My attempts to question the Patton family, now several generations removed from their famous World War II general and patriarch, have been rebuffed. Early on, when I had gathered only the broad outlines of evidence, mainly Bazata’s claims and Skubik’s book, which I felt warranted re-examining Patton’s death, I was told through an intermediary that “this is a subject that is not new to the family and I perceive they assign it no credibility.” The inference was clear: I was resurrecting something they had already dismissed and would not appreciate visiting again.
I can understand their concern.
In one of Bazata’s diaries there is an exasperatingly short and somewhat confusing entry that he and Patton’s son, George S. Patton (IV), an army general himself, now deceased, had sparred face
to face. The meeting, at a Washington restaurant, apparently was arranged by a mutual friend, Lou Conein,
8
a former Jedburgh and notorious CIA agent, following the publication of the
Spotlight
articles in 1979. Since the articles claimed Bazata only
knew
who had set up the accident (rather than revealing he had participated himself), Patton’s son was not aware of Bazata’s claims to me—unless he told the son too, and I doubt that. Bazata wrote that the meeting had degenerated into insults, which probably left the family with a bad taste.
as
I know they had not seen Bazata’s journals, and I doubt they have researched, as I have, Skubik’s experiences, whose 1993 book, as tantalizingly full of leads as it is, nevertheless was so badly organized that it would not be surprising if they had tossed it after the first few pages. In any case, my contact informed me that the family was not interested in talking to me. Therefore, questions like who Mrs. Patton’s detectives were and what they had found are unanswered—at least publicly.
Patton’s adult granddaughter, Helen Patton-Plusczyk, was also in the
War Stories
episode. Clearly skeptical, she revealed that while abroad she was approached by a “mysterious colonel who had been a spy for the Russians.” He told her he had some information for her, “A nurse or a medical aide had been instructed to open the windows of Grandpa’s room so he would contract pneumonia.” Even though she did not give it much credibility—nor tell what happened next—it would be productive to know more. I have a file of names, Russian and others—mostly agents—involved in various ways in Patton’s demise.
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Leads deemed dismissible earlier could be important in light of new information.
For instance, diagrams of Patton’s first floor hospital room—a small one at that, according to Farago, who says it was a former horse stall—show one wall facing a street.
10
If it had a window as the mysterious Russian spy implied, it would have been relatively easy for a harmful substance to be introduced from the outside at an opportune moment.
Such a scenario is not far fetched in the clandestine world following World War II. Exploding cigars, poison needle umbrellas, even radioactive coffee have been publicly shown to have been weapons in the Cold War arsenals of the CIA and KGB.
11
World War II was an incubator for such grisly exotica, including biochemical assassination weapons. They were used surreptitiously by both sides. By the start of the Cold War, the Russians operated a “Special Bureau” with a lab for “undetectable means of exterminating human beings.”
12
For instance, Soviet agents used an “atomizer” containing a bio-poison “which leaves no wound or other evidence of the cause of death.”
13
“Natural killers” were created that could induce heart attack, “cerebral apoplexy,” and other medical maladies leaving little or no trace.
14
For assassination, according to a formerly classified CIA study, “the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.”
15
In a hospital, “drugs can be very effective,” the study continues, “if the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care. [It] is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect.” Bazata told the
Spotlight
that a form of “refined cyanide” can “cause or appear to cause” embolism.
at
Most pertinent, assassinations using traffic accidents and hospitals—or both—were known methods of NKVD murder at the time Patton died. “As an intelligence officer [and WWII veteran],” Colonel John H. Roush, Jr., (Ret.), wrote to me, “I often wondered if the auto accident was a “staged” event, for the Soviets often used such an incident to eliminate someone they hated, and they did hate Gen. Patton.”
16
Soviets used trucks for assassinations according to Dr. Mark R. Elliot of Samford University. During a Soviet purge of mostly Russian Orthodox priests shortly after the war, writes Elliot, Eastern Rite Catholic Bishop Theodore Romzha was “struck [and murdered] by a Red Army truck while traveling in a horse drawn carriage.” Another death, he writes, resulted from a priest being “pushed from a sidewalk into the path of a truck.” From 1986 through February 1991, KGB-caused “suspicious” traffic accidents to “Christian activists” alone numbered fourteen, wrote Elliot, director of Samford’s Beeson Divinity School when he made the charges.
Looking deeper at the Romzha assassination, it turns out to be remarkably similar to the circumstances surrounding Patton’s demise. No less an authority than Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the NKVD’s “Special Tasks” department—its murder, kidnapping, and sabotage bureau—discloses that the bishop actually did not die in the 1947 accident. Rather, the accident “was badly handled.” Romzha “was only injured and sent to the hospital”—as Patton was—where he was then murdered with a surreptitious injection. Sudoplatov, who managed assassinations for Stalin throughout WWII and after, makes the disclosure in his 1994 book,
Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster
, which historian Robert Conquest
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calls “the most sensational . . . devastating . . . autobiography ever to emerge from the Stalinist milieu.”
According to Sudoplatov, who organized the murder of Stalin’s arch rival, Leon Trotsky, the Romzha assassination was ordered by Stalin because Nikita Kruschev, who was then in charge of suppressing Ukrainian nationalism, said the prelate was aiding rebels. Sudoplatov, a Ukrainian himself who had caught Stalin’s eye with his assassination of an earlier Ukrainian nationalist, Yevhen Konovalets, had dispatched a kill team with “an ampule of curare,” a paralyzing, plant-derived muscle relaxer normally used in surgery with the patient safely on a breathing machine. But without the machine—as Romzha was in his room—the victim, unable to raise even an eyelid, suffocates in what appears to be lung failure. The poison, writes Sudoplatov, was given to a “local . . . agent who worked as a nurse in [Romzha’s] hospital and she delivered the fatal injection.”
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In a similar assassination, A. Shumsky, another Ukrainian nationalist, ill and in exile, had written a “disrespectful” letter to Stalin and threatened to organize other exiles against him. Stalin ordered that he be “liquidated,” writes Sudoplatov. “It was my job to prevent his supporters from knowing that he had been murdered.” Shumsky was in a hospital but was recovering and hoping to be out soon—as was Patton—when he could carry out his threat. “Gregori M. Maironovsky, head of [NKVD] toxicological research, was called in as a consultant to the hospital . . . where Shumsky lay ill and did the job with poison from his laboratory. The execution was made to look like a natural death from heart failure.”
19
Throughout World War II until 1947, Maironovsky and similar henchmen carried out “death sentences and secret liquidations with their poisons.”
20
Sudoplatov, who spoke German, is said by Skubik in his book to have been in Germany when Patton died.
21
Stalin himself, according to intimates, favored traffic “accident” as a surreptitious killing method. In 1996, I met the late Valentin
M. Berezhkov who served as both Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister V. Molotov’s personal interpreter during World War II. He had translated for Molotov when the foreign minister had met with Hitler to sign Russia’s shocking pact with the Nazis in 1939, and for Stalin at the historic Allied summit at Teheran in 1943. He gave me his memoir,
At Stalin’s Side
, an account of his life in Russia and years at the Kremlin. In it, he discloses that when Stalin wanted to get rid of Soviet Consul Apresyan, who had served Moscow in China but whom Stalin decided “knew too much,” the consul was killed in a pre-arranged car accident on a mountain road. Saying Apresyan knew too much was “the signal, and the esteemed consul fell into disgrace,” writes Berezhkov. “His fate was already sealed. But the boss didn’t want to make too much noise about it. He decided to remove Apresyan quietly. Events soon followed an establish pattern.” He waited to have the auto accident staged until Apresyan had returned to Russia on his regular leave and gone on vacation. “None of the people around the Great Leader had any doubts that Stalin had arranged the accident. They had heard the sentence: ‘He knows too much!’”
22
A truck, as in the Patton accident, was used in another Stalin-ordered murder, writes Berezhkov—but of a much higher-level official. The official was Maxim Litvinov, who served in the important post of Soviet ambassador to the U.S. in Washington during the early years of World War II. Litvinov had a good relationship with President Roosevelt and other American officials and was involved in securing lend-lease help for the USSR. The country was in desperate need while fighting the Nazis who had attacked their former Soviet ally in June 1941. But Molotov was jealous of Litvinov, according to Berezhkov, and when the danger to Russia subsided, the foreign minister “began weaving a web of intrigue around Litvinov.” The ambassador was eventually
recalled. Stalin, who then bugged Litvinov’s subsequent meetings with Americans who came to Russia and conferred with their old friend, became convinced he was a traitor. The dictator “hatched” a plan for Litvinov to die in a car crash. Berezhkov wrote that Anastas Mykoyan, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, told him, “I know the place where it happened very well, not far from Litvinov’s dacha. There is a sharp turn there, and when Litvinov’s car came barreling around it, a truck was parked across the road. It had all been prearranged. Stalin was an unsurpassed master at things like that. He would call in the NKVD people and instruct them personally, one-on-one, and then a car crash just happened, and the person Stalin wanted to get rid of was killed. There were a number of cases like that.”
23
However, if the intended victim was put in the hospital, it made him or her more vulnerable. A noted case among Soviet watchers is that of Lev Sedov, son of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s arch rival. Trotsky and Stalin had vied for power in the early days of the communist revolution. After winning, Stalin became obsessed with liquidating the exiled Trotsky, which he eventually succeeded in doing.
24
Similarly, he was after Sedov, who was headquartered in Paris. But because Sedov, whose organization was penetrated by NKVD agents, was a good source of anti-Stalinist, Trotskyite information, he held off until early 1938 when Sedov had finally outlived his usefulness. After several failed attempts to assassinate him, the plotters were handed their best chance.
25
Sedov suffered acute appendicitis and needed an emergency operation. Rather than enter a French hospital, one of the plotters, thought by Sedov to be a trusted aide but who was really an NKVD agent, persuaded him to use “a small private clinic run by Russian emigres.” What happened next was very similar to what happened to Patton. “Sedov’s operation was successful and for [five] days he
seemed to be making a normal recovery,” write Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. “Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled doctors. Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain.” While there was no smoking-gun proof that the NKVD had done the killing, the authors note, its “medical section . . . was capable of poisoning Sedov” without leaving traces, and “it is certain” they “intended to assassinate” him.
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OSS was familiar with death by truck, too. According to an article accompanying the first of the two about Bazata in the
Spotlight
, other OSS veterans told “of the widespread belief among intelligence insiders that Lieutenant Colonel Anthony “Tall Tony” LoScalzo, a regular army finance officer attached to OSS in Italy, was assassinated when he threatened to wreck a scheme” thought up by renegade OSS conspirators. The scheme was to exchange devalued European banknotes for inflated official rates which OSS had access to. But LoScalzo balked. “Shortly afterwards, he was reported to have died of injuries received in a collision involving a huge Army truck.” The death triggered a criminal investigation but there were no indictments.
The article, by George Nicholas, also quotes Colonel Paul Lyon, “an experienced military intelligence officer who saw duty with the OSS,” and who was one of those who believed Patton was murdered. “The vicious conspiracy against ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’ was by no means an isolated incident,” Lyon told Nicholas, who wrote other articles for the
Spotlight
. “Other officers who were stubbornly patriotic or who clung to their anti-communist convictions met quick, violent, unexplained deaths, especially when a chance assignment landed them at the fulcrum of a critical situation. Take the case of Major Francis Holohan.” An OSS officer, Holohan was murdered in northern Italy in 1944 by members of his OSS team after he refused to yield to communist partisan
demands. Motives were never crystal clear, but Lieutenant Aldo Icardi, second in command, and Sergeant Carl LoDolce, according to
The Last Hero
, later confessed to the crime. Most OSS officers served courageously and honorably, Nicholas attests, but some were “wild and ruthless,” he quotes a third unnamed intelligence veteran, as saying. “But they were not stupid. They knew how to make a hit and get away . . . .”
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