Burn Down North Korea

How One Man Helped Burn Down North Korea

The story of one of the most effective and brutal spymasters in U.S. history, and the beginning of an infamous love affair with napalm.

By BLAINE HARDEN

It was long past time for Donald Nichols to go home. He had been spying in Korea for five years, rarely taking a day off, never returning stateside to see his family. His bosses in the U.S. Air Force had not seen an agent work so hard for so long. They called him a “one man war” and the “best intelligence operator” in the Far East. He “performed the impossible,” his commanding general said. Still, air force rules were clear: He must rotate back to the United States.

Nichols made his career by ignoring rules. A black-ops officer, he rarely wore a uniform and worked outside the chain of military command. As a captain, he did not take orders from colonels or majors. He reported directly to a general who gave him a long leash—lots of cash and his own secret base, his own army of spies and his own rules. Nick, as he was known to his men, didn’t look or behave like spies from books or movies. A seventh-grade dropout from South Florida, he was grossly overweight, drank Coca-Cola by the case and ate Hershey’s chocolate bars by the box. He told his men that he hated women. In his quarters at night, he organized clandestine sexual encounters with young South Korean airmen.

When he arrived in Korea in 1946, at the dawn of the Cold War, the peninsula was in chaos. The United States had arbitrarily cut Korea in half. The Soviet army had installed its puppet regime in the North. The U.S. Army had done the same in the South. There were border clashes, and a savage civil war broke out in the South. Americans back home paid no attention, but the fighting killed tens of thousands of Koreans. For Nichols, who was wildly ambitious and just 23 years old, it was a land of opportunity. He jumped into the thick of it, operating without supervision in a netherworld world of torture, mass killings and severed heads.

Then, in 1950, a global war started. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung—the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, the young tyrant now threatening the United States with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles—invaded South Korea, with the backing of Stalin. President Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea and told his secretary of state, “We’ve got to stop the sons a bitches no matter what.” By then, Nichols had a network of spies across the peninsula. He spoke pretty good Korean. More than any American, he was ready for war.

Nichols would find most of the targets for America’s carpet bombing of North Korea—a savage, three-year operation that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. When the war was over, the bombing would resonate in the North as Yankee genocide. It would give three generations of dictators named Kim a reason to warn that the Americans will come again with bombs and fire and death. This is the narrative that still drives Kim Jong Un’s relentless push to acquire nuclear weapons that can hit U.S. cities.

The story of Donald Nichols—the most important spy Americans have never heard of—explains the origins of this continuing crisis, while shining a new and disturbing light on the role of the United States in the creation of a divided Korea.

***

In the summer of 1951, Nichols, once again, received orders to ship out of Korea. To cancel them, he did what he had been doing for years: he played his ace. He wrote a letter to his immediate supervisor and pointed out that he was a close personal friend of President Syngman Rhee, the obstreperous leader of South Korea. “I have developed sources,” Nichols wrote, “which are of considerable interest to commanders concerned.” Nichols argued, in effect, that he was too valuable to the war effort to be sent home. His commanders knew he was right.

When they allowed him to stay on, they added a sweetener, promoting him from captain to major. His command responsibilities also expanded. The Fifth Air Force, which ran the air war in Korea, put Nichols in charge of newly discovered “tremendous opportunities existing in the intelligence collection field.” These were dozens of small islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea, to which Nichols steadily gained access in 1951 and 1952. With his other bases on the peninsula, he used the islands to create a sprawling spy empire of 50 subdetachments. Collectively, they were known as NICK.

Thus began the most magnificent season of Donald Nichols’s career. In a major war of the 20th century, he became a principal—albeit secret—player among American spooks jockeying for power, funding and clandestine glory. There was army intelligence. There was the CIA. There was NICK.

The Korean War stalemated in 1951 and it became almost impossible to move agents back and forth across the dug-in front lines of the mainland war. Spies who parachuted into North Korea were almost always caught and killed. So the islands, by default, became the preferred conduits “for infiltration and exfiltration of friendly agents.” This meant, in addition to building and staffing his island bases, Nichols needed to recruit more North Koreans who were willing to return home to spy—or who could be pressured into doing so. They became the eyes and ears of Nichols’s operation, feeding him target information for the years-long carpet bombing of the North.

One North Korean whom Nichols forced to become a spy was Kim Ji‑eok.

Kim was nineteen in the second year of the war and living on a farm about ten miles west of Pyongyang. To avoid conscription into the Korean People’s Army, he had found a job with the state railways, but there was little work because so many tracks had been destroyed by American bombs. When the government forced Kim Ji‑eok to do farm labor instead, he feared the bombs and napalm that had destroyed 75 percent of Pyongyang and continued to fall in and around the capital. He thought his chances of surviving the war would be better if he could sneak south and find his aunt and uncle in Seoul. He hired a guide who promised to lead him through the front lines, but on a pitch-black night near the front in April 1952, the guide became lost and then disappeared. Kim walked on alone. At daybreak, he found himself on the west coast, where mudflats led toward small, rocky islands.

A U.S. patrol boat spotted him and took him to nearby Yongmae Island, which was controlled by the Americans. Kim believed he was lucky. “I thought the Americans would set me free,” he said. “I was expecting to meet my uncle.”

Instead, they handed him over to South Korean airmen who worked for Nichols. They fed him salty soup and kept him in a house with ten others who had fled North Korea. One by one, each was interrogated about why he wanted to live in South Korea and what he knew about North Korean military bases, particularly air bases, flight patterns, and airplane hangars. Apparently satisfied that he was not a spy, Nichols’s men transported Kim to the South Korean city of Inchon by boat and then by truck to the capital Seoul, where he was dropped off at a former girls’ school in a downtown neighborhood called Anguk-dong. Nichols had taken over the two-story, 19-room building and made it his headquarters. There, he commanded a spy detachment that—at its peak—included 52 U.S. Air Force officers, 178 South Korean Air Force officers and about 700 Korean agents and fighters.

Kim failed miserably at his first mission, an attempt to locate Mirim Airport, a military airfield near Pyongyang in North Korea. He knew nothing about military installations, and once his other group members had fled, he tried to get back to South Korea and eventually found his way back to an island controlled by Americans.

He turned himself in as a returning spy, and for reasons he did not understand, the South Koreans who worked for Nichols selected him for more spy training and transported him back to Nichols’s headquarters in Seoul. There he had a brief but unforgettable audience with the commander.

“Nichols was really fat, with a huge, bulging belly. The Koreans called him ‘Neko, Neko.’ In his office there were all these yellow dogs and they barked at me. I didn’t even sit down. There was an American pilot in the office. I learned he was going to take me to a training camp. For the trip, Nichols gave the pilot a bundle of money. I don’t know how much it was. Nichols did not talk to me.”

After two short flights and a boat journey, Kim arrived on Jebu, a west coast island where the South Korean air force operated a training camp. Most of the 60 trainees were volunteers from South Korea who would become noncommissioned officers in the air force. The rest were North Koreans or young men who did not belong to any military organization.

Kim had become an agent‑in‑training for a parachute drop. Nichols expected him to go back to North Korea and find useful bomb targets. His group of press- ganged spies, called Class C, was given American military uniforms without insignia, a pair of American-made military boots and C rations, the U.S. military meals intended for soldiers far from mess halls or field kitchens. But they were paid nothing and had no rank, serial number or identity card. “Officially, we did not exist,” Kim said.

From May until September 1952, his training consisted mostly of running, often with a parachute strapped to his back. He learned how to fold the parachute quickly and how to mark coordinates on a map. Once during training, he smiled while saluting and was severely beaten by Koreans who worked for Nichols. When he reported that he had a stomachache, the Koreans again beat him.

By September, Kim’s fellow Class C spies began leaving the island. They did not say good-bye or graduate. Every few days, a few of them simply disappeared. Kim suspected they had been selected for missions in the North. Rumors spread in the camp that South Korean instructors pushed terrified agents out of airplanes.

“I decided my best chance of living would be to escape,” Kim said.

With several others, he walked away at night across mudflats to the mainland. They found their way to the headquarters of the South Korean air force outside Seoul and, rather improbably, were allowed to tell their stories to General Kim Chung Yul, the air force chief of staff who had won his job with Nichols’s help. The general allowed the men to join the air force.

Kim Ji‑eok survived the war by working in a military hospital. After eight years in the air force, he found a job at a noodle restaurant owned by his aunt in Seoul—and that is where he was still working in 2015 when he told his story, at age 82.

“People call Nichols a hero, but I’m not so sure,” said Kim. “If he had sent me back again to North Korea, it would have been the end of my life.”

***

Agents like Kim Ji-eok were disposable tools. Nichols and his commanders used them to try to fix a uniquely American logistical problem: The Far East Air Forces had more bombers and more conventional bombs than it had North Korean targets. The Americans also had a near-inexhaustible supply of napalm.

The problem forced Nichols to rethink what it meant to be a special operations commander. In the first year of the war, he’d won promotions and medals by leading teams that broke codes and discovered vulnerabilities in Soviet tanks and fighter jets. By 1951, with the war stalled, his orders had changed. He was told to collect “information suitable for air target selection,” assess bomb damage and determine the “psychological effects of air power on the enemy.”

In American memory, napalm—the sticky gel that melts human flesh—is most closely associated with the Vietnam War. But the U.S. military did not fully appreciate how to use napalm until it dropped 32,000 tons of it on the Korean Peninsula. “Napalm was one of the ‘discoveries’ of the Korean War,” wrote J. M. Spaight, a British airpower expert in the 1950s. “[I]t was in Korea that its effectiveness as a stopping weapon was fully demonstrated. . . . But for [napalm] the United Nations force might have been bundled neck and crop out of Korea. . .”

A decade before Vietnam, Donald Nichols smelled victory in napalm’s flames. “Napalm Bombs have the greatest psychological effect on the people of North Korea, due to the lasting burning effect it has on whatever it comes in contact with,” he wrote in an air intelligence information report.

Nichols’s song of praise was part of an American military chorus in Korea, where operations analysts for the Fifth Air Force “heartily endorsed napalm as the best single antipersonnel weapon” in the war. General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, dispatched B‑29s with napalm over Pyongyang on January 3 and 5, 1951, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground.” Altogether, the United States dropped nearly twice as much napalm on Korea as it did on Japan in 1945, although less than a tenth of the 388,000 tons dropped in Southeast Asia between 1963 and 1973.

In the early days of the war in Korea, when American soldiers were outgunned and fleeing south, napalm was the great equalizer. Even a near miss could generate enough heat to ignite fuel inside a T‑34 tank. When Chinese forces surged south and attacked in human waves, napalm killed thousands and terrified many more. But the bulk of the napalm that the Americans dropped in the war was used strategically rather than tactically, which means it was used to set fire to cities, towns, and villages across North Korea.

As the war progressed, the American definition of what constituted a reasonable military target in North Korea kept expanding. At first, Truman believed that attacks on targets that were not “purely military” could provoke a larger war with the Soviet Union. The White House resisted an early air force proposal to do a “fire job”— using napalm—on North Korea’s five major industrial centers. But after the Chinese intervention on the side of North Korea, American restraint disappeared and the fire job began in November 1950. It continued throughout the rest of the war. Bombing targets, for napalm and conventional bombs, included nearly every man-made structure in North Korea, as well as most human or animal activities that could conceivably be interpreted from a war plane as suspicious.

As the target list expanded, so did the use of napalm, even to the point of exceeding its military utility, according to an air force survey of prisoners of war. The prisoners said that while they feared napalm, the most effective weapons were fragmentation bombs. “The Fifth Air Force’s preference for napalm as an antipersonnel weapon may not have been completely realistic,” the survey found.

Whether it was for napalm or conventional bombs, Nichols was under constant pressure throughout the war to locate more and more targets. When agents like Kim Ji-eok did manage to slip into North Korea and find something worth bombing or burning, they tried to slip away by walking across mudflats to an island where Nichols had a base. Not many made it. As Nichols’s operation moved into high gear, an acceptable loss rate for agents—caught and killed or simply bugging out—appears to have been 40 percent.

Nichols also killed his own spies if he believed they were double agents loyal to North Korea. To smoke them out, he orchestrated elaborate cons. One particularly theatrical operation occurred when Nichols was building his island empire, according to George T. Gregory, an air force major who served as an executive officer under Nichols. As Gregory tells the story, Nichols was aboard one of his boats, transporting agents to the mainland, when “blinding beams of searchlights suddenly bathed them in white.

“They were boarded and forced to line up with their hands behind their heads by the grim-looking men in North Korean navy uniforms,” Gregory wrote. “The North Koreans advised their captives that they were taking the ‘white foreigner’ [Nichols] with them, but would blow the ship and its crew of vile, traitorous South Koreans—American puppets—out of the water. Nichols was being led towards the enemy ship when one of the crewmen began screaming that he was a North Korean agent.”

Nichols had found his mole.

“The dummy Communist vessel, complete with North Korean Navy markings, sailor uniforms and Soviet guns, was planned and carried out by Nichols in its entirety,” Gregory wrote. Between 1951 and the end of 1952, Nichols doubled his production of air intelligence information reports, as the monthly total jumped from five hundred to about a thousand. “The increasing flow of reports made it necessary to work American personnel and indigenous translators and draftsmen in headquarters on frequent occasion at night and holidays,” according to a history of his unit.

The official air force history of the war describes Nichols as the “most important single collector” of air intelligence for the tactical bombing of North Korea. His reports pinpointed hand-grenade factories, freshly dug caves, radio stations, parking lots, food warehouses, ammunition dumps, print shops, a paper factory, a zinc factory, locomotives, Russian officer quarters, Chinese troop concentrations, and an underground clothing factory dug into the side of a mountain.

***

American bombs and napalm destroyed more of North Korea, in relation to its resources, than all the combined air attacks on Japan during World War II, including the atom bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the conclusion of the Far East Air Forces. The air force also believed that air attacks tipped the balance, forcing a crippled, traumatized enemy to the peace table. “We are pretty sure now that the Communists wanted peace, not because of a two-year stalemate on the ground, but to get airpower off their back,” General Otto P. Weyland, commander of the Far East Air Forces, said in 1954.

There were many who analyzed the bombing of North Korea and concluded that the air force had learned the wrong lessons. They found overwhelming evidence that bombing failed to stop “the forward movement of supplies” to North Korean and Chinese fighters.

Even Nichols, who won accolades for his success in identifying bomb targets, was among those who doubted the utility of the air-delivered devastation. “To a certain extent you could say we wasted our bombs on the roads, bridges, railroads, tunnels, etc.,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “The enemy made a fool of us.”

The enemy did so by transporting fuel, ammunition, and food in the same way that ants transport food to their colonies—in small quantities distributed among a large number of disciplined and highly motivated individuals.

In the end, American bombs did not stop the war; Stalin did, by dying. After the dictator’s death on March 5, 1953, no one who mattered in the Soviet Union wanted to prolong the expensive bloodshed in Korea. Within days, the Soviet leadership moved to work with the Chinese and seek “the soonest possible conclusion” to the war. Peace talks with the Americans suddenly turned serious.

Stalin’s death was also a turning point for Nichols. His island empire stopped growing. By late May, the air force ordered him to remove his agents from islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea. By late July, the major combatants in the Korean War had signed an armistice. The thirty-eighth parallel was again the internationally accepted dividing line between the two Koreas and fighting stopped. Nichols would stay on in Korea, remain in command of a spy base, and continue to meet regularly with Syngman Rhee. But his spy career—and, as it would turn out, his life— had peaked. He was thirty.