King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  Counterattacks by South Korean police triggered more riots, according to Major Jack B. Reed, commander of army counterintelligence in Korea. “Police methods are brutal,” he wrote in a report to Washington. “The Korean people, seeing the police in action during the strike breaking, fall easy prey to agitators.” The Americans fought protesters with the help of “right-wing groups [that] volunteered their services.” As many as thirty thousand Koreans were imprisoned, including most known members of the South Korean Communist Party and other leftists suspected of being agitators. The bloodshed and mass arrests were another public relations disaster for the Americans—and a gift to Kim Il Sung and Stalin. Hodge told MacArthur that the “Russian propaganda program in North Korea is making tremendous capital . . . and building up the Americans as the most cruel and sadistic imperialists in the entire world.”

  In the chaos, Nichols smelled opportunity.

  “An idea was born in Mr. Nichols’ mind” soon after he reported for duty in Korea, according to an air force history of his spy unit (which Nichols helped write). He would create his own team of espionage agents to conduct what he called “positive intelligence.” At the time, army counterintelligence agents generally played defense, investigating threats and stopping sabotage. The term “positive intelligence” refers to going on spy offense—infiltrating leftist organizations and sending agents behind enemy lines to find targets and recruit informers. “In those days, no one, in this area, knew or even thought about positive intelligence,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “We invented it for this area and taught others, as we saw fit, for our own benefit.”

  Nichols did not personally invent positive intelligence in Korea. After the riots of 1946, General Hodge ordered the entire Korea-based Counter Intelligence Corps to go on offense. But Nichols was singularly aggressive—and uniquely successful—in following Hodge’s order to make contact with Korean “political individuals” and extract information from them. Nichols, alone, landed the big fish. He secured the friendship, confidence, and patronage of the one politician who, for better and for worse, would matter most in South Korea.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rhee and Son

  They were an unlikely pair—the porcine young American agent and the bony old Korean politician.

  By the American’s account, he first met Syngman Rhee in August 1946, although he does not say where or how. The meeting occurred when he was fresh from his Tokyo cram course in counterintelligence. He had no Korean contacts, no influence, and an understandably sketchy notion of what he was supposed to be doing in Korea. Donald Nichols had been there barely a month and was just twenty-three.

  Rhee, then seventy-one, was the world’s most important Korean, in his own eyes and in the estimation of many Americans. He had lived most of his life in the United States, where he had scored a stunning trifecta of elite higher education: a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University, a master’s in history from Harvard, and a doctorate in the history of international law from Princeton. His university credentials “evoked awe” among Koreans.

  As a politician in exile, Rhee haunted the halls of Congress for four decades, strutting his Ivy League degrees, lobbying for Korean independence, and winning support from Republicans and Democrats. He also made many enemies. At the State Department in the mid-1940s, diplomats viewed him as too old, too stubborn, and too egotistical to be an effective leader. By 1948, two years after Rhee had returned to Korea, the CIA saw him as an exceptionally risky bet and described him as vain, delusional, and dangerous. “His intellect is a shallow one,” a CIA profile said, “and his behavior is often irrational and literally childish.” Rhee combined passionate anticommunism with an “unscrupulous” character, the profile concluded, and he would step on “any person or group he felt to be in his way.”

  When he met Nichols, Rhee had been back in Korea for less than a year and was determined to become president. He wanted to rule the entire Korean Peninsula and crush the regime of Kim Il Sung.

  Yet Rhee, for all his septuagenarian prickliness, and Nichols, for all his twentysomething callowness, found favor in each other. In Nichols, Rhee discovered a back door for delivering intelligence that could influence American policy toward Korea. He referred to the young American as “my son Nichols.”

  In Rhee, Nichols discovered the ultimate inside source—and a shortcut to becoming a very important intelligence asset. He called Rhee “Father.”

  “I was a good, close, sincere friend of Syngman Rhee from almost the time of his return to Korea from exile until I left in 1957,” Nichols bragged in his autobiography. “Because of this friendship and trust, I had complete access to the Republic of Korea government from its highest echelons to the bottom line. His door was open to me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I was one of the people he trusted implicitly, and he had few secrets I did not know. For this reason I was indeed in a position to know what was happening. . . .”

  Nichols made certain his superiors knew about his access to the head of state. After the war started, American generals sent reports to Washington that boasted about the singularly powerful source their agent in Seoul had cultivated. In a 1950 cable to air force headquarters, General Stratemeyer, the air force commander in Tokyo, wrote, “President Rhee has recommended Nichols for several South Korean Decorations and has asked for his assignment as personal advisor.”

  “Mr. Nichols’ case was unique,” declared a 1953 history of air force intelligence in the Far East. “[He] had developed such friendly personal relations with high ranking Korean personalities that President Syngman Rhee himself requested that he be permitted to remain in Korea.”

  To enhance his power in Seoul, Nichols would drop Rhee’s name whenever he met with his intelligence counterparts in the South Korean government. “If Mr. Nichols had a meeting with Rhee, he always used to tell us that he met with ‘Father,’” said Chung Bong-sun, the South Korean air force intelligence officer who worked for Nichols for nearly a decade. “We thought of Mr. Nichols as Syngman Rhee’s son, not birth son, but son still.”

  By boasting about his closeness to Rhee, Nichols secured inordinate attention and influence inside the security apparatus of South Korea. In Seoul’s rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy of police, spies, and anti-Communist enforcers, Nichols became a celebrity and a power broker. “For us, the two most famous Americans were Douglas MacArthur and Donald Nichols,” said Chung. “Mr. Nichols had our full trust. He was a very famous man. All South Korea ministers knew Mr. Nichols because he was close to President Rhee.”

  A measure of that trust was Nichols’s longtime alliance with Kim “Snake” Chang-ryong, a former Japanese military police officer who became Rhee’s right-hand man for anti-Communist vengeance and score settling. The nickname “Snake” supposedly came from MacArthur, who noticed Kim’s writhing restlessness. Kim Snake met with Nichols nearly every week in the late 1940s and early 1950s, according to Chung, who described the relationship between the two as extremely close. In the years when he met regularly with Nichols, Kim Snake is believed to have masterminded the executions of thousands of South Koreans suspected of being Communists, according to the findings of a later government inquiry.

  “Kim Chang-ryong was a simple guy, an amoral guy—like Nichols,” said Kim Dong-choon, a lead investigator for South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which in 2005 examined civilian massacres that occurred before and during the Korean War. “Rhee would not work with men he considered to be rivals, and he trusted Nichols and Kim because neither was a political threat.”

  Nichols passed the loyalty test for more than a decade as his access to the president became the stuff of legend among other American military intelligence agents in South Korea. Lieutenant Colonel Gene Mastrangelo arrived in Seoul five years after Nichols left, but officers there in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations were still talking about him. “Nichols was held in awe. They to
ld me he was the only guy who could walk into Rhee’s office unannounced and see the president,” said Mastrangelo, who later became deputy director of air force counterintelligence.

  It is impossible to document how many times Nichols met with Rhee. The Korean War ripped a gaping hole in the official record of Rhee’s rise to power and the early years of his presidency. His appointment books between 1945 and 1950 were destroyed or taken north when the Korean People’s Army overran Seoul in June 1950. Biographies of Rhee rarely mention Nichols, though that is hardly surprising because the South Korean military and intelligence establishment has refused to release most records related to Rhee’s years in power.

  But letters, U.S. government documents, and Rhee’s presidential papers show that the bond between the spy and the president was as strong as it was unusual. In a 1949 letter to the American ambassador in Seoul, Rhee personally requested that Nichols be allowed to stay in South Korea as his adviser. The American ambassador in Seoul, John J. Muccio, wrote that Nichols “draws his information primarily from Korean sources. His connections with Korean National Police intelligence officers are especially close, but he also makes full use of intelligence sources of the Korean Army and Navy.” A letter from the commander of American forces in Korea said that Rhee was “personally interested” in Nichols, who had won “the maximum in respect and cooperation” from Korean government agencies. The president’s wartime appointment book for 1951 shows that he met with Nichols at least five times, sometimes for as long as an hour, and the meetings came on days when Rhee was consulting with the most senior members of his government. On April 29, 1951, for example, Rhee met for half an hour with his foreign minister before meeting for an hour with “Mr. Nichols.”

  The personal ties Nichols maintained for more than a decade with a foreign head of state have no parallel in the history of U.S. military operations, according to retired air force colonel Michael E. Haas, a former special operations commander who has studied Nichols’s career and written several books about special ops during the cold war. Haas said Nichols took advantage of a unique opportunity in prewar Korea: there were no supervisory officers to monitor or limit his contacts with Rhee.

  “Incredibly, no one in the U.S. government appears to have asked, ‘What the hell is this twenty-three-year-old air force sergeant doing in the role of private confidant to a head of state?’” Haas said. “Inexplicable to this day is that neither General MacArthur’s Far East Command, nor the Departments of Defense or State, ever insisted on placing Nichols under the meaningful supervision of a senior intelligence official. It beggars belief that Nichols with his elementary school-only education was left to find his own way in such lethal corridors of power.”

  Of course, once the Soviet-backed northern invasion forced the United States to care intensely about Korea, no one dared criticize Nichols for being too chummy with South Korea’s president. The young spymaster was suddenly indispensable. No other American had his contacts. Nichols later wrote that Rhee, too, was pleased with how their relationship worked out.

  “It was not a breach of friendship to use information I garnered from and through my close association with him; Rhee knew I was doing it. He believed it to be in the best interest of his country and mine—indeed, of the world.”

  Rhee had flown home to Korea on October 16, 1945, after more than three decades of exile in the United States, in an aircraft provided by General MacArthur. The American military occupation was just a month old and already in need of help.

  To tame the restive Left-leaning majority, MacArthur and Hodge wanted a brand-name anti-Communist with street credibility. They hoped Rhee could be a steadying force—venerable enough to command respect, absent long enough to rise above petty political rivalries, and Americanized enough to be a useful puppet. Most important for the generals, who had stumbled badly over the question of what to do with the Japanese occupiers and their Korean collaborators, Rhee had anti-Japanese credentials. He had often told American audiences that the Japanese had jailed and tortured him when he was a young man—though it was actually police from the collapsing Korean monarchy who arrested him. Then, as the story went, he emerged from prison unbowed and defiant. He fled Korea rather than collaborate with Japanese colonial authorities.

  Born in 1875, Rhee was the second son of a once-noble Korean family that had slid into penury. His mother desperately wanted him to pass a civil service exam, secure a government job, and put bread on the family table. To that end, she pampered and hounded her little boy. When he was six and memorized a book with a thousand Chinese characters, she invited neighbors for a feast. But she also forced him to spend long hours practicing calligraphy. She did not allow him to lift anything heavy or throw stones, fearing nerve damage that might spoil his penmanship.

  Rhee never qualified for a civil service job in the corrupt and crumbling Chosun Dynasty, which had ruled Korea for nearly five hundred years. Instead, he enrolled in an American Methodist missionary school, where he excelled in his studies and became a firebrand for democracy. As a twenty-year-old, according to a biographer, he was “impetuous . . . arrogant, heedless, and impatient.”

  Those personality traits, which persisted undiminished into his eighties, landed Rhee behind bars in 1899. He spent nearly five years in prison. Thanks to an enlightened warden and sympathetic American missionaries, he made brilliant use of the time. He converted to Christianity, read voraciously, and transformed himself into an English-speaking expert on the West. After his release, American missionaries were amazed by his erudition and ambition. They helped him travel to America and to acquire the Ivy League polish that impressed Koreans even more than it did Americans.

  Rhee became a lobbyist for Korean independence. In the judgment of historian Bruce Cumings, he also became a parasite: “It seems he was never gainfully employed but supported himself through contributions from other Koreans.” Over the next thirty years, he maintained a fiercely loyal coterie of patrons, even as a number of his early contributors came to despise him. They accused him of misusing money, hogging publicity, and being an intransigent pain in the neck. They booted him out as leader of a Korean government in exile, although Rhee continued to insist he would always be the leader of all exiled Koreans. Through it all, he maintained a strong measure of international credibility and held a singular position inside Korea as a legitimate political leader.

  He had an instinctive ability to seduce English speakers he thought might be useful to him. “Rhee, far better than any other Korean leader, could take the measure of Americans,” Cumings wrote. “He was a master at grabbing the tail and wagging the dog.”

  This, then, was the politician MacArthur and Hodge hoped would be a force for peace and unity in the American zone. They protected him with bodyguards when he landed at Kimpo airfield and checked him into a suite at the Chosun Hotel in Seoul, where all American dignitaries were put up. He had his own dining room, a conference hall, and the use of a limousine. At a crowded press conference, Hodge enthusiastically reintroduced him to the Korean people. Set loose in the land of his birth, Rhee did not hesitate. He immediately began to wag the dog.

  He blamed the United States for allowing the Russians to grab the northern half of Korea and poison it with communism. As American generals would soon learn, the venerable one was just getting started. As the months went by and the American occupation’s grip on security continued to falter, Rhee became more obstreperous, more unpredictable, more hostile to U.S. interests. He flew back to Washington to accuse Hodge of being a dictator, noisily insulting the general at press conferences and quietly undermining him at the State Department.

  Rhee wanted independence for Korea with no strings attached (except for American money and military hardware) and he wanted to be in charge. To get what he wanted, he was willing to make sweetheart deals with wealthy Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese and work with the sadistic police force they had trained. While the ric
h gave him money and the police tortured his enemies, Rhee sheltered them beneath the umbrella of his anti-Japanese reputation. His most powerful political rivals were imprisoned or assassinated. He built mass political support with the help of strong-arm, ultra-Right youth organizations financed by his wealthy backers. These gangs often worked with the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, the same outfit Nichols worked for.

  The United States soon grew weary of its costly commitments in Korea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded as early as 1947—two years into the U.S. occupation—that Korea was not strategically important enough to justify the cost of troops and bases. The Truman administration decided the following year to withdraw nearly all American troops, give modest economic aid, and hope for the best. As it walked away, the U.S. government wrapped itself in diplomatic double-talk that belied its actions. It said that removal of troops “would in no way constitute a lessening of United States interests” in South Korea. Washington agreed to support UN-supervised elections, which were boycotted by the Left and which Rhee easily won.

  Many Americans who witnessed Rhee’s rise were depressed and disgusted. Those emotions found their way into a secret CIA assessment of Rhee in early 1948, which described him as a demagogue “bent on autocratic rule” who represented a “small class that virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country.”

  As president of South Korea, the CIA predicted, Rhee would demand the “ruthless suppression of all non-Rhee” opposition. As for the police force under him, the CIA said it was “inevitably committed to the support of the Right, since it realizes that the successful creation of a Leftist regime in South Korea would mean the massacre of police personnel.”