num_pages: 272
description: From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14 the shocking gripping account of the most powerful American spy youve never heard of whose role at the center of the Korean Warwhich gave rise to the North Korean regimeis essential to understanding the most intractable foreign policy conflict of our time.In 1946 master sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training he was sent to Korea then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most U.S. spiesNichols was a 7th grade dropouthe quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of Americas chosen puppet in South Korea President Syngman Rhee and became a pivotal player in the Korean War warning months in advance about the North Korean invasion breaking enemy codes and identifying most of the targets destroyed by American bombs in North Korea. But Nichols's triumphs had a dark side. Immersed in a world of torture and beheadings he became a spymaster with his own secret base his own covert army and his own rules. He recruited agents from refugee camps and prisons sending many to their deaths on reckless missions. His closeness to Rhee meant that he witnessedand did nothing to stop or even reportthe slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges. Nicholss clandestine reign lasted for an astounding eleven years. In this riveting book Blaine Harden traces Nichols's unlikely rise and tragic ruin from his birth in an operatically dysfunctional family in New Jersey to his sordid postwar decline which began when the U.S. military sacked him in Korea sent him to an air force psych ward in Florida and subjected himagainst his willto months of electroshock therapy. But King of Spies is not just the story of one American spy: with napalmed villages and severed heads high-level lies and long-running cover-ups it reminds us that the darkest sins of the Vietnam Warand many other conflicts that followedwere first committed in Korea.
language: English
title: King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spymaster in Korea
publisher: Viking