How America’s Colonel Kurtz Beat Back North Korea

dailybeast.com ^ | Blaine Harden

[RoosterRedux]

Donald Nichols, an Air Force spy in Korea at the dawn of the Cold War, was the best and worst kind of American warrior. Ferocious, creative and unbreakable, he won more than 20 medals for valor during the Korean War and vacuumed up battlefield secrets that saved countless American lives.

Yet Nichols was callow, untrained and very young—just 23—when he arrived on the Korean Peninsula. He was a seventh-grade dropout. He was virtually unsupervised. He would soon veer out of control, losing touch with morality, with legality, even with sanity—if Air Force psychiatrists are to be believed. He attended mass killings and trained South Korean police who specialized in torture. He was photographed standing beside a severed human head.

Nichols became America’s Kurtz, an uncontrolled commander in a faraway shadowland. The Air Force gave him an astonishingly long leash: his own secret base, his own secret army of spies, and a self-proclaimed “legal license to murder.” His commanding general described him as a “one man war.”

Suddenly and brutally, the Air Force turned against Nichols in 1957. He was spirited out of Korea and subjected to months of electroshock at Eglin Air Force Base Hospital in Florida. He told relatives the U.S. government was trying to destroy his memory.

Seven years before he was ignominiously removed from command, Nichols played a starring—albeit secret—role in the decisive early weeks of the Korean War. His code-breakers helped the Americans halt and turn back a North Korean invasion that stunned the world.

[PIF]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Nichols_(spy)

[JBW1949]

W.E.B. Griffin has a series of books, “The Corps”

The main character, Ken McCoy, in the fictional series is patterned after Nichols in books 8, 9 and 10....

[GreyFriar]

USAF intel during Korean War ping

[DUMBGRUNT]

This heartening story, however, was not at all typical of what happened to agents Nichols recruited and sent North. Most of his agents did not return from that first mission and the pattern would recur again and again. “Nobody expected them to return alive,” said Kim Bok-dong, a translator who worked for Nichols in 1950. “It was as if they were being sent to be killed.”
“Nichols was very focused, but he sacrificed too many Koreans to accomplish his mission,” said Lee Kang-hwa, a retired general in the South Korean Air Force who fought in the war and knew Nichols. “It is very unfortunate that a lot of Koreans were sent to die.” Nichols was not the only American sending South Koreans to near-certain death. CIA operations during the war were “not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in that the number of lives lost and the amount of time and treasure expended was enormously disproportionate to attainments there from,” an agency review concluded years after the war.

How many did the OSS and MI5 and MI6 send out, many women too?

[Yorlik803]

That kind of work isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it takes a hard man making ugly decisions to get the job done. Salute to this warrior.

[zot]

Thanks for the ping. I had not heard any of this.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

How many did the OSS and MI5 and MI6 send out, many women too?

The life expectancy of an SOE wireless operator in Occupied France was six weeks.

And yes, many of them were female.

[bitt]

p

[Twotone]

Interesting story, although they are definitely over-hyping the article with the ‘Kurtz’ stuff. Maybe you have to read the book for that.

[Jacquerie]

Thanks for the link.