secretly tried to renege on paying the reward, according to White House letters and memos. Along the way, No Kum Sok would become entangled in a web of Washington intrigue, as eager aides tried to make the president happy by keeping cash out of the hands of a defector who had risked everything for freedom—not for Moolah.

***

The Americans had been caught with their pants down and eyes closed.

Just as No took off that morning from North Korea, the radar at Kimpo was turned off for maintenance. The Americans made no attempt to escort No’s MiG, intercept it or shoot it down. Even the few American pilots in the flight pattern over Kimpo who caught sight of the distinctively snub-nosed, swept-wing interloper as it descended from the north dideyed each other as Anderson’s aides made an urgent call to Tokyo for interrogators and translators. Within an hour, 10 of them were on a plane bound for Kimpo. Back in the general’s office, the silence was finally shattered when Major Donald Nichols, head of intelligence for the Fifth Air Force, burst into the room and introduced himself to No, using his pretty good Korean.

Nichols, then 30, drank too much, never wore a proper uniform and was overweight. He was also the most effective American intelligence operative of the Korean War era. And Russian warplanes were one of his passions. They flew in Nichols’s helicopter to the compound of the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron on the western edge of Seoul. There, Nichols ran the show. Like Santa