On a clear morning in late September 1953, seven weeks after the Korean War armistice, crews at the U.S.-run Kimpo Air Base near Seoul were astonished to see an unannounced warplane roaring in from the north. The jet was coming
the wrong way on the takeoff patterns. Its wings were rocking and lights
flashing. The North Korean pilot at the controls, Lt. No Kum-Sok, was trying to
signal that he was not attacking. He was defecting. About 15 minutes
earlier, the 21-year-old airman had banked away from a North Korean patrol. The
demilitarized zone, separating the Korean Peninsula, was on the horizon. He
pushed his Soviet-made MiG-15 to its limits, climbing to 23,000 feet over the
no man’s land of the DMZ and then barreling down into South Korea at more than
600 mph. In a stroke of luck, the U.S. radar system was down for maintenance. When he touched
down at Kimpo, his snub-nosed MiG nearly collided with an F-86 Sabre that had
just landed at the other end of the runway. So began his new
life in the whirlwind of Cold War politics and propaganda. His plane was a
major military coup, handing the Americans the first intact model of the latest
MiG-15bis that was a main adversary of the F-86s in the 1950-1953 Korean War.
The pilot later
moved to the United States - with the media on hand for front-page coverage of
his arrival - changed his name to Kenneth Hill Rowe and caused ripples through
President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration over whether to pay a $100,000
bounty promised to any defector who came across with a MiG. He eventually
received it after the president relented.
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