No one of importance in American intelligence cared enough about Donald Nichols or Korea to try to shut him up—until the late spring of 1950. Until then, he had beavered away in obscurity, writing increasingly alarming reports about North Korea’s war plans, reports that were either unread or ignored by nearly all the Americans who mattered in Tokyo and Washington.
Nearly every month, his productivity increased, as measured by the ballooning volume of air intelligence information reports he sent monthly to Far East Air Forces headquarters. The civil war that tore South Korea apart in the late 1940s had helped him expand his spying network, as he extracted intelligence from detainees (with the help of Rhee’s torturers) and recruited new agents to send into North Korea. In the South Korean government, the few officials whom he could not “win over by sheer friendship and magnetism,” he controlled with intimidation, fear, and blackmail.
On his own authority, Nichols traveled to North Korea for what he called a “legal-illegal looky-looky.” He disguised himself as an army lieutenant and pretended to be a train commander while transporting supplies from Seoul to American negotiators who were based in Pyongyang in 1947 and claims he occasionally met with Soviet and North Korean officials. As the North Korean military buildup gathered momentum in 1949, he took dangerous low-altitude surveillance flights over North Korea in unarmed, fabric-covered L-4 spotter planes flown by South Korean air force pilots.
At the same time, Nichols attended and photographed executions of South Koreans at the hands of the South Korean National Police and the South Korean army. Thirty-nine “confessed Communists” were secretly killed on the afternoon of April 14, 1950, in the hills about ten miles northeast of Seoul as Nichols took pictures with a Leica he bought at an army PX in Seoul for $174. “No newspaper correspondents were observed and no mention of this particular execution has been noted in the press to date—eleven days afterwards,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Bob E. Edwards, the military attaché at the American embassy in Seoul, in a cable sent to Washington.
The cable included fifteen of Nichols’s photographs. The sequence of death, as shown in the photos, was just as he later described it in his memoir: After victims were lined up for roll call, military police used rope to tie them to posts. Open wooden coffins can be seen in the background. Pinned over each victim’s heart was a numbered paper target with a large black bull’s-eye. After the initial volley from the firing squad, some victims, wounded but not dead, were shot through the head at point-blank range with .45-caliber pistols.
In his cable, Edwards described the scene as “a normal execution as carried out quite frequently in South Korea. . . . The victims were singing the Communist song and giving cheers for the leaders of North Korea when the firing squad opened fire. They faced the squad with a sullen attitude and died bravely.”
Nichols dressed for the execution in a business suit, dark tie, and white shirt. An army photograph that day shows him at the front of a cluster of American officers who are watching the killings. He is crouched on his haunches, like a catcher in baseball, snapping photographs.
He had invited Serbando Torres, his clerk, to come along. But Torres said he was “squeamish” and encouraged his air force colleague Sergeant Russell Bauer to go in his place. When Bauer came back to the office in the late afternoon, his uniform was spattered with blood and brain tissue. Torres asked him why. A Korean soldier had used a samurai sword to behead a wounded victim, Bauer replied, noting that it had taken the soldier several whacks before the job was done. The beheading was not included among the photographs that were sent to Washington. Torres said Nichols seemed unaffected by the killings he witnessed. “I don’t believe they bothered him,” he said.
The trust Nichols established with Rhee meant that he was the first American called when a North Korean fighter pilot defected to the South in a Soviet-made aircraft. In late April 1950, Lieutenant Lee Kun Soon, twenty-four, a flight instructor in the North Korean air force, landed an Ilyushin IL-10 ground attack fighter at an airport in Pusan, at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. Nichols hurried to the scene, interrogated the pilot, and persuaded South Korean officials to give the plane to the United States. He also coaxed the pilot into coming to work at his spy base.
These kinds of intelligence scoops thrilled Nichols’s supervisors in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. In twice-yearly officer effectiveness evaluations, they heaped praise on him. “An outstanding investigator and intelligence officer who has demonstrated exceptional ability in securing the trust, confidence and cooperation of Korean military and civil officials,” Lieutenant Colonel Spencer W. Raynor wrote in May 1950. Nichols “made himself indispensable” in Korea, another evaluation said. As a spy who aggressively exploits enemy intelligence, Raynor wrote, “Mr. Nichols is the most capable and most outstanding officer I have ever known.”
Higher up in the U.S. chain of command, however, Nichols had made an exceptionally powerful enemy—one who would soon try to destroy him.
By stirring up Pentagon and State Department bureaucrats with his report of “inevitable” war in Korea, Nichols had unwittingly challenged the judgment of army Major General Charles A. Willoughby, chief of intelligence for MacArthur.
Five weeks before Nichols predicted a North Korean invasion, Willoughby had sent his own personal prediction to Washington. “Such an act is unlikely,” he wrote. A month after Nichols’s report of certain war was flagged as “significant” by the Far East Air Forces, Willoughby advised the Pentagon: “It is believed that there will be no civil war in Korea this spring or summer. . . .”
Willoughby was a dangerous man to contradict. Besides being the top intelligence officer in the Far East Command, he was a member of MacArthur’s inner circle in the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building in Tokyo. That building was where, as supreme commander, MacArthur took on the airs of a head of state while leading the rebirth of postwar Japan. By 1950, MacArthur was seventy years old and a global legend of wildly contradictory parts. He had been a fearless frontline general in World Wars I and II, earning nearly every conceivable medal for effectiveness and valor, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. His rare gift was for orchestrating spectacular victories without killing large numbers of Americans, as he had done in the war against Japan. Yet MacArthur was much more—and much less—than a battlefield genius. Biographers over the decades have described him as brainy, backstabbing, charming, childish, theatrical, and sly. He was incapable of admitting mistakes. “No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform,” William Manchester wrote in his masterful biography American Caesar.
MacArthur was also openly insubordinate to Truman, declining a White House invitation after World War II to return to Washington for talks about America’s role in the future of the Far East. The general made no effort to hide his presidential ambitions and encouraged Republicans to nominate him for the presidency in 1948. Truman despised him, calling him “Mr. Prima Donna.” MacArthur suffered from a character flaw that Manchester diagnosed as “peacockery,” a self-blinding mix of arrogance, vanity, and pride. As a five-star general entering his eighth decade of magnificence, MacArthur did not like to be told what he did not already know. Some of his general staff officers were, in the words of columnist Joseph Alsop, “almost wholly simpering and reverential.” He rarely met face-to-face with anyone else. As the historian William Stueck put it, MacArthur surrounded himself with men “who would not disturb the dream world of self worship in which he chose to live.”
No staff officer was more skilled in giving the great man a soothing bath in his own preconceptions than Charles Willoughby. Starting in the early days of World War II, when he first became MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, or G-2, Willoughby was part of the “Bataan Gang,” a gaggle of officers who were evacuated with MacArthur from the Philippines in 1942 and stayed with him through the Japanese occupation and into the first year of the Korean War.
Willoughby, fifty-eight in 1950, was born in Germany, and there was much about him that struck his colleagues as insufferably Prussian. He sometimes wore a monocle. His combination of pomposity and affectation generated derisive nicknames: “Sir Charles,” “Baron von Willoughby,” and “Bonnie Prince Charles.” Outside of his flattering audiences with MacArthur, Willoughby could be intimidating, arrogant, and vindictive. He was widely despised.
But he was not a fool. He spoke five languages, including Japanese, and had years of experience in directing sprawling intelligence operations. Because MacArthur did not pay attention to Korea, it was Willoughby—and only Willoughby—who determined what was going on there. In the years before the outbreak of war, he was the chief interpreter of intelligence about North Korea for the Far East Command, the entire U.S. military, the State Department, and the Truman White House. MacArthur affectionately called Willoughby “my pet fascist.” The two generals had similar distastes. According to historian Millett, they both looked down their noses at “Democrats, the British, most Asians, Washington agencies in general and the navy in particular, army officers who might be critical of [MacArthur’s] infallible judgment, potentially unfriendly representatives of the press, civilian diplomats, and Communists, generously defined.” After the war, colleagues would accuse Willoughby of deliberately falsifying intelligence reports to please MacArthur.
Besides arrogance and sycophancy, Willoughby’s defining weakness as an intelligence analyst was his reluctance to believe sources he did not directly control, especially reports that relied on the work of Asians. During 1949 and early 1950, Willoughby refused to believe the mushrooming numbers of reports from U.S. military intelligence operatives that showed North Korea’s preparations for a large-scale invasion. Some came from Nichols, but many others came from an army intelligence detachment in Seoul called the Korean Liaison Office, which Willoughby himself had established. The American embassy in Seoul and army intelligence advisers wrote similar reports that reached the State Department and the CIA. Almost all of them relied upon the intelligence work of Korean agents, whose judgment Willoughby reflexively discounted.
The reports that came from Nichols were especially suspect, receiving “the lowest possible reliability evaluation.” A possible reason was that Nichols and his team of air force agents were “in direct competition” with Willoughby’s army spy team.
MacArthur, Willoughby, and the army brass in Washington had a major bureaucratic incentive for discounting the likelihood of war on the Korean Peninsula. Under Truman, who was skeptical of defense spending and did not trust his generals, the military budget kept shrinking. The army was squeezed especially hard. In the second half of the 1940s, its manpower fell from 6 million to 530,000. The army’s chief of staff, General Omar N. Bradley, said the cuts had forced the army into a “shockingly deplorable state” of combat readiness. MacArthur complained that he barely had enough soldiers for the occupation of Japan. He viewed the additional cost of supplying, feeding, and training troops in Korea as unnecessary and insupportable. The army argued in 1947 that American troops should leave Korea, and it won the day inside Truman’s White House. With its budgetary blinders on, the army did not see the pullout as likely to trigger a Soviet-backed invasion of South Korea. Instead, it insisted that an invasion was merely “possible.”
In soft-pedaling the chance of an invasion, the army generals were quite alone. A CIA report had concluded that the “withdrawal of US forces from Korea in the spring of 1949 would probably in time be followed by an invasion.” That secret report was supported by the State Department, the navy, and the air force. They joined the CIA in warning the White House that a total pullout was unwise. It would be smarter and safer, they argued, to keep several thousand troops in the country. Yet the army prevailed and nearly all of the troops were withdrawn by the end of 1949.
MacArthur’s mule-headed unwillingness to acknowledge the likelihood of an attack from the North was well known in the State Department. “In Tokyo, General MacArthur’s intelligence continued in all official assessments down to the outbreak of the war to discount reports and rumors of invasion,” the Korean desk officer at the State Department later wrote. He and his staff pulled together the “considerable flow” of reports about new North Korean military units receiving heavy artillery and tanks from the Soviet Union. But the Pentagon and the White House refused to pay attention. As the desk officer explained, they “would only review and adopt the estimates of the Theater Commander,” meaning MacArthur—though it was really up to Willoughby.
In Washington, indifference to Korea was understandable. The Truman administration had many hot spots to worry about, especially in Eastern Europe, and the United States had written off Korea as a strategic interest. Busy policy makers had to focus on problems deemed urgent.
In Willoughby’s view, scores of reports about an imminent invasion of South Korea never rose to that level. So they were not taken seriously in Tokyo or sent on to Washington with instructions that they be placed in front of officials powerful enough to change a Korea policy that was becoming more delusional and more risky with each passing month.
The report on “inevitable” war that Nichols wrote in Seoul in February 1950 was an exception. This is the report that troubled the Joint Chiefs in Washington in March, the report that the Pentagon bounced back to the Far East Command in Tokyo in April, the report that challenged the judgment of MacArthur, as advised by his chief of intelligence. In May 1950, just two months before the outbreak of war, Willoughby did not attempt to discern the report’s accuracy. He went after Nichols and tried to shut him up. When that did not work, he tried to ship him out of Korea. Willoughby also scolded Nichols’s commanding officer “for allowing him to submit such information.”
Willoughby’s offensive began with a word to the American embassy in Seoul.
“It was suggested that Mr. Nichols discontinue reporting information which caused unnecessary alarm,” according to a history of Far East Air Forces intelligence. “This, Mr. Nichols refused to agree to do.”
In the normal military chain of command, Nichols, then a twenty-seven-year-old chief warrant officer, would follow an order from Willoughby. But by 1950, Nichols had found shelter in a rabbit hole in the command structure. He and his men were officially attached to the Korean Military Advisory Group. KMAG was not under MacArthur’s command or Willoughby’s; it took orders from the American ambassador in Seoul, John Muccio. Because Willoughby could not sack Nichols, he could only send a letter to Muccio, strongly suggesting that Nichols and his intelligence team be tossed out of Korea.
The actual letter, written on May 9, 1950, is missing. Files at the American embassy were destroyed or lost during the North Korean invasion of Seoul, and Willoughby himself destroyed many intelligence files at the Far East Command, excepting ones he wanted to be seen. He ordered that “all materials other than the copies [he] and General MacArthur took back to the States” be burned in 1951.
But the ambassador’s written response to Willoughby, which was classified for sixty-five years, does exist in the archives of the Air Force Historical Research Agency in Montgomery, Alabama. In his letter, Muccio said that Nichols was performing splendidly in Korea and that he remained in the country at the personal request of President Rhee. The letter politely but firmly told Willoughby to buzz off.
American Embassy
Seoul, May 16, 1950
Dear General Willoughby,
. . . Mr. Nichols’ knowledge and friendly relationship to key Korean personalities who have intelligence information are such that I consider his services most helpful and would consider their loss a serious one. . . .
In my opinion, there is no other American intelligence unit or agency now operating in South Korea which produces a larger volume of useful intelligence material on Communist and subversive activities than does Mr. Nichols’ unit. . . .
I do not believe that Mr. Nichols’ unit conflicts in any significant way with your own unit here or with CIA activities, and I trust that Mr. Nichols and his unit will continue to function in South Korea in their usual efficient and helpful manner.
Sincerely yours,
John J. Muccio
Nichols, as a result, stayed put. And Willoughby stood by his belief that war was unlikely—a position that did not change until the invasion of South Korea.
As an intelligence agent in his twenties, Nichols had an uncanny ability to find powerful older men who would protect him. Just before the American ambassador shielded him from Willoughby’s talons, Nichols had dinner with an air force general who would become his principal wartime patron and defender.
They met at the end of 1949, when Major General Earle E. Partridge flew into Seoul on a post-Christmas hunting junket. Partridge was commander of the Fifth Air Force, the Japan-based command responsible for American air power in the Pacific. Bombers, fighters, and ground-attack aircraft from the Fifth Air Force would soon be drawn into the Korean War. But at the time, Partridge knew next to nothing about Korea, even though he had been in command in the Pacific region for nearly eighteen months. He had no contingency plan to deploy aircraft there. He had not been privy to any of the early warnings from Nichols and other intelligence sources about North Korea’s preparations for an invasion.
A primary reason for his ignorance was that Willoughby did not widely circulate those alarming reports to most senior officers in the Far East Command. Willoughby’s intelligence guidance suggested that the Fifth Air Force should prepare for a flare-up of violence in the Philippines and, to that end, Partridge had sent his best intelligence officers to Manila.
The general had come to Korea for sport: to shoot game birds on Cheju. The fighting between Communist guerrillas and Rhee’s forces that had decimated human beings on the island had benefited pheasants, which thrived in abandoned farmlands.
On the night before and the night after his successful hunt, Partridge dined in Seoul. The guests at these two dinners gave him what he later described as his first introduction to South Korea. He encountered “all the ones necessary to know in the top of that government.” At the first dinner, he met Ambassador Muccio, the head of the South Korean air force, and Nichols. At the second, he met Rhee. Nichols must have made a good first impression: in the year that followed, Partridge would single out the young chief warrant officer as the most valuable intelligence man in the Far East.
Partridge was then nearing fifty and perhaps saw something of his younger self in Nichols. Neither of them owed their rise to economic privilege or family connections. While the general’s childhood was less squalid than that of Nichols, it was similarly scarred. Without money for college and without a mother (who died when he was fifteen), he had joined the army at eighteen and his first war was unglamorous, digging ditches in France during World War I. Partridge had managed to bootstrap himself into a remarkable military career, winning an appointment to West Point, becoming perhaps the best aerial machine gunner and bomb dropper in the Army Air Corps, and helping to lead the bombing of North Africa, Sicily, and Germany during World War II. Partridge was “incautious with his own life.” Flying in a one-seat propeller-driven fighter aircraft—and ignoring antiaircraft fire—he routinely accompanied bomber groups on missions over Germany. En route, he critiqued the formations and made his own assessments of bomb damage. In the last year of the war in Europe, he was promoted to major general, given command of the Third Bomb Division, and led bombing campaigns that created firestorms in German cities like Hamburg, killing tens of thousands of civilians.
Like Nichols, Partridge had no patience with “any rule that stood in the way of a good idea.” To get more bang from each mission, he ordered his men to pack B-17 bombers with two thousand more pounds of bombs than they were authorized to carry. And while he said that he personally believed that bombing civilian populations was “useless, useless, foolishness,” he never hesitated to follow orders. “If the powers say bomb the city,” he said, “you bomb the city.” During the war in Korea, Nichols and his agents would be the general’s primary source of targeting information as the Fifth Air Force bombed every city in the North.
In appearance and manner, Partridge was nothing like Nichols. Reed thin and carefully dressed, he was soft-spoken and self-effacing. Like many generals of his era, he lived like an aristocrat, golfing, playing squash, and shooting birds at every opportunity. But he did not put on airs. He judged junior officers by their performance rather than their pedigree. A character appraisal by his boss in the Far East Air Forces, General Stratemeyer, said Partridge was “not bound by convention or past concepts but retains an open mind and is willing to consider and try out new methods. . . .”
Nichols was a case in point. Partridge was not put off by his youth, his lack of education, his sometimes bumptious aggression, his struggles to control his weight, or his refusal to wear a proper uniform. Partridge never mentioned these issues in the twenty-eight references he made to Nichols in his diary and oral histories. Instead, he celebrated Nichols’s quirks: “He had his own code, that is, one not approved by MacArthur’s intelligence people. Of course, in this respect, he was illegal as a three dollar bill . . . but he could do anything. . . . Just an incredible man.”
Bombing campaigns in North Africa and Europe during World War II had taught Partridge to take special care of his spies.
“I learned—it took me just one day—that you can’t do anything without the complete support and confidence of your intelligence section,” he later said. “[B]ecause when you arrive in theater, you know zero about what’s going on.”
When North Korea invaded, Partridge indeed knew little about the Korean Peninsula. Nichols quickly brought him up to speed. In return—and to keep the intelligence flowing—Partridge decided to create a special spy unit for Nichols and give him funding for his own intelligence base. Under the general’s wing, Nichols found shelter from the Willoughbys of the U.S. intelligence community: those in the army and the CIA who attempted to control, reel in, or otherwise nibble at the empire that Nichols was just beginning to build. Partridge also invited Nichols to come along with him to shoot birds.
Undeterred by Willoughby, Nichols wrote scores of reports during the first six months of 1950 about North Korea’s preparations for an invasion. In the late spring, Nichols told air force headquarters in Tokyo of an intercepted message from Moscow to Pyongyang that said Stalin had approved of an attack on South Korea. Three days before the attack, Nichols wrote that thirty truckloads of North Korean troops were on the move “for the purpose of preparing to invade South Korea.”
Nichols later claimed that he wrote a “major report” in early June that nailed the timing of the invasion. He said he predicted it would begin between June 25 and June 28, 1950. It occurred on June 25. “Some ass at General MacArthur’s Headquarters in Tokyo and/or Washington didn’t believe what was being reported. . . . Or was too stupid to credit it,” he wrote in his autobiography.
This prescient report, if it exists, has not yet surfaced in the National Archives or in those of the air force. It may have been destroyed when Willoughby ordered the burning of intelligence records of the Far East Command, or Nichols might not have written it at all. There is reason to be suspicious. During his years in Korea, Nichols exaggerated his accomplishments. Some military historians have concluded that while Nichols did excellent work in chronicling North Korean preparations for war, he was no better than army intelligence or the CIA in finding hard evidence of an imminent attack.
Partridge believed otherwise, insisting that Nichols sent a precise invasion date to MacArthur’s headquarters—where it was intentionally ignored and destroyed.
“My one-man army told them there was going to be a war,” Partridge said in his oral history. “He had put operators behind the border. He knew what was going on, and he watched them build up their units and supplies. . . . Then he went up to an offshore island where with a telescope he could get a look along the border. He said, ‘The war will start within a week.’ He then sent this message to Tokyo, and it was suppressed by somebody.”
Besides starting a war, the invasion triggered decades of second-guessing and finger-pointing in Washington about who was to blame for ignoring the Soviet-backed buildup inside North Korea. The verdict of history is that there was indeed a major intelligence failure. The invasion genuinely surprised American political and military leaders in Washington, as well as the American public. They had not been told what Nichols and other U.S. intelligence operatives had been telling Willoughby for many months.
Truman was embarrassed and angered by the failure of the CIA to give him a clear warning of war. He fired the agency’s director, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, named a new director in the summer of 1950, and a far-reaching reorganization of CIA operations soon followed. A congressional committee asked MacArthur why he and his staff officers did not know about the strength of North Korea’s military buildup:
“I don’t see how it would have been humanly possible for any men or group of men to predict such an attack as that, any more than you could predict such an attack as took place at Pearl Harbor,” MacArthur replied, not mentioning, of course, the intelligence information that his own intelligence chief had known about and ignored.
Willoughby responded to criticism by saying he had forwarded hundreds of intelligence reports to the Pentagon that detailed what North Korea and the Soviets were planning. He neglected to admit that he had consistently undermined these reports, giving them low evaluations for credibility and thereby guaranteeing that they would not be taken seriously in Washington. He also neglected to say that he had tried to destroy the career of a young air force intelligence agent who had been particularly insistent—and accurate—in predicting the war.
Willoughby, though, was nothing if not flexible.
As MacArthur scrambled to turn back North Korea’s invasion, Willoughby changed his approach to the problem of Donald Nichols. Instead of trying to banish him from the Korean Peninsula, Willoughby demanded that Nichols come work for army intelligence.