access to No on Okinawa—from asking any more questions about why the government had not paid the money.

The check No deposited that day was given to him by his handler at the time, Lieutenant Reid Clark, a Mormon Sabre pilot who was working for the 6002nd Air Intelligence Service Group. The check, though, was a phony. After his trip to the bank, the balance in No’s account did not change. The Air Force never told him that his photo-op deposit was a sham.

By the late spring of 1954, No had spent half a year under interrogation. The Americans were running out of questions, and he was itching to go to the United States.

The Eisenhower administration, too, wanted him in the States, where it intended to parade him aroundas an anti-Communist hero. The Pentagon was negotiating an exclusive two-part, as-told-to story that would run in the Saturday Evening Post in October 1954 under the headline “I Flew My MiG to Freedom.” The CIA, meanwhile, had secured No’s admission in the fall as a freshman at the University of Delaware.

No arrived in San Francisco on May 4, 1954, where he held another press conference and Universal Pictures featured him in a newsreel that was shown in movie houses across the United States. In the newsreel, the narrator said that No would return to South Korea after a year of studying in the United States.

“Looking like an American Joe College in sports clothes and a pork- pie hat, he smiled broadly and spoke to newsmen in fairly good