How the U.S. Won the Stalemate

“King of Spies – the Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea,”by Blaine Harden, 2017

Korea is the forgotten war and not for good reason.  Donald Nichols, the odd chief spy for the U.S., is doubly-forgotten and should not be.   This book revisits the Korean War as a prelude to the American War in Vietnam.  Korea had the same napalm, carpet bombing, mass executions, class conflict, butchery and dictators that populated that later war.  Korea was fought on one side by the militarily incompetent Kim Il Sung, along with the North Korean and Chinese armys and Soviet equipment and pilots.  On the other side was the bloody South Korean tin-pot dictator Syngman Rhee, his army and intelligence services and the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force in all their dubious glory.

3 million died as part of this event in the global class war, mostly civilians.

This book focuses on Donald Nichols – a tall, overweight and untrained 7^th grade dropout who amazingly became a confidant of Rhee and the key spymaster for the U.S. Navy in this war.  His accomplishments actually turned the tide, according to Harden.  The stubborn and arrogant General Douglas McArthur and his minions like General Charles Willoughby ignored Nichols’ warnings of a North Korean invasion in 1950.  Willoughby discounted anything provided by an unknown non-com using South Korean informers. The U.S. also missed the massive buildup of the Chinese People’s Army in 1951, as the U.S. army sat on the Chinese border along the Yalu River.  Both errors led to almost certain defeat for the U.S. military.

Nichols, a young and untrained soldier, through his connections with Rhee and the South Korean military, built an intelligence machine second to none.  It predicted the first invasion; disassembled parts of the first Soviet T34 tank; dropped defectors into North Korea or stationed them on islands along the peninsula to get intelligence; cracked the North Korean army’s military code (which never change!); retrieved parts from a modern Soviet MIG15 at a crash site and later first debriefed North Korean pilots who defected with a MIG15 and a YAK18.  He even looted Sung’s office in Pyongyang. The ‘cracking’ of codes - actually a defector under Nichols’ control got a copy of the codebook - allowed the U.S. to bomb and predict moves by the North Korean military.  The T34 analysis turned up an ‘Achilles heel’ vent at the back of the tank.  The MIG15 discovery helped the U.S. better develop their own Sabre jets.  And so on.

What Harden does not do as an author is connect the dots between a virtual civil war going on in South Korea prior to the 1950 invasion by North Korea and the invasion itself.  Most southern Koreans were on the Left after years of dynastic rule and then Japanese occupation. Rhee was roundly despised, as he blocked with pro-Japanese businessmen.  In response, from 1946 to 1950 Rhee and his South Korean security services waged a bloody civil war which killed over 100,000 men, women and children suspected of being Communists or connected with the South Korean Workers Party.  Many were not.  This includes the notorious mass massacre at Taejon, South Korea, which was covered up for years, then blamed on the North.  It was a prelude to My Lai, but worse.  This gives some logic to the North’s dangerous decision to invade southern Korea at the time, to protect their allies in the south.

Taejon / Daejon Massacre

Nichols was aware of the torture, mass killings and executions carried out by Rhee and his police and army thugs, but said nothing and reported nothing at the time.  He just took pictures. He himself sent many Koreans to spy and certain death by parachute or boat in North Korea, to the point where some tried to kill him in his tent.  He pushed some North Koreans out of airplanes and basically did what he wanted.  He was protected by the U.S. ambassador and Navy top-brass, who found his frequent and accurate intelligence reports useful.  They gave him carte blanche so he worked with almost no supervision.

Ultimately Nichols’ code-breaking and human intelligence helped lead to the destruction of every city in North Korea by conventional bombs and napalm, along with every bridge, road, tunnel, village, port, dock or structure that could be mapped. The North Koreans, much like their later Vietnamese counter-parts along the Ho Chi Minh trail, used human beings to carry food and materials to the war fronts, circumventing roads, and were thus able to still supply their armies.  This war-crime destruction by the U.S. remains unmentioned in current reports on the situation in Korea – as if the North Koreans have no reason to be suspicious.

After the stalemate and armistice, Nichols was removed from Korea by the military. It is not known quite why, except the military thought he was ‘deranged.’ He was demoted, institutionalized by them in several mental institutions on a wrong diagnosis, given electro-shock ‘treatments’ (which Harden amazingly defends!) and then discharged from the service.  Nichols was fond of young boys and was later convicted of sexual abuse of young boys in Florida.  He’d shown some of this behavior in Korea with young servicemen.  In his autobiography Nichols exaggerated or lied frequently, covered up abuse, but did hint at the Taejon massacre, though placing it in a different location.  But the true and dark story was still remarkable.  While in Korea he had access to massive amounts of U.S. and Korean cash that he kept behind his desk for spy purposes.  After the war he smuggled tens of thousands of dollars out of South Korea and used the money to buy property, houses, cars and a newer life in the States.

 

To this day, the war in Korea has not officially ended.  When Trump brought up officially ending the war two years ago as part of a peace deal, the media, the academics, the think tanks, the liberals, the conservatives, the neo-liberals and the neo-conservatives all howled.  Then his own advisors torpedoed any deal and Trump went along with them.  Peace is not in our time, not when capital rules. 

 

Other reviews on the subject of Korea below, use blog search box upper left:  “The End of Free Speech,” “The Grass,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South,” “The Vegetarian,” “Land Grabbing,” “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social-Democracy,” “Modern De Facto Slavery” and “Kill Everything That Moves” (Turse, about Vietnam.)

And I bought it in Siena, Italy

Red Frog

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

October 4, 2019