Target (49 page)

Curious, too, was something at the end of Dr. Spurling’s long memoir about caring for Patton at the hospital—something I had missed at a first reading focused on Patton’s condition: “General Marshall in Washington requested that a confidential medical report be sent to him daily. These confidential bulletins always told the stark truth and I am sure that there was never any question in Washington but what [sic] General Patton was done for. I always sent a copy of these reports to the Surgeon General of the Army.” Spurling was sending back secret reports? Why? Was this just confidentiality to protect Patton’s privacy? Or was there more to it than Spurling understood? The in-house medical reports were not released to the public. Would not those have sufficed to keep concerned colleagues like Marshall informed? Marshall, to put it mildly, in the words of one obituary writer, was a Patton “detractor.”
⁸
It is hard to believe he was monitoring the situation out of personal concern. He was notoriously cool and distant toward his colleagues—and others, for that matter, save his family. Patton was certainly, after the accident, written off as a potential field general for military action. But he had already been written off
before
the accident. Basically, in Marshall’s eyes, he was crazy. So why the clandestine reports? Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower attended Patton’s funeral, nor did Truman, who did not care for Patton either.
⁹
Patton reportedly specifically asked his wife to keep Eisenhower’s Beetle Smith from attending his funeral, although newspaper reports indicate Smith might have been there.

The Cadillac limousine in which Patton was injured is, in all this, a witness for the prosecution, albeit a silent, unfortunately inaccessible one. For decades, the car, repaired, was thought to be on display at the Patton Museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky. But Cadillac’s expert determined along with obvious signs of fraud, including the crude obliteration of its identifying VIN number, that the car is a fake. It will never yield crucial answers. Why was this done? Was the filing down of the VIN and phony workmanship tags on the car at Fort Knox just to facilitate a Black Market swap? Or was it part of an assassination plot in order to get rid of crucial evidence? The real car might have answered key questions. How was Patton injured? Not only how had his neck been broken, but how had he gotten such a vicious gash on his face, the exact nature of which is still debatable? Did it start at the nose and rip a V-like patch of bone-exposing skin up to the top of the head? Or had it started on the top and ripped downward? The nature of his wound has some bearing on whether he might have been shot by a non-lethal object like Douglas Bazata claims.

The Soviets are among the most elusive part of this story. If Patton was murdered, it was most likely because he posed a political threat to the Soviets, as well as a personal and professional threat to some in his own camp who might therefore have participated or, just as easily, looked the other way. He also was hated by some in authority in the U.S. for his indiscretion and his desire for war with the Soviets, which very well could have sparked World War III. Given what is now known about NKVD-OSS cooperation and America’s manipulation, if not near domination, by Stalin during the war and the U.S. administration’s Left-led belief that the communist dictator’s favor was essential for a peaceful and prosperous postwar world, it is not hard to imagine such factors combining to hatch a plot whose aims could morph from being purely
non-lethal “Stop Patton” into a begrudging secret order for his “elimination.”

Such an assassination scenario, of course, is speculation based on political and military realities from the still-emerging story of World War II. In the past, such speculation could not be substantiated beyond rumor. But now, in addition to the mysteries and questions that have emerged from studying Patton’s accident and death—something not adequately done by prior historians—two members of the clandestine world, Bazata and Skubik, have added personal witness to the scenario. They are not kooks. Their testimony is not rumor. Bazata was at the heart of the clandestine assassination world during the war, and he was in Germany near Patton in the occupation. Skubik, while more policeman than undercover operative, worked for what could be called, in effect, the military’s covert FBI—the CIC—during the war and in Germany when Patton died.

Both were there at the crucial time.

Bazata, after twenty-two years at the Mumm Estate and Baron Mumm’s suicide, exited Europe abruptly around 1970,
^cd
some say under suspicious circumstances. Given the life he had led as a mercenary, head of his secret “Co-Op,” and a flamboyant artist patronized by jet-setting European high society, rumors, hazy and impossible to check, were plenty. He and Marie-Pierre flew to Saigon to stay with, among others, William Colby, then a CIA official running the infamous “Phoenix” assassination program of counter-insurgency against the Viet Cong. He and Colby, who would soon head the CIA, had been Jedburghs together. Bazata’s
stated reason for the trip was to study Vietnamese art, specifically “lacquers,” an ancient Asian technique using thick tree sap for paint. “The list of owners of [Bazata’s] paintings reads like the Almanach de Gotha [royalty list], barons and princes galore,” wrote Joy Billington, who profiled him later in Washington, D.C. Now he wanted to try a new way of painting, one he said was harder.
¹⁰
They spent some six months in Vietnam, Bazata spending time studying with local artists and playing a lot of poker at which he was said to be very good. But he also participated in Phoenix, which might also have had something to do with his going there. Phoenix was, in essence, a terror program, designed to counter Viet Cong insurgency. Later congressional hearings revealed that between 10,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese had died under the program. Suspected Viet Cong, for instance, were thrown alive from helicopters. “I participated lightly,” Bazata told me. But he became “disgusted. It was kill, kill, kill. How could they tell who was guilty and who was innocent?” It was the beginning of a rift between Colby and him that never healed.

By the time he and Marie-Pierre left Vietnam, Bazata knew his days as a field-operating mercenary were over. The body can only take so much. He had lost an edge, although he still looked and seemed strong. He decided to come home and collect his due—what had been promised him, he said, by Donovan and others after the war who had told him that if he performed for them, he would be rewarded—a cushy job, good pay, no sweat. But it did not happen. Not only did it not happen, he was basically shunned. Who are you, he said upstarts at the agency asked when he tried to get a job there. When he told what he could of his past, they said prove it. Show us the records, which, of course, were mostly non-existent. Agents he had worked with were largely gone, retired, not inclined nor able to help. The agency, heavily hit by congressional and
public outcry against intelligence abuses in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, had begun purging operatives like himself and turning toward technology, such as satellites, for spying. Men like Colby, who could have helped, had lost their clout. Even if he had not, he and Colby were, by then, estranged, although they continued a tenuous relationship based on their OSS days. For all practical purposes, Bazata was out in the cold.

After a short, failed venture in Pennsylvania, he apparently began to reestablish some contacts, because he wrote of being offered jobs in “the clandestinity,” which he refused. Probably, they demanded too much physically. However, he apparently accepted from the same people a job running a combination bird farm and hunting preserve in rural Maryland woods. It may have been a CIA-connected safe house because he wrote persons “under suspicion and surveillance” were involved. “Sportsmen” came to hunt and eat the birds. In June 1975,
Esquire
magazine featured him along with five other clandestines in a short piece titled “Declassified: Six Good Spies.” A picture showed him looking hardassed in front of a peacock, the caption reading, “PRESENT SITUATION: artist. Lives outside Washington, D.C. INTELLIGENCE DATA: Scored highest officer rating in the history of Fort Benning, higher than MacArthur and Eisenhower.” That may have been a reference to his historic marksmanship, but he also claimed high scores in written tests. While at the farm, he said, there were attempts on his life because of what he knew. They continued for years, but he gave few details other than to say they were “amateurish” and he handled all of them. Much later, Marie-Pierre described one. She believed it was around 1975. “The peacocks were very good guard animals,” she said. They would become noisy at the first sign of intruders. One night, late, the birds started making a ruckus. She turned on the light in their bedroom. Baz
shouted to shut it off. As soon as she did, shots crashed through the window. Bazata had a pistol in his night stand. “He ran out and fired,” returning shortly. Before she could inquire, he said “don’t ask.” She did not. She believed not knowing was for her own good.

Bazata and Marie-Pierre struggled. Money was scarce. Eventually his service-related wounds forced him to seek medical disability from the government. He had arthritis, stab and gunshot wounds that were giving him problems, a bad eye, mangled feet, the horrible groin wound, and an aching back and spine from so many parachute jumps. He even had “hitman anguish” he wrote, presumably jokingly, to one doctor. It had all occurred in service to his country. But when he went to the VA, they gave him the same treatment the CIA had. Where’s the proof? He asked if he could sign an affidavit or take a lie detector test. No, they said. They had to have official records of which, again, in most cases, there were none. The work had been secret. No records had been kept. Their denials infuriated him. He spent two years fighting the VA. He had to write colleagues around the world asking them to supply letters attesting to his injuries and how he had gotten them. It was a bureaucratic nightmare for one who detested bureaucrats. In a final confrontation, he had to go before a three-doctor Board of Veterans Appeals. “Let me tell you of my entire body, part by part,” he wrote in jesting preparation. I have the 54-page transcript of the session. In the end, they gave him 100 percent disability benefits.

It was immediately following this ordeal, which left him embittered, that Bazata made the public announcement at the OSS dinner that he had been asked by Donovan to kill Patton. Colby and other OSSers had been at the same table when he said it to reporter Joy Billington. He figured that would get some attention.
His disclosure led to the
Spotlight
articles, for which he was paid something in the neighborhood of $3,000, according to copies of checks I have seen. Did he need the money? Yes. Was that why he did it? Perhaps, but it is misleading to say that. He had been looking for a way to tell the story for years, urged on by what he thought was his own betrayal and by other World War II secrets that were being revealed. The OSS dinner came when he felt he could wait no more. He never asked me for money. Not once. Was it conscience? Anger? Duty? A little of all three, in my opinion.

He still could be lying. Some of his former Jedburgh friends do not believe him, but even they say he was not a liar and acknowledge that they themselves have no way of knowing the truth.

His diaries, for the most part, support his verbal claims. They provide volumes of agonized discussion of his involvement in the Patton plot. “I killed him. This is the truth.... Why am I so evil?” On and on. I do not believe the diaries were written for somebody to find. Even to himself, he wrote in code. They are hard to interpret. There are notations which cause me to wonder. Was he, in writing them, practicing to pull the wool over someone’s eyes? It is a possibility, but I do not think so. The diaries are not written as practice or sprucing up arguments. On the whole, they constitute a deeply remorseful confession and examination of a human life spent taking other human life, sprinkled with reluctant pride at how well he had done it. I think I was lucky, in terms of his willingness to talk, by coming to Bazata when I did when he was sick and his guard was down, his entire personality subdued. A year or two earlier, certainly before he had made his startling announcement, all I would have gotten would have been triple talk, or a noncommittal stare—if not intimidation. He never would have shown me those diaries. They are very private, very intimate. Only his stroke, in my opinion, loosed the bonds.

Impressive, I think, are the accounts Bazata wrote of the meetings he had with Donovan. They are very detailed and ring true, at least to me. Take the luncheon at London’s Claridge Hotel: “He seemed very reticent and embarrassed,” he wrote of Donovan. “I put him easy at once: with: ‘General, Sir, you have an additional mission for me! You can trust me totally!’... ‘Thank you, Douglas, I do indeed have a problem that we all must settle. It is the extreme disobedience of Gen. Geo. P. and his very very serious disregard of orders for the common cause . . . . He grows more violent daily and surely must be ill . . . .’” Bazata did not talk like that. Or write like that. He usually wrote in complicated, almost undecipherable bursts. But someone like Donovan, broaching such a volatile subject as possibly assassinating one of their own—one so high up—may very well have talked like that. To me, it sounds like Bazata was recalling what he had lived. And Donovan’s arguments for having to do away with Patton, as Bazata relates, follow what I have come to learn actually happened. They did think Patton was crazy. They did think he was out of control and resented him for it. They sincerely thought him a danger to postwar peace and their own pro-Soviet aims.