King of Spies

by Blaine Harden

  The electroshock treatment Nichols received at Eglin was considerably more intensive—and disorienting—than he would likely have received today. Two or three treatments a week are now the norm for acutely ill patients, and the duration of the pulse of electricity sent through a patient’s brain is briefer and more focused than in the 1950s. It is targeted to stimulate brain regions associated with mood while avoiding areas used in cognition.

  Whatever the political reasons may have been for booting Nichols out of Korea and relieving him of command, his clinical record suggests that air force doctors believed they were helping him. Based on a review of that record, electroshock experts say Nichols almost certainly benefited from his stay at Eglin. “For the psychiatry of the day, his treatment was about right,” said Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine at the University of Toronto. By the time Nichols received electroshock in 1957, most U.S. military hospitals were using techniques that were less painful and more humane than what Jack Nicholson’s character endured in Cuckoo’s Nest, according to Dr. Max Fink, a psychiatrist who worked in military hospitals and began using “modified electroshock” in 1952. Modified treatment would have put Nichols to sleep with an anesthetic, covered his nose and mouth with a mask to deliver oxygen to his brain, and given him an intravenous dose of a drug called succinylcholine, which relaxes muscles during convulsions. Nichols would not have been at risk of a fractured jaw or of broken bones in his spinal column, a common side effect of unmodified shock therapy. “I think the doctors in this case did well and he was successfully treated for the time,” said Fink, who has written a number of books on electroshock and has studied its efficacy for more than six decades.

  While doctors Fink and Shorter agreed that electroshock treatment was appropriate for Nichols, they also believed that military psychiatrists misdiagnosed him. Based on the evidence in his clinical record, both said, Nichols was not schizophrenic. Fink and Shorter said the air force probably triggered his mental breakdown by demolishing his self-image as an effective intelligence commander.

  “They clearly wanted to get rid of him and that must have been a colossal disappointment,” said Shorter. “It is reasonable to believe that he had a severe psychiatric reaction to the sudden end of his career.”

  Nichols explained the overwhelming feeling of worthlessness he experienced when the air force sacked him and sent him home. In the most emotionally powerful passage in his autobiography, he wrote: “I [left the air force] in the category of an untouchable in 1957 . . . as an untouchable to anyone who had ever worked in the intelligence jobs of the Orient. I was a bastard orphan of the intelligence services without reference, protection, unit, assignment, indeed without a home.”

  His decade of high-wire stress as a spymaster, his fear of assassination, and his guilt about sending agents to their death in North Korea—all might have heightened his risk of mental illness. But his sudden fall from intelligence prince to psych-ward untouchable appears to have been the trigger for what today would be described as a reactive psychosis marked by severe depression.

  Electroshock happens to be a highly effective treatment for such depression, producing positive responses in about 80 percent of patients, according to clinical research. This seems to have been true for Nichols. He was hardly ebullient when his daily electroshock treatments ended at Eglin, and it took two weeks for his “organic confusion” to clear up. But the overall result, his doctors said, was that he seemed “much more at ease, much more relaxed, and more sociable with only minimal evidence of depression. . . .” After visiting relatives on leave, he returned to Eglin in January 1958 in “good spirits, and it was felt that he had received maximum hospital benefit.”

  Although Partridge did not visit Nichols, the general was unable to stop worrying about him and sent at least one letter to psychiatrists at Eglin before Nichols was discharged on January 16, 1958. Their patient had endured eleven years of “tremendous physical and mental strain” in Korea, Partridge wrote, telling doctors to give Nichols “maximum permanent medical retirement.”

  “I have personally observed the apparent state of his physical and mental health deteriorate as a result of this service,” Partridge wrote. He added, quite prophetically, “I have serious doubts as to his future service, usefulness, or even his ability to pursue a civilian vocation.”

  On April 2, 1958, the air force released Nichols from active duty, placing him on “temporary disability retirement.” He was judged to be 70 percent disabled. His final diagnosis from Eglin was “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type, chronic, severe, manifested by effectual disturbances, thinking disturbances, loosening of associations, marked agitated depression, etc.” Psychiatrists said he was “mentally competent,” but described his impairment as “marked” for military duty and “moderate” for life as a civilian. As far as air force doctors could determine, he never got much better.

  In the spring of 1962, when he was thirty-nine, Nichols traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, for an extensive evaluation at Maxwell Air Force Base hospital. It was the final step before his permanent separation from the air force and it determined how much disability pay he would receive for the rest of his life. It was also the fourth time in four years that he had been ordered to report to an air force hospital. Based on the clinical notes for that visit, he was fed up with military psychiatrists.

  “The patient was a very obese white male,” his doctor wrote. “He would seem to disregard the examiner except when a specific question was asked and then he would answer appropriately in the shortest possible answer. Then he would seem to go back and withdraw in himself and be absorbed in his own thoughts. The slightest exertion seemed to drain all of his energy from him. If the patient tried to go into any detail he would tend to lose the train of thought and wander off. There were no apparent delusions and hallucinations even though the patient was preoccupied within himself. There seems to be a rather marked depression present. Patient complained of rather severe nightmares and at times would react to these and on one occasion recently was destructive [no details given]. The patient was obviously unable to pursue a sustained train of mental activity. His affect was markedly flat. The patient was oriented as to time, place, and person.”

  The air force concluded that Nichols had “severe mental illness” and reaffirmed that he was 70 percent disabled. His doctor wrote that he had “continued to deteriorate” since coming home from Korea and concluded his clinical report by writing, “The prognosis for any improvement is extremely poor.”

  In his autobiography, published nineteen years after he was discharged from the air force, Nichols did not write about his lockdown in psychiatric wards, running outside in the cold in his pajamas, pounding his fist against walls, throwing a chair in the nurses’ station, seething through heavy doses of Thorazine, or enduring fifty rounds of electroshock. Like many Americans of his era, he surely viewed mental illness as an embarrassing sign of weakness. Fifteen years after Nichols’s treatment, disclosure of electroshock destroyed the vice presidential hopes of U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri.

  In all likelihood, Nichols viewed his psychiatric treatment as a trumped-up government excuse for ejecting him from the air force. It is also possible that he forgot many details about his treatment, owing to the memory-obliterating effects of electroshock. It is far less likely that he forgot about Colonel Dunn or the report that finished him as an air force intelligence commander, although neither the colonel nor his report appears in Nichols’s autobiography.

  Nichols did write effusively and at length about Syngman Rhee and how their friendship enabled him to become a successful spy. He offered no insights, however, into how that friendship might have cost him his career, sentenced him to the psych ward, and triggered his involuntary early retirement. Like a good spy, Nichols sanitized the narrative, writing: “For some reason which God alone knows, in late 1957, He saw fit to allow me to return from Korea
.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Adrift and Accused

  After leaving Eglin Air Force Base Hospital, Donald Nichols moved in with his older brother Judson, who lived in central Florida with his wife, Nora Mae, and their four children. Near the small town of DeLand, they owned an old farmhouse that sat on concrete blocks, had asbestos siding, and needed work.

  A devout Christian, Judson was a welcoming brother. He had always worried that Donald, more than any of his siblings, had been scarred as a boy by the sexual antics of their mother. Judson had recently landed a job as head of bus operations for Volusia County Schools. After years of struggling to feed and clothe his family, the job provided him with a regular salary, along with a realistic expectation that he and his wife could fix up their house. Still, they drove an old Plymouth. Like most people who came of age during the Depression, they worried about money. To supplement Judson’s salary, the family raised ferns for sale in flower shops.

  Donald’s arrival was a seismic disturbance, and the tremors began even before he showed up in person. He sent the family an expensive set of fine china in a big aluminum trunk, each piece carefully wrapped in tissue paper. The children, ages two to fourteen, did not know what to make of the fancy, imported dinnerware, but quickly found a soothing use for the tissue: it replaced pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalog they had been using as toilet paper.

  When he arrived in the flesh, Nichols was driving a new car, a white 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air with twin headlights and a V-8 engine. He was also carrying loads of money.

  “You would have known Uncle Don only one day before he made you know that he was rich,” said Donald H. Nichols, Judson’s oldest son, then fourteen. “He had so much cash and he loved to show it off. He’d pull a wad out of his pocket, maybe a thousand dollars or two. The money was always a mystery to us the whole time we knew him. He never said where it came from. He didn’t want anybody to know how much he had. It wasn’t millions, but it was probably a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  After he moved into the farmhouse, Uncle Don, who had a loud and commanding voice, often issued orders to everyone in the household. He bought mountains of junk food—chips, crackers, candy bars, and Cokes—and shared it reluctantly with his nieces and nephews. He had a tiny 16-millimeter movie camera, a tool of the spy trade that intrigued the children. Stay away from it, he warned: it contains secrets from Korea.

  In his Chevy, he took the family on rides that were often disturbing. At an all-you-can-eat chicken restaurant, he gorged on so much chicken that the owner called the police. At all-you-can-drink roadside juice stands, he guzzled orange juice until he threw up. At supermarkets, he would hijack grocery carts, taking them from parents distracted by their kids. Then he would rush to the checkout counter, buy everything in the cart, and race away in his Chevy, smiling broadly. Stopping at a roadside amusement park, he once ordered the entire family—including Judson and the reluctant Nora Mae—to get out of the car and go down a steep slide on a small rug. With his young nephew Donald riding shotgun, he drove his big car at more than 120 miles an hour on the back roads of central Florida, grinning and glancing sideways to gauge the terror in the eyes of his passenger.

  “He was crazy Uncle Don, a kind of overgrown kid. You didn’t want to grow up to be like him,” Donald said. “He was looking desperately for fun. The things you would expect from a military guy like him—cigarettes, booze, and women—they were not in the picture. Instead, at the drop of a hat, he would do something stupid. It was all superficial, being crazy. He challenged me to a ‘blender contest.’ Mix up anything from the fridge and drink it. I put gumdrops, pickles, mustard in. He drank it all and threw up. It was good fun for kids, not so much for my parents.”

  Soon, three boys from Korea moved in—Uncle Don’s adopted sons. In his autobiography, Nichols said he had “prepared for the exit of my sons” during his final weeks in Korea. It might also have been during this time that he arranged for the shipment of his cash back to Florida, a movement of funds that had to have been concealed from customs authorities.

  The oldest adopted boy, Lee Tae Chon Nichols, turned sixteen in the summer of 1958. He had been one of Nichols’s houseboys at the spy base outside Seoul. Naturalization records list his occupation as “cook” and show that he arrived in the United States on November 19, 1957, around the time Nichols checked into Eglin Air Force Base Hospital.

  The second oldest, Bruce Nichols, whose Korean name was Kim Si Koo, was ten. He had also arrived in the United States the previous November. Records show that Bruce and Lee were born in Seoul.

  The youngest, Donald “Donnie” Nichols II, was five. As explained previously, he arrived in the United States in 1955 because his adoptive father feared the boy was being stalked by North Korean assassins. Before Donnie showed up at Judson’s house he had lived in Hollywood, Florida, with Nichols’s eldest brother, Walter Sr., a local policeman, and his wife, Fern. Nichols would claim decades later that Donnie was the only child of his marriage to Kim In Hwa. But in the spring of 1958, he did not mention a wife who died in childbirth—he said Donnie was adopted.

  In the DeLand farmhouse, seven children and three adults squeezed into three small bedrooms and shared one bath. It was crowded and tense. Nora Mae was unwilling to leave her children alone with her brother-in-law. Nichols treated his two older Korean boys less like sons and more like servants. They would, in time, become resentful and testy. It was clear to everyone that Donnie was Uncle Don’s favorite. After several bumpy weeks with Judson’s family, Nichols and his sons moved out.

  He bought a nearly new house in South Florida. Located less than a block from the Fort Lauderdale Country Club, with four bedrooms and three baths, it was much larger and fancier than the homes of any of Nichols’s brothers. The deed on the property in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, shows that on May 2, 1958, Nichols paid an unspecified amount of cash to take over a ten-thousand-dollar mortgage.

  After enrolling his sons in local schools, Nichols began searching for something to do with the rest of his life. He was thirty-five and an exile from the military, the only American institution he understood. He did not—and probably could not—plug into the old-boy network that many retired intelligence officers use to arrange lucrative government contracts or jobs in corporate security. “I found the civilian touch isn’t exactly ‘Heaven’ for retired military officers,” he wrote. “[T]he majority of people I met didn’t seem to give a damn about anyone but themselves.”

  Like many parents in a new town, he made friends through his children. He took neighbor boys fishing with his sons. He started a wholesale plant nursery and began buying real estate, purchasing at least three undeveloped parcels in Broward County. Most of the houses in his middle-class subdivision, called Country Club Estates, were two or three years old, and Nichols got to know his neighbors while discussing suitable trees and shrubbery to plant around the ranch-style houses. But he could not find a full-time job that suited him and was often bored.

  “In addition to my inability to adjust to the change of pace from espionage to civilian life, I found it impossible to adjust to the new atmosphere which had taken place in Florida after my long absence,” he said in his autobiography. “For lack of something better to do in those interminable days in Florida, I made a study of palms. . . . I continued as a lone wolf resting under and studying my stately friends, sometimes suppressing the desire to howl my melancholy song of affinity with these abnormal lords of the plant world.”

  Nichols did not appear to show symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In the 1960s, as his brother Judson and Judson’s children saw him, he was cogent, articulate, certainly sane—though at times manic and often brooding. With family, he sometimes talked about his time in the psych ward, describing electroshock treatments as very painful. He repeatedly told them that the government wanted him to forget what he had done in Korea and that he, too, wanted to forget.

 
Yet he displayed his war medals in his house and told war stories: about massacres he had witnessed, tanks and MiGs he had captured, a secret trip into Manchuria, schemes that captured teams of North Korean agents, and his “very close friend” Syngman Rhee.

  The more Uncle Don talked about Korea, the less his family trusted his stories.

  “It was just his personality,” recalled his nephew. “You never quite believed him or knew where you stood with him. I never saw a moment of introspection. I never saw the inside of the guy. He never questioned what he was doing with his life. Today, I would call him a phony. He was missing a tick. Empathy. He was missing empathy.

  “You couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting or not. He was a master manipulator. We thought he manipulated the air force to get a medical discharge. We thought this guy has figured a way to get a lifetime pension early. He claimed he knew Syngman Rhee, but we wondered if it was real. We never understood the importance of what he did. We flat-out missed it.”

  At six in the evening on December 18, 1965, Nichols telephoned a twelve-year-old neighbor boy and invited him to his home. The boy lived a few blocks away, on the far side of the Fort Lauderdale Country Club. He was a playmate of Donnie’s, and Nichols had taken him along on a family fishing trip. But when Nichols invited the neighbor boy over, his three adopted sons were elsewhere.

  “So I asked my mom and dad if I could go over to his house and they said yes,” the boy said later in a sworn deposition. “I got on my bike and went over to his house and he said he had a Christmas present, which he didn’t.”