A Rogue American Spy and Why North Korea Hates America

Donald Nichols never fit the mold of a post-war American spy. In 1946 he went to Korea as a nobody, going to a place that nobody wanted to go to. When he arrived he began preparing for a war that no one else knew was coming. When it did, he was uniquely ready.

He became an intelligence superstar. He had his own base of operations, and his own army. He became disturbingly close to South Korean President Syngman Rhee, and condoned, if not participated in, Rhee’s campaign of mass killings and beheadings.

This is the remarkable story that author and journalist Blaine Harden tells Jeff Schechtman, in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast.

Once the war began, Harden explains, Nichols was invaluable. He created the South Korean Air Force, and he knew when and where America and South Korea could inflict maximum damage in bombing the North. To this day, Nichols’s actions lie at the heart of Kim Jong-un’s argument to the North Korean people about why they should hate America. It’s Nichols’s legacy that Donald Trump’s rhetoric plays directly into.

Nichols was a real life Col. Kurtz, the barbaric officer portrayed by Marlon Brando in the movie Apocalypse Now. And, as Harden tells the story, in 1957, the US military came for him, put him in a straitjacket and took him to a military psych ward where he received massive amounts of electroshock treatment. They turned him into a “non-person.”

To this day, Harden argues, there is no clear reason as to why, and no idea how high up the orders to nullify him came from.

Blaine Harden is the author of King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea (Viking, October 3, 2017).

[kidlast]

I swear there is a character in the movie the prophecy based on this dude im probably wrong but it was one of the few parts of the movie i actually liked and i never forgot it
colonel arthur hawthorne was the name