Target (9 page)

He was, at that time (the late 1960s), a free-lance mercenary, a continuing clandestine, working piecemeal for the CIA,
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the French, probably the Germans and the British, and others who would hire him for tough missions their own could not, or would not do. These missions included sabotage, plucking hostage-held friendlies (military and non-military) from the confines of those who would do them harm, assassinations, and other extreme and dangerous intelligence jobs—and all the while hiding such activity under the cover of being the chief of staff for the vineyards of the famous Mumm Champagne estate located in Europe at Johannisberg, Germany, conveniently near the French and German border—an ideal location in Cold War Europe.

After WW II, following mysterious
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Jedburgh missions to Denmark and Belgium, he had been assigned to the American Zone of Occupation in Southern Germany—Patton’s territory—first spying on the French and then supervising captured German generals writing a history of their war efforts. He traveled frequently in the Bad Nauheim—Frankfurt—Munich axis putting him in close proximity to the fateful events involving Patton in December 1945. Within two years of Patton’s death he had received from
Paris’s Institute Agronomique a degree in Oenology, the science of wine and wine making, and had joined the House of Baron de Mumm, a player in Europe’s economic and social scene. The baron was of German heritage and he and his wife were prominent in European society. In time, Bazata had launched a career as an artist and become a jet-set favorite, selling canvases throughout Europe and in America. It is easy to imagine what must have been a gregarious, swashbuckling Bazata, described by a CIA-connected agent then as “a native version of Zorba the Greek,”
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the life-loving, exorbitant peasant, beguiling prospective patrons as much with his eccentric persona as with his paintings, which were modernist. The Duchess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco
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each gave him one-man shows. Museums in Europe and America displayed his canvases.
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He hobnobbed with legendary artist Salvador Dali whom, he wrote, painted a portrait of him as Don Quixote which he later lost.
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And although he considered himself a serious painter, as he would later write, the work with the brush, as with the wine, was still mainly a cover.
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This, then, was his situation in 1969 when he was asked by good friend and former Jedburgh, Phil Chadbourne, Jr., a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Monaco, to accompany him to what turned out to be the same weekend of parties and events Marie-Pierre was attending. They talked, at that first chance attraction, about the hotel’s paintings, history, and other things two people attracted to each other discuss, and saw each other several more times that day, growing more charmed at each meeting. The next day was scheduled as a party for her and her fiancé. But that night she went back to the room she was sharing with the doctor, returned his ring, and left with Bazata the next morning. “Baz was
an extraordinary personality,” Bazata’s friend Chadbourne would later tell me.
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“We were all in London one weekend drinking. We went outside and a baroness came by in her expensive car. Baz just opened the door and got in. We couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe it. He drove off and spent the weekend with her. She became his lover, fell madly in love with him and he grew tired of her”—this from a man, the suave Chadbourne, known as quite a lady-killer himself in his day. “After he met Marie-Pierre,” said Chadbourne, returning to the matter at hand, “he informed me the next morning we were going to the hotel to get her bags and she was coming with us. I scoffed. I didn’t believe it. But she came out smiling.”

And now they were here in front of me, having been married for twenty-six years. He was an aged man, no question, bent somewhat, certainly the result, to some extent, of all his war wounds coming to roost. But he also had recently suffered a “terrible stroke,” as he put it, and I was concerned about how that might affect our talks. But he was tall and strong-handed and showed no demonstrable effects of the illness for which he was being treated—at least not then. In fact, shortly after we had been introduced and in response to a question I posed, he fell to the lawn in a collapsing roll to show me how Jedburgh parachutists were taught to land.

Marie-Pierre was not what I had pictured. Her high voice and French accent on the phone had conjured in my mind a petite, almost pixie-like woman. But she was tall and dark-haired with a European freshness—as attractive as expected from what I had heard about Bazata. She and he were silently close. We all went to lunch. Bazata and I seemed to hit it off. In the middle, he suddenly announced to everyone, “I like him.” I reciprocated. He was engaging, gracious, and a jokester—not at all the dark and brooding
type I had envisioned for an assassin. With his white hair and trim mustache, strong looks and command of languages and history, he could have passed for a retired British colonel, or fading European film star—except for the Jersey accent. But there was also a hint of menace occasionally, a fleeting ferocity that flashed in his eyes when he touched on certain points. Then he would go silent, as if deciding he had said enough.

For the next several days I interviewed Bazata who was both forthcoming and reticent, sometimes claiming memory loss, other times lucid. I had purposely started out lightly by inquiring into his background, a good way to ease into the more controversial aspects. But it was not long before we were on topic. His grandparents had come to America from Czechoslovakia. His father, he said, before becoming a Presbyterian minister, ironically had caught the eye of George Patton when the two had been athletes in Southern California in the early 1900s. Charles Bazata, a multi-sport star at Occidental College, a major school in those days in the Los Angeles area, had actually halted an important football game in which he was a halfback and team captain over a miscall by a referee and had led his team off the field, threatening to end the game, until the error had been corrected, which, according to Bazata, it was. Patton, born in nearby San Gabriel and probably in his teens then, apparently had witnessed the highly unusual protest and never forgotten it. Bazata said Patton “had tremendous respect for my father.” As a result, years later, when Bazata had been a weapons instructor at Ft. Benning, he said he had met the tank general who, after getting acquainted, had asked him to become an intelligence officer for him. Patton, independently wealthy, frequently had his own personal spies. But he had turned Patton down because he wanted to be a lone operative and his joining OSS, where he thought he would have the best chance,
was already in the works. “For me, the strength of courage was to do it alone,” he would later write.
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He had “no intention” of being bossed by the “clown officers” he knew he would be under if working for Patton. But they parted agreeing on the codeword “Occidental,” meaningful only to them, would be used if Bazata ever had information he thought Patton should know.

As we talked, it became clear that more had happened to him in France than Millar had recorded in his book, or had been put in official reports—and rightfully so.
Maquis
was Millar’s story, not Bazata’s. And, as any researcher learns, especially one researching spies, official reports are sometimes doctored. One such instance, said Bazata, was the omission of his abduction by French partisans as he was spying in Besancon.

“We’ve been watching you,” Bazata said they told him. They took him to a hotel room. “What are you doing?” they demanded. He repeatedly told them he was on their side but his accent was bad and they did not believe him. He was tortured. They kept saying, “Prove it!” They removed his thumbnails with a “thin, sharp” screwdriver and then smashed the thumbs with a hammer. “I didn’t shit my pants or yell.... I wasn’t going to let them see me cry.... I believe you can attune yourself with God”—something he had learned from his father—“I didn’t let it hurt me.” After the initial damage, the pain was not that bad, he shrugged. “I thanked [God] for it.” He figured he would have been killed but a Maquis friend, using an explosive, blew a hole in the wall, and he had escaped in the commotion. As proof, he volunteered his thumbs as we talked. I had not noticed them before. They were large and disfigured and minus nails.
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When he and Millar had made their daring motorcycle dash through German lines to get to American troops, Bazata said he had a secret mission about which Millar was unaware—which
possibly explains the urgency Millar writes Bazata exhibited to make the dangerous dash.
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The mission, he said, was to stop Patton’s advance into Germany. It had been arranged, he said, by Donovan in a series of meetings he had with the OSS chief prior to his jump into France.
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The brass were not happy with Patton, Bazata said he was told, and wanted to rein him in. How they were going to stop him is unknown. Bazata was vague about it. He told the
Spotlight
, they stopped Patton “militarily.” But that is all he would say. In one of his diaries he wrote Patton’s truckers were “encouraged to Black Market”; i.e., steal and sell his “gasoline... clothing and food” and “deliberately [send] wrong trucks... with drivers well known as Black-marketers, etc.”
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In fact, according to the record, Patton
had been
stopped as he was approaching the Belfort Gap, while Bazata had been in the area on the Cedric mission. However, most histories record that the halt occurred because Eisenhower had allocated scarce gas to General Montgomery, Patton’s British rival, whose plan Eisenhower preferred, rather than to the Third Army. The lack of gas had incensed Patton, who was well ahead of Montgomery in a thrust toward the German border. But official plans were for Montgomery’s “Market Garden” approach via the Netherlands to pave the way to the crossover. In 1979, Bazata had told
The Spotlight
he did not know who had told Donovan to stop Patton but “since Donovan was directly responsible to the president... I assumed... [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] knew and had authorized the action.”
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If he had not accepted the mission, Bazata said, he believed he would have been killed—“hit by a taxi in London,” as he put it.
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They thought Patton disobedient, disruptive, and
uncontrollable and were going to stop him with or without “my help,” he said. “We used a certain trick and it worked.” He was stopped just north of Besancon and southwest of Belfort. But doing it was “disastrous... for me” because “we were in effect stopping Patton from going on and winning the war.”
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Patton, when he was halted, had the Germans on the run. Conversely, Montgomery’s Eisenhower-backed Market Garden to cross the Lower Rhine at Arnhem had failed, thus giving the Germans time to regroup and recharge and, later, launch the Battle of the Bulge, the German offensive in which more Americans died than in probably any other U.S. fight with the Nazis. Bazata told me he had not realized the depth of antagonism toward Patton amongst some of the military elite until General Alexander Patch, commander of Seventh Army, to whom he had been directed after reaching U.S. lines with Millar, had “shocked” him by saying he did not want to help Patton,
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and General Truscott had shocked even more by stating, “Somebody has to stop him [meaning Patton].” He went away thinking, “Good God, was he [Truscott] in on it too?”
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Interestingly, I was later to find some proof of what Bazata was claiming. Back in 1963, Austen Lake, a noted journalist and author of the time who had been a correspondent with the Third Army during Patton’s dash across Europe, wrote in his regular newspaper column:

When Bazata had been hit by shrapnel in the hand in France, he had been on a sniping mission.
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He was, after all, a world-class marksman lethal in a variety of ways.
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In addition to Cedric, he said he had made “unofficial” jumps into France for which there would be no records. They were “special assignments,” he indicated without elaborating, and by war’s end, he said, he was a designated OSS assassin. There may have been more [OSS assassins]—he did not know.
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And his job, he said, was not restricted to “eliminating” just the enemy. It included those supposedly on the Allied side believed to be spies. “If somebody knew something, or thought they did, and that would [hurt] us, we had to shut them up before he got to [the other] government. That was my job.” He also, he said, eliminated those in the OSS who talked too much—“noisy guys within our own outfit.” Killing then did not come easy to him, he said. What justified it was “you were doing it for your country.” Often there were obstacles to overcome. Sometimes “you couldn’t kill a guy in a railroad station with a pistol because the noise would bring the cops so you got them in a dark alley.” He used a roll of coins or similar in his fist to deliver a blow to the back of the neck.
“It breaks the main bone there, knocks them out instantly. He doesn’t make any noise.... If he’s moving... give him a second.... I remember I hit a guy so hard that his feet came up and hit me in the balls. I was ashamed of myself.”