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How One Man Helped Burn Down North Korea (Donald Nichols)
Politico History ^ | October 02, 2017 | How One Man Helped Burn Down North Korea

Posted on 12/29/2024 4:05:43 PM PST by texas booster

Edited on 12/29/2024 6:46:02 PM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]

The story of one of the most effective and brutal spymasters in U.S. history & beginning of an infamous love affair with napalm.

It was long past time for Donald Nichols to go home. He had been spying in Korea for five years, rarely taking a day off, never returning stateside to see his family. His bosses in the U.S. Air Force had not seen an agent work so hard for so long. They called him a “one man war” & the “best intelligence operator” in the Far East. He “performed the impossible,” his commanding general said. Still, air force rules were clear: He must rotate back to United States.


(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...


TOPICS: Education; History; Military/Veterans; Reference
KEYWORDS: 1946; 1950; blaineharden; bookdeals; books; donaldnichols; donnichols; harden; korea; koreanwar; northkorea; northwest; osi; penguin; penguinpress; politico; pollutico; southkorea; stalin; washingtonpost
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To: texas booster

Interesting stuff!


4 posted on 12/29/2024 4:09:33 PM PST by Gay State Conservative (Import The Third World,Become The Third World)
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To: texas booster
Kim had become an agent‑in‑training for a parachute drop. Nichols expected him to go back to North Korea and find useful bomb targets. His group of press- ganged spies, called Class C, was given American military uniforms without insignia, a pair of American-made military boots and C rations, the U.S. military meals intended for soldiers far from mess halls or field kitchens. But they were paid nothing and had no rank, serial number or identity card. “Officially, we did not exist,” Kim said.

From May until September 1952, his training consisted mostly of running, often with a parachute strapped to his back. He learned how to fold the parachute quickly and how to mark coordinates on a map. Once during training, he smiled while saluting and was severely beaten by Koreans who worked for Nichols. When he reported that he had a stomachache, the Koreans again beat him.

By September, Kim’s fellow Class C spies began leaving the island. They did not say good-bye or graduate. Every few days, a few of them simply disappeared. Kim suspected they had been selected for missions in the North. Rumors spread in the camp that South Korean instructors pushed terrified agents out of airplanes.

“I decided my best chance of living would be to escape,” Kim said.

With several others, he walked away at night across mudflats to the mainland. They found their way to the headquarters of the South Korean air force outside Seoul and, rather improbably, were allowed to tell their stories to General Kim Chung Yul, the air force chief of staff who had won his job with Nichols’s help. The general allowed the men to join the air force.

Kim Ji‑eok survived the war by working in a military hospital. After eight years in the air force, he found a job at a noodle restaurant owned by his aunt in Seoul—and that is where he was still working in 2015 when he told his story, at age 82.

“People call Nichols a hero, but I’m not so sure,” said Kim. “If he had sent me back again to North Korea, it would have been the end of my life.”

5 posted on 12/29/2024 4:09:56 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster
Agents like Kim Ji-eok were disposable tools. Nichols and his commanders used them to try to fix a uniquely American logistical problem: The Far East Air Forces had more bombers and more conventional bombs than it had North Korean targets. The Americans also had a near-inexhaustible supply of napalm.

The problem forced Nichols to rethink what it meant to be a special operations commander. In the first year of the war, he’d won promotions and medals by leading teams that broke codes and discovered vulnerabilities in Soviet tanks and fighter jets. By 1951, with the war stalled, his orders had changed. He was told to collect “information suitable for air target selection,” assess bomb damage and determine the “psychological effects of air power on the enemy.”

In American memory, napalm—the sticky gel that melts human flesh—is most closely associated with the Vietnam War. But the U.S. military did not fully appreciate how to use napalm until it dropped 32,000 tons of it on the Korean Peninsula. “Napalm was one of the ‘discoveries’ of the Korean War,” wrote J. M. Spaight, a British airpower expert in the 1950s. “[I]t was in Korea that its effectiveness as a stopping weapon was fully demonstrated. . . . But for [napalm] the United Nations force might have been bundled neck and crop out of Korea. . .”

A decade before Vietnam, Donald Nichols smelled victory in napalm’s flames. “Napalm Bombs have the greatest psychological effect on the people of North Korea, due to the lasting burning effect it has on whatever it comes in contact with,” he wrote in an air intelligence information report.

Nichols’s song of praise was part of an American military chorus in Korea, where operations analysts for the Fifth Air Force “heartily endorsed napalm as the best single antipersonnel weapon” in the war. General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, dispatched B‑29s with napalm over Pyongyang on January 3 and 5, 1951, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground.” Altogether, the United States dropped nearly twice as much napalm on Korea as it did on Japan in 1945, although less than a tenth of the 388,000 tons dropped in Southeast Asia between 1963 and 1973.

In the early days of the war in Korea, when American soldiers were outgunned and fleeing south, napalm was the great equalizer. Even a near miss could generate enough heat to ignite fuel inside a T‑34 tank. When Chinese forces surged south and attacked in human waves, napalm killed thousands and terrified many more. But the bulk of the napalm that the Americans dropped in the war was used strategically rather than tactically, which means it was used to set fire to cities, towns, and villages across North Korea.

As the war progressed, the American definition of what constituted a reasonable military target in North Korea kept expanding. At first, Truman believed that attacks on targets that were not “purely military” could provoke a larger war with the Soviet Union. The White House resisted an early air force proposal to do a “fire job”— using napalm—on North Korea’s five major industrial centers. But after the Chinese intervention on the side of North Korea, American restraint disappeared and the fire job began in November 1950. It continued throughout the rest of the war. Bombing targets, for napalm and conventional bombs, included nearly every man-made structure in North Korea, as well as most human or animal activities that could conceivably be interpreted from a war plane as suspicious.

As the target list expanded, so did the use of napalm, even to the point of exceeding its military utility, according to an air force survey of prisoners of war. The prisoners said that while they feared napalm, the most effective weapons were fragmentation bombs. “The Fifth Air Force’s preference for napalm as an antipersonnel weapon may not have been completely realistic,” the survey found.

Whether it was for napalm or conventional bombs, Nichols was under constant pressure throughout the war to locate more and more targets. When agents like Kim Ji-eok did manage to slip into North Korea and find something worth bombing or burning, they tried to slip away by walking across mudflats to an island where Nichols had a base. Not many made it. As Nichols’s operation moved into high gear, an acceptable loss rate for agents—caught and killed or simply bugging out—appears to have been 40 percent.

Nichols also killed his own spies if he believed they were double agents loyal to North Korea. To smoke them out, he orchestrated elaborate cons. One particularly theatrical operation occurred when Nichols was building his island empire, according to George T. Gregory, an air force major who served as an executive officer under Nichols. As Gregory tells the story, Nichols was aboard one of his boats, transporting agents to the mainland, when “blinding beams of searchlights suddenly bathed them in white.

“They were boarded and forced to line up with their hands behind their heads by the grim-looking men in North Korean navy uniforms,” Gregory wrote. “The North Koreans advised their captives that they were taking the ‘white foreigner’ [Nichols] with them, but would blow the ship and its crew of vile, traitorous South Koreans—American puppets—out of the water. Nichols was being led towards the enemy ship when one of the crewmen began screaming that he was a North Korean agent.”

Nichols had found his mole.

“The dummy Communist vessel, complete with North Korean Navy markings, sailor uniforms and Soviet guns, was planned and carried out by Nichols in its entirety,” Gregory wrote. Between 1951 and the end of 1952, Nichols doubled his production of air intelligence information reports, as the monthly total jumped from five hundred to about a thousand. “The increasing flow of reports made it necessary to work American personnel and indigenous translators and draftsmen in headquarters on frequent occasion at night and holidays,” according to a history of his unit.

The official air force history of the war describes Nichols as the “most important single collector” of air intelligence for the tactical bombing of North Korea. His reports pinpointed hand-grenade factories, freshly dug caves, radio stations, parking lots, food warehouses, ammunition dumps, print shops, a paper factory, a zinc factory, locomotives, Russian officer quarters, Chinese troop concentrations, and an underground clothing factory dug into the side of a mountain.

6 posted on 12/29/2024 4:11:55 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster
American bombs and napalm destroyed more of North Korea, in relation to its resources, than all the combined air attacks on Japan during World War II, including the atom bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the conclusion of the Far East Air Forces. The air force also believed that air attacks tipped the balance, forcing a crippled, traumatized enemy to the peace table. “We are pretty sure now that the Communists wanted peace, not because of a two-year stalemate on the ground, but to get airpower off their back,” General Otto P. Weyland, commander of the Far East Air Forces, said in 1954.

There were many who analyzed the bombing of North Korea and concluded that the air force had learned the wrong lessons. They found overwhelming evidence that bombing failed to stop “the forward movement of supplies” to North Korean and Chinese fighters.

Even Nichols, who won accolades for his success in identifying bomb targets, was among those who doubted the utility of the air-delivered devastation. “To a certain extent you could say we wasted our bombs on the roads, bridges, railroads, tunnels, etc.,” Nichols wrote in his autobiography. “The enemy made a fool of us.”

The enemy did so by transporting fuel, ammunition, and food in the same way that ants transport food to their colonies—in small quantities distributed among a large number of disciplined and highly motivated individuals.

In the end, American bombs did not stop the war; Stalin did, by dying. After the dictator’s death on March 5, 1953, no one who mattered in the Soviet Union wanted to prolong the expensive bloodshed in Korea. Within days, the Soviet leadership moved to work with the Chinese and seek “the soonest possible conclusion” to the war. Peace talks with the Americans suddenly turned serious.

Stalin’s death was also a turning point for Nichols. His island empire stopped growing. By late May, the air force ordered him to remove his agents from islands off the east and west coasts of North Korea. By late July, the major combatants in the Korean War had signed an armistice. The thirty-eighth parallel was again the internationally accepted dividing line between the two Koreas and fighting stopped. Nichols would stay on in Korea, remain in command of a spy base, and continue to meet regularly with Syngman Rhee. But his spy career—and, as it would turn out, his life— had peaked. He was thirty.

7 posted on 12/29/2024 4:12:58 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: PJ-Comix
Adapted from King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea by Blaine Harden, to be published on October 3, 2017 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Blaine Harden.

With the renewed interest in the Squid Games 2, I am posting the except from the book listed above.

8 posted on 12/29/2024 4:14:47 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster
Here is the book in question. Sure the source is Politico, but there may be gems that pop out now and then.


9 posted on 12/29/2024 4:17:56 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster
Forced spies from North Korea like Kim Ji-eok were indispensable to Donald Nichols' war; they were sent on dangerous missions back to North Korea that had a casualty rate of about 40 percent. | Courtesy of Lindsay Morgan


10 posted on 12/29/2024 4:19:19 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster

By BLAINE HARDEN


11 posted on 12/29/2024 4:22:59 PM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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To: texas booster

Too much information


12 posted on 12/29/2024 4:32:24 PM PST by DIRTYSECRET
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To: DIRTYSECRET
It is definitely a long excerpt from the book, but with the current interest in the Squid Games 2 and the left penchant to erase things from the internet, I republished the excerpt in full.

Yes there is too much information, but it is complete.

13 posted on 12/29/2024 4:46:50 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: DIRTYSECRET
Too much information

Are you serious? I like brevity, but this is a story and is not some dull reading, and the intolerance of reading much - and using smartphones for reports as this - is one of the problems of the younger generation.

14 posted on 12/29/2024 5:04:26 PM PST by daniel1212 (Turn 2 the Lord Jesus who saves damned+destitute sinners on His acct, believe, b baptized+follow HIM)
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To: texas booster

It was long, but such an an intriguing account, I didn’t mind. Thanks for sharing.


15 posted on 12/29/2024 5:14:48 PM PST by fidelis (Ecce Crucem Domini! Fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda, Radix David! Alleluia!)
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To: texas booster

Amazing how the writer is able to tell things from the North Korean communist perspective like she is the natural born daughter of the Dear Leader.


16 posted on 12/29/2024 5:19:53 PM PST by piasa (Attitude adjustmilents offered here free of charge)
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To: texas booster
Like Alan Turing, this is a story about a brave genius, working for the right side, yet unhealthy and sexually perverted, whose genius enabled him to do "good" as regards warfare, as well as his uncouth reg-breaking, and evil, and get away with the latter. Until forced to retire. What your article omits is:
Nichols was forced to retire from the military on a medical disability in 1962.[18] He was later charged in Florida with repeated sexual assaults on young boys and pleaded nolo contendere in 1987 to two felony counts of lewd behavior in the presence of a child.[19] He died in the psychiatric ward of a veteran's hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he had gone in lieu of imprisonment in Florida as a sexual predator....Nichols wrote an autobiography, How Many Times Can I Die?, that is notable for exaggerating his achievements and omitting key elements in his life. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Nichols_%28spy%29

He also did not live long: 18 February 1923 – 2 June 1992)

17 posted on 12/29/2024 5:23:54 PM PST by daniel1212 (Turn 2 the Lord Jesus who saves damned+destitute sinners on His acct, believe, b baptized+follow HIM)
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To: piasa
Absolutely!

That's why I mentioned that it was a Politico article. They lean left, way left, and this article from 2017 shows it.

18 posted on 12/29/2024 5:29:38 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: daniel1212
Many very bright individuals believe in the "I am all that' philosophy, and they try anything they feel like.

From the song by Rich Mullins "The Maker of Noses":

They said boy you just follow your heart
But my heart just led me into my chest
They said follow your nose
But the direction changed every time I went and turned my head
And they said boy you just follow your dreams
But my dreams were only misty notions

He followed his internal light, and that light was darkness.

19 posted on 12/29/2024 5:35:09 PM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster

“”His group of press- ganged spies, called Class C, was given American military uniforms without insignia, a pair of American-made military boots and C rations, the U.S. military meals intended for soldiers far from mess halls or field kitchens. But they were paid nothing and had no rank, serial number or identity card. “Officially, we did not exist,” Kim said.””

My uncle served over there... was one of the folks who parachuted in behind enemy lines ... and beyond. Didn’t wear insignia, operated out of an isolated barracks of men far from mess halls and kitchens and with out windows that people could look in. Could and did pass for a Korean or Chinese, depending. Officially, didn’t exist. Looked 100% harmless. Was not forced to do the work.

Great man, served most of WW2 as a Navy seaman, an Army infantryman and eventually Army Air Corps before ending up in the Air Force and then Korea with “no rank” ... loved to fish and was a great cook, could fix everything, organized perfectly synchronized invasions of Disneyworld for relatives, always said New Orleans was a nerve center for communists in the US, was pretty good at giving orders people would obey without question, because everyone loved and respected him. Could locate and assist downed pilots anywhere, any time. But, had a hard time tracking his daughter, lol.


20 posted on 12/29/2024 5:46:07 PM PST by piasa (Attitude adjustmilents offered here free of charge)
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