Blaine Harden is former East Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post and author of Escape From Camp 14. This article is excerpted from his new book, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom, published March 17, 2015, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

I t was September 21, 1953, just seven weeks after an armistice had ended the Korean War. Joseph Stalin was dead, and the Soviet Union had finally stopped its secret support of the North Koreans in the conflict. President Dwight Eisenhower was desperate to hold together the fragile peace that had halted bloodshed in a deeply unpopular war. And North Korea, under its Great Leader Kim Il Sung, was warning that the Americans could not to be trusted and might attack at any time; in violation of the armistice, the country was smuggling in Soviet-made MiG fighter jets and beginning to fly them on reconnaissance missions.

That fall morning, North Korean fighter pilot No Kum Sok seized his chance to fly away. For years, he had pretended to be a “No. 1 Communist,” but, in truth, he loathed the Great Leader and wanted to live in the United States. At an airfield near Pyongyang, he climbed into the cockpit of a MiG-15. He knew the fighter well, having flown more than 100 missions in one against American Sabre jets during the war. He also knew exactly where to find Kimpo, an American air base near Seoul in South Korea. He knew, too, how much fuel he would need for his 600-mile-an-hour escape in the gas-guzzling fighter.


He did not know about “Operation Moolah”: a standing offer from the U.S. Air Force of $100,000 (about $900,000 today) to any Russian, Chinese or North Korean pilot with the moxie to swipe a battle-ready Soviet MiG and deliver it intact to the Americans. The offer was made before the armistice by General Mark W. Clark, commander of U.S. forces in the Far East. Clark thought it would vex the enemy and sow suspicion among Communist commanders.

Instead, it vexed Eisenhower, who hated the notion of paying off a Commie thief. He and his administration secretly tried to renege on paying the reward, according to White House letters and memos. Along the way, No Kum Sok would become entangled in a web of Washington intrigue, as eager aides tried to make the president happy by keeping cash out of the hands of a defector who had risked everything for freedom—not for Moolah.

***

The Americans had been caught with their pants down and eyes closed.

Just as No took off that morning from North Korea, the radar at Kimpo was turned off for maintenance. The Americans made no attempt to escort No’s MiG, intercept it or shoot it down. Even the few American pilots in the flight pattern over Kimpo who caught sight of the distinctively snub-nosed, swept-wing interloper as it descended from the north did not recognize it as an enemy aircraft. None of them altered flight plans or alerted flight control. They did not realize what was in their midst until after No had landed and Captain Dave Williams howled over the radio about a goddamn wrong-way MiG.

Inside the headquarters of the Fifth Air Force, a medical officer poked and prodded No for 15 minutes, sampling his blood and impressing him by using a brand-new needle to do the job. No was then escorted to the commander’s office for an amiably empty encounter with Lieutenant General Samuel E. Anderson, who did not speak Korean and had no interpreter. After exchanging hellos, the general sat behind his desk while the pilot sat stiffly on a wooden chair. For half an hour, they wordlessly eyed each other as Anderson’s aides made an urgent call to Tokyo for interrogators and translators. Within an hour, 10 of them were on a plane bound for Kimpo. Back in the general’s office, the silence was finally shattered when Major Donald Nichols, head of intelligence for the Fifth Air Force, burst into the room and introduced himself to No, using his pretty good Korean.

Nichols, then 30, drank too much, never wore a proper uniform and was overweight. He was also the most effective American intelligence operative of the Korean War era. And Russian warplanes were one of his passions. They flew in Nichols’s helicopter to the compound of the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron on the western edge of Seoul. There, Nichols ran the show. Like Santa Claus, he handed out hundred-pound bags of rice on paydays.

When they entered his office, a pack of mixed-breed dogs (No counted 10, including several huskies) got up and wagged their tails. The questioning could not officially begin until the interrogation team arrived from Tokyo. So they waited in Nichols’s office, where No petted the dogs and Nichols kept being called away for meetings. Nichols’s Korean assistant served No an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola, a beverage he had never heard of. He loved it at first taste. Years later, he would buy stock in Coca- Cola.

Drinking his Coke, No heard, for the first time, about his $100,000. The major’s assistant mentioned that the U.S. government, in return for delivery of the MiG, would soon give No enough money to buy 33 brand-new American cars. No understood that this was an impressive sum of money, but he did not understand why the Americans would want to compensate him for an aircraft that happened to be his ticket to freedom. The Korean assistant did not explain. Like everyone else whom No would meet in the hours and days ahead, he assumed that the North Korean pilot had been lured to South Korea by Operation Moolah.

Later in the morning, as the wait continued for the interrogators from Tokyo, Nichols sat down with No and informally questioned him. During their conversation, which was not recorded, the major casually declared, “You are a rich man now.”

Nichols did not elaborate, also assuming that No had come for the money and knew the particulars of Operation Moolah. No was deeply confused by this talk of his being a rich man. He did not know what to say.

Penguin Random House.

As No continued waiting for his interrogators, Air Force photographers insisted that he pose for propaganda photographs. For some pictures, he put on his Snoopy-style helmet, bulbous black oxygen mask, leather gloves and parachute. For others, he gazed soulfully into the middle distance with his leather flight jacket partly unzipped. For still others, he was photographed from behind as he looked over his MiG.

No looked like a defector from central casting. He was lean and handsome, with high cheekbones and a full head of thick black hair. He was 21 but looked younger.

After the photographers finished, No’s flight suit was confiscated. He was issued Air Force fatigues and escorted to lunch at the officers’ mess, where he found the food to be inedible—bland and greasy. He could not help but compare it with the gourmet meals he had enjoyed in with the honchos in Manchuria, where MiG pilots were based. The American pilots, though, were wolfing it down. At the officers’ mess, No could not even find water to drink, just tasteless powdered milk and coffee that was much too bitter to drink. American military food shocked his system; it took about a week before he could eat enough of it to make a dent in his hunger

After lunch, the intelligence officers arrived from Tokyo, and No’s interrogation began in a conference room at Nichols’s compound. Most of his questioners were college-educated Japanese Americans. Only one, a Korean American, spoke Korean. So the interrogation was conducted mostly in Japanese, which No still spoke fluently. The men asking questions were not like North Korean military officers or any Asians he had met. They were informal, plainspoken, compassionate and direct.

For all their friendliness, his interrogators were relentless. Over two days, they grilled No about his personal life, the circumstances of his escape, the placement of North Korean air force units, the leadership and command structure of the air force, the location of airfields in North Korea and Manchuria, and on and on.

Nichols personally wrote the report on No’s initial interrogation. The 55-page document was a rush job: finished in three days, stamped “SECRET” and kept secret for 60 years. It is, however, a remarkably thorough account of the equipment, leadership, training and strategies of North Korean and Soviet air operations in Manchuria and North Korea during the war. As judged by his interrogators, No was a lucid, precise and cooperative source. “He was able to recall,” the report says, “air units, personnel strength, structure, and number of aircraft assigned to respective units.”

As No tired, his interrogators gave him American cigarettes, which they said would help him think. No was impressed by the cigarettes, which were not rotten like the Chinese and Russian brands he had become addicted to. Before his first round of interrogation ended, a transcript shows that No was asked about the American offer of cash for his MiG. The interrogator seemed surprised by No’s ignorance.

Question: “Did you know that the U.N. has offered a reward for MiG pilots escaping to U.N. airfields with their MiGs?”

Answer: “I have never heard about it.”

Question: “Didn’t you read the leaflets we dropped regarding the reward?”

Answer: “No, I have never seen them.”

In his report on the interrogation, Nichols seemed dubious that No had never heard about the reward.

“Refugee stated, apparently in all sincerity, that all North Korean pilots had been prohibited from tuning in on South Korea radio broadcasts,” Nichols wrote. “He also declared emphatically that he had never seen any propaganda leaflet guaranteeing him any monetary compensation for a delivery intact of a MiG into U.N. hands. Therefore, refugee was ignorant, ostensibly, of the standing monetary offer made by the U.S.”

When the interrogation ended at two in the morning, Nichols’s assistant escorted No to a small apartment where a futon had been placed on the floor for him. Bleary-eyed but jubilant, No lay down and reviewed all that he had accomplished in one day: flying clear of Kim Il Sung, escaping a dead-end future in North Korea and finding safety in the West. As an unexpected bonus, the Americans had been kind to him, even complimentary. One interrogator told him that someday he could become president of South Korea.

The Americans, though, had pestered him about reward money—what he knew and when he knew it—and they did not seem to believe his answers. It was irritating and confusing.

When No awoke at 7 a.m., a morning newspaper had been placed next to his futon. He read a story about himself on the front page. In describing his escape, it explained what his interrogators had assumed he already knew: For nearly half a year, the Americans had been dangling dollars as bait for a MiG pilot to land at Kimpo—and a North Korean named No Kum Sok was the first to bite.

No deeply resented the implication that he was more interested in money than in freedom. But at least now he could make sense of his interrogators’ questions. In No’s view, Operation Moolah had never tempted a single North Korean, Chinese or Soviet pilot. To start with, the Americans had dropped their leaflets in the wrong place. They should have dropped them in Manchuria. Even if pilots had read the leaflets or heard the radio broadcasts, No believed, they would never have trusted the Americans enough to risk being shot down.

Finally, he knew that Communist pilots did not understand how much $100,000 was worth. The reward would have been much more tempting, he thought, if the Americans had promised a good job in America.

No also realized that it did not matter what he thought. His life—and his befuddling future as “Moolah Man”—was now in the hands of the U.S. government.

***

Thirteen time zones away from No and the MiG, the president of the United States was ticked off by Operation Moolah and its vulgar financial inducements.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had run for president in 1952 in part on the promise to end the Korean War. He did not want the fighter jet and worried that its theft might undermine the fragile armistice. He believed the Russian-made aircraft should be returned to its rightful owner as soon as possible, and to discourage other pilots from coming in from the cold, he wanted to cancel Operation Moolah. He also wanted to make sure that the North Korean pilot, whose name Eisenhower had yet to learn, would not blow the $100,000 on booze and broads. Better yet, he wanted to find a way to pressure the pilot to turn down the moolah altogether.

Eisenhower never made these views public. But they echoed long and loud in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, where subordinates spent the next year trying to thread a needle: keeping the president happy while keeping reporters from learning that Ike, the outwardly genial general, wanted to pay out the reward money very slowly or not at all.

Eisenhower had flown out of Washington early on Monday morning, September 21, before reports about the MiG and the defector reached the White House. While he was giving speeches that day in Massachusetts, his national security team met and decided that even though the Korean War had ended, the United States must honor the commitment made in Operation Moolah. They authorized the Air Force to announce in Washington that afternoon that the reward would be paid. Air Force headquarters also sent a message to its Far East Command saying that Operation Moolah remained in effect and cash rewards for additional MiGs would be paid in the future.

Eisenhower hurriedly approved his security team’s decision during a busy day of glad-handing in New England, but that night in Boston he had second thoughts.

“I am sorry that I was not in Washington today to discuss the MiG incident with the entire staff,” he dictated in a personal and confidential four-page letter to his longtime adviser and confidant, Walter Bedell Smith. Smith, who had served Ike during World War II, was then undersecretary of state and had participated in the meeting with the president’s national security advisers at which No’s reward was authorized.

“I realize that the recommendations sent to me had the unanimous support of my shrewdest and most knowledgeable advisers on such matters; however, I must confess I was not convinced,” Eisenhower wrote.

What upset him was “the ethics of the case.” He fretted in his letter that keeping the MiG, paying the reward and continuing to promise cash for MiGs would violate terms of the truce that ended the fighting. He also viewed the payment of bribes for aircraft as a tired old warfare trick that was beneath the dignity of the United States—and not likely to lure in any more MiGs.

“If we are to win the propaganda war—and I think it most important that we do—we have to be alert for every opportunity to produce unusual results,” he wrote. “The normal and the routine are not good enough, and I do not for a moment believe the defection of this one North Korean will encourage any others to come in.”

During World War II, when he was supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower had had personal experience with defectors absconding in airplanes. His command gave the French several American-made P-40 ground-attack aircraft, and two French pilots flew them to German-occupied France. In his letter to Smith, Eisenhower mentioned the irksome matter of the P-40s, noting that “these incidents are so scattered and so infrequent as to have little significance.”

The president wrote that if MiGs “start coming in to us by the hundreds, I will eat crow, but knowing the Communists I would gamble that there will be little if any more of this. Their methods of punishing people through torturing families are too well known and too effective to give rise to any great hope that we are going to wreck the Communist Air Force in this fashion.”

Eisenhower, who came from a poor Kansas farm family and had always lived on his military salary, was not pleased to authorize a large payment of taxpayer money for property stolen from a foreign government. Still, he reluctantly agreed in the letter he wrote from Boston “that we had to pay the $100,000 in this case.”

Keeping the MiG was another matter. “We are not anxious to have this one,” Eisenhower wrote. “And certainly I cannot see why we want any more of them.” He also suggested that Operation Moolah be “withdrawn” and that the “Communists [be notified] that we had no interest in the MiG plane, and if they wanted to send a pilot down and take it back, that would be all right with us.”

The advantages of these actions, he wrote, would be that the United States could “stand before the world as very honorable people, maintaining that while we had not been guilty of real violation of the armistice, we were anxious to avoid any implication of violating its spirit. …. If we get accused of violating the spirit of the Armistice, and this argument makes any headway with neutrals and even some of our friends, I think we will experience a defeat in this so-called psychological warfare.”

The president closed by telling Smith, “This note is for no official action whatsoever. I am merely trying to put my personal thoughts before you.”

That no-action proviso would be ignored in the coming days and months. The president had put his druthers down on paper, and the president’s men were eager to please.

On No’s second morning in South Korea, the U.S. Far East Command had not yet been apprised of Eisenhower’s views. This was largely a function of time zones. When the president dictated his letter on Monday night in Boston, it was already Tuesday morning in Korea.

Having heard nothing to the contrary from Washington, Air Force officers in Seoul were of the opinion that the stolen MiG and its pilot constituted a great victory in America’s propaganda war against Communism. They decided to put No on immediate public display—at a press conference in Seoul.

But before they showed him off to reporters, they decided he needed some coaching. On one especially touchy subject, they coached him to lie. A well-dressed American in civilian clothes (whose name No never heard) asked if he had ever seen American fighter jets in Chinese airspace. Of course, No replied, he had seen many American Sabres shoot down MiGs on takeoff and landing from Manchurian airfields. The well-dressed man said that if a reporter asked about these incursions in Manchuria, No must say he had seen nothing.

***

Lies were nothing new to No Kum Sok. Had he not been an experienced and convincing liar, he would never have been in a position to steal a MiG. Moreover, the Korean War, as he witnessed it unfold, was made of lies. The Soviet Union lied about its pilots fighting over MiG Alley. Kim Il Sung lied about who started the war and then lied about who won it. If anyone dared tell the truth about how catastrophically Kim managed the war, he was imprisoned or killed.

So when the Americans at Kimpo instructed him to lie about the Sabres he had seen in Manchuria, No understood what they wanted. In any case, he felt he had no choice.

Just before he left the American intelligence compound to travel to the press conference in central Seoul, No had another talk with Major Nichols. The spymaster told him to get out of South Korea and settle in the United States. Learn English, go to college and become somebody, Nichols said.

Ever since he was a boy studying his father’s picture books about America, No had wanted to do as Nichols advised. During his first day of interrogation, he had been unable to think of a way to ask how or if he could travel to the United States. Now, with a green light from the intelligence chief, he decided to insist at every opportunity on going to America.

No had never witnessed a Western-style press conference, yet he was not particularly worried about what it would be like to star in one. He assumed it would be an orderly affair: a handful of friendly newsmen chatting with him in an office, as he had done with Air Force interrogators. But as he sat between two security guards in the backseat of a light blue Chevrolet sedan, with sirens blaring and lights flashing while his motorcade pushed through crowds in the war-shattered streets of Seoul, he began to get nervous.

Although the Korean War had ended, news from Korea—about freed prisoners of war, truce violations and unearthed bodies from secret mass killings—continued to dominate foreign news dispatches in American and European newspapers. A large American and international press contingent remained in Seoul. For these reporters, the defection of a Communist MiG pilot was the juiciest story in weeks. It had military, diplomatic and strategic implications—and a wonderful human-interest core. More than 200 journalists wanted to photograph the North Korean and find out why he had swiped a MiG. They packed the press conference, which was held in a building where many correspondents lived. When No was ushered into the room by a large African-American Air Force sergeant holding a submachine gun, row upon row of television lights stunned him. Wearing U.S. Air Force fatigues, a peaked fatigue cap that was several sizes too small and North Korean underwear, he stood at a table loaded with microphones. He spoke slowly through an interpreter, choosing his words carefully and struggling to contain his fear.

For an hour and a half, he answered questions and made global news. He was the first defector since the end of the war and the first eyewitness to explain publicly that Soviet pilots had trained North Koreans like himself to fly MiGs. He described how legions of Soviet pilots had participated in air-to-air jet combat against Americans throughout the Korean War. He also explained, again as the first eyewitness to speak to the Western press, that North Korea was currently bringing in warplanes from Manchuria in violation of the armistice.

Asked if North Korean leaders believed war would start again, No replied, “Yes, they do, and they are preparing for it.” He also said Kim Il Sung’s government continued to tell his people that the Korean War was not over “in order to keep them working hard.”

But what “startled reporters” most at the press conference, according to a United Press dispatch, was No’s statement that he had heard nothing about Operation Moolah. While he said that he was “very glad” to learn about the reward money, he found it impossible to say how he planned to spend it.

“After a pause and alternately grinning and wetting his dry lips, casting his eyes downward at his shifting feet, he said, ‘I don’t know,’” the New York Times reported.

As instructed by his American handlers, No did lie.

In 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 did not 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 subjected to an “exhaustive technical study” at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The Air Force told No, just before he boarded a military plane at Kimpo, that he was headed for Tokyo for more interrogation.

Neither statement was true. On September 23, the MiG and its pilot were transported separately and secretly to Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, the American-controlled Japanese island about a thousand miles south of Tokyo.

Also in secret, the Air Force urgently located and immediately dispatched two of America’s best pilots to Okinawa to learn everything possible about the MiG before having to return it. Major Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier and the legendary test pilot who would become the hero of The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe’s book and the Oscar-winning movie), was called away from Edwards Air Force Base in California. Captain Tom Collins, a test pilot who had just set a new world speed record in a Sabre, was plucked from Wright-Patterson, along with his boss, Major General Albert Boyd, also a test pilot.

All of this had been set in motion by the reactions and overreactions of advisers scrambling to please Eisenhower. It would have been easier, safer and far cheaper to transport the MiG back to the Air Technical Intel Center in Ohio. But Ike wanted to return the MiG to its rightful owner in a timely fashion, so the Pentagon opted for field-testing during the rainy season on a semitropical island whose only advantage was a location 6,000 miles closer to North Korea than Dayton, Ohio.

No went to Okinawa (rather than Tokyo, where his interrogators were based) to be available, when needed, to help Yeager and Collins understand how to fly a MiG.

Back in Washington, Walter Bedell Smith seemed stung by the president’s criticism of his initial decision in “the matter of the MiG.” In a memorandum for the president, Smith tried to explain his thinking and then proposed a face-saving way for the administration to get out of paying No.

“So that you will not think too ill of my judgment,” Smith wrote, “I was consulted and expressed an opinion only in the matter of the payment of the $100,000, which, as you know, I felt should be paid, as the good faith of the United States was involved.”

Having said that, Smith explained that he would “try to arrange to have the pilot reject the $100,000 on the basis that his action was because of his own convictions and not for money.” To keep the pilot from grumbling, Smith said the government could make him a “ward” of the National Committee for a Free Asia, which was a Washington-based foundation secretly funded by the CIA. Smith said the committee “will give him the technical education he wishes and provide for his future to the extent of the reward which he would otherwise have received. … I feel that there is real propaganda value in this.”

This was precisely what Eisenhower wanted to hear. When he read Smith’s memo, Eisenhower scribbled at the bottom, “Now we’re clicking.”

***

In November 1953, as a depressed and weary No began his second month of interrogations, in between stints helping Yeager and Collins test the MiG on Okinawa, Andy Brown, No’s Korean-speaking CIA handler, asked him to star in another press conference in Seoul, where he would tell reporters that he did not want the $100,000. Brown vaguely explained that there had been some bureaucratic complications in arranging payment. He promised that the government would take good care of No once he moved to the United States.

“This doesn’t mean you don’t get the money,” Brown said. “They will buy you a car and whatever you need.”

No felt powerless to object. He had been sworn in on Okinawa as a U.S. government employee and was being paid $300 a month, which to him seemed like a fortune. With shopping privileges at the base exchange in Kadena, he could buy more clothes, food and gadgets than he had ever imagined possible. He spent $250 on a fancy German-made Contax camera. He opened a savings account at the American Express office on the base. As for the reward money, No believed he was entitled to what the government had promised. But the Americans had taken charge of his life, and he felt they were taking good care of him.

Two days after No landed the MiG at Kimpo, Eisenhower told his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to pay the reward “under some sort of trusteeship.” The Departments of State and Defense chewed over that order for 16 days. Then Dulles received a telephone call from Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, who was worried that the Eisenhower administration would be “in trouble” if it did not pay the reward.

Dulles replied that Eisenhower had become concerned about the embarrassing possibilities of giving so much money to a Red defector. The president, Dulles said, “hoped that it would be paid in some kind of trust so that it would not be blown on ‘wine, women and song.’”

Wilson feared something much worse: bad media coverage.

“The press has displayed continued interest in the payment of the reward,” he told Dulles. “Once secrecy is removed [about No’s whereabouts on Okinawa] it will not be practical or desirable to keep him from the press. … [Reporters] might point out that his mother is a poor refugee. … [The money] must be paid on a basis that can stand inspection by the press.”

Dulles conceded the point. The two cabinet secretaries agreed that they would come up with “some kind of a thing that can be completely disclosed to the press.” By the time it reached No in Okinawa, that “thing” was Andy Brown’s request that No tell the world he did not want the money.

After No agreed to do exactly that, he heard nothing for several weeks. Brown finished his temporary assignment as No’s handler and returned to his CIA office in Tokyo. In his absence, a revolving cast of U.S. government employees, civilian and military, American-born and foreign nationals, took turns teaching No how to think, speak and eat like an American. He learned how to drive a jeep, write a personal check and shop in a supermarket. He dined regularly at the homes of American families on the island. His stomach was trained to tolerate hot dogs and other American delicacies. At his first Thanksgiving dinner, he worried about the turkey, expecting it to taste like a tough old eagle, but discovered he liked it.

For several weeks, No worried about the press conference at which he was supposed to reject the money. Brown then returned to Okinawa and told No that the generals in Tokyo had changed their minds, deciding that the U.S. government would look cheap if the press reported that No had been pressured to give up the $100,000.

Brown, though, did not clarify how—or if—the reward would be paid. About a week later, No received a surprise crash course in money management, courtesy of the State Department, which dispatched a personal investment specialist from Foggy Bottom to Okinawa. The man, whose name No never caught, lectured No for several hours over three days. Through a translator, he told No that the reward was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he should not waste. The financial adviser did not mention Eisenhower or his concerns, but insisted that No be cautious in his investment decisions. Stocks, bonds and interest rates were, at the time, a complete mystery to No; he had no idea what the State Department man was talking about.

The headquarters of the Far East Command in Tokyo told the world on November 28, 1953, that No had been paid for Operation Moolah. A press release said he deposited his reward check in the American Express Bank on Okinawa. The military released a photograph of No standing at the bank’s counter in his blue suit, signing a deposit slip as an attractive young woman, identified as bank clerk Flora Swinford, looked on approvingly.

“Lieutenant No has requested that the U.S. Air Force assist him in establishing a trust fund with the reward money for his education in the United States and for the care of his mother who is still in Korea,” the release said.

No had made no such request. He did not know what a trust fund was. The Air Force had distributed the photograph and the press release in an attempt to stop reporters in Tokyo and Seoul—who still had no 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 around as 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 English,” the Associated Press reported. “He said he would spend part of his reward money to study political science at the University of Delaware, part to support his mother who escaped to South Korea in 1950 and the rest to help rebuild South Korea.”

But in San Francisco, No did not actually say the words reporters and the newsreel attributed to him. When he landed in the United States, he did not know how, when or if he would get the reward money or what he would do with it. At the press conference in San Francisco, it was his official escort and translator, the army captain James Kim, who explained No’s supposed plans. Without No’s knowledge or approval, Kim answered reporters’ questions in ways that suited the public relations interests of the Eisenhower administration. No never intended to move back to South Korea or send money to help rebuild that country, and he never told the press that he would do so.

***

A week after coming to the United States—more than eight months after he stole the MiG—No finally learned what the Eisenhower administration was going to do with his moolah.

A bank vice president laid it out for him in the main office of Riggs National Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. At the time, Riggs was the leading bank in the nation’s capital. Eisenhower banked there, as did Vice President Richard Nixon, more than 20 previous presidents and most of the city’s embassies and diplomats. Riggs later marketed itself as “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.” Its luster was eventually lost to scandals, mismanagement and CIA-managed ties to unsavory governments, including that of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Riggs disappeared in 2005 after a bank merger.

If No would sign the papers on the table in front of him, the banker said, then $100,000, tax-free, would be deposited in his name. There were a number of conditions. The money would go into a trust, and No would not have access to the principal, because the government worried he might spend it too fast and too frivolously. He would receive a onetime payment of $5,000 to help get him started in a new life, cover his housing and pay school fees at the Newark campus of the University of Delaware. He would receive a monthly stipend of $250. The trust fund and its restrictions would remain in place for five years, with automatic renewal every five years unless No revoked it.

No still did not understand what a trust fund was. As he listened to the banker, he concluded that the Americans were trying to chisel him. Confused, suspicious and seething, he refused to sign, walked out of the world’s most important bank and went back to his hotel room.

No had gone to Riggs with a three-man entourage, including Captain Kim, the Army escort and translator who had been with No since they left Okinawa. No had become friends with Kim, a gregarious Korean American who grew up in Los Angeles. But No was not aware that the Army captain had, during press conferences in San Francisco and again in Washington, put words in his mouth. In the Washington office of the U.S. Information Agency, where reporters were summoned when No arrived in the capital, Kim told reporters that No had “asked for a lawyer to the MiG.” No denies this. Kim also told the press that whatever money remained after No had paid for his college education and provided for his mother “would go to the Korean people,” which was not No’s intention.

After arriving in Washington but before the meeting at Riggs National Bank, Kim had taken No up to Capitol Hill, where he met Vice President Nixon (No found him friendly), was formally introduced at a House session and had a brief meeting with Speaker Joseph Martin, a Republican. He did not talk to Eisenhower that day or ever. For all his micromanaging of No’s reward money or perhaps because of it, the president never asked to meet with No.

On the day of his unhappy encounter at Riggs National Bank, No went back to his hotel to brood about whether the U.S. government was trying to cheat him. He was free to grumble and complain. But he had very few, if any, options, other than to do what he was told. Cut off from his mother in South Korea, he had no one to give him independent counsel. His friends, such as they were, were military officers and CIA agents. They were pleasant enough, but their loyalties were not to him. The only person No could talk to was Captain Kim, and Kim followed the government script.

After two days, No was persuaded that the trust fund was not a trick, and he walked back to the bank. Kim came along, as did the lawyer hired by the CIA and the CIA agent with the check. No signed the papers. In the fall of 1954, after he began classes at the University of Delaware, reporters continued to ask about the reward money and suggested in news stories that it had not been paid, which irritated the CIA. Agents told No to make it clear to newsmen that he had the money and he was happy about how it had all turned out. The Associated Press, the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post all reported—without qualification—that No was richer by $100,000.