Researching Donald Nichols

An extraordinary element of Nichols's 11-year tenure as a spy in South Korea (from 1946 to 1957), was his close personal relationship with South Korean President Syngman Rhee. Nichols was just 23 when he met the 71-year-old Rhee, but the inexperienced American spy (a 7th grade dropout) and the worldly Korean politician (a master's degree from Harvard, a doctorate from Princeton) found each other useful. Rhee used Nichols to transmit intelligence leaks to senior U.S. commanders, which helped speed Rhee's rise to power in South Korea, and Nichols boasted to his superiors that in Rhee he had cultivated a uniquely powerful and well-informed source in Seoul.

There was a dark side, though, to Nichols's long run as a spy commander in Korea, as well as to his postwar life in Florida, where he repeatedly committed sexual crimes involving young boys. His friendship with Rhee and his collaboration with the South Korean security apparatus immersed Nichols in a brutal world of anticommunist purges, where he witnessed torture, beheadings, and the mass shootings of thousands of South Korean who were perceived as enemies of Rhee's government. Nichols did not report these atrocities to his superiors, and his senior intelligence clerk, Sergeant Serbando Torres, later said that "slaughtering all these people...didn't seem to bother him that much."

As the creator and commander of his own spy unit, Nichols had near-complete autonomy from the Air Force command structure. For many years, he reported only to Air Force General Earle E. Partridge, who was in charge of the air war in Korea. The lack of supervision gave Nichols freedom to indulge his sexual interest in young Korean airmen, who were periodically brought to him in the evenings at his spy base outside of Seoul. His spy command also gave Nichols unsupervised access to large amounts of cash, which he used to pay off agents and some of which he later brought back to the United States, where he kept tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his brother's freezer in Florida.

The intelligence career of Nichols came to a secretive and tragic end in 1957, when the Air Force suddenly relieved him of his command, removed him from Korea, and sent him to psychiatric wards at U.S. military hospitals, first in Tachikawa, Japan, and then at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. His military service record indicated no history of mental illness, and Air Force colleagues said he showed no such symptoms, but Air Force doctors quickly diagnosed Nichols as a "deteriorating schizophrenic." He was given large doses of Thorazine and then forced to undergo at least 14 rounds of electroshock. Nichols later told relatives "that the government wanted to erase his brain—because he knew too much."

Nichols was forced to retire from the military on a medical disability in 1962. 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. 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. He was inducted into the Air Commando Hall of Fame in 1995. Nichols wrote an autobiography, How Many Times Can I Die?, that is notable for exaggerating his achievements and omitting key elements in his life. A biography entitled King of Spies was published in 2017 by Blaine Harden, author of two earlier books about North Korea.