Target (46 page)

Similarly, recent non-fiction books
Blunder
(1985),
The Hunt for Zero Point
(2002), and
Reich of the Black Sun
(2004) argue
that Patton discovered futuristic Nazi secret weapons at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, where the Third Army basically ended the war, and that fear that he would disclose the finds caused his assassination. These books’ assertions about what was discovered, including undisclosed German nuclear research and fantastic sources of space propulsion, are based on little known facts, some of which are emerging in the continual unraveling of World War II secrets, and deserve more study. It is interesting to note that it was while Patton was in Pilsen that Skubik said the general “became acquainted with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” and Stepan Bandera.
²
But Patton in his diary mentions Pilsen and the hidden factories several times and nowhere hints that he found anything worthy of special secrecy. Of course, if he were keeping it secret, why would he? Whatever the truth of the missing Nazi gold and recovered Nazi secret weapons, the secrets involving the conduct of the war Patton knew from his participation before and after he arrived at Pilsen are, in the opinion of military historian Charles Whiting, the “obvious” reasons to silence him.
³
These included the strategic and tactical blunders made by his superiors,
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the resultant prolonging of the war and considerable loss of life estimated to have occurred because of them, and the appeasement of Stalin and the Soviets that allowed half of Europe to be enslaved at the conclusion of the war which resulted in the costly, 45-year Cold War. Such secrets were aspects of the conflict and its aftermath hidden in 1945 and are still little known except amongst scholars who debate them today.

And there are still other, little-known motives.

For instance, thousands of Americans and European soldiers who were POWs when the Russians overran their camps never returned home.
⁴
John M. G. Brown, a former Vietnam War combat infantryman, has been studying the matter since the 1980s. In a two-part series of articles that appeared in the
New American
in 1990, he detailed a secret decision that is still largely hidden today: Roosevelt, Truman, and Marshall, “to avoid a 1945 military confrontation with Stalin over the thousands of American, British, and Commonwealth POWs under Soviet control” decided not to press Russia to return the Allied POWs because “Soviet participation in the United Nations and entrance into the Japanese war were seen as more important.” Patton, according to Brown, was one of those who protested the decision in secret because of its classification. One of the reasons he was sent back to the U.S. in the summer of 1945, writes Brown, was to separate him from the policies that would leave so many in bondage for fear he would blow a whistle.
⁵
As a result of the cruel policy, according to Brown, many of the abandoned POWs spent the rest of their lives in the gulags working as slave labor for the USSR.

“General George Marshall issued the secret orders implementing the policy decision,” wrote Brown. “In the last two weeks of his life Roosevelt stuck to the decision. From this point on, Stalin knew that the American leadership would back down” when he made demands. Stalin was using the POW “kidnapping,” which amounted to holding hostages, to get the U.S. and Britain to agree to Soviet control of Eastern Europe. “Nearly a month later, as the European war drew to a close, a new president, Harry Truman, was briefed by [U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union] Averell Harriman on the POW kidnapping . . . . Truman, however, also decided that the potential losses, both diplomatic and military, of open
conflict with the Soviet Union were not worth the recovery of all U.S. prisoners in Soviet control. He too considered the United Nations and the Japanese war top priorities and endorsed Roosevelt’s decision.”
⁶

As a result of Truman’s decision, wrote Brown, who said he found details of the Soviet “blackmail” in declassified documents in the National Archives, “Marshall again issued the order forbidding the use of military force to recover American POWs . . . . U.S. and British intelligence reports and cables from General Marshall spoke of more than 15,000 Americans and some 8,500 British and Commonwealth prisoners in Soviet-occupied Austria alone.” Many of those POWs, he wrote, had been identified by Patton’s Third Army. “While the Soviets temporarily admitted their existence, they refused U.S. and British... entrance into the camps” and eventually denied the POW’s existence outright. “The crisis was kept secret from the American and British people, who were told on May 31, 1945 by Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson that substantially all their prisoners had been returned. Yet a classified SHAEF memo . . . the day before states that an estimated 20,000 Americans and 20,000 British remained in Soviet hands.” Robert Patterson was the same man who had vouched for Soviet spy Nathan Silvermaster when the FBI had questioned his loyalty and whom Patton had shocked by pleading, “Mr. Secretary, for God’s sake....Let’s not give [the Russians] time to build up their supplies. If we do . . . we have had a victory over the Germans [but] failed in the liberation of Europe.”

Even beyond knowing such shocking secrets as the alleged betrayal of American POWs, Patton’s public threats against the USSR and Stalin seem motive enough for the Soviets to target him. I have been told Stalin would never be so foolish as to try to kill
Patton—especially at that time. Things were going his way. He had Eastern Europe and U.S. policy in his hands. Why chance losing that? Such thinking, in my opinion, assumes Stalin was reasonable and hoped for peace like his Allies. He was not—although, incredibly, many viewed him that way. He was a paranoid, unhinged dictator who ruled by fear and murder; a ruthless, merciless killer who calculatingly marked enemies and friends alike for death on a list he penciled daily at his desk like a cross-word puzzle.
⁷
The Katyn masscare showed what he thought of caution in international politics. He ordered every Polish military and civilian leader in Soviet captivity murdered in order to control resistance in Poland. Patton, with his influence and intentions, was a larger danger to the dictator than the Poles. And Stalin was not known to hesitate. Like “a spider at the center of a web,” wrote Russian historian Donald Rayfield, one of the few who has documented the dictator’s crimes, Stalin “was alert to any disturbance and could neutralize any threat.”
⁸
“Assassination [was] an integral part of Stalin’s foreign policy,” wrote Vasili Mitrokhin, former KGB archivist.
⁹
At the end of the war, NKVD murder, often directly ordered and plotted by Stalin, was almost a daily occurrence. Other foreign notables whose fame and prestige matched Patton’s—all military men—were marked for death by Stalin, including Hitler, General Franco of Spain, General Goering, General Tito, and Trotsky, the revolutionary, according to subordinates like his chief of assassination, Sudoplatov.
¹⁰
For various reasons,
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his old rival Trotsky was the only one of those he was able to have killed. But he hatched assassination plots against all of them. Each was as prominent as Patton and most of them were
capable of hurting him politically should his or the NKVD’s fingerprints be discerned (Hitler and Goering being the exceptions)—but that never seems to have worried him.

Just how bizarre and international Stalin’s plots could become is shown in the recent revelation that American icon John Wayne, the actor, was among his intended victims, according to British film historian and Wayne biographer Michael Munn. In the late 1940s, Wayne, a symbol of American independence and ruggedness, spurred by revelations of communist infiltration into the U.S. government, became an ultra-right anti-communist. He supported Senator Joseph McCarthy in denouncing communists, while most in Hollwood, where Wayne worked, attacked McCarthy and the blacklisting of Hollywood leftists which McCarthy was spawning. He was elected president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and spoke frequently at “Crusade for Freedom” rallies where he denounced such films as
All the King’s Men
, the 1949 Best Picture winner, which he felt “smeared the machinery of the country’s government” and would “tear down people’s faith in... the American way.”
¹¹

According to sources Munn interviewed,
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Sergei Gerasimov, a Soviet film director, was in Hollywood and became aware of Wayne’s activism. Gerasimov returned to Russia to tell Stalin, who took an active part in Russian film making, about Wayne’s crusade and influence in America. Stalin became convinced that Wayne “was one of the greatest enemies to the Soviet Union,” and a major obstacle to world revolution.
¹²
In 1983, writes Munn, Orson Wells, no conservative, told him,

Wayne himself admitted as much—although he wanted it kept quiet because of a questionable stunt he pulled to scare some KGB assassins sent to kill him. Munn writes he and Wayne were in Wayne’s trailer when Munn asked “Duke” if what he had heard about Stalin targeting him was true. Wayne was silent a few moments. “Then, in an almost hushed tone, he said to me, ‘Once the genie’s out of the bottle, how ya gonna get it back in again?. . . Kid, I’ve been criticized for years because I’ve made my feelings known about those pinko bastards . . . . I’ll be straight with you ’cos I like you, and you already know more than anyone should. This is between you and me. The communists have been trying to kill me since 1949.’”
¹⁴
The revered actor then told Munn a story involving a thwarted KGB attempt to kill Wayne. It “was at Wayne’s office at Warner Bros., where he and Jimmy Grant [Wayne’s frequent screenwriter] would be working on a script,” writes Munn. The FBI had informed Wayne that the assassins were coming and would be masquerading as agents. When real agents arrived to set a trap, Wayne asked if he and Grant could teach the Russians a lesson. He wanted to show he was not afraid of them. He proposed using guns loaded with blanks to act out an execution on the assassins. The agents agreed. When the assassins arrived, they
were arrested and taken in a car to a place up the coast of California. Munn concluded, “That’s how John Wayne and James Grant came to be on a remote beach late into the evening, with guns aimed at the heads of two KGB agents, kneeling in the sand, and thinking their time was up.”
¹⁵

Having failed in their mission, the two assassins defected.

If Stalin targeted John Wayne, why not George Patton?

Banished to Bad Nauheim, where he would preside over the leisurely writing by a small group of soldiers and military historians of tactical lessons learned in the war, Patton was hurt, angry, and spied upon by the Russians and his own country. SHAEF’s tap of his phone line meant he was being monitored by his superiors, who worried he might do something rash and hoped they would be alerted with enough time to stop him from any potential war-starting scheme. And the Soviets, watching him as well as listening to his phone conversations, were in a position to monitor his every move and react.
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Those listening in on the phone taps probably got an earful. They could have little doubt that Patton had no plans of remaining silent once free of his military fetters.

On October 2, Patton wrote to Charles Codman, his former aide-de-camp,

On or about October 13, Patton was involved in an auto accident in which he was only slightly injured. Details, strangely, are almost nonexistent. Blumenson mentions it fleetingly in the
Patton Papers
, as does Farago in
Last Days
, who attributes it to Patton’s alleged propensity to be “accident prone,” a belief which most Patton historians echo. A small newspaper story from the Independent News Service, datelined October 14, records, “Patton was reported in an automobile accident near his headquaters at Bad Nauheim” and “escaped serious injury.” It is possible, since this accident is relatively close in time to the more fateful one on December 9, that some of the seemingly erroneous reports about December 9 are mixing the two. Was this preliminary October accident, innocuous as it seems by most accounts, an earlier assassination attempt?