About this item
From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14, the shocking, gripping account of the most powerful American spy you've never heard of, whose role at the center of the Korean War - which gave rise to the North Korean regime - is 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. spies - Nichols was a 7th grade dropout - he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of America's 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 witnessed - and did nothing to stop or even report - the slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges. Nichols's 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 him - against his will - to 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 War - and many other conflicts that followed - were first committed in Korea.
About the Author
Blaine Harden is an author and journalist whose most recent book is Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies and the Taking of the American West. The LA Times calls it "terrifically readable." The book exposes one of the most persistent "alternative facts" in American history: the story of a lying missionary, a traumatized tribe, a mass killing, and a myth that shaped the West.Blaine contributes to the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, PBS Frontline and The Economist. A longtime foreign correspondent, he worked for The Washington Post in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a roving national reporter for The New York Times and writer for the Times Magazine.Previous books include:King of Spies. It's the untold story of U.S. Air Force Major Donald Nichols, an intelligence agent who operated in Korea for 11 secret years with his own army of spies, his own base, and his own murderous rules. The book sheds new light on the U.S. role in the Korean War. More importantly, it explains - at a time when North Korea is threatening the U.S. with long-range nuclear missiles - the origins of an intractable foreign policy mess.The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot was chosen by Amazon as one of the best books of 2015. It won a 2016 citation from the Overseas Press Club of America for non-fiction books on international affairs. The book tells the story of how North Korea's Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force played a high-risk game of deception. After years of planning, the fighter pilot fled North Korea in a MiG-15, Russia's hottest fighter jet, and made a life in the United States.Escape From Camp 14 was a New York Times and international bestseller that has been translated into 28 languages. It's the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born and raised in a North Korean prison camp to escape to the West. Escape from Camp 14 won the 2012 Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique, a French literary award, was a nonfiction finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was featured on 60 Minutes.A River Lost. It's about well-intentioned Americans (including the author's father) who dammed and degraded the West's greatest river, the Columbia. The New York Times called it a "hard-nosed, tough-minded, clear-eyed dispatch on the sort of contentious subject that is almost always distorted by ideology or obscured by a fog of sentiment." An updated and revised edition of A River Lost was published in 2012 to coincide with a PBS American Experience program about Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River.Blaine's first book, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, was described by The Independent (London) as the "best contemporary book on Africa."Blaine lives in Seattle with his wife Jessica and their two children, Lu
