response to a question about American warplanes in Chinese airspace, north of the Yalu River, he said he had not seen any.

If he had told the truth, if he had detailed the extraordinary frequency and relative ease with which Sabres shot down MiGs over Manchuria in the last year of the war, his press conference would not have been a propaganda coup for the United States. Reporters would have written about American pilots ignoring United Nations rules and disobeying direct orders from Washington.

Instead, No’s performance was a propaganda home run. Reporters focused on North Korea’s smuggling of warplanes. “Reds Breaking Truce,” said a front-page headline in the New York Times. Nearly every story around the world focused on how shocking it was that the North Korean pilot didnot know—or claimed not to know—about the reward money.

No returned by motorcade to Nichols’s compound for another marathon interrogation. In the days, weeks and months to come, there would be hundreds of these sessions, and in all of them No impressed his interrogators, according to Air Force documents.

Before the questions ended on that second day, again at 2 a.m., No learned that he would be granted political asylum. If he wanted, he could live in the United States. He also learned that he would be leaving Korea in the morning.

The day after No defected, the Air Force announced in Seoul that his MiG had been dismantled and loaded on a cargo plane and was bound for the United States. The New York Times reported that it would be