On the morning of 21 September 1953, a 21-year-old Senior Lieutenant of the Korean People’s Army Air Force named No Kum-Sok climbed into his MiG-15bis at Sunan air base outside Pyongyang. Sunan was a thirty-minute drive from his home in North Korean territory; his mother lived alone in the small house where he had grown up. He had eaten breakfast with her two hours earlier. When he started the engine of the MiG, taxied out, and accelerated down the runway, he had no intention of ever seeing her again.

Seventeen minutes later he landed at Kimpo Air Base in South Korea, sweating through his summer flight suit, holding his hands above his head as American military police ran toward the still-hot aircraft. He had no idea that the United States government had been quietly offering one hundred thousand dollars to any communist pilot who would defect with an intact MiG-15. He had not heard of Operation Moolah. He had simply decided, after a year of watching his country, that he could not live there.

The MiG that haunted MiG Alley

The MiG-15 was the United States Air Force’s problem. From late 1950 to mid-1953, the swept-wing Soviet fighter — flown by North Korean, Chinese, and frequently Soviet pilots — outclassed every American aircraft over the Yalu River corridor that became known as MiG Alley. Only the F-86 Sabre could give it a fight, and the Sabre had its hands full. The MiG flew higher, climbed faster, and carried heavier cannon armament than its rivals. Above all, it could escape combat by climbing — the one thing no American fighter at the time could match.

The United States desperately wanted an intact example to take apart. Throughout the war, USAF intelligence officers reconstructed MiG-15 wreckage piece by piece from shot-down examples, but no complete airframe had been recovered. In April 1953, four months before the armistice, Far East Air Forces commander General Mark Clark authorised Operation Moolah — a propaganda and bounty programme dropping leaflets over Communist airfields offering $100,000 in cash and political asylum to any pilot who delivered an operational MiG to UN territory.

A son who hated his country

No Kum-Sok was born in Sinhung, in the north-east of what would become North Korea, in 1932. His father, a senior official in a Japanese fertiliser factory, despised the Soviet occupation forces who arrived after Japan’s surrender. The family fled south briefly but was forced to return. When the Korean People’s Army Air Force took over the north’s military aviation, the young No — a brilliant student of mathematics and natural science — was selected for jet pilot training in Manchuria with the Soviet 64th Independent Fighter Aviation Corps. He learned to fly the MiG-15 from a Soviet major who, by his own later account, did not realise how much No hated him.

By 1953 he had flown more than 100 combat sorties against US and South Korean aircraft over the Yalu. He had not, by his own account, ever shot anything down. He had been planning his defection for almost a year. The armistice on 27 July complicated everything — the regular combat sorties stopped, and he no longer had a routine flight schedule that would let him “wander” toward South Korea unnoticed. He decided to take a training sortie south anyway.

“I knew I would never see my mother again. I had said goodbye to her at breakfast without telling her. If I had failed and survived, the regime would have killed her. If I succeeded, she would be safe — they would assume she knew nothing, because she did not.”

Kenneth H. Rowe (No Kum-Sok) — From his 1996 memoir, A MiG-15 to Freedom

Seventeen minutes south

No took off from Sunan at 0921 local time, climbed to 17,000 feet, and pointed his MiG at the 38th parallel. He pushed the throttle full forward. The aircraft accelerated to roughly 1,000 km/h — Mach 0.85 at altitude. At the parallel he pushed the nose over and accelerated further on the descent. South Korean radar picked him up at the border and reported a single high-speed contact heading south. UN air defence ground controllers vectored two F-86 Sabres of the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing to intercept him, but the MiG was already on short final at Kimpo by the time the Sabres reached his altitude.

He landed downwind, on a runway full of aircraft. There were no friendly recognition signals exchanged — he had not known any to give. He stopped the aircraft on the runway, climbed out with his hands up, and was taken into custody. The MiG-15bis was inspected, photographed, partially disassembled, loaded onto a C-124 Globemaster, flown to Okinawa, and test-flown there by Major Chuck Yeager and Captain “Tom” Collins of the USAF Test Pilot School. Within a week, the United States knew exactly what the MiG-15 could do.

The bounty he did not know about

When American officers told No about Operation Moolah, he did not believe them. The Korean People’s Army Air Force had blocked every Western broadcast and confiscated every leaflet. He had defected because of conditions inside North Korea, not because of any reward. Nonetheless, the United States paid him the full $100,000 — equivalent to roughly $1.2 million today. He used the money to put himself through Delaware State College, to bring his mother out of North Korea via a circuitous route through Hong Kong, and to start a new life as Kenneth H. Rowe.

He worked as an aeronautical engineer for Lockheed, Boeing, Westinghouse, and DuPont, taught engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and lived in Florida until his death in December 2022 at age 90. The aircraft he flew south is on permanent display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It is one of two complete MiG-15s in the museum collection. The other was donated by Poland.

Sources: National Museum of the USAF, Operation Moolah CIA declassified files, A MiG-15 to Freedom (No Kum-Sok memoir, McFarland 1996), Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine.