During World War II, Donald Nichols worked in a U.S. Army motor pool and a makeshift morgue. He repaired trucks bound for Burma and embalmed GIs bound for home. The soldiers died of malaria, dengue fever, or amoebic dysentery—diseases that hospitalized but could not kill Nichols. For his grit and his gumption, he was promoted in India to master sergeant at the age of nineteen, making him one of the youngest men of that rank in the army. By the spring of 1946, the war was over and Nichols was no longer pumping embalming fluid into his dead comrades. But he was still stuck in the motor pool, this time on Guam, a sleepy speck of American-owned sand in the western Pacific. In Washington, President Harry S. Truman was gutting the defense budget and the army was imploding. So were the chances that Nichols could make a career in the military—until he caught the eye of recruiters from the Counter Intelligence Corps, an army unit that hunted saboteurs near military bases. The army flew him to Tokyo, gave him three months’ training, and sent him to Korea.
There, at the dawn of the cold war, the motor pool mechanic metamorphosed into a black-ops phenomenon. He became a spymaster with his own base, his own secret army, and his own rules. His target: North Korea, the Soviet puppet regime that would become the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state. Nichols was wildly ambitious, virtually unsupervised, and just twenty-three years old. He would build an eponymous intelligence outfit, known as NICK, that outhustled and outspied the Central Intelligence Agency and the massive military intelligence apparatus under General Douglas MacArthur. He warned months in advance—with precise details on troops, tanks, and aircraft—about the Soviet-supported North Korean invasion that would catch the United States flatfooted in June 1950. In the early, desperate days of the Korean War, when GIs were panicking, retreating, and dying, his team of Korean cryptographers broke North Korean army codes, which helped American forces hold the line, saving them from being pushed off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. Nichols also saved countless lives by penetrating enemy lines to discover vulnerabilities in Soviet tanks and MiG fighter jets. He and his operatives found most of the targets for the bombing of North Korea. He swiped photographs of Stalin and Mao from the office of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. He also took the Great Leader’s swivel chair. His commanding general called him “magnificent,” “wonderful,” and a “one man war” who “didn’t know what it was to be scared of anything.”
More than any American, Nichols was ready for war in Korea. Years before it started, when the Korean Peninsula was a backwater and he was a nobody, he insinuated himself into the affections of an extreme right-wing politician who would become South Korea’s founding leader. President Syngman Rhee had a PhD from Princeton and a penchant for exterminating Koreans he believed to be Communists. He led South Korea for a dozen years and Nichols became his “son.” As such, Nichols entered a demimonde of torture, mass killings, and chopped-off heads as Rhee and his security forces prosecuted a savage civil war against South Koreans suspected of loyalty to the Communist North. Rhee’s anti-Communist crusade—tacitly supported and covered up by the United States—would kill tens of thousands of South Korean civilians, many of them women and children.
For an American spy immersed in war, torture, and extrajudicial killings, Nichols had an astonishingly long tenure—eleven years. His officer efficiency reports described him as “highly aggressive” and “audacious.” His superiors had never seen an agent work so hard for so long. Spying was all he knew, they said in their evaluations of Nichols, and all he was suited for. Year after year, he rarely took a day off. “He is the only one of his kind I have ever known,” his commanding colonel wrote.
Nichols did not look, dress, or behave like the spies we know from books and movies. Quick tempered and pushy, fast talking and fleshy, he drank Coca-Cola by the case and ate candy bars by the box. Butterfingers, when he could find them; Hershey’s, when he could not. He did not smoke and rarely touched alcohol. He had zero interest in women, often telling his men that he “hated” them. Among Koreans, he was an American colossus: six feet two inches tall, weighing up to 260 pounds. “No Korean could match his height or fatness,” said Chung Bong-sun, who worked for Nichols for eight years as an intelligence officer in the South Korean air force. “But he was very agile and could run fast.”
By breeding and background, Nichols had nothing in common with the upper-crust spies who ran covert operations for the CIA. Unlike the agency’s very best men, he had not attended an East Coast boarding school or gone to Yale or worked on Wall Street or summered in the Hamptons. Even compared with other American military intelligence agents, he was astoundingly unschooled, with no college and no high school. Twelve weeks of spy class in Tokyo were as close as he ever came to higher education. A child of America’s Great Depression, he grew up poor, ill clothed, unwashed, and hungry. When he was seven, his mother abandoned him and his three older brothers. His father took the four boys from Hackensack, New Jersey, to South Florida, where they stumbled miserably through the 1930s. Donald dropped out of school in seventh grade and became a scavenger, stealing everything from tomatoes to tractor parts. He enlisted in the army at seventeen for the “big pay day” of twenty-one dollars a month. He sent sixteen dollars to his brothers to help them buy false teeth for their father.
Nichols grew into adulthood with a distinctly sophomoric sense of humor. In Korea, he told his interpreter to put a can of shaving cream up to his ear, squeeze the spray button, and “hear the music.” In his midthirties, when he was back in Florida, his behavior veered from quirky to criminal. He stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars—loot he brought back from Korea—in his brother Judson’s freezer. He kept big wads of it in his pocket and flashed it in front of strangers, stuffing it in his knee socks when crossing national borders. He became a fugitive from justice in the 1960s and was wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At forty-three, bound for Mexico while fleeing a felony morals charge, he left a paper sack containing twenty-five thousand dollars in cash on a coffee shop counter.
For all his failure to conduct himself with the panache of James Bond, the prudence of George Smiley, or even the common sense that God gave a goose, Nichols had an exquisite gift for clandestine operations. He wowed generals in the Far East Air Forces by conceiving, organizing, and leading covert missions inside North Korea. They described him as “an invaluable man” and “the best intelligence operator in the theater.” General George E. Stratemeyer, commander of Far East Air Forces, wrote in his diary during the first year of the Korean War that Nichols had “performed the impossible.”
Nichols, who moved from the army to the air force in 1947, when the latter became a separate service, was promoted faster than regulations normally allowed, moving from master sergeant to chief warrant officer to lieutenant to captain to major. The speed of his rise raised eyebrows in Washington. In a cable from Tokyo, General Stratemeyer had to explain that because Nichols was clearly the best intelligence agent in the Far East, his promotions were “a completely justifiable exception” to military policy. As his power and political connections grew, Nichols ascended to a unique perch, operating above and beyond conventional calibrations of military rank. He wore civilian clothes or plain military fatigues that bore no insignia of military branch, unit, or rank. American airmen assigned to his unit were told that his rank was a secret. They knew only that he was “a big shot” and they called him “Mr. Nichols.”
To keep Mr. Nichols happy and to ward off attempts by army intelligence or the CIA to poach his services, air force generals gave him his own intelligence base, funded it generously, and allowed him to run it largely as he pleased. There was no base like it in Korea or anywhere else in the American military. From “Nick’s place,” as his commanding general called it, he supervised up to fifty-eight American intelligence officers and airmen, two hundred South Korean intelligence officers, and more than seven hundred agents, most of them defectors and refugees from North Korea. The agents were his eyes and ears—and they were disposable. When he sent them inside North Korea, Nichols expected most would be captured, tortured, or killed. On his watch, as many as eight out of ten of the agents who parachuted over North Korea never came back. Nichols said his bosses “wanted the answers. And in some cases didn’t want to be told how I got them. They knew it meant lives, sometimes many.”
In constant need of new agents, Nichols frequented refugee camps and prisons, where he recruited gangsters, murderers, and thieves. If they survived a mission, he offered pardons and commissions in the South Korean air force, which Nichols helped create and which was run by a general he helped select. While his agents were in the North, Nichols gave rice to their families. At other times, to control their behavior, he threatened those families. For the few who made it back, he provided “a clean bed, a hot meal, a pretty body. . . .” During the first year of the war a group of his agents, furious over the death of so many of their comrades and afraid they might be next, attacked Nichols at night in his quarters. He shot several of them.
The CIA and army intelligence grumbled about Nichols, tried to rein him in, tried to fire him, and tried to hire him. But air force generals stood jealous guard, keeping him happy with promotions, a big budget, and medals—at least twenty-one of them. One of those was the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second-highest military honor, which he received for salvaging key parts from a crashed Russian-made fighter jet inside North Korea. A South Korean intelligence officer who was on that mission and later became director of his country’s central intelligence agency said Nichols fabricated a self-serving story about what happened on the ground during that mission in order to win the medal. This was not a one-off lie. Nichols was smart and bold, but he embellished his achievements to make himself look even more so.
Inside North Korea, Nichols was sometimes called “the King of U.S. spies.” His espionage efforts were recounted at the end of the war with considerable accuracy in a Pyongyang courtroom during a sensational, Stalinist-style show trial. North Korea also put a bounty on his head. When one would-be assassin was arrested near Seoul and confessed to having come from the North to kill him, the suspect was summarily shot and buried on a hill above the office where Nichols worked.
Nichols claimed the air force gave him a “license to murder,” which he used to dispose of “double agents,” pushing them out of boats and dropping them from airplanes. Worried about assassination, he lived with a large pack of snarling dogs. His dogs joined him for meals in the officers’ mess, where they occasionally bit other officers.
Before and during the Korean War, Nichols attended mass executions of suspected Communists, including one of the most notorious atrocities of the Rhee era, when South Korean police and army forces shot thousands of civilians in early July 1950 and buried their bodies in ditches near the town of Taejon. For decades, the official U.S. military history of the Korean War wrongly blamed this massacre on North Korean soldiers. Nichols never disputed this false claim and never publicly acknowledged his presence at the Taejon killings.
For nearly fifty years the government of South Korea refused to investigate what happened at places like Taejon. When a truth commission was created by reform governments in Seoul at the beginning of the twenty-first century, South Korean intelligence and defense ministries refused to open their files. But investigators found forensic and eyewitness evidence of the killings of at least a hundred thousand civilians. After less than a decade of semiopenness, Korea’s elected leaders reversed course in 2010, shutting down the inquiries and ignoring their findings. The massacres have again become a taboo subject, obscured by denial and stonewalling. The nation’s War Memorial museum in Seoul bears no mention of them.
The friendship between Nichols and South Korea’s founding leader was deep and durable. Nichols would always praise Syngman Rhee as “one of history’s great men.” Few share this view. In the judgment of history, Rhee was a prickly ideologue who mismanaged the economy, murdered his rivals, and stayed in power far too long. Street protests in South Korea forced him out in 1960, when the United States put him on a military plane and flew him into exile in Hawaii.
Nichols, too, was forced out of Korea. In the autumn of 1957, the air force flew him to Eglin Air Force Base Hospital in Florida, checked him into a psychiatric ward, and sedated him with extralarge doses of Thorazine. When he would not calm down, he was forced to submit to electroshock treatment. “He demonstrated considerable organic confusion” after his eighth consecutive daily treatment, his clinical record says. Psychiatrists then gave him six more rounds of electroshock on six consecutive days. “They are trying to destroy my memory,” he told his family.
Within a few months, he agreed to retire from the air force on a medical disability. Had he not done so, air force investigators said, he would have been thrown out.
Family members did not know then—and would not know for six decades—the scope and significance of what Nichols had done in Korea. Nor did they know why he had left the air force so abruptly. They found his war stories fantastical. They found him spooky, selfish, and strange. “With Uncle Don, you never knew what to believe,” said a niece who lived with him for several years. Nichols himself began to wonder how he had managed to become what he had been. In an autobiography he paid to have published in a small-town Florida print shop, he asked: “How did I, an uneducated, non-trained, non-experienced individual possess the knowledge that I did/do about ways and means to conduct sabotage/espionage????”
He acknowledged that his years as a spy ended in disgrace, but he did not explain why. He concealed his electroshock treatment. What he did not hide was the numbness and confusion he felt as an ex-spy adrift in the United States. “I was a fifth wheel . . . a misfit wherever I went.” He joined what he called the ranks of the “living dead.” Jobless and unemployable, he wandered zombielike among countrymen who ignored him and his war.
World War II had affirmed American values by crushing Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. It set the table for decades of prosperity and global dominance. The Korean War affirmed nothing and ended in a way that was impossible to celebrate: in a tie that cost more than 33,000 American combatants their lives. And it was soon eclipsed by slow-motion defeat in Vietnam, where failure featured drugged-out GIs, covered-up civilian massacres, secret bombings, napalmed children, and a decade of presidential lies. That war, the first to be televised, spilled combat into living rooms and seared itself into popular culture in a way that Korea never did. The Vietnam War’s hallucinogenic mix of technology, pointlessness, and death forced Americans to reconsider what their country stood for. As historian Ronald Steel explained, Vietnam was “the graveyard of an image we held of ourselves.”
Yet civilian killings and napalmed villages, high-level lies and long-running cover-ups, were hardly new in Vietnam. A decade earlier—when Americans were paying less attention, when the press asked fewer questions—Korea had them all. Those black threads are woven into the reign and ruin of Donald Nichols. He cozied up to a fanatical foreign leader, sat in on torture sessions, attended mass killings (without reporting them), sent hundreds of Koreans to near-certain death, and targeted civilians for incendiary bombs. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Nichols was an uncontrolled commander in a faraway shadowland. But he was no fictional archetype. He was a highly decorated U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who ran his own secret war for more than a decade, while losing touch with propriety, with morality, with legality—even with sanity, if military psychiatrists are to be believed.
The air force credited Nichols, more than anyone else, with finding bomb targets in North Korea. That U.S. bombing campaign, which continued for three years, destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns. Napalm and conventional explosives razed 85 percent of its buildings. The North Korean government never released numbers on civilian deaths, but the population of the country officially declined during the war by 1,311,000, or 14 percent. General Curtis E. LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the war, guessed that American bombs killed even more: about 20 percent of the North Korean population, roughly 1,900,000 people. Americans would never pay much attention to these deaths, but outside of the United States the bombing was widely regarded as a war crime. It still resonates as Yankee genocide inside North Korea, where the Kim family dictatorship endlessly warns that the Americans will come again with bombs and fire and death.
While Korea would become “the forgotten war,” Americans would not forget Donald Nichols. They never heard of him. Not from their government, not from the press, not in the 1950s, not for nearly half a century.
With the help of his autobiography and some archival records, military historians pieced together scattered fragments of his career in the 1990s, usually in book chapters and articles written for intelligence specialists and published by the Naval Institute Press or the Air University Press. In some of those partial portraits, he was presented as a working-class war hero, an alcoholic pirate, or a two-dimensional rib tickler. An otherwise excellent book on the air war in Korea calls him “one of those colorful, larger-than-life, bold, and outlandish characters that occasionally appear and add sparkle to tedious histories.” None of these historians learned how the U.S. military ended his career. And only one Korean War–era journalist, John Dille, a writer for Life magazine, seems to have understood his significance as an intelligence operative. Dille, though, disguised Nichols’s identity, calling him “Bill.” After interviewing Nichols in Seoul, he praised him without qualification, writing that “Bill” was “responsible, more than anything else” for America’s success in Korea.
Nichols was more candid. He acknowledged that his years in Korea were steeped in civilian blood. In his autobiography he described himself as a “thief, assassin, judge, jury and executioner.” He said he wrote the book as “an expiation, an apology to a multitude of unnamed men, women, and children whose sufferings and deaths related to events in my life.” But it spells out little of what he apologized for. His exploits, he wrote, were “better left un-detailed for reasons of sensitivity, as well as for security.” The air force, in some ways, has followed suit. In an unusual and obdurate insistence on secrecy, it continues to classify and withhold documents related to spy operations that Nichols led more than sixty years ago. In the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, hundreds of intelligence reports written by Nichols have been pulled off shelves since 2011 at the request of the air force and replaced with blue sheets of paper stamped “access restricted.”
An internal air force publication described Nichols as one of the “founding fathers” of its covert operations. Yet the air force has given no awards in his name. No buildings, streets, or schools are named after him. His photograph is not displayed at the Air Force Special Operations Command headquarters at Hurlburt Field in Florida. Instructors there do not tell their students about him. Herb Mason, the command historian at air force special-ops headquarters, used to mention Nichols in intelligence lectures. But several years ago he stopped, deciding it was best to say nothing about the spy who came in from the motor pool.
“We couldn’t tell his whole story, so I chose not to bring him up anymore,” said Mason. “As far as I know, the air force has never even considered an honor for Nichols. He had a dark side. In wartime, he was the guy you want on your team. In peacetime, you lock him up.”
In King of Spies, I have tried to unlock Donald Nichols and, for the first time, tell the story of his life and legacy. Drawing upon his previously unreleased military service record, his psychiatric treatment notes, newly declassified air force documents, Syngman Rhee’s presidential papers, unsealed civilian court records, private letters, and interviews with family members and his former intelligence colleagues in the United States and South Korea, the book reveals an American intelligence commander who was a fearless war hero and a postwar outlaw, a special-ops innovator and a shameless liar, a self-invented spymaster and a sexual predator who succeeded for years in covering his tracks. Nichols was the best and the worst kind of American warrior: ferocious, creative, and unbreakable. Yet he was oblivious to the rules of war and wasteful of human life. The air force gave him an astonishingly long leash and allowed him to play whatever role he chose—until it suddenly and secretly jerked him out of Korea, incorrectly diagnosed him as severely schizophrenic, and pushed him out into civilian life. Nichols never detailed the full scope of his wartime triumphs; neither has the U.S. military. His achievements were too closely linked to atrocities, too twisted up in allegiance to a foreign autocrat, too tainted by what happened after he was sent home. As such, his extraordinary and tragic story was allowed to sink into the murk of America’s forgotten war—until now.