@article{717912,
      recid = {717912},
      author = {Harden, Blaine.},
      title = {The great leader and the fighter pilot : the true story of  the tyrant who created North Korea and the young lieutenant  who stole his way to freedom /},
      pages = {x, 290 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates ;},
      abstract = {"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 fact-based narrative it would use to  this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans. Drawing  on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the  role of Mao and Stalin in Kim's shadowy rise, as well as  from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and  interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding  escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the  world's longest-lasting totalitarian state"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/717912},
}