Air Force fatigues and escorted to lunch at the officers’ mess, where he found the food to be inedible—bland and greasy. He could not help but compare it with the gourmet meals he had enjoyed in with the honchos in Manchuria, where MiG pilots were based. The American pilots, though, were wolfing it down. At the officers’ mess, No could not even find water to drink, just tasteless powdered milk and coffee that was much too bitter to drink. American military food shocked his system; it took about a week before he could eat enough of it to make a dent in his hunger

After lunch, the intelligence officers arrived from Tokyo, and No’s interrogation began in a conference room at Nichols’s compound. Most of his questioners were college-educatedJapanese Americans. Only one, a Korean American, spoke Korean. So the interrogation was conducted mostly in Japanese, which No still spoke fluently. The men asking questions were not like North Korean military officers or any Asians he had met. They were informal, plainspoken, compassionate and direct.

For all their friendliness, his interrogators were relentless. Over two days, they grilled No about his personal life, the circumstances of his escape, the placement of North Korean air force units, the leadership and command structure of the air force, the location of airfields in North Korea and Manchuria, and on and on.

Nichols personally wrote the report on No’s initial interrogation. The 55-page document was a rush job: finished in three days, stamped “SECRET” and kept secret for 60 years. It is, however,