King of Spies

Chapter 1

Nichols of Korea

To understand the improbable rise of Donald Nichols, it is useful-up to a point-to think of him as a supersized American version of T. E. Lawrence, the diminutive British military officer who became known as Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas Edward Lawrence was a lowly second lieutenant assigned to intelligence in Cairo in 1914 when he united fractious desert tribes, led an Arab Revolt that defeated the Turks, and helped Great Britain win World War I. Lawrence and Nichols were both in their twenties when they performed their respective miracles. Both were cheeky, creative, and skilled at wringing personal power out of chaos. They were also natural leaders, brave, and wonderfully lucky under fire. Their adversaries-the Turks and the North Koreans-repeatedly failed to kill them. Though Lawrence was an Oxford-trained scholar, an archaeologist, and a translator of the classics, his ascendancy in Arabia, much like Nichols's in Korea, was largely rooted in good timing.

Lawrence arrived in the Middle East in 1910, four years before World War I, when the Great Powers were not yet paying attention to the region. It was, as Lawrence said, "a sideshow of a sideshow." His early arrival gave him time to master Arabic, understand fundamentalist Islam, learn how to survive in the desert, acquire a nuanced firsthand understanding of the region's geography and trade routes, and make personal contacts with key tribal and political leaders. When war came, Lawrence was better prepared than any other Englishman.

Nichols's sideshow was the Korean Peninsula in the mid-1940s. Except for a few hundred Protestant missionaries, who had been proselytizing and teaching there since the late nineteenth century, few Americans traveled to or knew anything about the place. There were no important American commercial interests in Korea. After Nichols was sent there in 1946, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared it to be of "little strategic value." The focus of postwar American interest in the Far East was Japan, where General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of American forces in the Pacific, had become shogun. In the late 1940s he was using his nearly unlimited authority to reinvent the country as a peaceful, productive, and democratic ally of the United States. MacArthur succeeded in this mission beyond all expectations. Korea is less than forty miles from the westernmost islands of Japan, but it existed on the dim edge of MacArthur's lordly attention span.

Everything changed in late June 1950 when North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union, launched a massive armored invasion of its U.S.-supported neighbor to the south. The exceptionally bloody three-year war that followed drew combatants from twenty nations on six continents. About 1.2 million soldiers were killed. The number of civilian dead has been estimated at 2.7 million. For the first and only time in history, American fighter pilots faced off in jets against Russian fighter pilots. The Korean War, as historian William Stueck wrote, "served in many ways as a substitute for World War III."Yet the states that were fighting and financing it chose to corral the chaos, keeping all the death and nearly all the destruction inside the borders of the Korean Peninsula, a geographic space about the size of Minnesota.

Like Lawrence, Nichols arrived early for his war-four years early. He had no way of knowing what lay ahead. Nonetheless, he worked relentlessly to get ready. He traveled widely, sometimes in disguise. He made powerful friends. He taught himself the local language.

But similarities between Lawrence and Nichols go only so far. Lawrence was angered and embarrassed by Britain's colonial ambitions in the Middle East. More scholar than spy, more diplomat than soldier, he was a paradoxical man, painfully shy but also a brilliant self-promoter. In Arab garb and riding a camel, he posed for photographs that made him an international celebrity.

Nichols was no scholar, no diplomat, no seeker of fame. In South Korea, he was invisible outside the world of military intelligence. Even in that world he avoided cocktail parties and crowded receptions. An evaluation of his performance as an officer said "he has a pronounced lack of interest in social activities and this might tend to limit his growth potential to [spying]." He often ate dinner alone in his compound and dressed in a way that attracted little attention."One who has been engaged in intelligence work for years subconsciously strives to stay in the background," Nichols later wrote in a letter to his commanding general, saying it is a "natural tendency that is difficult to overcome."

Nichols rarely read a book and did not acquire a nuanced historical understanding of Korea. He paid little attention to the news. A streetwise hustler, he had a good ear for language, although he was not nearly as proficient in Korean as Lawrence was in Arabic. Instead, Nichols excelled in bare-knuckle bullying. "I soon learned one of the most effective ways to control high level politicians is through a state of fear," he wrote. "Everyone has a skeleton to hide. Find out what, where or who it is, and you have your man more or less under control."

Unlike Lawrence, Nichols did not aspire to shape the fate of nations or challenge the policies of his government. He played the anti-Communist cards his government and Syngman Rhee dealt him. He made his generals look good. In return, they gave him the keys to his own spy kingdom.

After World War II, most American servicemen were desperate to go home. From Austria to the Philippines, tens of thousands of them marched and protested, sometimes violently, to speed up the pace of demobilization. Within two years, nine out of ten had returned to the States, where they stashed their uniforms in the attic and rejoined civilian life. Between 1945 and 1947, the number of U.S. military personnel plummeted from more than 12 million to fewer than 1.6 million.

For American officers and enlisted men who remained overseas as postwar occupiers, the place to be in the Far East was Japan. Even a private could feel rich and eat well there. It was safe. Soldierly responsibilities were few. "Shack girls" were abundant and affordable; easy money could be made on the black market. Back in the States, "Have Fun in Japan" was an army recruitment pitch.

Korea was seen as a hellhole. Soldiers and airmen stationed there complained about the stink of human excrement, which was used to fertilize rice paddies. Housing was limited, food bad, roads poor, and weather extreme, with harsh winter winds that blew in from Siberia and sweltering summers punctuated by long bouts of rain. Mud brown was the color of a GI's life in Korea. For American troops lucky enough to be stationed in Japan, an American general said there were only three things to fear: "gonorrhea, diarrhea, and Korea."

Losers, it was said, were posted there. "It was an article of faith in the U.S. Army officer's corps that assignment to Korea was one short step away from being cashiered out of the service," wrote Ed Evanhoe, a combat infantryman and later an army intelligence officer in Korea. "Few of the better army officers volunteered. . . ."

Nichols saw it differently.

For him, anywhere the army sent him was an improvement on the life he had known growing up. His family was operatically dysfunctional. Back in Hackensack, before his mother left the family, she bathed naked in the kitchen sink and had sex with male suitors in the living room while his father, Walter, a postman, was out delivering the mail.His mother's behavior haunted him all his life. During the Korean War, Nichols often spoke disparagingly of women, explaining to his men that it was because his mother had abandoned him.

Walter Nichols left New Jersey in 1933 and took his four boys, including ten-year-old Donald, to South Florida, but he could not find work and would not get over the collapse of his marriage. He brooded for years over his gallivanting wife and periodically beat his sons. Once, while sharpening knives in the kitchen, he threatened to kill himself, but only after he had slit his boys' throats.

When Miami proved too expensive, Walter took his sons to the low-rent outskirts of Hollywood, Florida, a resort town that had been carved out of mangrove swamps and salt marshes during a real-estate boom in the early 1920s. Its developers had tried to give the place more swank than other upstart coastal resorts by bringing in titled Europeans, hiring tennis champions, and building a "tailor-made" city of shops, hotels, and apartments in white and pink stucco. The Nichols family lived on the bleak, sun-blasted fringes of all this in a shack with a tar-paper roof, no running water, and walls black from kerosene smoke. The boys rarely had money for soap. Most of their food and clothing throughout the 1930s came from the Salvation Army and from government assistance. To help his father put food on the table, Donald, starting as a preteen, shoveled chicken manure, picked fruit, pumped gas, and burglarized neighbors.Still, there was rarely enough food and he often went to bed hungry. Chronic childhood hunger, he would later say, was the cause of his lifelong struggle with obesity and his "psychopathic" bingeing on Coke and chocolate.

Donald attended elementary school in the nearby town of Dania, usually without bathing and sometimes without shoes. As the youngest boy in his family, he wore hand-me-down pants that often had holes in the rear end. He had no underwear. He believed his classmates saw him as white trash and was quick to take offense. When a sympathetic classmate, Nora Mae Swengel, who thought Donald had nice green eyes, gave him four pencils, he broke them in half and threw them on the floor.Often, though, he had to swallow his pride; he begged a dentist to fix a toothache. Nichols dropped out of school when he was fourteen and found full-time work as a dishwasher in the Hollywood Beach Hotel, an expensive resort that served roast beef, tenderloin, and other delicacies that he had heard about but rarely eaten. The best part of his $2.50-a-day job was returning home with the half-eaten scraps of rich tourists. Nichols joined Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, a jobs program during the Depression, and helped build federal parks in the Florida Keys. At seventeen, after three years of mixing low-wage work with petty crime, he concluded that he could "only find hope in the big pay offered by the United States Army."

After he enlisted in the spring of 1940, his father lived alone and struggled to pay his boardinghouse rent. Walter wrote mournful, self-pitying letters to his youngest son, an army private at MacDill Field near Tampa. The letters, which arrived once or twice a week, begged for money and complained about a life that was "nothing but trouble." After Donald sent money, his father wrote back with passive-aggressive pleas for more: "I am sorry I had to write you for that $5.00. I had to have it for my room rent. . . . Even now I have to get a day's work so that I can eat."

Besides money problems, the letters wallowed in uxorious torment. Walter was unable to forget and unwilling to forgive his flamboyantly unfaithful wife, whom he called "Peanut." His letters surely must have tormented Donald, who was reading them in an army barracks in his first months away from home. In one letter, Walter asked Donald, who rarely saw or communicated with his mother, to somehow bring Peanut back to him. "I need her now," he wrote. "I want her and you can help me by writing her a nice letter. Call her and she will be tickled to death."

In another letter, Walter mentioned that his sons Judson and Bill had seen Peanut in bed with another man. "I wanted her but have changed my mind," he wrote. "I am going to divorce her as soon as I get the money. To hell with her now."

Walter did not divorce his Peanut. In the late autumn of 1940, at age fifty-three, he died pining for her. Doctors blamed a bad heart. The three eldest boys blamed their mother. Army private Donald Nichols, still seventeen and still based in Tampa, blamed himself. "My biggest regret in life is, has always been, and will always be, that of leaving my Dad when he needed me," he wrote. "I should have remained with my Dad. He died of loneliness, nothing else."

Nichols shipped out to the Pacific war zone in January 1942, a month after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Trained as a carburetor repairman, he was assigned to a sprawling army motor pool in the South Asian port city of Karachi, where he helped keep thousands of trucks on the road to Burma. The trucks carried men and supplies to war zones in China and Southeast Asia. While there were no battle casualties in Karachi, large numbers of army mechanics succumbed to malaria and intestinal disease. The army could not keep up with the corpses that needed to be prepared for a long voyage home. "Our higher brass evidently forgot that people were going to die," Nichols wrote in his autobiography. So he volunteered to become an embalmer. Working in the motor pool during the day and in a morgue at night, he was soon exhausted, became deathly ill, and was hospitalized for several weeks.

After his recovery, Nichols got his first taste of undercover work. He was assigned to police the docks in Karachi, where he quickly learned how to fiddle with the paperwork on newly arrived supply crates, redirecting them from other army units to his own. Soon, mechanics in his automotive shop had all the tools and truck parts they needed, as well as "crates of other items of necessity to our unit and to ourselves." His commanding officers were pleased and promoted Nichols to master sergeant. The lesson he learned on Karachi's docks would serve him well in Korea: if you make the bosses happy, they won't question your methods.

He returned to the United States in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end, but for only a few months, much of it spent in military hospitals. When he landed in New York in a C-54 army transport plane, he weighed eighty-seven pounds and needed weeks of treatment for dysentery and other lingering infections of the gut. Doctors also performed an appendectomy. Nichols did not consider leaving the army and going home to Florida. With his father dead, there was no family home to go home to. He learned from his brothers that his mother was still sleeping around in Hackensack-and sometimes South Florida-with a changing cast of no-account men. As a teen, Donald had never shown any romantic interest in girls; he certainly did not have one waiting for him. His brothers were scattered geographically, and when they got together, they did not get along. Judson, the second born and most congenial of the brothers, dropped out of high school to pick tomatoes up and down the East Coast. William, the third son, went to war and came home an alcoholic. He quarreled with his oldest brother, Walter Jr., a policeman in Hollywood, Florida, who suspected that William was sleeping with Walter's wife, Fern. Walter Jr. and William would spend much of their lives not speaking to each other. "The Nichols brothers were an explosion waiting to happen," said Donald H. Nichols, Judson's eldest son.