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

Blaine Harden’s book King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea narrates the story of Donald Nichols, an ‘American T.E. Lawrence’; implicated in torture and murder, he died in ignominy in a psychiatric hospital

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US Air Force planes bomb North Korea in January 1951. Donald Nichols is credited with providing the air force more bombing targets than anyone else during the Korean war. Picture: AP

Published: 6:16pm, 18 Oct 2017Updated: 6:15pm, 18 Oct 2017

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

His United States Air Force rank was a secret and the men he commanded knew him only as “a big shot”. One of the founding fathers of America’s covert cold war operations, he is credited with finding more bombing targets than anyone else during the Korean war of 1950 to 1953. Had he been alive today, US President Donald Trump would probably have sent him to take out “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un.

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.