Target (10 page)

One day in April of 1945, just before the war in Europe ended, he said he met with Donovan who asked what he wanted to do in the future. He said he told the director he wanted to continue in the clandestine service. Although this meeting was touched on only lightly in our interviews, Bazata’s writings,
²²
which I later would read, gave more detail: Donovan was pleased with his answer, saying “excellent,” and continued that “they”—never defined—had a few “interesting” tasks for him “that should appeal to the adventurously patriotic qualities in you.” The tasks would “concern [American] interests of certain complexity” and be “centered in Europe—mostly [Germany]—also [France] and a bit on the fringes.” There would be “many diverse obstacles” but “an adroit chap like yourself can readily improvise as the target appears or moves or alters or magnifies.” The targets would come from various fields—“[military]—political—industrial—criminal and from both Allied/Axis sources. If you agree, we’d like you to aid us... while continuing on as you are.” Bazata asked if the job would be unofficial. “Yes,” he wrote Donovan replied. “ ‘That seems the most secure and safe manner.’” There would be no records. Why was he selected? Because of his loyalty and the fact that they knew he would “never denounce nor betray colleagues.” What about expenses? “You’ll have a chap to tap. This same chap will describe ‘surprise’ targets as they erupt.” Other than that, he would be free to run his own show; arrange his own contacts, drops, safe areas, schedules. We “don’t know what you do,” he said Donovan said to begin the meeting. “No one seems to... but [we] do know you to be exceptionally capable—fearless—a totally devoted [American].”

“Baz very interested,” he wrote in his typical terse, third person, often difficult-to-follow style. “In effect,” he continues in the diary, “he [Bazata] was asked... to provide his own support [and] to do their dirty work. To be on [the] extreme end of [the] limb—with no support—no authority—no official backing/aid [and] would be thrown to wolves at any failure.” If industry was to provide targets, then “Baz” he wrote, “was the peasant there solely to enrich those bastards.” But the offer was exactly what he sought, a post-war job in the clandestine with both the danger and autonomy he coveted. He could not resist—so he agreed. “How stupid can we all be? Me to accept—they to ask [and]
believe
I accepted....
Did
they believe me? Was I a patsy? Go carefully kid. But GO!” (italics mine).
^t
23

Sometime after their earlier 1945 meeting—which he indicated to the
Spotlight
occurred in the fall of 1945 but was not time specific with me—he said he was again contacted by Donovan and, this time, offered $10,000—equivalent roughly to $100,000 today
²⁴
—to kill Patton. “He said to me, ‘We have a very important job for you Douglas. I got my orders from way up. Many people want this done.’” Donovan, he said, made a case that Patton “was evil. He had been doing things against America’s interest and the situation could no longer be tolerated. American security was at stake. Bazata did not like Donovan, he said and wrote. He thought him a “phony” and derisively referred to him as “Mildew” or “Millie” because of what he felt was Donovan’s humorless, dour personality and lack of real courage. But the director “was the number one guy.... I didn’t doubt his orders.”

Bizarrely, said Bazata, because they were friends, he had already, in the months before, secretly contacted Patton and told him, without revealing who or what, that enemies from his own side were out to “hurt” him. “He was a pretty gutsy guy and said well fuck ’em. They’ve got to run pretty fast to catch me. Things like that.... But what could he do? He wasn’t going to stop or go away.... He had his destiny to fulfill.... Nobody could make him do that. He knew it all.” So, he said, he listened to Donovan. He knew Patton “wasn’t playing the game,” and was “disregarding orders.” Donovan said Patton was undermining all that had been achieved and was a threat to U.S. objectives. “It’s difficult for me to talk about it.... All I can say is very slowly and unpleasantly I was convinced that they were right.” Patton was a killer, Bazata said, as incongruous as that sounded considering his own exploits he had been sharing with me. “He should be eliminated.”

He accepted.

It was now, obviously, the time to query him on the accident. But as we got into it, I realized that he was not taking the same stance he had with the
Spotlight.
That stance had been that he had only
known
the person who had caused the accident; that he had not participated in it and had worked to undermine the plot. But as we continued it became apparent that he was saying HE had caused the accident; that he had been there when it had happened and had, in effect, helped plan it. Although he was at first either confused or coy—I could not tell—saying things like, “I’m having a hard time remembering” and “I’m not sure but I think I was there.” In fact, maybe the stroke he had had was legitimately interfering with his memory. Maybe I was too, since I was suggesting with my questions that he might have been there, a logical conclusion when one studied his
Spotlight
confession. Regardless, Bazata very quickly began telling me how the opportunity had arisen and how it was basically the “fulfillment of a plan.”

In the
Spotlight
he had been precise in stating he did not want to execute the order and had only played along because he feared he would be killed if he did not. But now he was almost sinister in his recounting, chuckling quietly with a grin, “I operated. I operated.” At least he said that in the beginning. Then he became remorseful. Mostly, he was matter-of-fact.

Over a period of days, as he related it to me piecemeal, the following scenario emerged:

Prior to the accident he met a man who became a co-conspirator with him. He claimed he never knew the man’s name and identified him to me only as the “Pole,” because, he said, he spoke with an Eastern European accent which sounded Polish. But he was not sure. He never asked, he said, as is the custom in his line of work. He said the Pole “shocked” him by indicating he, too, had been ordered to kill Patton. “Obviously somebody had talked,” was his first guess. He could not understand it, he said, because he and Donovan had agreed no one else should ever know. But as they talked he began to think the man may have been sent as insurance by those who had ordered Donovan, or by others unknown to Donovan because, after Patton’s death, Donovan had congratulated him for it. Donovan had assumed that he, Bazata, had been responsible. When I asked how the Pole had told him of his mutual assignment, he answered, “I don’t remember the words exactly, but it was [just that] he was going to kill somebody. I don’t think he said Patton. I think that came up later.... Whatever that guy said, I listened and I said... he’s one of the boys,” meaning, I presumed, a professional assassin. He had also been paid, he told Bazata. The two of them decided to do the job together. The Pole, he said, basically planned it. Since Bazata was the best shot, “I would do the triggering and he would stand along side of me... if I missed... he’d back me up.” Having an accomplice was best, he said he decided, because things can and will go wrong.

They had special-made weapons—two of them—fashioned in a foreign country and gotten from “private sources” whose identity he never knew. They were like rifles and could shoot any projectile—rock, metal, “even a coffee cup.” At different times in the interviews he told me they had come from Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and a “little country” he could not remember. The important thing was it was driven by “air” and a “spring” and thus silent, which was needed, and the damage it did to the victim would not appear to have come from a bullet. Additionally, what was shot, if found, would look like innocent debris—a rock from the road or metal from the car. “It was magnificent.” Its limitation was that it was only accurate for short distances, “like across this room.” He indicated the living room we occupied. He said he tested his with a rock “and unless you had a good rock, it would veer off.... For instance, if one part of the rock was large it would twirl.” He was “almost positive” that the projectile they had used for the accident was a “square” piece of metal, but said his memory could be faulty and it might have been a rock.

He indicated that early the Sunday morning of the accident, he had gone to Bad Nauheim and had secretly trailed the Cadillac as it left. He had ways, he said, of knowing what was happening in Patton’s headquarters. “When [General] Gay was in with Patton [deciding on the trip], I was in contact. They were going to go hunting.” He said he had “people” (spies) in the Patton camp. He did not elaborate.

When, early in the trip, Patton had stopped to tour the Roman ruins at Saalburg, he said he had crept up to the vacated limousine and, on the side where Patton was sitting, inserted something small that jammed the window or windows—it was not clear
²⁵
—so it (or they) would not close. The jamming created an opening about “four or so inches” through which he could shoot. Apparently
after rigging the Patton car window (or windows), he had stopped trailing the limousine and gone ahead to the ambush area to await Patton’s arrival. He said figuring out the route was not hard and implied they either had inside information or it was the logical route to the hunting grounds.

To set up the accident, they had positioned two trucks. The primary truck was a U.S. Army truck that would be moving up the two-lane road toward the approaching Patton car and then suddenly turn in front of it. The resultant crash and sudden halting of the limousine would give Bazata, hiding inside or beside
²⁶
the shell of an abandoned vehicle amidst war debris on the roadside, an optimum shot. “But you had to be good to make that shot.” The second truck was a local vehicle, not American, broken down and purposely positioned at a spot somewhat off the road and up from the turning lane on the right—which, from my earlier investigations I remembered as a path or entrance into something
²⁷
—right in front of where they hoped the Patton car would be forced. It was there, he said, to block the limousine in case it veered to the right, around the turning truck. It would keep the limo within the shooting area: the killing zone.

They had gotten the stationary truck themselves, positioned it, and done something to it so it would be legitimately broken down where they placed it. But the army truck—the one that would do the turning—was to be waiting further down from them on the other side of the road and driven by an American who had some of his friends in the cab—“truck drivers or guys who drove the trucks just in the shop.” He did not know them except to say he was sure “they are all dead now” and had been given money and liquor to participate. “I don’t think they knew who was going to be hit but they knew there was going to be a problem.” He and the Pole had signals set up to alert the driver waiting in the truck cab
with his companions to the approach of the target vehicle. Those in the truck waited longer than they thought they had been told because of Patton’s stop at the Roman ruin so he and the Pole had to give the truck occupants some “phony” explanations to ease their impatience.

As they waited, “I was watching from the vehicle....” “About how long a shot is that going to be?” I asked. “Let’s say it is about maximum ten yards”; minimum, fifteen feet. He said he got “up and down many times” while waiting but was not worried about passersby seeing him. They were pretending to be attending their broken down truck. He drew a little diagram for me of the setup on the road showing the two trucks and where he was hiding. “And this guy [in the waiting truck]” does not move up here [to the site of the accident] until [he gets the] signal... that the [Patton ] car is finally seen.”

As to the actual accident, he did not give me a dramatic account. He just indicated everything went as planned except they did not kill Patton.

Basically they botched it—as happens more than not, he said, in such operations. There is always tomorrow.

I asked him, “You shot through the open window?”

“Yeah.... Side window. The windows were opened on the side, not on the back.”

“Did you see where the thing hit?”

“I would have to say yes. Vaguely. He got hit in the face.”

In 1979, the
Spotlight
had asked him, “And this weapon caused the total paralysis that Patton suffered?” He had answered, “That’s correct... the force with which that projectile hit was the equivalent of a whiplash suffered at a speed of 80 or 100 miles an hour.”

In the commotion that ensued, he said he was able to pose as a bystander and remove what he had placed in the window (or windows). “At a time like that you can do almost anything and it isn’t really noticed,” he had told the
Spotlight
.

He said he had gone to the hospital shortly after the accident with a poison “concoction” he and the Pole had made up but he could not get to Patton and had not been involved in Patton’s subsequent death—therefore he could always say truthfully he had not killed him.

Rolling down the window and shooting Patton through it was the hardest part of Bazata’s story to believe. He offered no proof, other than the fact that he was a world-class shooter. “What does it matter?” he said wearily, when I asked him whether there was anyone who could verify everything he had told me. “They’re all dead now.”

He shared with the
Spotlight
that the assassin had told him he killed Patton with cyanide—“a certain refined form . . . that can cause or appear to cause embolisms, heart failure and things like that.” It had been made in Czechoslovakia and “was very effective in small amounts.” In an obvious correlation to Patton’s sudden hospital downturn, he added, “It can even be timed to kill in a given period such as eighteen to forty-eight hours.”