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He was not a “hit man,” he insisted. Hit men enjoy their work, think it manly. He was a machine. He abhorred killings when the victim knew his fate:

Friends remark that while he was compassionate and devoid of ego, he also lacked a conscience. “Charming but deadly,” is the
way a former Jedburgh characterized him. He had a sixth sense. “Largely I fell back on ESP [extra sensory perception] and the strange will from a [mysterious] unconscious . . . . I believe in storing the very act of thinking. You gather, you decide,” you program, “stopping activity in suspension to be reactivated unconsciously.... Ditto sight . . . .You feel-see a room or forest or person or situation as you do art or a painting . . . as some animals must by radiation . . . you feel police, spies, queers, nuts as you feel an immobile distant deer in a shaded forest.” He used “self-hypnosis” to endure pain, preferred spur-of-the-moment to planning and welcomed obstacles as tests of his ability. “Everything is possible by daring, timing, skill and know how at the proper instant . . . . I can kill anyone in the world without capture or discovery.”

Justifying the weeding, he wrote: “Civilization is advanced mostly through corruption by the eternal evils within man”—jealousy, pride, ambition, the lust for power and possessions. These were the causes of war, which was the worst of man’s evils. World War II had been a folly of nations and leaders killing for power and possession. He recognized this first when he was asked by Donovan to “stop” Patton and then when the British refused to take the surrender of large numbers of Germans he captured during the Cedric mission. They wanted the war prolonged, he charged. He especially disliked phonies, power grabbers, and those who preyed on the innocent and he felt their transgressions justified retribution. “Thus Baz grants himself the authority to lie to liars . . . cheat cheats . . . deceive manipulators . . . brut [sic] the bullies . . . . Slay the dragons . . . . Killing is ending an animal . . . a mad dog [that] must be eliminated.”

This philosophy had become almost like a religion, guiding and giving him purpose. It had grown, he wrote, from his relationship with a mysterious friend and mentor who had saved his life as he
came ashore as a young marine to kill Batista, the revolutionary, in early 1930s Cuba.

He described his contemporary as suave, polite, and “always smiling,” and he assumed he worked for Cuban intelligence. They never asked each other personal questions. Their ages were roughly the same and their relationship had flowered. “We were astonished to learn we slew none for vengeance or anger, none for satisfaction or orgasm. We both quietly aimed at eliminating evil.” He admired this man more than anyone he had ever met, save his father. And vowing he would never disclose his identity—because of the harm that might cause—he used pseudonyms for him, sometimes “Peter,” sometimes “Paul.” This friend later became a founding member of the Co-Op.

In one of the diaries, Bazata elaborated on the terrible injury he received jumping into France for Cedric in August 1944: The safehouse Millar took them to that first night belonged to two granddaughters of an [unnamed] French general and hero of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. After ordering the young and exhausted Floyd to take the lone bed in the room prepared for the two and “making a super human effort not to show my wound,” he had joined in their parlor the two “delightful crones” who were “fully dressed and coiffed as befit proud granddaughters of a well-known French general.” They showed him

Without recording their reaction, he excused himself and went back to his room. It “contained a long table with 2 wash basins, 2 pitchers of water and 4 towels. In total torture”—as an oblivious Floyd “snored . . . strongly and regularly,” he removed his trousers and undershorts, “all massed with gelatinous blood and . . . flesh” and was “horrified” by what he saw. The wound “went absolutely to the inner hip bone, about an inch or so from my crotch and . . . higher up than my genitals. It was very jagged and wide. But the bleeding had stopped. I pulled away pieces of flesh with my fingers,” tied “ends of what I thought were two small veins.” Not wanting to “ruin the [granddaughters’] lovely towels,” he swabbed the hideous gash “with two of my handkerchiefs soaked in water... filled the cut with . . . sulfamilimide from the brown paper bag in my jacket pocket,” and bound the wound with four additional handkerchiefs he had. “I was to leave this tragic wound exactly like that for approximately 6 weeks without ever once even looking at it.”

Cleaning up and disposing of the “mess” behind “a dense hedge . . . against the house,” he put on fresh shorts and trousers and become “alarmed at the grotesque swelling” of the wound which “exaggerated [its] appearance at least 4 fold.” Laboriously—for every movement was a knife stab in the gut—he eased himself to the hard floor. Once there and supine, he prayed, thanking God for “safe arrival” of his team. “It did not occur to me that I was not safe. It never did”—not before then or after. “From time to time, I would touch my stomach-abdomen startled to feel it swollen so fantastically high—a foot or so? Was this possible? Was I delirious?
Then I thought of [my] duty.” It was to “take care of Floyd first, then to command our team—we 3, self included.
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The 1
^st
act . . .” (which would come in the morning) was to radio back to London, “to announce all well . . . . It never occurred to me to . . . say I was hurt. This was an agent’s war and I had accepted it . . . . I must sound out Emile [Millar] very slowly, cautiously, carefully. I had special orders from both the British and the French. Emile . . . was felt to be strongly communistic. I must ascertain this and ascertain his influence-actions. The Americans knew nothing of this and must learn nothing. Thus I must code with infinite care, every word having been scrupulously pre-arranged.”
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He must have dozed, he writes, for he was abruptly awakened by the sound of artillery fire. “I was stunned. Whose?...It couldn’t be the Americans who were . . . far to the South.... But could it be Patton?. . . Are you beating me?” he asked as if addressing the general. “No, no. Even this semi-mad racehorse couldn’t be that magic[al]. George was very far off. Well then, [could it be] the Germans? But why artillery at 04:30 hours, on a target of cob-webs”—apparently the little village he was in. “But it was drawing closer... I must alert Dick [snoring Floyd] and the 2 aristocrats. We must go down to the cellar. I tried to arise. Absolutely impossible. I was that stark stiff. Nothing bent save my arms and even [those] 2 power-houses ached. At length I rolled me over on my “front.” It seemed a life-time of effort.” Thinking his “insides [were] falling out,” he “managed to get to my knees.” Then, “pushed to super effort by this monster artillery” that continued to approach, “I staggered to my bare feet . . . panting . . . reeling.” Because his legs “would not hold together inward,” he was compelled to swing them in jerks like Frankenstein to the snoring Floyd “least I do a splitz and never recover. But when he reached the bed, Floyd was still snoring. “Why the hell wasn’t he awake!” He called Floyd’s name. The snores continued.
“I shook him a few times, weakly, of course. He moved slightly but continued snoring.” He was on the brink of shouting when “I heard it—an abrupt, violent downpour of rain.” A thunder storm? Lightning lit the predawn darkness. “What the hell?” Suddenly he realized his mistake. In the graying morning, he stood “in total shame. Me, Bazata—Lebeau
^v
—the great marine, hot shot, the most experienced Jed . . . .I’d been conned by some lousy thunder. . . .”

Bazata had returned to London from Cedric with an uncharacteristic unease. As he trained for more Jedburgh missions, his pelvic injury, he later told the Veterans Administration, continued to bother him, including leaving him impotent. There is evidence in his writings that he feared for his life and refused OSS treatment in a hospital bed because he felt he would be vulnerable to attack there. He successfully cured the impotence himself, he testified before the VA, by injecting himself with testosterone. The treatment had been suggested by a colonel friend at a London party who helped him get the hormone.
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The suspicion of whether he had stolen money designated for the Maquis—quietly dropped when he was cleared by the French themselves—might also have factored in his unease. He felt he had done his job well and strongly resented what he perceived as an ungrateful, unloyal accusation. But a friend and fellow OSS member indicates, without knowing as much, that the “Patton problem”—then nearing its height—might have been the root of his post-Cedric trepidation.

“I first met Douglas deWitt Bazata in London . . . during the Spring of 1945,” wrote Joseph W. La Gattuta, a retired army lieutenant colonel when he penned the statement for Bazata’s VA
inquiry in 1978. La Gattuta, an OSS first lieutenant in 1945, had come to late-war Britain to, among other things, put some unnamed foreign nationals through parachute school. Bazata, whom he met in a bar there, had volunteered some “invaluable operational assistance.” Despite this helpfulness and a friendship the two had forged carousing in London, “I was nevertheless impressed by the fact that he was laboring under considerable mental stress. I subsequently learned that Bazata had been seriously wounded during his parachute mission into then German-occupied France, and that additionally he was enduring some severe psychological reaction to some of the tasks he had [been asked] to carry out.” Leaving London after several weeks, La Gattuta returned following VE-Day, May 8, 1945: “I saw Bazata again and was at once struck by his very nervous manner and apprehension over our imminent return to the United States.” Aware of Bazata’s clergyman father, he wrote that Bazata “feared” his family “would be horror stricken at his actions during the war.” After the bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, Bazata had told him, “man’s cruelty to man was almost beyond comprehension.”
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Whatever the cause of his unease, this was towards the end of the period—from just prior to Cedric to the early post-war aftermath—that Bazata claims he was having meetings (8 in all) with Donovan that included the request to kill Patton. A “restricted” OSS order I obtained at the National Archives stipulates that Bazata, La Gattuta and a list of other OSS officers report “to the Director, OSS, Washington, D.C.” upon their arrival in the capital, which was sometime in late June.
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That, so far, is the only official record I have found of Donovan and Bazata meeting face to face. However, any meetings on such a sensitive and volatile subject as what to do with a troublesome Patton certainly would have been clandestine and not recorded in routine orders, even if, like this one, the order was classified. Early on, writes Bazata—in the
summer of 1944 when he was preparing for Cedric and the meetings on stopping Patton had just begun—Donovan had wanted their meetings to be at his private apartment but “I said no Sir. I wished [to] be clear [of] listeners, traps . . . .We met at small, quiet hotels . . . twice at 20:00 hours [8:00 p.m.].” The “conversations” were “unwitnessed [with] no notes” and sealed with only “our word.” The “reason,” he writes, was “survival”—his own.

At first, he writes, just after joining OSS in late 1943, he purposely flouted his qualifications as an assassin thinking he would get an assignment to kill important Nazis like Field Marshall Rommel, Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, or even Hitler himself, an idea he said he seriously proposed not only to OSS but surreptitiously to several other allied countries, but without any takers.
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“They must have thought I was insane or possibly a harmless crank.... It would have been quite easy.... One man, one bullet . . . .” He, at that early stage, was looking for the most dangerous assignment he could attract; the highest adventure. He and his friend, fellow OSS Jedburgh, Rene Dussaq, a former Hollywood stuntman who would gain fame in wartime France as “Captain Bazooka” because of his skill and daring with the anti-tank weapon, would play tricks of exaggeration on what he writes were OSS “informers,” persons apparently used by the hierarchy to keep watch on their own. “They [the informers] were so obvious it was laughable”—waiters where they drank, taxicab drivers who transported them. “Dussaq would say, ‘Tell ’em about the time you killed those mobsters at sea.’ I would say, ‘Oh, they weren’t mobsters. ’ It would build from there and they’d [the informants] go [back to their handlers and say], ‘Boy, that guy’s a killer.’”
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