Target (52 page)

The possibility of another war alone would have been reason enough. The stakes were that high. The mounting complaints about Patton by the Russians would have given the situation urgency. Germany was a giant stage in 1945—a turning point for the world. Which way would it go? The Russians were paranoid and took matters into their own hands. As for America, early on, statements about Patton like Marshall’s, “He needs a brake to slow him down,” certainly furthered, if not initiated, the “Stop
Patton” movement.
²³
Donovan, untethered, reporting only to the president and those he chose, would have become involved as the movement snowballed, with Patton making more enemies, angering higher-ups as he triumphed, slapped, disobeyed, and boldly spoke his mind through North Africa, Sicily, England, France, and Germany. Then, in the occupation, he became really dangerous. What would he do? What about when he returned home? He was admired. He could easily win public office. Add Donovan’s turmoil at war’s end and the pieces are there for a secret deal, a final solution. Such plots are not written down. The orders—“suggestions”—are verbal. Sometimes, they just evolve, or morph from original intentions, the originators not privy to the final machinations—and not wanting to be; only aware and glad once the problem finally goes away.

That is a dramatist’s scenario for the most part, not backed by any proof in its darkest possibilities. But the evidence so far unearthed suggests that it
could
be true. There is fact in the scenario. It could have happened. Something is not right about what we, so far, know happened to Patton—as well as what we do not know. His accident and death need further investigation.

His remains should be exhumed and tested. In 1991, the remains of Zachary Taylor, twelfth president of the U.S., were exhumed to determine if he had been poisoned with arsenic back in 1850.
^cl
24
If Taylor, why not Patton? Getting access to Russian documents will be difficult, if not impossible. The Russians, especially, do not like to air their dirty laundry, no matter how old. Eastern European archives, formerly under communist governments, will probably be easier to access. And there are many archives here, especially those connected to organizations and persons
paramount in this story—FDR, Marshall, Eisenhower, Donovan, Morgenthau, and the OSS and CIC, to name the most prominent—which might yield further information. And veterans from that era could come forward with valuable information once what we do know is published.

It seems clear that what really happened to Patton has been covered up. Until the truth is revealed, the rumors about his accident and death will persist, crucial history may be lost, and an enormous crime may have gone unpunished. Patton deserves better.

More than a year after
Target: Patton
was published I was looking through my files and found something surprising. It was a three-page letter to me from the late Ralph de Toledano, the former
Newsweek
editor, author of twenty-five books (including best sellers), syndicated columnist, and journalist who had helped found William F. Buckley’s
National Review
. Toledano was a revered investigative reporter. What was surprising was that I had not used his letter. It supports the evidence that Patton was assassinated.

I had contacted Toledano because of a 1999 column he had written about an early CIA plot to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. During World War II, Chiang was an American ally and the leader of the Nationalist Chinese. Fighting Mao Zedong’s Red Chinese right after the war, Chiang relocated to the island of Taiwan and established the Republic of China in opposition to the communist government on the mainland. Like Patton, he was anathema to the Truman administration which, like FDR’s before it, favored
Soviet Russia early on. The CIA (formerly OSS) had proposed a “simple” solution: “Eliminate Chiang and Taiwan’s will to resist the communist onslaught would end.”
¹

(Further research shows this was not the only time a plan to assassinate Chiang had been proposed. During the war, President Roosevelt himself, who had broken many promises to his Chinese ally, had asked that a plan be made to “eliminate” Chaing, according to Colonel Frank Dorn, aide to General Joe Stillwell, US liaison to China in whose territory the plan would be carried out. Donovan’s OSS is said to have devised a plot for an aircraft “accident.” But FDR never gave final approval.
²
)

It was incredible to me that we sided with Mao, not only a communist but probably the twentieth century’s greatest mass murderer.
³
But we did. A CIA hit team, led by a U.S. Army colonel, was budgeted $3 million for the mission. But Chiang, now leery of his “ally,” found out about it before they could act. Vice President Richard Nixon, about whom Toledano was writing a book when he heard of the failed plot, confirmed the earlier mission and added that Syngman Rhee, the anti-communist leader of South Korea, had also been the target of a CIA murder attempt.
⁴
(Patton, remember, was anti-communist.) At the end of the column—prompting me to contact him—Toledano wrote he’d learned of a plot to assassinate Patton.

Reading over the 3-page letter, I realized why I’d probably buried it. Preceding a certain mid-letter disclosure, he’d admonished, “For obvious reasons, the following must in no way be attributed to me or to anyone else, and can be used as coming from an anonymous source.” I don’t like to use anonymous sources; thus I probably had put the letter aside to either return to it later or find sources I
could
quote—as I did. But apparently—stupidly—I’d forgotten about it. It was dated “3 January 2005.”
Since Toledano, an OSS agent during the war, died in 2007, I see no reason now not to quote from it.

Here are the pertinent parts:

This reinforces one of the main ideas in this book: that the assassination was a joint OSS-NKVD operation.

Toledano continues:

Toledano’s admonition to me not to quote him came in regard to something
Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer
confided to him. (Wedemeyer, now deceased, whose book,
Wedemeyer Reports
Toledano helped get published, is the same I quoted earlier in this book.)

What Wedemeyer confided, wrote Toledano, “came in strictest confidence.... Never a friend of the top Pentagon brass but very much in the know, Wedemeyer told me that Marshall Zukov had put pressure on General Eisenhower to ‘get rid’ of or ‘remove’ Patton. He had heard, but could not vouch [for] it that Noel Field (OSS liaison in Zurich with the Rote Kapelle) had reported similarly to Allen Dulles [OSS chief in Switzerland and later head of the CIA]. Eisenhower had passed on Zhukov’s ‘message’ to the Pentagon.”

This, too, underscores what I had learned about Zukov, the powerful Russian general.

That’s what Toledano had written me.

I caution that none of these good leads has been corroborated. I have only recently revisited the letter. But given Toledano’s reputation and background, I give them strong credence. As veteran journalist Wes Vernon wrote in his May 7, 2007 eulogy of Toledano—titled “Hard-nosed investigative reporting: a giant has left us”—“Ralph had covered the political landscape of the 20th Century. He was a walking encyclopedia. Mention almost any historical figure and Ralph had either interviewed him or covered him as a newspaperman.” His “shoe-leather detective work... shed . . . light on . . . dark corners where certified scoundrels and plotters of all kinds of mischief dwell.”