Target (12 page)

Why these facts were withheld, the letter does not state. But the information about the German civilian employee was the first description of any of the possible passengers in Thompson’s truck that I had discovered. A German civilian? Who was he? Why was he there? Obviously, those answers might be in the missing on-scene accident report, presumably being read by Sergeant Parrish, which was one of the reasons I was pursuing it. Or it might be in some of the other missing reports. Apparently the “Provost” letter had as one of its aims explaining why Sergeant Parrish had given out any information at all because its last paragraph discussed who was authorized to disclose information about the accident and ended, “Sgt. Parrish may be held at fault for failing to inform his company commander before he released the information.”

Some sort of lid, cover-up—call it what you will—had been imposed on releasing information about the accident. Why? Was it just normal public-military bureaucratic secrecy, or did it stem from something more sinister?

Often in my search, I had been told, especially by archivists, that the dearth in records about the accident probably stemmed from the fact that it seemed little more than a “fender-bender”; that by this time—late 1945—the war was over and every serviceman wanted to come home and cared little about keeping records, or were keeping them badly. And finally, that Patton’s accident, despite who he was, just was not of that much concern to authorities because it was peacetime and his usefulness was over.

The following, it seems to me, in addition to deepening the mystery about missing Patton accident reports, also belies those notions.

News of Patton’s accident shot around the world quickly. Even before the next day’s banner headlines about it appeared, reporters
were scurrying for facts. An Associated Press correspondent, according to a War Department message I found,
¹¹
called the Patton residence only hours after the accident seeking reaction and information. Surprised at the news, probably distraught, the family called the War Department.

On the same day—no less an authority than the sitting Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, demanded that he be provided information on the accident ASAP. Accordingly, (December 9) the following order was sent to U.S. headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany: “General Handy has instructed that we [in his office, since they apparently had jurisdiction over Europe] notify General Eisenhower and General Surles of any new information coming in on General Patton.” The matter was so important, wrote the author,
¹²
that he was to be awoken from bed by the night duty officer, should anything come in while he was away. And if he could not be reached, a “Colonel Westover” was to be contacted.

Certainly, the on-scene accident report would have been primary information to be sent to Eisenhower. But something went wrong. For some unknown reason, the order to Frankfurt never went out. In a “12 Dec 45” memo “for the record,”
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Colonel Westover wrote that it had been discovered that the message had been marked by the “War Department Class Message Center with a notation ‘not transmitted.’ An attempt,” he wrote, was in progress, “to determine who cancelled the message. No cancellation was ever given by European Section. . . . ” He continued to note that the message center was directed to prepare a memo “explaining reasons for [the message] not having been dispatched.”

I could find nothing more on the investigation. Like looking for the on-scene report, as well as the other investigations, the trail went cold. Had the message been sabotaged? By whom? For what purpose? Was a lid put on the resultant investigation? I could only
wonder. But I no longer thought the absence of the on-scene investigation was just a fluke. One, even two missing reports on the accident could be explained away by chance or accidental destruction. But four related reports or investigations which were given priority and mentioned in related documents?

I began to think that the odds that the records had been deliberately destroyed were mounting and that what I was finding were bits and pieces, hard to manage, that had somehow survived.

“My full intention is to
tell the truth,” wrote Bazata in a secret diary in 1979. “All espionage is 100% dirt—‘played’ mostly by dirty players—weaklings—liars—sneaks—cowards—thieves & especially betrayers. A specific that oft [sic] falls within the [espionage] area is murder-assassination.”

Thus began one of Bazata’s forty diary-journals
¹
he composed in secret after his return to the U.S. for good in late 1971.

Would these yield any more information on the accident or Patton’s death?

I hoped so.

First, they had to be mastered.

The compositions, mostly in letter size spiral notebooks, were Bazata’s attempt to make sense out of a brutal, shadowy life that ended in deep dissatisfaction and to try to tell his story. They are not easy to decipher. Most are long, some as many as 350 pages. They were handwritten, difficult to read for that reason alone,
and structured in a kind of code that included jumping pages to continue thoughts, inserting disjointed threads abruptly, and carrying thoughts from back pages to front rather than the normal front to back. They contained code words, pseudonyms, abbreviations, and different colored inks and letter sizes for different parts. Such obfuscation seemed a holdover from his life of secrets. But along with his personal letters and some other writings, the diaries, as the numbers I read mounted, filled in gaps, gave new details about his Patton claims, and further illuminated his clandestine life—all of which could be factored into the truth or falsity of his claims.

“Killing is . . . the most unpalatable area of this [the story he apparently was trying to write]. Killing was the life-time expertise of Baz—over 50 [years] of it in a multitude of forms and places and times, for a wide variety of reasons & for...certain... countries—organizations—causes . . . .” Bazata’s ledger continued.

The killing included not only what he had done in World War II, but before and after—as a freelance spy, secret agent for governments, a Cold War mercenary and soldier-of-fortune masquerading as an artist, and as the apparent leader of a secret group of clandestines like himself which he called variously the “Co-Op,” for its bond of brotherhood, and “La Table,” for the place where they periodically met in Marseilles, France. The group, comprised of far-flung members, did special jobs for governments and other employers, including body guarding and assassination, and carried on its own unlawful activities for profit and under what appeared (to them at least) to be a guiding philosophy that made war on whom and what they decided was bad for the world.

He often, in the writings, termed the killing “weeding.” Those weeded included soldiers, spies, weapon and drug dealers, criminals, dictators, and political opponents of those who hired him or
his group. They never, he wrote, conducted personal vendettas. That was against their creed. Their activities included kidnapping, robbery, and extortion, but in the latter case, only from people they determined were “evil.” They would not extort those they deemed “innocents.” But they would menace a bully, war profiteer, or vicious criminal. In Monaco, for example, they “tapped” an arms merchant who “sold to all sides” at “exorbitant prices.” Bazata knew the man because he had painted a “Cezanne” and sold the fake as authentic to the unwitting gunrunner for $20,000, which was then given collectively—and it has to be said, generously—to the Co-Op.

The abduction had been “very simple.” Disguised as local thugs, they had “picked him up at a bouillabaisse restaurant in an old port of Cannes.” They drove him to a secluded place, “explaining first our intense loathing of [his] business . . . and him in particular.” They removed his underwear, keeping it to mail to him later as a threat if need be, and “sliced his balls—the skin of the scrotum—seven times. He screamed... appeared to swoon, this tough hard, ruthless, vain, and self-adoring businessman, so I punched his nose to unswoon him.... He whimpered and wept and pleaded—wife, good man, charity, etc . . . . One more punch shut this shit up. It was explained he had been robbed by four dirty thieves—Italian or Corsican or Catalan . . . . He didn’t know which . . . . We thus removed his watch, money, papers and a very vulgar diamond ring [inscribed to his wife] who had five prior husbands.” He was to tell “the police that this was a normal, everyday take . . . or he and his wife would be executed within 3 days [and his] mansion burnt . . . He was to have $30,000—a pittance, but all we needed at the moment—the next day at his home in Monaco. A small delivery truck would appear to deliver a package of [lobsters]. . . a fish-kid—an innocent—would receive his sealed
and unmarked envelope.” If he continued to “work and thrive as before . . . he would hear from us again in a year or so . . . .”

Weeding was Bazata’s forte. He writes of killing “seven... Russian ‘bully boys,’ a very ticklish job.” He was “alone on an open road” when he did it and “very uncomfortable. Took ½ bottle of Calvados
²
to even Baz’s keel.” He killed them with “two 45 cal. Colts. Got a peasant to pull the bodies into small wood and threatened him not to tell or [he would] join the bodies with his entire family.” They got special weapons made in East Germany—a pistol that collected its own spent cartridges and one that sounded like a vehicle backfire. “You’d have a car nearby with a kerosene smoke device built in to draw attention.” For the wartime and post-war French leader Charles DeGaulle, he rescued kidnapped French officers about to be executed by Algerian rebels and weeded leaders of the Charlemagne Division, a 3000-strong unit of French soldiers, many of whom had volunteered—treasonously so, in DeGaulle’s eyes—to fight with the Waffen SS at the end of the war. “Baz was order-requested to do this,” he wrote. “He said yes if his name not involved. DeGaulle agreed.”

Anonymity and secrecy were paramount, both for Bazata and the Co-Op. His job as chief of staff at the Mumm Estate in Johannisberg, Germany, and reputation as a modernist European artist in the post-war continental culture were good covers and handy. One of his acquaintances told me he had a furnace there in which he could dispose of bodies. No one questioned his flamboyance, his travel, and unorthodox lifestyle. Those who knew were sworn to secrecy and well aware of the penalty for disclosure or even drawing attention. It was death.

So why was he now talking? The reasons, he wrote, were many. His parents, the only people he really feared knowing about his past, were now dead. The Co-Op was no more, several of its members
having been assassinated in some kind of betrayal or ambush which resulted in him personally hunting down and killing those responsible—at least those are the indications in his writings. And the time was right. Many secrets he thought sacrosanct were—by the early 1970s when it appears he began talking—being disclosed in books he was seeing. America, he decided, needed to know what he knew—how it was betrayed by its leaders in World War II; how they had turned on their best, like Patton, and the war had been prolonged because of it. So many had died needlessly, he writes repeatedly. That war had been a dirty, vile business. It had enraged him.

But mostly, it appeared to me, he was talking because he felt personally betrayed. Over and over he writes that he had been promised rewards when he returned home, a good job and retirement in particular—most notably by Donovan when he agreed to be an OSS assassin and continue as such after the war. He had envisioned a job with the CIA. But instead he had been shunned. The new generation of intelligence bureaucrats did not know who he was or what he had done, and those who had some inkling had been standoffish and disowning. His records had been purged, undoubtedly to hide the involvement in dirty business of higher ups. All they now contained were slurs and innuendos that he said were lies. There were major omissions. He had to fight for years gathering signed statements from colleagues to eventually get his disability which, given the many wounds he suffered, finally ended at 100 percent—a fact verifiable by, for one, the Veterans Administration.

He was bitter and in need of money.

But the life he had led—still shrouded in mystery even in the diaries—troubled him deeply. “Lord, why have I done this,” he wrote, omitting details. “Why am I so bad?” Why, he asked, was
he given such skills and, yet, indecision about whether he was right or wrong in using them. “Man is vain, pompous, vulgar, mean . . . . And yet I am one of these men . . . . None know my terrible inner struggles, the restless nites [sic]—not even my wife.... I am plagued by doubts between so-called right and so-called wrong. And legality—man’s convenient invention for himself—repels me . . . . I have no confidant save my God . . . .” He was getting old and thinking of death. He coveted his father’s Bible. Marie-Pierre said he prayed almost every night, lying prone in his bed, his lips moving silently. She knew not to disturb him. If, by mistake, she entered, he would open his eyes and his stare would say leave, which she would do.