Target (29 page)

By the time Stephen Skubik learned of Patton’s death, he was so frustrated over his thwarted attempts to prevent harm to the general that he decided to submit a request to go home, an option he had under occupation rules because of service points accrued. He had already had a third confrontation with Donovan, he writes, which, in view of his previous run-ins, he had tried hard to avoid:

Pavel Shandruk, the Ukrainian general he befriended while interrogating him, had asked him as an American agent sympathetic to Ukrainians to give Donovan dossiers on communist spies he had accumulated. Shandruk showed Skubik “hundreds” of notebooks and envelopes crammed with intelligence. Skubik balked. He was not on good terms with Donovan and Donovan did not like Ukrainians, he told the general. But Shandruk persisted. Reluctantly, Skubik took the intelligence and turned it over to Major Stone, seemingly his only OSS friend, and, as he expected, Donovan had erupted.

“There I was once again with that angry S.O.B. who believed all Ukrainians were Nazi collaborators, anti-Semitic and trying to cause a war with Russia. He believed I was [a Ukrainian] agent. ‘Soldier, what kind of crap is this you’re bringing me?’” he quotes Donovan as demanding. “ ‘Why did General Shandruk ask you to deliver this to me?’ I said this is not crap. It’s reliable.” Donovan
braced him. “ ‘Stand at attention, Private,’ he shouted. I said, ‘Sir, I’m a Special Agent, C.I.C., not a Private.’ He said, ‘Take this stuff to the British. They’re dumb enough to believe the Ukrainians.’” With that, he “stood up, threw me a salute and walked out,” later threatening to bust him to private and court martial him for “improper and insubordinate” remarks.
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In addition, his Ukrainian sources, Skubik writes, were telling him that “Patton was killed by Davidov and his NKVD dogs.” One of their spies had “infiltrated” Davidov’s NKVD unit at Frankfurt and had seen Soviet assassin chief Pavel Sudoplatov at the Russian compound. The same spy had seen truck driver Robert L. Thompson there too, they claimed. “I was certain that Thompson was an OSS/NKVD agent who had known exactly where General Patton would be on the morning of December 9.” He had been tipped off by spies at Patton’s camp, had stolen the truck, and disappeared, leaving Skubik with only questions. Who was Thompson? Why was he not cited? Why was he, Skubik, prevented from investigating Patton’s accident?
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“There were too many unanswered questions,” he writes, too many “strange coincidences”—the accident taking place just a day before Patton was to leave, Patton dying after rallying and being readied for the trip home to Boston. No autopsy. “These strange coincidences and happenings are just the kind of events to lead any investigator to be suspicious.” He would have interviewed certain Ukrainian agents—especially Ivan Malij, a mysterious figure he discusses briefly
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—“people on the scene . . . bystanders” at the accident.“Captain Snyder, the ambulance driver, would have
to explain why there was the delay of more than thirty minutes before leaving” the accident.
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“I would have talked with the medics who accompanied Patton in the ambulance.” He would have “checked with the Signal Corps to find out who permitted Robert Thompson to drive away with the GMC truck,” interviewed “all of the radio operators at the Signal Corps and at Patton’s HQ.”

At the hospital, he wrote, he would have inquired “if Patton’s broken neck was in any way unusual” and checked the backgrounds and especially activities during the crucial hospitalization period of all who doctored, nursed, or in any other way attended Patton.

In view of what he had learned himself, he would have interviewed Davidov, Donovan, and others in the NKVD and OSS. But, of course, that was not going to happen. He was convinced Patton was murdered. But he was helpless, a restricted and watched CIC agent becoming gun-shy of inquiring further.

He had been warned.

Then a series of quick events convinced him he had better leave Germany as soon as possible.

Word came that Donovan, possibly after conferring with Davidov, who was still angry at him, had prevailed in disciplining him and he had been busted to private. The demotion did not matter. “I never cared too much about military rank anyhow.... I was going home. I was being honorably discharged.”
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His commanding officer, Gillespie, was putting him in for a medal.
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“He [Gillespie] had tears in his eyes when he read the citation to me. He was a damned good friend. He said, ‘Steve, I’m sorry for all the trouble you’ve had. I want you to know that I consider you a real fine C.I.C. agent . . . . I’m glad you nailed Davidov.’”
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But returning home after a farewell party given him by Ukrainian leaders, including Shandruk and Professor Smal-Stocki, both of whom had earlier warned him Patton was in danger, he was arrested by a “captain”—not otherwise identified—and accused of “fraternizing with Germans,” a charge which made little sense. Fraternization laws were loosening by then and Skubik’s military records say nothing about any such infraction. Nevertheless, he writes, he was jailed for two days until Gillespie, raising hell, sprung him. Gillespie, he writes, suspected the arresting captain was “fishy”—possibly even some kind of OSS imposter—but had to threaten a court martial to free him. “Gee Steve, why can’t you stay out of trouble?” the weary lieutenant inquired. “ ‘Gillie,’ I said, ‘The buggers are out to get me.’”
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He was a marked man.

He could not get to the ship home fast enough.

He arrived in Brooklyn, N.Y., on February 19, 1946, hoping to put everything behind him. A trip to Canton, Ohio to see his foster parents did not help. There had never been much love exhibited by them toward him, especially, say Skubik’s children, by his foster mother, who had treated him basically as slave labor. The wartime separation had not helped the relationship. A girl he had
met before going to Germany, Ann McCarroll Davis, a trusted U.S. Army cryptographer working at what became the National Security Agency, was in Washington, D.C. They had corresponded while he was in Germany. He went there and she helped him find a place to live. She would soon become his wife. He took a job selling food products and was doing better “except I had problems with shell shock and amoebic dysentery.” His “nerves were shot,” says his son, Mark, who remembers that waking his father in the 1960s was “tricky as he would jump to his feet in a fighting position.” He was worse in 1946. But Ann, a Phi Beta Kappa at Duke, recruited by the code-busters even before she had graduated because of her language skills, aided greatly in his readjustment. They were quite the couple. “I once sat down and tried to figure out how many languages my parents spoke,” said Mark. “Including the ones where only limited knowledge could be assumed, I came up with eighteen.”

As time passed and things got better, “I decided to try and get my rank reinstated. I knew that my reduction in rank was not properly handled.” He probably wanted the post-war benefits the higher rank entitled. To his chagrin, however, in the process, he was directed back to the same Colonel MacIntosh he had been at odds with at OSS Germany. It looked like trouble again. But MacIntosh “greeted me like an old friend... asked me to call him ‘Mac.’” He addressed Skubik as “Steve.” He told Skubik that General Davidov was “in some kind of trouble.” He invited Skubik to lunch at the Mayflower Hotel where Washington luminaries like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had permanent tables. MacIntosh greeted Hoover as they passed by. On the way home, he asked Skubik if he would like to go back to Germany as a liaison officer. OSS had been dissolved and they were now SSU—
the Strategic Services Unit.
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Things were different now, he said. They would make him a first lieutenant. He would have more pay and benefits. They could use his language skills. Skubik said he would think about it if they would make him a captain. To his astonishment, MacIntosh agreed.
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It was enticing. But while he was contemplating the offer, he ran into Major Stone,
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the OSS officer he had befriended in Germany. “He was in Washington on assignment. He asked me what I was doing?” When Skubik told him about the MacIntosh offer, Stone looked troubled. “Don’t do it,” he warned. “They want you back in uniform in order to kill you . . . . You’re political dynamite. You’ve got the Russians mad as hell” for accusing “General Davidov and the NKVD of murdering Patton.” The fear rushed back. “What am I supposed to do . . . can’t they kill me here?” They can, acknowledged Stone, “only it would be neater if you were in uniform.” Go underground for a few years, Stone advised. Skubik’s wife-to-be got access to his file—a file, like most others involved with Patton’s demise, impossible to find today—and “understood why I was so nervous.” Apparently she saw something which led her to believe his Patton story. He contemplated going to the authorities but Ann cautioned he could not prove anything.
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He dropped out, or “sort of did,” as he puts it, traveling from Boston to Miami with his food brokerage, keeping a low profile. “I always was on the alert and I never stayed near the area from which I made telephone calls.” His son says he would not stay in the same hotel room twice. In 1947, he and Ann married and set up a home in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. But he continued
with the same cautions until two things happened. One, Ann had their first child, a daughter, while he was away and had to be taken to the hospital by a stranger. She vowed it would not happen again. She wanted him to stop traveling and work nearby. Second, conservative Republican senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, learning of Skubik’s background, recruited him to work at the Republican National Committee in 1951. “He was going to run for president. Since I was from Ohio and I was a Democrat... he had me checked out after one of his staff secretaries recommended me.”
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General Donovan’s collaboration with communists and Russians in fighting fascism, says his son, was one of the reasons Skubik decided to change party affiliations. The Taft connection finally made him come out of the shadows. “I felt free to roam the streets,” he wrote. His support for the Ukrainian struggle was still strong and Republicans, especially conservatives, were interested in fighting Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe. “Skubik authored the Liberation Policy platform that was debated during the 1952 Republican National Convention,” wrote a Ukrainian-American journal.
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Taft, he writes, promised him that when he became president, he would investigate Patton’s charges that German POWs were being mistreated in the occupation and also Patton’s “murder.” But Eisenhower defeated Taft at the convention and Skubik eventually was dropped from the Eisenhower campaign team but not before, he writes, he helped convince Eisenhower’s soon-to-be secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to adopt the liberation policy.

About this time, he joined the Prudential Insurance Company as a licensed broker. With determination and an optimistic persistence, according to acquaintances, he began a rise with both the company and the Republican Party which would see him eventually become head of Prudential’s District of Columbia office and
serve Republican campaigns as an advisor on Eastern European affairs and public relations into the 1980s. “He worked with the Dulles brothers on writing the policy to “ ‘free the captive nations’ of Eastern Europe,” his daughter Harriet wrote me in 2004. “He helped to develop the Heritage Counsel comprised of leaders from various nations who were dedicated to democracy and fighting communism and its spread.”
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While not wealthy or famous, he and Ann, whose father had been a newspaper editor and Washington correspondent, socialized with nationally known political figures including President Nixon, Evangelist Billy Graham, and Chinese-born Anna Chennault, widow of “Flying Tiger” creator, General Claire Chennault. Harriet’s godfather was the late Vice Admiral William L. Rees, a World War II intelligence officer and commander of the Atlantic Fleet in the late 1950s. “It puzzles me now that I work in a senior government position
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as a graduate of Harvard, why my parents had such consistent access to senior politicians,” writes Harriet. Regularly meeting with Ukrainian groups, he may have been involved in post-war clandestine matters, she concedes.

In the early 1960s, he was suddenly, and somewhat jarringly, reminded of Patton’s demise. A defected Soviet assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky, revealed in interrogation that he had murdered Stephan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist from whom Skubik had first learned of the threats to Patton’s life. Bandera had been found dying outside the entrance to his apartment in Munich, Germany, in 1959. After autopsy, the death had been officially ruled the result of a natural heart attack. Little publicity was given to the death. But in a well-publicized trial in 1961, Stashinsky had testified he had been ordered by the KGB
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to assassinate Bandera,
proof of Soviet assassination aims and methods that the outside world could not ignore. Stashinsky had killed Bandera with a specially designed gun that sprayed gaseous hydrogen cyanide in Bandera’s face. The cyanide, a massive artery and vein constrictor, had induced heart failure. Its vapors dissipated, leaving the poison undetectable. He had used the same “spray” gun two years earlier, Stashinsky confessed, to assassinate another Ukrainian leader, Lev Rebet—also thought to have been a natural death—and been told then that the weapon had been used successfully many times prior.