Target (18 page)

For the trip, the Russians sandwiched the jeep between two trucks. Each had soldiers in it armed with machine guns. “I wasn’t a prisoner but I was not free to leave.” He figured the worst was coming and as the convoy proceeded along winding mountain roads he thought hard how he could escape. He noticed that if he slowed down, the truck behind would slow enough to keep distance between them, but the truck ahead would continue at a steady pace. He also noticed that when they went around steep curves, the truck ahead would disappear. “I couldn’t see [it], so they couldn’t see me either.” On very sharp curves, both trucks disappeared.

That would be his escape!

He began alternately slowing and then speeding up and tail-gating, increasing the separation between both trucks. Eventually, he estimated, there was about 250 feet either way between the jeep
and the trucks whose occupants did not seem to notice or care. At the next sharp curve, at precisely the instant the two larger vehicles left his view, he bolted. “I veered sharply to the left and jumped the jeep into the air onto the field and toward the woods. It wasn’t fun. It was deadly serious.” Behind him, the two SS informers saw soldiers from the rear truck leap out and start shooting. “But by that time I was in the woods and out of range. I sped hell bent toward the American territory.”

On the way back they had to bust through at least one check point, his two passengers hugging the floorboards. “I gunned the jeep to its maximum speed and crashed through the wooden rail. The stunned Russian guards shouted at me . . . .I’d expected the guards to fire . . . but they didn’t”—probably because they had been surprised. He and his two passengers “laughed and cheered and even gave an Indian yell . . . .It was touch and go but we made it.”
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Back in Zwickau, he turned in the books to Lieutenant Gillespie and “slept well that night.” The next day, however, he got a call from a “Colonel Leo Rodin,” the superior to whom Gillespie had forwarded the notebooks. Rodin, presumably a CIC officer but never identified specifically as such, had an office in Bad Nauheim, where Patton would soon be headquartered. He wanted Skubik to come right over. Once Skubik was there, Rodin told him he was lucky to have escaped. “You better stay clear of the Russians. They know who you are and where to find you.” It was as if he had done something wrong. And why did they know so much about him? He had lied to the Russian major. (Was it because of the intelligence he had been reporting about Patton? Had someone been giving the Russians information?) But then Rodin had indicated the value of what he had done by suggesting he kill the two informers. Rodin said “they might tell someone about our having
the books which could alert the escaping Nazis and they could change names and locations.”

Skubik balked. “I told him I wasn’t going to murder anyone.” He expressed an affinity for the two informers because they had risked their lives to help him find the notebooks. The colonel apparently changed the subject. He wanted to know “about my Polish connections. He knew that I had met Jan Karksi, a courier for the Polish underground who made frequent trips to London. He asked about my meeting with Mikolyczyk, the Minister of Poland. I told him that I had only spoken briefly with the man and had nothing to report.” Rodin was also interested in his knowledge of a “Polish General Anders” and his soldiers. It was all very strange. Why the Poles? Why the worry about what the Russians thought? At one point, he writes, “Rodin was interrogating me for information which he might use in his work with OSS General Donovan.”
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At another, he wonders if Rodin was working for the Russians. If that were the case, he knew he was in trouble. Not only because of his Patton warnings, but because he had other run-ins with the Soviets as well.

Prior to the formal Soviet occupation, he had to confront a surly Russian colonel who, with a truck and squad of men, was trying to harass the non-communist German mayor of Zwickau that Skubik had appointed and loot the town’s food supply. Arguing with the colonel, Skubik had charged that the Soviets were acting like Nazis. “You want to have your way by using threats and gun power against decent people.” Furious, the Russians had exited but complained to American authorities.
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He had also, somewhat innocently, gotten involved in the very touchy subject of repatriation with the Soviets. Stalin wanted every displaced person and POW who had formerly lived in the Soviet Union sent back to the motherland, regardless of that person’s
wishes. In a chance meeting in Frankfurt, Skubik introduced a Ukrainian prelate, the Reverend Stephen Reshytylo, whom he was interviewing, to General Eisenhower who happened to be walking by and had spoken to him. Reshytylo, in Frankfurt to try to halt the deportation of his Ukrainian flock, had used the opportunity to speak to Eisenhower who became sympathetic—so much so that he sent the prelate to pertinent policy makers. As Skubik’s obituary in the
Ukrainian Weekly
states, “That meeting led Gen. Eisenhower and the U.S. State Department to reverse U.S. policy on Soviet refugees, thus saving the lives of countless thousands facing death in Soviet labor camps.”
⁵²

In addition, just before his team had left Zwickau, Skubik had arrested one of the Soviet’s chief German operatives, the pro-Russian Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht, who would later head communist East Germany and become noted for building the Berlin Wall in order to prevent escapes to the West, was an indicted murderer, Stalinist, and hard line communist organizer who had been rushed into Germany with the Red Army at the war’s end to set up puppet governments throughout the occupied territories. A carpenter and militant socialist, he helped organize the German communist Party in 1919 and served as a communist delegate in the German parliament. In 1931, Ulbricht had ordered, under Soviet guidance, the murder by locals of two German policemen in Berlin.
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When Hitler had come to power in 1933 and a warrant for Ulbricht’s arrest in the murders was issued, he fled to Moscow where he stayed working as a henchman for Stalin, until being dispatched back to Germany with Russian troops in April 1945. Apparently, one of the early cities he entered was Zwickau because toward the end of their stay there, Skubik writes, he was confronted with Ulbricht trying to kick patients out of the Zwickau hospital so he could set up a headquarters there. He was also, with organizers, going to the
Zwikau prison, where CIC was housing its Nazi prisoners, and offering the Nazis freedom if they joined the communist party.

Skubik writes, “This made me furious. I went to the prison with GIs and kicked out the communist [organizers].” He then went to the hospital and arrested Ulbricht. But his actions were short lived. A few days later, the Yalta-agreed-upon Occupation Zones came into effect (July 1) and he and his team found themselves in a riot of chaos trying to get out of Zwickau before the Russians arrived. Many in the city who had helped CIC, and in other ways felt they would be persecuted by the arriving Soviets, begged to go with the team. They agreed and organized a mass exodus of trains and cars carrying all manner of goods and people to the newly created American Zone.

And they took Ulbricht with them.

“I suppose the worst thing I did to the Soviets, up to that time, was to take arrested communist leader Ulbricht with me.” He and Harry Toombs had shackled the German and put him in their jeep. On the way, Toombs wanted to scare Ulbricht. Skubik writes he did not like the idea. For one thing, there was not enough time. They had to get to the American Zone. But Toombs persisted. “I want to show this son-of-a-bitchin’ communist what fear means, I want to give him some of his own medicine,” he quotes Toombs as arguing. Skubik reluctantly stopped and Toombs took Ulbricht into the woods where he played a kind of Russian Roulette with him. Feigning bullets in the pistol, he put the barrel to Ulbricht’s head and pulled the trigger. After five pulls, Ulbricht collapsed. Satisfied, Toombs walked him back to the jeep and they continued.

But Skubik had been right. The time wasted had allowed two Russian trucks full of soldiers to catch up. They were led by a Russian colonel. “I spoke to him in Russian and told him that Ulbricht was our prisoner for violating our laws in Zwickau. He had
his soldiers point their guns at us. He said ‘Now he belongs to us.’ I began a meek protest but a look at the guns convinced me to accept the Russian colonel’s point.”

They released their prisoner. He concludes, “I later found out that Ulbricht was the head of the Russian NKVD operating in Germany and was one of “Wild Bill” Donovan’s recruits [apparently for spying on the Nazis]. No wonder my name was mud with the OSS General.”
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And there were more reasons to fear trouble from U.S. and Soviet authorities.

Working counterintelligence, he had arrested two Russian spies with U.S. codes in their possession. It was a good catch in the undeclared “border wars” that were heightening between the Soviets and U.S. agents. But after turning the spies in, he learned that they had been released by “our intelligence officer” (not otherwise described). He went to Gillespie and complained. Exact reasons why are not given but Skubik and Gillespie ended up in the office of Colonel Rodin, who defiantly told them that actually it had been his orders that had caused the two spies to be released. Skubik was confused. Clearly, the two were enemies of the U.S. “I asked why? He said he had his reasons [and] I didn’t need to know.”

Skubik, if it is to be assumed that Rodin was CIC, was outranked. There was nothing he could do. But a short time later, he writes, he caught the same two again stealing secrets. Again they were released. “I got mad.” He stormed into the office of his immediate superior, Gillespie, and underlined that “the information these spies had on them could be very useful to the Soviet military. It compromised our codes.”

Gillespie’s reaction, not explained further, was to send him back to the OSS.

At first it seemed he would get a better reception than he had before. He saw Major Stone who was “very appreciative” and sent him in again to talk to General Donovan. “That was a big mistake.” Donovan again brought up the Patton warnings, saying they were just a provocation, and this time
ordered
Skubik to arrest Bandera. Skubik reiterated that there was no way he could do so with Bandera’s twenty bodyguards. And anyway, because Skubik was a CIC agent, he was not subject to Donovan’s orders. “The general understood...even he had no authority over me.” And when he brought up the two Russian spies, he writes Donovan got madder. He said “it was my duty to do what Colonel Rodin said.” This seemed proof to him that Rodin and Donovan were working together. Skubik countered that his duty was “to protect secret information.” At that point, Donovan accused him of being a Ukrainian spy working for Bandera, a charge Skubik vigorously denied—and continued to deny his entire life. He spoke Ukrainian. That was why he was talking to Bandera. He was just doing his job. He decided, for whatever reason, Donovan was out to get him. “That incident with the Russian spies, the Patton rumor, and my involvement with the refugee business was building up a storm for me.”
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Why would Bill Donovan
be so hostile to Skubik and the Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom would eventually become operatives for the CIA?

Why would he simply dismiss reports of a possible assassination attempt on the highest ranking American general in Europe?

Such intelligence was the kind he and the OSS were supposed to uncover. Even if he thought it was a ruse, he should have interrogated Skubik and tried to find out all he could rather than being dismissive, hostile, and antagonistic which certainly complicated any attempts to get to the truth of the matter. Who, in those days, could be so sure that the reports from the Ukrainians, as connected as they were to the Soviets, were unquestionably bogus?

Donovan’s and Rodin’s actions are hard to understand; unless something else was going on—something hidden, as is often the case in the clandestine world.

It is little known today, except amongst scholars and surviving OSS agents, that midway in World War II Donovan had forged a
top secret relationship with the communist NKVD, the OSS’s Soviet counterpart. It was a logical and bold move by the risk-taking, determined-to-succeed-at-all-costs Donovan. The USSR, after its shocking alliance with Hitler had been shattered by an unexpected Nazi invasion in 1941, was suddenly, because of the invasion, an ally with the West in the fight against Germany and had a much better fix on the Nazis at that point than the fledgling OSS did. It was older and more experienced than the OSS, (with a lineage some traced back to the Tsars of previous centuries). Russia was also physically closer to Germany than the U.S. and thus its agents had an easier job penetrating enemy territory than the OSS.

The first World War II contact with the USSR by a U.S. leader regarding help in spying that I could find was made not by the OSS, which was just being formed, but by New Deal Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., longtime friend, Hyde Park neighbor, and confidant of President Roosevelt. The Roosevelt administration had been the first U.S. administration to diplomatically recognize communist Russia as a legitimate government. The prior Republican Hoover administration had vigorously opposed such recognition. But the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s had softened the anti-communist attitude of many Americans—especially amongst Democrats where socialism made gains. Roosevelt looked favorably on the communist nation, especially after the Nazis turned on their Soviet ally which, with Britain, left the two European nations leading the fight against Germany. Roosevelt felt rightly that the Soviet Union, in its fight against the Nazi invader, would be one of the keys in defeating the Germans.