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What the other two waiting to take their turn didn’t know, he said, was that he had hidden in his coat a fourteen-inch-long lead pipe.

He whipped it out.

“To be certain, and to violently impress [presumably other hobos in the speeding car]... I clobbered each unconscious... across their faces . . . where it showed the most.... I pulled each ‘cadaver’ to the door and dumped each silently.... I heard a few moans from . . . the remainders—all seated—one vomiting softly in his foul corner. Bums are weak; tough perhaps, in the clinging-to-life sense, but weak flee-ers [sic] from man.”

According to his recollection, he was only eighteen at the time.

Even before he was a teenager, his father, an excellent pugilist, had taught him to box. The son, initially timid, grew to love the sport. “It enables you to conquer yourself, teaches you discipline and how to resist temptation, like throwing a roundhouse. You don’t want to succumb to that. Use the jab. Punch straight in.” He had a wicked jab and used to lie awake at night wondering why God had favored him so. Appropriately, he wrote in his diary, attack one spot. “That’s what my father taught me. Think. Use your head. Don’t get riled. Hit ’em enough times and they’ll go down.”
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In a letter he wrote to a friend much later, he recounted a fist fight he forced despite his fear. “You’ve got to courage it, stick to it without over-thot [sic],” or end up “sweating in the... night [like before a parachute] jump.” Early in his military career, he was being bullied by a navy boxer and maintenance chief, bigger than himself “who hated me because I... was of Bohemian origin.... He kept trying to pick a fight.” Surprising the man with a cursing, 4:00 a.m. barracks wakeup, he maneuvered to get the angry adversary in front of him and facing a blinding spotlight. “This small ruse is/was ancient: but excited kids NEVER think” of such advantages. “I always wore 2 rings: one [for] each hand: but for this sweet PREPARED occasion... I placed both”—one
with a ruby, the other his fraternity emblem—“on my left hand: 2 different fingers for a sweet broad spread .... Without warning I began...very rapid...straight left jabs....I felt his nose... smash... his cheek-bones cave....”
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It solved the problem.

In 1933, to the dismay of his father who probably wanted him to complete college, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, and after joining his regimental boxing team, became, by a succession of local and regional ring victories, the Corps’s unofficial heavyweight boxing champion
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—“the happiest four years of my life,” he would later say of his overall four-year enlistment. “The marines were tough then but I loved it.” As part of a marine contingent to the Chicago Century of Progress (World’s Fair) exhibition in 1934, he said he had fought exhibitions against, among other notables, former champions Max Bear, Jack Sharkey, and Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion who was fifty-two years old at the time.
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He lost all the exhibitions but considered each a privilege: “I loved those chaps.”

He had a high tolerance for pain. “Nobody could make me talk,” he wrote. “I practiced splinters up my nails... burned myself... filed my teeth.” He had had a foot smashed in a bad accident in which a huge wall shelf holding vehicle engines collapsed and killed several marines. It had left his big toe permanently bent beneath the one next to it. The two looked like grotesquely crossed fingers.
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Doctors said he would never walk again and certainly never box again. They had been wrong.

His eyesight and ability to shoot was so good, he had earlier been made a member of the Marine Corps champion rifle teams which had dominated the annual National Rifle and Pistol Competitions throughout the 1930s. By the time he went to Ft. Benning, where he would become an army weapons instructor after
leaving the marines, he was known as one of the best shots in the military.
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He would nearly lose an eye when a practice grenade had prematurely exploded as he was demonstrating it to a class at Ft. Benning.

Bazata had a rebel streak and an irreverence for authority that Bernie Knox, a fellow Jedburgh and later director emeritus of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., would write was a “brazen audacity, both physical and verbal, that took people’s breath away and enabled him to get away with actions and remarks that were, in a military milieu, outrageous.”
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He was known to address full colonels as “Sugar,”
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and once reported for maneuvers straight-faced in bathrobe and slippers, his duffle bag militarily packed with pillows.
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He sometimes had a cagey laugh and a wily manner that often signaled recipient beware. In 1934, he spent time in the steaming hot brig of the USS
Wyoming
, an aging battleship, for cold-cocking a marine captain. “He was snotty to me and I thumped him—not the thing,” he would later admit, “for a [private first class] to do.”

However, he could always be counted on in tough situations so the marines forgave him. “This officer has great initiative, energy, physical courage and daring,” his immediate OSS superior would write in 1945.
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At age nine, he had been up in a bi-plane when the door had suddenly flown open. “I’d found it scarily inviting.... I held [it] closed. I loved it. For me, the strength of courage was to do it alone—go it alone—into an unknown.” He was a man of action, always preferring to enter the tempest, rules be damned, rather than cautiously wait for “legalities.” As a result, he maintained that the Marine Corps had launched his career as a government hit man. In the choppy, personally coded, hard-to-understand style of many of his diaries—because, by that time, he had been so long in the secret world of intelligence that he seemed often to be
trying to disguise what he was writing—he would pen this relatively decipherable passage: “Upon joining the marine corps March 1933—he [Bazata] fired expert with Springfield 30-06 Model 1911 [rifle]—This extremely rare on 1
^st
cruise... and even more so first year.... For this reason and perhaps others—Baz was slowly—gradually sounded out—about possible willingness [to] join marine assassination team. Baz did not agree entirely, nor did he refuse ....”
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It had happened off Cuba, he would write in the diaries numerous times, while he was serving in a shipboard unit. He was given special orders. “My so-called pro-job there was to slay Herr Batista [Fulgencio Batista, at that time a Cuban army sergeant who had overthrown the government of Gerardo Machado in a coup September 4, 1933, and would himself be overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959].” But after slipping over the ship’s side with killing gear (atop his head) and swimming to shore, he was stopped on the dock by a mysterious friend on the island at the last minute. They knew he was coming, the friend, whom Bazata codenamed “Peter/Paul” in his writings, and who would crop up later in Bazata’s life, warned. Understandably—if this did happen—there is no record of it available to researchers, if there is, in fact, any record of it at all. An order to assassinate would have been highly sensitive and most probably verbal. But Bazata’s CIA files do show that he received “a letter of commendation” from Rear Admiral C. S. Freeman, who was in charge of U.S. navy ships in the area at the time.
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In the letter he is lauded “for services performed in connection with intelligence during Cuban situation dated 30 January 1934,” roughly three months after Batista had grabbed power. Nine months later, according to the same record, Bazata was promoted to private 1
^st
class.

The Liberator was nearing the drop zone and the three waiting Jedburghs were alerted. They took positions in the now-open “Joe hole,” feet dangling in an approximate four-foot-wide opening, newly constructed of plywood and metal hitchings over the plane’s rearward bomb bay. The noise of the outside air rushing by and the engine’s roar was now deafening, rendering talking, restricted anyway to hide their identities from spies, almost impossible. So the parachutists fixed their eyes on the dispatcher near them who himself was watching specially rigged lights. The red bulb, already glowing, meant “action station.” Green, soon to illuminate, meant “go.”
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He would give the signal with his hand.

Up ahead, in the midst of the darkness beneath the plane, anxious Maquis, amidst local peasants, waited with a young, decorated British special forces agent, George Millar, whom the Jeds about to jump knew only by his code-name “Emile.”
^h
Those waiting on the fringes of a clearing in the midst of dense woods would pinpoint the drop zone with hastily lit bonfires and flashlights after they located the bomber in the night sky and received the proper code response through their radios. Eight miles away, German patrols on a main road were looking for just such activity.

This was the most dangerous part of the airborne delivery. The plane would be vulnerable flying slowly amidst mountains and the drops would be made at a very low altitude of approximately two hundred feet—or less.
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Enemy night fighters were flying in the surrounding skies. The crew had been hit by cannon fire during an earlier drop mission. The twin-engine fighter—a Junkers 88—had attacked the Liberator, injuring the tail gunner and opening a hole
through the fuselage the size of a washtub.
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The attack had forced the plane into a nearby flak trap where two others of the crew were injured by bursting shells. The drop had been abandoned and the crew and Jeds had been lucky to return home on three engines—so they were understandably gun-shy on this August night.

The plan now was to first swoop in and drop supplies for the Maquis—ambush and sniping rifles, ammunition, and better radios with a longer range than they already had—items Millar had been constantly requesting. The first drop would give the planes’ pilots a chance to orient to the drop zone, code named “Treasurer.” It was thirteen kilometers north northeast of Besancon, an ancient town of churches and ruins dating back to the Romans, who, under Julius Caesar, had taken the settlement in 58 B.C. Since then the town, surrounded by a river and mountains, had been overrun by barbarians, absorbed into France in 1674, bombarded by the Austrians in 1814, and was now in the path of the mostly retreating Nazis.

The supply drop went without a hitch; those waiting below catching a glimpse of the big planes’ illuminated belly as it swooped close over the field and then looped up and back around. Inside the fuselage, the green bulb lit as the plane neared for its second pass. The dispatcher, taking the cue, began dropping his hand at short, calculated intervals. First went Chapel, then Floyd, and finally Bazata. Chapel and Floyd got out easily. But something went wrong when Bazata, at the lowest altitude, dropped. Sources conflict
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over where and why he encountered trouble—whether it was just as he jumped through the hole or on the way down, his parachute static line, a steel wire attached to the plane used to yank his parachute open, got caught near his groin and sliced upward through his jumpsuit and uniform, ripping into his inner thigh and opening a gash clear to the bone. The mishap forced
him into the wrong position for landing and since he had jumped at somewhere between two hundred and one hundred feet altitude, he wrote, he did not have time to right himself and had landed badly—face first—adding further injury.

“I lay in agony, even in some alarm”—for the safety of his men and the success of the mission—he wrote decades later to Bill Colby, a friend and fellow Jedburgh who was (at the time of the writing) the director of the CIA.
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But he got himself together when Millar, “aghast at his injury,” found him and explained that they had to leave quickly because of the nearby Germans. Somehow, with the aid of others, he made it to a vehicle hidden in the surrounding woods and, dousing the bonfires, they all escaped. They had no doctor. “I was my doc... tied the damn viens [sic] into knots with my little fingers.” His thigh “blew up like a black balloon... for nearly 3 weeks.” But “trusting no one,”
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and because his parents had taught him “never to complain of the physical,”
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he had made no mention of the injury to his mostly British handlers back in London. His first communication sent back read, “Jedburgh CEDRIC reports 28 Aug the safe arrival of his party.... He is beginning to get organized right away....”
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The new arrivals were driven by back roads to a former French soldier’s country home where arrangements had been made for them to stay—at least for the time being. Because of the heavy German presence in the area, it was decided that they should change into civilian clothes and destroy their uniforms. From then on, if caught, they could be considered spies by the Nazis and put to death rather than be granted prisoner of war status like uniformed soldiers. Millar, in the role of host to the Jeds, wrote that
at first he worried about having to baby-sit them. But Bazata, despite his injury, quickly won him over. As “the big American” talked, “my reluctance faded,” he wrote. He “was a blustering man with a heavy, Russian looking face... brilliant... a quick, eager talker.... [He] liked to sketch things in with broad sweeps of his imagination... and he picked out and hammered on the salient immediate supply necessities of the area as a good newspaper editor might have done. He was a get-things-done man.”
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