On the morning of 21 September 1953, a flight line at Kimpo Air Base watched a swept-wing jet swing onto the approach and took it for one of their own F-86 Sabres. It wasn’t. It was a Soviet-built MiG-15, still wearing North Korean red stars, flown by a 21-year-old enemy lieutenant named No Kum-Sok.
He landed the wrong way down the runway, nearly clipping a Sabre, taxied between two American jets, climbed out, tore the portrait of Kim Il Sung from his cockpit, and threw up his hands.
In seventeen minutes he had crossed from the world’s most closed society into the West — and handed the United States the prize it had chased for three years: an intact MiG-15. What he did not know was that he had also just earned a secret $100,000 bounty.
Quick Facts
| Pilot | Senior Lt No Kum-Sok, North Korean air force, age 21 |
| Date | 21 September 1953, weeks after the armistice |
| Aircraft | MiG-15bis — later marked “616” by the USAF for testing |
| Route | Sunan, near Pyongyang, to Kimpo Air Base, South Korea |
| Flight time | About 17 minutes |
| Reward | Operation Moolah’s $100,000 — which No says he never knew about |
| The jet | Tested by US pilots incl. Chuck Yeager; now at the National Museum of the USAF |
| Later life | Emigrated in 1954, became engineer Kenneth H. Rowe |
An Anti-Communist Hiding in a Cockpit
No Kum-Sok grew up quietly anti-communist under a regime where such views could get a man killed. To survive — and to fly — he buried them, talked his way into pilot training, and was sent to learn the MiG-15. By the war’s end he had flown scores of combat missions, expecting to keep fighting until he died.
Defection, he always insisted, was about escape, not money. The hard part was finding a moment when he was airborne, armed, and briefly beyond the reach of his own side.
Seventeen Minutes to Freedom
On that September morning he took off from Sunan as if on a routine patrol, then broke south alone across the front. He was too far from base to be chased, and the American radar covering Kimpo happened to be down for maintenance. He crossed the line in minutes.
Landing against the traffic pattern was itself luck: pilots said that had he joined the pattern the “correct” way, he would have been spotted and shot down. Instead the most secret fighter of the Cold War rolled to a stop on an American airfield.
No Kum-Sok, beside his own jet, recounts the defection.
The $100,000 He Never Heard Of
In April 1953, months before the armistice, the US Far East Command had launched Operation Moolah, promising $100,000 and asylum to the first communist pilot to deliver an intact MiG-15. Leaflets rained on air bases and the offer was broadcast in several languages — yet No landed genuinely unaware of it.
North Korean pilots, he explained, could not listen to Southern radio, and the leaflets were not dropped where the MiGs were actually based. He was eventually handed a US Treasury check for $100,000, dated April 1954. President Eisenhower was against paying defectors, but the reward was paid anyway.
No Kum-Sok and his biographer on the flight and its aftermath.
Yeager Flies the Enemy’s Jet
The MiG was taken apart within a day, flown to Okinawa, and rebuilt in USAF markings with “616” on its nose. Test pilots, among them Major Chuck Yeager, put it through its paces — with No himself briefing them on its quirks. Their verdict: a fast-climbing, high-flying fighter that was also treacherous near the edge of its envelope.
Nobody Claimed the Jet
After the Okinawa trials, which began with Capt. H. E. “Tom” Collins and continued with Yeager, the MiG was taken apart again and flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in December 1953 for more testing. The United States then offered to return the aircraft to its rightful owners. No country claimed it. The MiG-15bis went to the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton in 1957, where it is still on display.
No did not come alone for long. His mother had already escaped to South Korea in 1951, two years before his flight, and at his request she was later brought to the United States to join him.
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Becoming Kenneth Rowe
In 1954 No emigrated to the United States and chose a new name: Kenneth H. Rowe. He earned engineering degrees, worked for Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed, and later taught for 17 years at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
He wrote a memoir, visited his old jet at the museum many times, and said he never once second-guessed his decision. He died in 2022, at the age of 90 — an ocean and a lifetime away from the runway at Sunan.
The seventeen-minute flight to Kimpo.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was No Kum-sok?
What was Operation Moolah?
Did No Kum-sok know about the reward?
Was No Kum-sok paid the $100,000?
Who flew No Kum-sok’s MiG-15 after the defection?
Where is No Kum-sok’s MiG-15 now?
Sources: Wikipedia (No Kum-sok; Operation Moolah); National Museum of the US Air Force; University of Delaware Messenger (2011); Yeager: An Autobiography (1985).
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