Target (8 page)

They were in the north near Vesoul west of Belfort when they heard from an informant that American troops were definitely in Rigney, a town southeast of them toward Besancon. But the Germans were blowing up bridges across the Ognon River which they would have to cross to get to Rigney. Only one bridge, it seemed, was left—the one at Cenans, the next town south of them—and enemy engineers were already beginning to place explosives on it. The informant had just come from there and seen them. “We can rush them, can’t we?” Millar writes Bazata interjected.
⁴⁶
They had recently acquired a big Terrot motorcycle, which only Millar had experience in driving. “If you can hold on behind me,” he answered, “I dare say the bike will go fast enough to take us through.”

They were on the “monster” as soon as they could get it up from a ditch it was in and running. They both had pistols, but Millar warned Bazata not to let go of him to shoot. He would need both hands to hold on since the roads were bad at Cenan. They took off in a bluster, Millar purposely going as fast as he could, about seventy miles per hour, over hills and potholes in order to get Bazata used to the speed. At some of the holes,
“Bazata nearly bounced over my head. The tears were pouring from my eyes,” he wrote.
⁴⁷

The bridge was at the bottom of a steep hill, perhaps a hundred yards straight down to its entrance. Barreling over the crest, Millar gave the motorcycle full throttle and shot downward, steadfast in what he was about to do, seemingly oblivious to the consequences. “The bridge seemed to leap toward us, in a blur of speed.” He was cognizant of “several figures” and two trucks on the side of the road, but in the intense concentration of the moment heard nothing but the roar of the motorcycle. They hit a bump and “the big machine seemed to buck clear of the ground and I was afraid she would twist in the air but somehow we kept going straight and Bazata was still there.”
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As they zoomed across the bridge, Bazata, who apparently was more cognizant of the dangers around, wrote that the startled Germans “fired at us with machine guns and blew the bridge.”
^o
But they were already on the other side and roared onward. Millar, he said, had “black and blue” imprints of his (Bazata’s) hands on his lower chest “for a couple of days.”
⁴⁹

Once across the river and heading for Rigney they were stopped by an American sentry who sent them, eventually—after much interrogation and handoffs to higher officers—to the headquarters of General Lucian Truscott, commander of VI Corps whose 3rd Infantry Division, Seventh U.S. Army, was moving up from Southern France into the Besancon-Belfort area after landing at St. Tropez. Truscott, according to Bazata in his report, was grateful for the intelligence, especially the news of the paratroopers, and
after treating the two to dinner, asked them to relay his thoughts to London via their behind-the-lines, direct radio connection with instructions as soon as possible—a course of action Millar thought they could maybe delay at least a little bit in order to enjoy the safety and relative comfort they had reached. But, he later recalled, “I knew perfectly well that Bazata was crazy. Nothing would stop him from going back to Loulans (their base near Vesoul) that night, and I was not going to waste time arguing.”
⁵⁰

Mounting the Terrot, they roared back through the German lines and aside from being “captured” by surprised Americans along the way, made it back to their base deep in occupied territory without major incident. As it turned out, London decided against dropping the paratroopers but for the next few days had Bazata and Millar overseeing the arrival of many smaller groups, some Jed, some U.S. Army drops. In the meantime, Truscott’s forces continued northward until they were battling for Loulans. Caught in the middle of an artillery duel between German and American forces, Bazata, while on a sniping mission, was hit in the left hand by flying shrapnel and radioed somewhat facetiously that the Germans were “formidable... have lovely purple heart ready.”
⁵¹
More serious, according to Bazata, was a bullet wound he suffered in the “gut.”
⁵²
The exact circumstances are unclear. But he said he had been dropped by his chauffer in the woods after sending a secret radio message from their car. A German had gotten a direct hit on him. He said it was superficial, but the trauma to his thigh probably compounded the issue. He “crawled into the woods and stayed there for two days” before his men came to get him. They took the bullet out. Like the injury to his thigh, he did not report it to London.

Back on his feet, he made continual trips across enemy lines to American headquarters and then back into enemy territory.
He was asked “to capture a German general and his one hundred guards.”
⁵³
He organized the mission. But when he arrived to lead the local Maquis in the general’s area, he found they had been attacked by the Germans and fled. “So we lost our general.” On September 11, he radioed London, “All is hectic. Doing liaison work for Americans in all directions. Delaying Boche... and cleaning up in rear”—meaning killing stragglers. As the American forces advanced, he gathered intelligence to aid them. And so it went. By September 21, U.S. troops had chased the Germans out of France and closed the Belfort Gap. London radioed, “You have all done a grand job and it is now time to come home.” They would send a plane to retrieve him. Bazata radioed back there was still work to be done. Not until September 29, did he radio, “Everything settled now. Shall leave for Paris tomorrow. Should like to recommend Emile [Millar] for an American decoration.”

It had been a very successful mission. In the time he had been there, according to his Distinguished Service Cross recommendation, “the number of Resistance personnel in his area had increased from a few to 6,000 Maquis with 1,000 additional Russian (Ukrainian) troops....” The actual awarded citation
⁵⁴
said,

He was lauded in a recommendation for promotion for his “courage and initiative” in organizing ambushes which had caused the Germans to greatly overestimate Maquis strength and have to commit forces against them that could have been better used elsewhere.
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But perhaps the most important compliment had come from a man Bazata would one day say he was at odds with over Patton—none other than his boss, the OSS chief himself, “Wild Bill” Donovan. When, in 1977, Colonel William H. Pietsch, Jr., also a Jedburgh, was asked by Bazata, who was then fighting the Veterans Administration to get full disability, to verify his injuries, Pietsch wrote to the VA: “I was present when Mr. Gerald E. Miller and Colonel Joseph Haskell (the two top-ranking Special Operations officers in OSS London Headquarters) discussed the qualifications of certain officers with Major General William Donovan, the director of the OSS.” After listening to a description of Captain Bazata’s wounds, General Donovan said simply, “There’s no doubt about it. He’s a hero.”
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Donovan certainly knew who Bazata was and, perhaps more importantly, of what he was capable.

Douglas Bazata’s house
was a modest one-story bungalow in a pleasant Chevy Chase, Maryland, neighborhood in the northern outskirts of Washington, D.C. The streets to it curved through forested hills hiding gentle ravines where, I imagined while driving there, shallow brooks trickled. A lot of former military and government workers retire near the capitol. In preparation for meeting Bazata I had done a little research.

Back in October 1979, Bazata had given an interview to the
Spotlight
,
^p
a radical populist Washington, D.C. weekly, which had used the interview to produce two front-page articles saying Patton had been assassinated. The first, run in the October 15 issue, had concentrated on the motives to kill the general, of which, I knew, were many. He distrusted the Russians and wanted to go to
war with them. He had damning secrets to tell about World War II; how badly it was run and how it could have ended earlier. Who knew what else? He did not agree with punishing all Germans, especially those who were not hardcore Nazis. The second article, which ran on October 22, bannered, “I Was Paid to Kill Patton: Exclusive interview with OSS ‘Hit Man.’” In both articles, Bazata added a new element to the story. He claimed he had been asked by none other than OSS director-founder “Wild Bill” Donovan himself to assassinate the general. But he had not done it and had no intention of doing it since he knew Patton and liked him. The December 9, 1945 accident had been staged by an acquaintance whom he did not or would not name. Since the general had not died in the accident—as was intended—he said he was told a “refined form of cyanide that can cause embolisms, heart failure and things like that” had been used to kill him later in the hospital. It had been made in Czechoslovakia, and, in small amounts, could be “timed to kill” over a ‘period such as 18 to 48 hours’”—an obvious allusion to the fact that Patton had suffered an unexpected relapse. Even though he had not done the job, Bazata told the
Spotlight
, Donovan mistakenly thought he had, and paid him $10,000, which Bazata had kept.

This was interesting new information to me. Bazata, it showed, had previously gone public. As if Patton being murdered was not controversial enough, he charged that Donovan had been part of the plot which elevated the claim considerably. “Wild Bill” Donovan was an icon, especially to most in the OSS. He was the creator and guiding light of the country’s first large spy and intelligence network. It was the forerunner of no less a monumental agency than the CIA. Donovan had been commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. He was a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York where he had made a
name for himself as a tough and honest prosecutor. He had been awarded the nation’s highest military tribute, the Medal of Honor, for courageous action in the trenches of World War I. A noted biography about him was titled,
The Last Hero
¹
—an accolade then president Dwight D. Eisenhower gave him upon hearing of Donovan’s death in 1959. Charging Donovan had been involved in Patton’s death was like accusing the Pope—at least to most other OSSers.

But Bazata, disdainful of his former boss, had passed a lie-detector test on all he had told the
Spotlight
, according to its staff. They had had an unnamed “professional analyst” subject Bazata’s interview to “the rigors of a content analysis survey using a Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE),” the preamble to their articles stated. “The PSE is an advanced polygraph machine (‘lie detector’) in use by hundreds of police departments and intelligence agencies. His report: Bazata gives no evidence of lying.” The
Spotlight
, it disclosed, had contacted Bazata after reading his charges in a
Washington Star
article a month earlier. Reporter Joy Billington had attended a “Veterans of the OSS” dinner at Washington’s Hilton Hotel and “eaten,” she emphasized “under a giant sepia photograph” of their deceased leader Donovan. At a table that included, among others, former CIA director William Colby, Bazata, she said, had responded to one of her questions by making his “controversial claim.” She had quoted him, “Apparently quite a number of top-level people were jealous of Patton. I know the guy who killed him. But I was the one who got paid for it.... If you [Billington] get me killed, get someone to say a prayer over my grave.”
²

Bazata, I was to find out, was, among other things, a religious man.

I parked my car and was greeted by Nick Longworth, Bazata (now eighty-five), and his younger, French-born wife, Marie-Pierre.
The story was that they had met when she was to attend a lavish weekend engagement party in Southern France—but it just so happened to be
her
engagement party. Approximately twenty-eight at the time, she was a recent graduate, fluent in five languages, and betrothed to a prominent young French ophthalmologist. She was attending a medical conference with him in one of France’s beautiful southern cities when, in the lobby of their hotel, “I saw this striking looking man. I could not stop looking at him.” He saw her and she was embarrassed. “He knows what I’m thinking,” she thought. But he came over. Did I believe in love at first sight, she asked me by way of explanation.