Tyrant and truant

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. By Blaine Harden. Viking; 290 pages; $27.95. Pan Macmillan; £16.99.

THE vain feats of Kim Il Sung, the Korean guerrilla leader who fought the Japanese occupiers from Manchuria, were irresistible to the destitute North Koreans who, by the 1940s, had suffered nearly four decades of brutal colonisation. They did not know the truth: that Kim lost his war, fled east and later slinked home in a Soviet uniform, kowtowing to Stalin until his death. Nor did they see that Kim’s monstrous regime, which would last another 41 years until he died in 1994, was built on fiction.

In 1945 No Kum Sok was one of those who thought that young Kim, the Soviet poodle, was a sham. In the boy’s hometown, Russian soldiers ransacked and raped, and his family fell on hard times. Mr No longed to escape to America. Posing as a false communist, spying and snitching to prove his fervour, he became the youngest pilot in the North Korean air force. In 1950 the Soviet-backed North invaded the South, prompting a UN-backed American-led force to step in. The Chinese, in turn, supported the North. Just after the conflict ended, Mr No flew a Soviet MiG-15 jet over the border and defected to the South.

Both men’s lives in the nascent North Korean state are deftly woven together by Blaine Harden, an American journalist, who has made good use of Mr No’s memoirs, as well as newly declassified air-force intelligence reports, presidential papers and Chinese and Soviet archives. The history of the war unfolds at the top, as Stalin, Mao and Kim (mostly “stewing in his irrelevance”) jockey, bicker and bootlick for influence. It is played out at the bottom through Mr No, who hears of the war at his naval academy in Chongjin, in the north-east, and goes to China to train as a pilot.

North Korea was deeply vulnerable from the skies. Three weeks into the war, almost all of its combat planes had been strafed; America described its early air-force campaign as “leisurely”. Its bombers destroyed more than four-fifths of the North’s infrastructure. The destruction of Chongjin, which Mr No witnessed, was a “steady, systematic and unhurried chore”. Within two months the B-29 bombers said they were running out of targets.

If China fought America to a bloody stalemate on the ground, in the air the Soviet Union’s best pilots fought its air force to a draw. By late 1951 about 2,500 MiGs prowled the skies above a section of the Sino-Korean border, known as “MiG Alley”. Stalin wanted his meddling kept quiet, so Soviet pilots flew without identification papers, in Chinese flight uniforms aboard jets with Chinese markings. America was not fooled, but it chose to ignore the charade—a move, Mr Harden says, that may have kept “the cold war cool”.

America, too, engaged in deceit. Mr No says he saw American pilots cross into Manchuria, in violation of the rules of combat, to attack enemy planes, including those of his colleagues, as they landed (the air force would try to cover this up for decades). They also dumped over 32,000 tonnes of napalm on the North, nearly twice as much as fell on Japan in 1945. Enemy soldiers lived on rice, so the Americans blew up dams to flood the paddy fields.

How Mr No witnessed the savagery and still clung to his admiration for America is not quite spelt out. But Mr Harden does make clear that Mr No’s flight was for freedom and not for the American cash that awaited him under the terms of Operation Moolah—a bribe of $100,000 (about $900,000 today) set up in 1953 for the first pilot to defect in a MiG. An American general called Mr No’s defection the country’s most “spectacular” piece of psychological warfare against the communists; Mr No had never heard of the reward.

The destruction of the North prompted much guilt across the socialist world, which Kim was quick to prey on. In 1954 China spent more than 3% of its budget helping the North. The devastation became Kim’s most potent propaganda. He found in it the trope that would continue to justify his people’s suffering for decades to come: that foreign powers—chiefly America—had always been to blame.