I just realized that my title may be a bit confusing (e.g. it should have said "a large amount of money"). I'm sorry for that, but english is not my native language.
In the episode I mentioned, they want to give the north korean pilot 100.000$. 50k because he landed his plane and another 50k because he was the first to do this. Did the US army do this so they can examine enemy technology or just as a PR stunt?
EDIT: as /u/zoinks_the_miner mentioned
On April 27, General Mark Clark, head of United States Forces, Far East, offered $50,000 American to any and all enemy pilots landing a Soviet-built jet in good condition in friendly territory. Plus an additional 50 big ones to the one who's first. Full transcript: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=mash&episode=s11e03
The episode is based on a real event, but the timeline is off. Chuck Yeager discussed it in his autobiography in the chapter "Outflying the Russians":
Flying the MiG is the most demanding situation I have ever faced. It's a quirky airplane that's killed a lot of its pilots. We learn as we fly, on a tight time frame, the old man [Gen. Albert Boyd] pushing me right to the edge--a fraction further and he will probably lose me. And he knows it.
General Boyd has brought me and Tom Collins, another test pilot, out to the middle of the Pacific because a North Korean pilot named Kim Sok Ho defected in his MiG-15. He received a $100,000 reward for giving us our first opportunity to fly the MiG. We were told to run a complete flight test on it, as if it were a brand new airplane, plot its speed, power, climb rate, and range. The MiG-15 was in combat with our Sabres over Korea, and our intelligence estimates of the Russian fighter's capabilities were the basis for how we engaged them in dogfights. We would discover that our test data matched perfectly with the Air Force estimates. A shaky truce was in effect in Korea, but our people thought it could bust at any moment; there was a lot of interest in our test.
That last line suggests the testing took place after the Korean War; the chapter itself is dated February 1954, months after the end of fighting in July 1953, and the pilot defected in September 1953. Yeager and Boyd both discuss the efforts to map out the MiG's performance, including determining if it could actually go supersonic (it can't) in an effort that could have killed Yeager. Some of the things mentioned make me wonder how the Russians ever thought it was a good idea to fly the plane.
Not an answer, but for anyone not familiar with the episode, here is the reference from the broadcast:
On April 27, General Mark Clark, head of United States Forces, Far East, offered $50,000 American to any and all enemy pilots landing a Soviet-built jet in good condition in friendly territory. Plus an additional 50 big ones to the one who's first.
Full transcript: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=mash&episode=s11e03