is willing to consider and try out new methods. . . .”

  Nichols was a case in point. Partridge was not put off by his youth, his lack of education, his sometimes bumptious aggression, his struggles to control his weight, or his refusal to wear a proper uniform. Partridge never mentioned these issues in the twenty-eight references he made to Nichols in his diary and oral histories. Instead, he celebrated Nichols’s quirks: “He had his own code, that is, one not approved by MacArthur’s intelligence people. Of course, in this respect, he was illegal as a three dollar bill . . . but he could do anything. . . . Just an incredible man.”

  Bombing campaigns in North Africa and Europe during World War II had taught Partridge to take special care of his spies.

  “I learned—it took me just one day—that you can’t do anything without the complete support and confidence of your intelligence section,” he later said. “[B]ecause when you arrive in theater, you know zero about what’s going on.”

  When North Korea invaded, Partridge indeed knew little about the Korean Peninsula. Nichols quickly brought him up to speed. In return—and to keep the intelligence flowing—Partridge decided to create a special spy unit for Nichols and give him funding for his own intelligence base. Under the general’s wing, Nichols found shelter from the Willoughbys of the U.S. intelligence community: those in the army and the CIA who attempted to control, reel in, or otherwise nibble at the empire that Nichols was just beginning to build. Partridge also invited Nichols to come along with him to shoot birds.

  Undeterred by Willoughby, Nichols wrote scores of reports during the first six months of 1950 about North Korea’s preparations for an invasion. In the late spring, Nichols told air force headquarters in Tokyo of an intercepted message from Moscow to Pyongyang that said Stalin had approved of an attack on South Korea. Three days before the attack, Nichols wrote that thirty truckloads of North Korean troops were on the move “for the purpose of preparing to invade South Korea.”

  Nichols later claimed that he wrote a “major report” in early June that nailed the timing of the invasion. He said he predicted it would begin between June 25 and June 28, 1950. It occurred on June 25. “Some ass at General MacArthur’s Headquarters in Tokyo and/or Washington didn’t believe what was being reported. . . . Or was too stupid to credit it,” he wrote in his autobiography.

  This prescient report, if it exists, has not yet surfaced in the National Archives or in those of the air force. It may have been destroyed when Willoughby ordered the burning of intelligence records of the Far East Command, or Nichols might not have written it at all. There is reason to be suspicious. During his years in Korea, Nichols exaggerated his accomplishments. Some military historians have concluded that while Nichols did excellent work in chronicling North Korean preparations for war, he was no better than army intelligence or the CIA in finding hard evidence of an imminent attack.

  Partridge believed otherwise, insisting that Nichols sent a precise invasion date to MacArthur’s headquarters—where it was intentionally ignored and destroyed.

  “My one-man army told them there was going to be a war,” Partridge said in his oral history. “He had put operators behind the border. He knew what was going on, and he watched them build up their units and supplies. . . . Then he went up to an offshore island where with a telescope he could get a look along the border. He said, ‘The war will start within a week.’ He then sent this message to Tokyo, and it was suppressed by somebody.”

  Besides starting a war, the invasion triggered decades of second-guessing and finger-pointing in Washington about who was to blame for ignoring the Soviet-backed buildup inside North Korea. The verdict of history is that there was indeed a major intelligence failure. The invasion genuinely surprised American political and military leaders in Washington, as well as the American public. They had not been told what Nichols and other U.S. intelligence operatives had been telling Willoughby for many months.

  Truman was embarrassed and angered by the failure of the CIA to give him a clear warning of war. He fired the agency’s director, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, named a new director in the summer of 1950, and a far-reaching reorganization of CIA operations soon followed. A congressional committee asked MacArthur why he and his staff officers did not know about the strength of North Korea’s military buildup:

  “I don’t see how it would have been humanly possible for any men or group of men to predict such an attack as that, any more than you could predict such an attack as took place at Pearl Harbor,” MacArthur replied, not mentioning, of course, the intelligence information that his own intelligence chief had known about and ignored.

  Willoughby responded to criticism by saying he had forwarded hundreds of intelligence reports to the Pentagon that detailed what North Korea and the Soviets were planning. He neglected to admit that he had consistently undermined these reports, giving them low evaluations for credibility and thereby guaranteeing that they would not be taken seriously in Washington. He also neglected to say that he had tried to destroy the career of a young air force intelligence agent who had been particularly insistent—and accurate—in predicting the war.

  Willoughby, though, was nothing
if not flexible.

  As MacArthur scrambled to turn back North Korea’s invasion, Willoughby changed his approach to the problem of Donald Nichols. Instead of trying to banish him from the Korean Peninsula, Willoughby demanded that Nichols come work for army intelligence.

  PART II

  WAR SPY

  CHAPTER 4

  Dark Star

  The Korean People’s Army began firing artillery across the thirty-eighth parallel at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, June 25, 1950. Two hours later, North Korea’s blitzkrieg began. Soviet-made T-34 tanks led about 90,000 troops south across the border. The eighty tanks in the first assault were all but unstoppable. Mortars, artillery shells, and bazooka rockets bounced off their thick, sharply angled armor. By 9:00 a.m., the first South Korean town, Kaesong, had fallen. North Korean soldiers also came by sea, wading ashore on the east side of the peninsula from a ragged armada of junks and small boats.

  Donald Nichols called Far East Air Forces headquarters in Tokyo at 9:45 that morning and struggled, over a scratchy phone line, to make himself understood. Several times, his agitation turned to anger. He spent nearly all day on the phone, trying to explain the seriousness of what was happening.

  General Partridge was out early Sunday, shotgun in hand. He was shooting skeet in Japan and having a fine time of it. In his diary that night, before any mention of the invasion, he wrote that he had hit 116 out of 125 clay targets. It was not until late morning, when he returned to his quarters at Nagoya Air Field, where the Fifth Air Force was based, that he learned about the attack.

  Like nearly everyone else in Japan, Partridge had not been expecting trouble in Korea. So instead of rushing to Tokyo, about an hour away by plane, he telephoned General Jarred Crabb, deputy chief of staff for operations at air force headquarters there, and discussed the only contingency plan that had been made for Korea—evacuating American citizens. Partridge told Crabb to get started with preparations. Then, with his wife, Katy, and daughter, Kay, the general went out for an afternoon round of golf.

  Asked years later if he had understood the seriousness of the invasion, Partridge said he had not. Willoughby’s intelligence shop had kept him in the dark about North Korea’s preparations for war. “Had I known what Nichols had said previously, which was suppressed, I would have known instantly that we were in for deep trouble.”

  MacArthur was not initially alarmed, either. “This is probably only a reconnaissance-in-force,” he said at a briefing on Sunday night. “If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back.”

  Nichols knew better. With Seoul just thirty-five miles south of the thirty-eighth parallel, he knew the Korean People’s Army would take it—soon. He ordered his men to remove five file cabinets from his office in a rented house on the outskirts of the capital. They emptied them on the ground and burned all the files, which included names, addresses, and reports from agents who were on Nichols’s payroll in North and South Korea. “It took most of Sunday to destroy all that stuff,” said Serbando Torres, the army clerk who would stay by Nichols’s side for much of the war.

  Nichols’s prediction was again accurate. Within twenty-four hours of the invasion, Seoul was doomed. Three divisions of the South Korean army had been broken. Its soldiers were on the run, fleeing toward the Han, a broad river on the southern edge of the capital, as North Korean tanks and infantry gave chase. In Tokyo, MacArthur began to grasp the scale of the disaster. “Our estimate,” he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a teleconference, “is that complete collapse is imminent.”

  In Washington, as the news sank in, the Truman administration saw much more than just the invasion of an inconsequential Asian country. It saw global communism on the march and the black arts of Stalin at work. At a meeting at Blair House, Truman’s temporary residence while the White House was being renovated, generals, cabinet members, and the president himself spoke of “raw aggression” and voiced “moral outrage.” In their great-power pique, Truman and his advisers did not see the invasion as a consequence of decisions that they had made about the Korean Peninsula. They had defined it as strategically unimportant and had withdrawn the army from South Korea. By leaving behind no armor, no artillery, and no modern military aircraft, they had made South Korea a sitting duck, just as Rhee had feared.

  The attack did not provoke introspection in Washington. Instead, it was viewed as a test of national character, one that demanded action. “We’ve got to stop the sons of bitches no matter what,” Truman told his secretary of state. Two days after the invasion, the White House pushed the United Nations Security Council to authorize the use of force. The Soviet Union could not veto the resolution because its representative skipped the meeting. In less than a week, Truman approved the use of ground forces.

  Americans welcomed the rush to war. In the cold war summer of 1950, the Red Scare was real. Commies, it seemed, were everywhere. Five months before the invasion, U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had produced a piece of paper that he said listed the names of 205 Communist Party members who were then working and making policy decisions at the State Department. Screenwriters, directors, and actors had been subpoenaed to testify about their Communist links. While most Americans knew nothing about the Korean Peninsula, they believed, for a few intoxicating months, that it was worth fighting for. It made sense to most Americans that the Reds then gobbling up Korea would soon devour the United States, unless they were stopped. A week after the invasion, 81 percent of those polled by Gallup shared Truman’s gut reaction to “the sons of bitches.” In Congress, word that Truman had committed air and sea forces triggered “spontaneous applause.” Nearly every American newspaper supported the use of force. The editorial cartoonist for the Scripps Howard chain was told to go easy drawing caricatures of Truman because it would be bad for “the morale of our readers to picture the commander-in-chief as a grinning nincompoop.” With the president pounding his drum as the press cheered and the public followed along, American generals in the Far East Command suddenly had to fight a war they had not anticipated in a place they did not know or understand. A useful symbol of their collective cluelessness when it came to Korea was the round of golf that Partridge, a vastly experienced wartime commander, decided to play after learning about the invasion.

  On the second day of the war, after Partridge flew to Tokyo and met with other air force officers, he was overwhelmed by the scale of what he called an “intelligence failure in the field.” None of them knew that Nichols, who worked for the air force, had been predicting war. The next day, MacArthur ordered the Fifth Air Force to hit the North Koreans “with every resource at our disposal.” In response, Partridge incautiously promised to have a bombing “mission operating against the North Korean forces before dark.” That mission was aborted when Partridge discovered that his intelligence operation was incapable of finding targets and “completely disorganized.” In his diary that night, Partridge wrote that he had never seen such incompetence in wartime and that it “must be corrected.”

  The correction would be Donald Nichols.

  His four years of anonymous spadework in Korea were about to pay handsome dividends—for the air force, the American war effort, and Nichols himself. Making use of his unrivaled access to South Korean politicians, generals, and spies, he began providing the air force with bomb targets and annotated maps. By mid-July, the Far East Air Forces appointed him as its special representative with authority to gather intelligence across the battlefield. By mid-August, the army and the air force began squabbling over who needed his services most. The invasion revealed Nichols as a natural warrior. As other Americans panicked, Nichols calmly destroyed records and guarded the identity of his agents. The American embassy, by contrast, left its personnel files on five thousand Korean employees unprotected—and available to the North Korean army.

  Nichols would win numerous awards for valor and receive lavish praise from senior commanders, one of
whom called him “a legend to the South Korean people.” The invasion also revealed his darker side. A week after the invasion, he watched South Korean police participate in the mass killing of thousands of civilians and became part of a cover-up that lasted for more than half a century.

  As for his close friend President Rhee, the invasion was an opportunity to consolidate power. Truman’s resolute military response to the attack gave Rhee hope that the Americans would finally abandon the notion of a divided Korea. Rhee expected the United States to lead a war that would extirpate Communists in the North and bring the entire peninsula under his control. To that end, just three weeks into the war, he wrote to Truman:

  The time has come to cut out once and for all the cancer of imperialist aggression, the malignant growth artificially grown within the bosom of our country by the world communists. The Government and the people of the Republic of Korea consider this is the time to unify Korea, and for anything less than unification to come out of these great sacrifices of Koreans and their powerful allies would be unthinkable. . . . Daily I pray for the joint success of our arms, for clear skies so that the planes of the United States Airforce may search out and destroy the enemy, and for the earliest possible arrival of sufficient men and material so that we can turn to the offensive, break through the hard crust of enemy forces and start the victorious march north.

  As North Korean artillery began to strike the outskirts of Seoul, Nichols helped Americans evacuate to Japan. With a white sheet tied to his jeep, he drove back and forth across the tarmac at Kimpo airfield, signaling when it was safe for air force pilots to land in their C-47 transport planes. As Nichols remembered it, “all other U.S. intelligence units immediately sought safety in Japan.” Three of his agents also evacuated.