From the bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14, the murderous rise
of North Korea’s founding dictator and the fighter pilot who faked him
out
In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, New York Times bestselling author Blaine
Harden tells the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power and plunged his country
into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was
playing a high-risk game of deception—and escape.
As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to
love his Great Leader. That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the
Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the
equivalent of nearly one million
dollars today). The theft—just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953—electrified
the world and incited Kim’s bloody vengeance.
During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing
hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the factbased
narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans.
