Review | A ‘one-man war machine’: America’s spymaster in Korea and his reign of sabotage, torture and murder revealed in new book

King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea
by Blaine Harden
Viking

Donald Nichols was an unusually talented and highly decorated spy who oversaw a vast organisation of espionage and sabotage on the Korean Peninsula. He is the tragic hero of King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea, the latest of three acclaimed books on the divided land by Blaine Harden, a former Washington Post bureau chief for East Asia.

Nichols, Harden writes, was a “supersized American version” of T.E. Lawrence, “the diminutive British military officer” famously known as Lawrence of Arabia. And yet the tall and burly “Nichols of Korea” is virtually unknown in the US and Harden explains why in his masterful 260-page work of narrative history, which is based on newly declassified docu­ments, private letters, interviews with former intelli­gence officers, and papers of South Korea’s founding president, Syngman Rhee.

A child of the Great Depression, Nichols came from a broken home, growing up poor in New Jersey, and had no high-school or college education. During the second world war, he worked in a US Army motor pool and a makeshift morgue in the port city of Karachi, in what was then British India. By day, he repaired trucks bound for Burma; by night he embalmed GIs claimed by tropical diseases.