Kenneth Rowe, who piloted N. Korean warplane to freedom, dies at 90
On a clear morning in late September 1953, seven weeks after the Korean
War armistice, crews at the U.S.-run Kimpo Air Base near Seoul were astonished to see an unannounced warplane roaring in from the north.
The jet was coming the wrong way on the takeoff patterns. Its wings were rocking and lights flashing. The North Korean pilot at the controls, Lt. No KumSok, was trying to signal that he was not attacking. He was defecting.
About 15 minutes earlier, the 21-year-old airman had banked away from a North Korean patrol. The demilitarized zone, separating the Korean Peninsula, was on the horizon. He pushed his Soviet-made MiG-15 to its limits, climbing to 23,000 feet over the no man’s land of the DMZ and then barreling down into South Korea at more than 600 mph. In a stroke of luck, the U.S. radar system was down for maintenance.
When he touched down at Kimpo, his snub-nosed MiG nearly collided with an F-86 Sabre that had just landed at the other end of the runway.
His plane was a major military coup, handing the Americans the first intact model of the latest MiG-15bis that was a main adversary of the F-86s in the 1950-53 Korean War.
The pilot later moved to the United States — with the media on hand for front-page coverage of his arrival — changed his name to Kenneth Hill Rowe and caused ripples through President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration over whether to pay a $100,000 bounty promised to any defector who came across with a MiG. He eventually received it after the president relented.
Rowe, who died Dec. 26 at age 90 at his home in Daytona Beach, said he didn’t know about the reward money at the time.
He only sought to breath “free air for the first time in my life,” Rowe recounted in a memoir, “A MiG-15 to Freedom,” written with J. Roger Osterholm.
For the Pentagon, his MiG was an invaluable prize. It was not the first defection aboard a Sovietmade warplane to South Korea. In 1950, a North Korean pilot flew an Ilyushin Il-10 prop to the South. But the MiG-15bis, with its signature slantback wing design, was far more advanced.
The warplanes, based in China’s Manchuria near the North Korean border, had changed the air war in the Koreas. The MiG-15s were outclassing some U.S. warplanes, including the F-84 Thunderjets. Allied forces, fighting under U.N. auspices, halted daylight bombing runs.
The F-86 matched better against the MiGs in air duels, according to military historians. But the North Koreans and their Chinese allies still had an advantage as being closer in the main battle spaces known as “MiG Alley.”
The Air Force put the newly acquired MiG-15 through a series of rigorous test flights to assess its capabilities. Among the pilots used was Maj. Chuck Yeager, who was the first aviator to break the sound barrier in 1947 and who later pushed jets to the edge of the atmosphere in tests that provided foundations for future space missions. (Rowe’s MiG is now part of the collection at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Ohio.)
After Rowe landed on Sept. 21, 1953, he tore up a portrait of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. For years, Rowe had pretended to be ultra-loyal to the regime as he moved up the military ranks, racking up dozens of combat flights. He was always waiting for his chance to make a break.
“All hell broke loose around the air base,” Rowe called in the memoir. The only English word he could muster was “motorcar,” hoping someone would drive him to see a commander.
No one on the base (now the site of Gimpo International Airport) could speak Korean or Japanese, which Rowe knew fluently from being raised in Japaneseoccupied Korea. Eventually, Rowe ended up in the office of an intelligence specialist, Air Force Maj. Donald Nichols, who spoke passable Korean, according to the events described in Blaine Harden’s 2015 book, “The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot,” about Kim’s rise and Rowe’s escape.
Nichols’s 55-page report on the questioning of Rowe described him as a rich source of information on North Korean, Chinese and Soviet operations.
“He was able to recall air units, personnel strength, structure and number of aircraft assigned to respective units,” the report said.
Yet interrogators seemed unconvinced that Rowe did not know of the $100,000 enticement (nearly $1 million in today’s economy) to defect with a MiG under a program code-named “Operation Moolah.”
It took years before the money was paid. Eisenhower thought it unseemly to so generously reward defectors and worried it could unset the fragile peace on the Korean Peninsula. His advisers and military brass persuaded him that reneging on the offer would be a misstep in the Cold War’s ideological tussles between East and West.
Rowe was moved to Okinawa in late 1953, where he was put on the payroll at $300 a month. He splurged on Japanese food, a West German-made Contax camera and U.S.style clothes.
No Kum-Sok was born on Jan. 10, 1932, in Sinheung, Korea, which was then under Japanese occupation. His family had a relatively comfortable life through his father, who worked at a Japanese company. His mother raised Rowe as a Christian.
Rowe long plotted his escape even as he portrayed himself to peers as a zealot of Kim’s rule. He first became a naval cadet, seeking to possibly flee at a foreign port. He then transferred to the air corps and trained with Soviet pilots in Manchuria before receiving his wings at age 19.
He graduated in 1958 from the University of Delaware with a mechanical engineering degree and went on to work for defense and aerospace companies. He later taught engineering at EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.
Rowe is survived by his wife of 62 years, Clara Rowe; a daughter and son; and a grandson.