The Soviet MiG-15 first appeared over Korea on Nov. 1, 1950. American air commanders realized they were looking at a serious problem.
B-29 Superfortress crews that had operated with near-impunity for much of the conflict suddenly faced a deadly enemy aircraft. The swept-wing Soviet fighter climbed harder, flew higher and carried more firepower than anything the United Nations had in theater. Even the F-86 Sabre, the Air Force's best fighter at the time, struggled to compete above 30,000 feet.
For three years, U.S. pilots built their tactics against a jet they had never gotten their hands on, relying on what combat could teach them and what intelligence could piece together from a distance.
Washington wanted an intact MiG to study. As the Korean War came to a close, the Air Force set out to capture one.
Operation Moolah
In April 1953, the U.S. Far East Air Forces launched Operation Moolah, a psychological operation with a straightforward offer. Any Communist pilot who flew a working MiG-15 to allied-controlled territory in South Korea would receive $100,000 and political asylum.
Leaflets carrying the proposition were printed and dropped over North Korean air bases along the Yalu River. American forces in the south prepared for any potential sighting of a defecting communist aircraft.
Over the next few months, nothing happened. American planners had made a slight miscalculation. North Korean MiG-15 pilots were staged out of Manchuria at the time, not along the Yalu. They never actually saw the leaflets.
The Korean armistice was signed July 27, 1953, bringing the Korean War to a close. However, the Air Force still did not have a captured airplane. Most of the planners wrote off the operation as a failure.
The North Korean Pilot
Senior Lt. No Kum-sok was born Jan. 10, 1932, in what is now North Korea. His father quietly rejected the communist regime and raised his family with the same disposition, but survival required discretion.
As Soviet-backed governance tightened after World War II, expressing anti-communist views outside the walls of your own home carried mortal risk. No performed the loyalty the regime demanded while quietly seeking an escape route.
He enrolled in the North Korean Naval Academy at 17 with a distinct goal that he shared with none of his family or friends. Aviation, he reasoned, was his best realistic chance of getting out. He transferred to flight training, studied under Soviet advisors in Manchuria and by 19 was the youngest combat pilot in the Korean People's Air Force.
Over the following years he flew more than 100 sorties against F-86s, attended every required political session, carried out every assigned mission and spent 18 months quietly preparing for a flight to freedom.
He never encountered the Operation Moolah leaflets. He had no knowledge of the reward. Getting out of the communist nation was the only goal.
"It is incorrect to say that I defected from the North Korean communist regime because I had never been a communist," No said in later interviews. "I was trapped in North Korea and my only way out was to fly to the South."
The armistice accelerated his thinking. Peacetime would bring fewer sorties, closer oversight and tighter scrutiny of every pilot's movements. He identified a training sortie from Sunan Air Base, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, as his window. He chose the morning of Sept. 21, 1953 as the date for his escape plan.
"I figured I had a 20 percent chance of success," he said. "I thought that was good enough."
17 Minutes to Freedom
No's MiG-15, tail number Red 2057, peeled away from its formation without drawing attention. He brought the aircraft down low to stay beneath radar coverage and pointed it south toward South Korea. Sunan to Kimpo Air Base, outside Seoul, took 17 minutes at roughly 620 miles per hour.
Fortunately, Kimpo's radar system was offline that morning for scheduled maintenance, and No's crossing went untracked. He came in from the north, joining the landing pattern in the opposite direction from the F-86s already on approach. Ground personnel, seeing a jet they could not yet identify clearly, assumed it was a Sabre.
"The luckiest thing was that the US radar was shut down on that morning, when I got there," No said afterward. "They had maintenance work."
An American fighter approaching from the far end of the runway very nearly met No head-on as both aircraft converged on the same pavement. Capt. Jim Sutton, orbiting above at the time, said afterward that a standard approach from the correct direction would have gotten No spotted and shot down before he touched down. Instead, No rolled out cleanly and brought the aircraft to a stop between two parked Sabres. It was only then that the Americans realized what had just happened.
"It's a goddamn MiG!" Capt. Dave Williams called over the radio.
No shut down the engine, climbed out of the cockpit, pulled out the photograph of Kim Il-sung that North Korean regulations required in every aircraft, and tore it to pieces, then raised both arms as base security closed in.
Australian airmen from No. 77 Squadron RAAF scrambled alongside the American 4th Fighter Wing in the event that North Korean jets came after the defector. Most found themselves at the flight line instead, crowding in to look at the aircraft up close.
The MiG was inside a hangar within hours. Mechanics began taking it apart that afternoon without manuals or technical documentation of any kind. By the following morning, it was loaded aboard a C-124 Globemaster and bound for Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, repainted in American markings and ready for what came next.
Testing the MiG
Maj. Chuck Yeager and Capt. H.E. "Tom" Collins, working under Maj. Gen. Albert Boyd of the Wright Air Development Center began a full evaluation of the aircraft at Kadena on Sept. 29. Technicians examined the MiG for sabotage before the first flight was attempted. No, deep into intelligence debriefings at a nearby facility, briefed the test pilots directly on how the aircraft behaved under stress.
His warnings were accurate. Collins documented what No had told him in a 1991 account published in "Test Flying at Old Wright Field."
"The defector pilot told me that the MiG-15 airplane had a strong tendency to spin out of accelerated, or even one 'G,' stalls and, often, it did not recover from the spin," Collins wrote.
The 11-day evaluation confirmed the MiG had real advantages. Its engine was powerful, its climb rate outpaced the F-86, and it could operate above 50,000 feet where American fighters could not follow. But its limits were severe.
Without an all-flying tail, control degraded badly as it approached Mach 1. Approaching the speed during one of the tests, Yeager lost roll authority entirely, not recovering it until he descended to 12,000 feet. North Korean doctrine at the time stated that pilots were to eject if three turns passed without recovery.
Yeager characterized the aircraft as a "flying booby trap" and assessed his views of the aircraft.
"Flying the MiG-15 is the most demanding situation I have ever faced," he said. "It's a quirky airplane that has killed a lot of its pilots."
Boyd later added his own evaluation of the plane and the tests.
"Because of him, we now know more about this airplane than the Russians do," he said of Yeager's test flights.
Previous U.S. air combat doctrine against the MiG had been assembled from educated inference and pilot debriefs. The evaluation mapped the jet's actual performance envelope, confirmed where its advantages were real and what its weaknesses were.
The tests established the specific conditions under which the F-86 held the upper hand. That information shaped American air-to-air tactics in the years that followed.
Collecting the Reward
The MiG itself was only part of what No delivered. After landing at Kimpo, he was flown by helicopter to a Fifth Air Force Intelligence facility outside Seoul, then moved to further debriefings in Okinawa that ran close to six hours a day, five days a week, for nearly seven months.
He covered Soviet training methods, North Korean and Chinese air order of battle, base locations, unit structures, command personnel and operational logistics. He also spoke directly with Yeager and Collins before their test flights, as Collins later confirmed.
When intelligence officers told No about the $100,000 Operation Moolah reward, he was genuinely surprised. He had known nothing about it. North Korean pilots were barred from monitoring South Korean radio, and the leaflets had been dropped where MiG pilots were not stationed.
No said later that the dollar figure would have meant nothing to a North Korean pilot even if he had seen it. A job and a place to live in North America, he said, would have been a more persuasive offer than cash.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower opposed paying the reward on principle, viewing the transaction as ethically problematic against the backdrop of a fragile armistice. He eventually relented. No collected the full $100,000, put the principal in a trust, and drew on the interest to fund his education and support his family going forward.
Consequences
Pyongyang declared that No had been abducted, despite the fact that No was outspoken about what he had planned and accomplished. North Korean forces retaliated.
Capt. Lee Un-yong, a Korean People's Army Air Force flight instructor who made his own defection to the South two years later, reported that five of No's comrades and commanders were executed after the defection. Among them was Lt. Kun Soo-sung, No's closest friend in the squadron.
General Wan-yong, the top commander of the North Korean air force, was demoted in the 1970s as repercussions from the incident continued working through the chain of command. What became of No's extended family in the North was never confirmed.
No's father had died years before the escape. No was unaware, until after landing at Kimpo, that his mother was still alive. She had gotten out of the country during the Hungnam evacuation in December 1950. The two were eventually reunited, first in South Korea and later in the United States.
An American Life
No arrived in the United States in 1954, met Vice President Richard Nixon on Capitol Hill that May and became an American citizen through a special act of Congress signed by Eisenhower. He enrolled at the University of Delaware, earned degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering.
He later spent years working as an aerospace engineer for Boeing, General Dynamics, DuPont, Westinghouse, General Electric and other major firms.
In 1983, he joined Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, as an associate professor in the aerospace engineering department. He taught aeronautical science there for 17 years. Chuck Yeager, who had pushed No's MiG to its limits on Okinawa, became a lasting friend in the years that followed. When Yeager traveled to Embry-Riddle in 1987 to accept an honorary doctorate, he stayed at No's home.
The MiG-15bis reached Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in December 1953, was reassembled and remained in testing until a hard landing in 1956 ended its flying life. The aircraft was later transferred to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson, where it remains on display to this day.
No Kum-sok published his memoir, "A MiG-15 to Freedom," in 1996 under his birth name. He spent the last six decades of his life as Kenneth Rowe. He died Dec. 26, 2022, in Daytona Beach at the age of 90.
No's decision to defect from North Korea not only provided the U.S. with one of its greatest intelligence victories of the Cold War, but it also allowed him to reunite with his mother before becoming an American citizen and living a successful life away from the authoritarian regime he was raised under.
Sources: No Kum-sok with J. Roger Osterholm, "A MiG-15 to Freedom: Memoir of the Wartime North Korean Defector Who First Delivered the Secret Fighter Jet to the Americans in 1953," McFarland and Company, 1996; Blaine Harden, "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," Viking, 2015; Capt. H.E. Collins, "Test Flying at Old Wright Field," 1991; Herbert A. Friedman, "Operation Moolah: The Plot to Steal a MiG-15," PsyWarrior; Australian War Memorial; Chuck Yeager Foundation; Gathering of Eagles Foundation; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Lift Magazine; University of Delaware Messenger; PRI/The World; Korean War Legacy Foundation; Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine.
