Target (51 page)

The documents that survived on microfilm stayed hidden until 1980, according to the National Archives, when a close Donovan associate gave them to Anthony Cave Brown for use in writing his Donovan biography,
The Last Hero.
They then became public. But the considerable amount of records that were outright destroyed in that three-day frenzy are lost forever.
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In addition to losing the OSS and not being given the directorship of the CIA, which biographer Brown says was one of the tragedies of his life,
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Donovan’s immediate post-war troubles quickly mounted around his alleged sympathies for communists, a charge his Republican background would seem to belie. But as his wartime record unfolded in 1946, his toleration of, if not collaboration with, communists brought him considerable grief. He had always been more of an opportunist than an ideologue. Charges of “fronting” for post-war Left-wing organizations, such as the American Institute of International Information, were leveled. He was accused of complicity in the “Amerasia” scandal, one of the first big anti-communist flaps following the war.
⁷
It did not help when his assistant Duncan Lee was accused of being a Soviet spy and fled. And when Donovan was called before a
congressional committee investigating communists in the OSS, he lied about the backgrounds of four communist party members he had hired, according to Library of Congress historian John Earl Haynes and Emory University professor Harvey Klehr.
⁸
Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, first director of the CIA, accused Donovan of being “a traitor to his country.”
⁹
Others Donovan thought were in his camp followed suit and disowned him.

The forces that caused this vilification were not clear. Was it just a backlash from the opportunistic Donovan’s “deal with the devil” attitude in an effort to help win World War II, or did the scorn, which included Truman’s rebuff and dislike, indicate secret knowledge by high-placed officials of something damning but not revealed? In 1983,
Washington Post
writer Thomas O’Toole wrote, “Donovan was inclined to move boldly, even recklessly, in grasping what he felt to be the big chance.”
¹⁰
It was never clear just how far he had gone. When Senator Joseph McCarthy began citing numbers of “Reds” in the government in the post-war “Red Scare,” Donovan sided with those attacking the senator, which won him some favor with the Left but further alienated him from the Right. It was not until the early 1950s that he again began to be identified as a Right-leaning, anti-communist Republican. By then it was too late to revive his earlier ambitions to serve in the new intelligence agency with any hope of success. Truman, who had by then seen the truth about Soviet aims and was beginning to become an anti-communist himself, was long done with him. Donovan probably had influence in the CIA, maybe even worked for it unofficially, according to biographer Brown.
¹¹
But he was politically weak and in debt, and the period began his decline.

In 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower, probably partly as a consolation to his ambitious friend, appointed Donovan U.S. ambassador to Thailand, a Southeast Asian nation bordering Vietnam
with communist insurgents all through the region. William J. vanden Heuvel, later an assistant U.S. attorney with Robert Kennedy and deputy ambassador to the United Nations, was Donovan’s assistant. In a diary vanden Heuvel kept, he recorded a slow deterioration of his boss. At first, well-experienced in insurgency, Donovan threw himself enthusiastically into the job. But it was a losing battle. In 1954, the U.S.-backed French were overrun in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in the next big defeat for the West following the fall of China to communists. The victors, known as the Viet Minh, were later to become the Viet Cong. As months went by, vanden Heuvel began having disheartening clashes with the ambassador. “He suffers from psychotic meglomania which afflicts us all... but his is of the malignant variety.” One morning, he records, they disagreed and Donovan began hurling “goddamns” at him. “I am willing to serve him in every capacity, to do without question the work he wants done, but to be the victim of his temper and ego and enormous conceit is not part of the task.” Run-ins with Donovan’s “bad mood” increased, and vanden Heuvel considered leaving, even though he felt indebted to Donovan for a “fantastic opportunity. . . . It was the phoniness, the enormous conceit veiled in humility, the attack on virtually everyone in authority while pointing out his correctness over all these years.” Mistakes made in World War II were apparently taking their toll. Was there something grating on his conscience? One can only speculate. He was America’s first superspy and, according to Eisenhower, his final real backer, “the last great hero.”

Donovan spent just one year in Thailand. When he went home, the tide of communist revolution in Southeast Asia was larger than when he had arrived. In 1957, he had a series of strokes and was confined to a nursing home, in need of constant care. He died in 1959, and whatever secrets he had went with him.

Fred Ayer, Jr., Patton’s FBI agent nephew, immediately suspected murder when he learned of his uncle’s accident. “Those communist sons of bitches killed him,” he wrote he blurted upon receiving the news. Later, however, he had second thoughts. “One does not hit a car carrying the intended victim of assassination with a truck at low speed and from an angle. Nor does one choose a second vehicle as a murder weapon . . . . Also, I was told that the driver of the truck in question felt such deep remorse that he later attempted to commit suicide.”
¹²
But Thompson’s possible suicide attempt, if that occurred, could be viewed a different way—that he was distraught over having been part of a monstrous plot.

However, as noted in Chapter 13, the NKVD favored assassination-by-truck. Theodore Romzha, the canonized bishop killed by NKVD thugs in 1947, was hit by a Soviet truck being used as a weapon of assassination. And just as pertinently, he was taken, like Patton, injured—because the assassination was botched—to a hospital where he was poisoned by an NKVD assassin-nurse.
¹³
And that was not the first time the NKVD killed in a hospital. Stalin, according to his personal interpreter, Valentin M. Berezhkov, used traffic “accident” as a murder weapon. He had a truck stationed around a sharp curve on a mountain road, knowing that former Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Maxim Litvinov, whom he wanted eliminated, would be recklessly traveling the road. Litvinov, as planned, roared into the truck and was killed. Joe Lagattuta, an OSS officer in Europe at the time of Patton’s demise and friend of Bazata, said he was nearly killed right after the war by a German truck purposely ramming his jeep and knocking him into a ravine. At the hospital, he said, Bazata, who quickly arrived and worried for his friend, asked him, “Shall I kill someone?”
¹⁴

Maneuvering a potential victim into a hospital and killing him there—usually because of botched first attempts—was not a rare occurrence for NKVD assassins. They had a laboratory that specialized in undetectable poisons which induced natural causes of death like embolism. Skubik says Pavel Sudoplatov, NKVD head of assassinations at that time, was in Germany when Patton had his accident and died. The area, according to documents, was crawling with NKVD spies, who, in that very December, were communicating with great urgency about a secret event that U.S. military intelligence—rival to the OSS—tried with no success to decipher. While the U.S. was withdrawing troops, then, Stalin was gearing for war, which he, like Patton, believed imminent. As E. H. Cookridge, a British political journalist and wartime intelligence agent, notes, “Stalin had said at the Red Army’s first victory parade, ‘We are watching the plans of the capitalist reactionaries in London and Washington who are hatching plans for a war... against our socialist motherland. Constant vigilance is needed to protect the strength of our armed forces who may be called upon to smash a new... imperialist aggression.’”
¹⁵

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, a Patton contemporary, was so convinced that Patton had been murdered and that he, espousing that view, might suffer the same fate, that he wrote a letter to the FBI stating that they were not to believe it if he was found dead by his own hand. Stratemeyer, a 1915 graduate of West Point who had leadership jobs in World War II and Korea, wrote in 1960, “We have always been suspicious” of Patton’s death, as well as of other anti-Soviet American officials, such as Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who died in an apparent suicide under mysterious circumstance in 1949. “We have notified our lawyer that we have no intention of committing suicide. That if we are found dead under peculiar circumstances or should
disappear, we want him to insist upon a thorough investigation.”
¹⁶
Patton’s own wife was not sure he had not been assassinated—as evidenced by her hiring detectives to investigate the matter.

Patton’s accident and death is a bona fide mystery and it is time that fact is acknowledged. But someone like me can only scratch the surface. An official investigation should be launched, because if Patton was murdered, it is not only important history, but it is at the heart of a significant moral question. Should assassination be used by governments or leaders of governments to arbitrarily impose their will? If Patton was assassinated, he was not only the first major victim of the Cold War, but also of a World War II policy of assassinating enemy leaders that continued after the war and has included Mossadegh in Iran, Allende in Chile, and Diem in Vietnam—not to mention its use by nations like the former Soviet Union, now Russia, as shown by the recent murder of a Russian journalist
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that has been tied to the KGB.

Ironically—or perhaps significantly—Eisenhower, who has to be examined closely in regard to Patton’s fate, was probably one of the first practitioners of the World War II assassination policy by reputedly authorizing the murder of the Vichy French leader Darlan. Additionally, “President Eisenhower authorized the first CIA attempt on a [peacetime] foreign leader’s life,” according to Joseph J. Trento in
The Secret History of the CIA
.
¹⁷
That leader was Red China’s Chou En-lai. Eisenhower is also alleged to have authorized the assassination of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and was president when the CIA reportedly conspired unsuccessfully to assassinate Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.
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Eisenhower’s public image has been mostly that of a strong and kindly grandfather. But he was different than that. It was Ike who imposed—Patton enemies would say with good reason—starvation on German
POWs during the occupation (a policy Patton opposed) and forced the repatriation of large numbers of Soviet subjects despite certain death and torture. He and Marshall tried to have many of their records destroyed, according to David Irving in
The War Between the Generals
.
¹⁹
He was also not above lying in a memo to cover himself, as when there was “inquiry” into “why the Ardennes [Battle of the Bulge] region had been so thinly defended.”
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Eisenhower was “Machiavellian,” wrote
U.S. News & World Report
’s Michael Barone in a review of
Harry & Ike
. “He violated the rules of personal morality for what he regarded, reasonably, as the good of the state . . . . He proceeded very much less than straightforwardly.” He was “misleading and duplicitous . . . Truman was appalled that Eisenhower made appearances with Senators William Jenner and Joseph McCarthy—who had harshly criticized General George Marshall—and omitted from his speech in Wisconsin lines praising Marshall.”
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Eisenhower strangely found Patton’s loyalty to him a weakness rather than a strength and bragged to Marshall of exploiting it, as he did many times when he relied on Patton to get him out of battlefield jams. Dr. Charles B. Odom, Patton’s personal physician during the war and a noted New Orleans doctor following it, wrote, “If Patton had lived to write his book, one wonders whether Eisenhower would even have been nominated, much less elected President of the United States.”
²²
As it was, Patton’s book that came out posthumously,
War as I Knew It
, was tamed by editing and omission, as were his diaries.
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Does that mean Eisenhower murdered Patton? Of course not. Eisenhower was human and had flaws like anyone else. He was a great diplomat, had a decisive hand in the European victory, and served America well for two terms as president in the 1950s. But no one with motive, given the evidence already known, should be beyond suspicion, especially when the circumstances of that time are taken into account. The world had just emerged from the worst war in history. The greatest fear was another war. Those in power in the West were determined to make the peace work. Death and dying, however, was everywhere in Europe. All the military forces were used to it—and not adverse to using it for their own purposes. Assassination was a convenient way of dealing with problems with no easy solution. The OSS used it. The NKVD used it. So did every clandestine service at work in post-war Europe. Patton was threatening to plunge the world into World War III. Even well-meaning, reasonable men shuddered at the thought of what the renegade general—one who had continually disobeyed orders and had demonstrated he was capable of acting on his beliefs—could do. And Patton, especially, was feared and hated. There was a vengeful element in the U.S. against him—not to mention Russian motive. It would not be hard for even good men to contemplate a final solution—as long as there was deniability—and turn the other way.