GENERAL PARTRIDGE WAS WORKING by this time very closely with an eccentric, mentally unstable spy and fixer, Donald Nichols, who had the ear of President Syngman Rhee and help from Rhee’s brutish police force to get things done. Nichols claimed the Air Force gave him a license to murder, and he supervised, or at least observed, tortures and atrocities in South Korea in which hundreds of suspected Communist sympathizers were executed and buried in mass graves.

Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Sec…, loc. 549