Target (45 page)

Even without such provocation, Patton was already an avowed enemy of several Russian generals—a dangerous thing in its own right, according to Nicolai Khokhlov, a former NKVD/KGB operative. In 2007, I interviewed Khokhlov, widely reputed to have been a Soviet assassin. When we met, he corrected, “I was not an assassin. I was the director of many of them [assassinations], but not one myself.” His story is unique and redemptive in that he eventually had a crisis of conscience over his dark work and consequently defected to the West in 1953, giving the CIA its first inside look at SMERSH (
Smert’ Shpionam
—or “Death to Spies,” that operated from 1943 to 1946, although elements carried on into the early Cold War period), the Soviets’ most infamous murder unit.

Khokhlov was back in the news in 2006 and 2007 because of the bizarre death of former defected Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko who, in November 2006, became the first known victim of polonium-210 poisoning, a particularly heinous Soviet means of assassination whereby the unsuspecting victim ingests lethal radioactivity. Khokhlov, himself, was an earlier victim of the same Soviet method, although from a different type of nuclear poison. Lecturing in Frankfurt in 1957, he accepted a cup of coffee laced with radioactive thallium, a mixture undetectable by taste but administered
in fulfillment of the Soviet dictum that no one ever gets away with crossing the regime. “I suddenly felt very tired,” he wrote. “Things began to whirl about me in the hall.” Lights swayed, their rays doubling in his vision. Pain surged in his heart and stomach. What he had no way of knowing was that once ingested, the surreptitious thallium burned “through his stomach lining and entered the bloodstream,” where, by the time its torturous physical effects began appearing on the outside of his body, it supposedly would have vanished from his system—the perfect undetectable poison. “Friends . . . rushed him to a hospital where severe gastric poisoning was diagnosed. His condition worsened. His face erupted in black, brown and blue lumps, his eyes oozed a sticky liquid and his hair fell out in handfuls. The blood in his veins was turning to plasma; his bones were crumbling... ‘my body was convulsed into a terrible struggle with some strange force’”—a new height in torture death.
²⁸

By the grace of God, he says, he only drank half the cup of coffee. He recovered. “I am a religious man. Someone up there can do something.”
²⁹
As often occurs in the spy trade, things go wrong with the best made plans, and a leading New York toxicologist, aided by Khokholov’s knowledge of exotic Soviet poisons and the former spy’s medical records, deduced what had happened. In hindsight, Khokhlov remembered the coffee and realized he never should have accepted it in the first place. Today, as a professor, he lives comfortably in Southern California, having been pardoned by Boris Yeltsin in 1992. He lost his wife and child over the defection, and there were other heartbreaks in his story. But for my purposes he ventured that if Patton had been assassinated—something he said he had no personal knowledge about—his best guess would be that it was done by Soviet generals. Patton “was very aggressive with Soviet generals. He probably offended some, even
Marshall Zhukov. And knowing some of these guys mentally, they would say he needs a lesson. He needs to be taught a lesson.”

Not only had Patton offended Soviet generals, most notably at Prague and with post-war toasts, but he had indeed offended the mighty Zhukov himself. It had been Zhukov who had personally and vehemently pressed the charges against Patton about keeping and readying the SS troops. Zhukov “was one of the toughest individuals I had ever encountered,” wrote General James M. Gavin, commander of the elite 82
^nd
Airborne Division which had been dropped into Normandy in advance of D-Day. He met Zhukov, he wrote, when Eisenhower and the “Hero of Berlin” exchanged reviews of troops. Eisenhower, as a measure of his esteem, had presented the 82
^nd
in full dress to Zhukov. Afterward, at a host’s luncheon he arranged, Gavin was amazed to see another Russian general fearstruck when asked to step inside and join Zhukov and him for toasts. “I went out to talk to him through an interpreter, and when he learned that Marshal Zhukov was in the house, he actually trembled. He would not enter the house in any circumstances. With apologies he departed. When I went back into the house, I noticed that when Marshal Zhukov came into a room everybody disappeared . . . . Such was the degree of fear that he seemed to cause among his subordinates. He apparently had the right of life or death and did not hesitate to use it.”
³⁰

At a conference to plan a September 7, 1945, parade to celebrate the victory over Japan, Zhukov tried to tell Gavin “what to do.” Gavin knew he had equal status. “I declined [his attempt to take over]. He then told me that he was going to get in touch with Eisenhower. I told him that was fine with me but I saw no reason to change my position. That was the end of the discussion. Several days later I received some very nice candid photographs taken during the conference, although no cameraman had been visible.”

At the actual parade, which was to feature Zhukov and Patton together, things almost got comical if they did not foreshadow the tensions soon to become widespread. There had been a misunderstanding about who would lead the marchers, and when Zhukov, resplendent with medals hanging almost to his waist, jumped in a car to review the troops, Patton, who had not been told to wear his and was mad about it, had commandeered a car himself and ridden almost bumper to bumper with the perturbed marshal, making sure America was represented as well.
³¹

Back on the parade stand, wrote General Lucius Clay, “the Soviet commander and his staff acted as if the review was theirs alone,” crowding the Americans, British, and French back from the prominent center. Patton “sensed, as did most of us, that this was a deliberate Soviet effort to take sole credit for the capture of Berlin and major credit for the defeat of Germany.... But when the head of our marching column [the 82
^nd
Airborne troops and 2
^nd
Armored Division tanks] reached the stand... Patton whispered . . . ‘This is where you and I step forward’. . . we did so with great pride . . . .”
³²
Further, when Russian tanks emerged, Patton aide Major Van S. Merle-Smith told Fred Ayer, Jr., he overheard the following exchange: “My dear General Patton,” Smith said Zhukov boasted, “you see that tank, it carries a cannon which can throw a shell seven miles.” Patton [responded], “Indeed? Well, my dear Marshal Zhukov, let me tell you this, if any of my gunners started firing at your people before they had closed to less than seven hundred yards [less than half a mile] I’d have them courtmartialed for cowardice.” It was the first time, said Smith, “I saw a Russian commander stunned into silence.”
³³

It was less than a month later that Patton was fired as occupation governor of Bavaria and, perhaps more importantly, as commanding officer of his beloved Third Army. He was banished into
obscurity, not just in terms of public profile, but into the relatively unprotected physical area of Bad Nauheim, and stripped of the major security and protection, such as bodyguards and the large intelligence apparatus, he formerly had that had always kept him advised of dangerous situations. Skubik wrote, “I have spoken to Bert Goldstein, one of Patton’s bodyguards during that time . . . . Bert states that had the bodyguards not been removed Patton would not have been murdered. He is convinced that his favorite general was murdered.”
³⁴
I never could find Bert Goldstein, nor any list of Patton’s bodyguards in order to verify this. But I do not doubt that at least the bodyguards existed. Generals, and especially someone as controversial and outspoken as Patton, often had them.

He was fired at the end of September for an off-hand remark about political parties that was seized upon by critical reporters who knew it would bring him trouble. As part of the deNazification controversy he was embroiled in, Patton had agreed to a press conference on September 22 to clarify his positions. Eisenhower’s diplomatic aide, Robert Murphy, recalled, “Patton asserted that [the occupation government] would get better results if it employed more former [inconsquential] members of the Nazi party in administrative jobs and as skilled workmen.” Otherwise, they would be hiring incompetents. One of the correspondents, detecting an opening for a sensational news story, asked a loaded question: “After all, General, didn’t most ordinary Nazis join their party in about the same way that Americans become Republicans or Democrats?” The unsuspecting Patton replied, “Yes, that’s about it.” Within a few hours newspapers around the world were reporting: “American General says Nazis Are Just Like Republicans and Democrats!”
³⁵

An uproar ensued. Most accounts paint a similar picture of what had happened—a cabal of liberal, anti-Patton reporters,
angry with what they felt were Patton’s pro-Nazi, anti-Soviet, fascist views conspired to destroy him. Farago, however, wrote that the reporters were only pawns to “Eisenhower’s inner circle. In the end,” he wrote, “Patton was toppled . . . not by those ‘itenerant’ (sic) correspondents . . . but by a greater design devised by his own colleagues . . . [Gen.] Bedell Smith . . . [Gen.] Harold R. (Pinky) Bull, and [Gen.] Clarence Adcock....”
³⁶
Jeffrey St. John, Patton Society Research Library, concurs. “Fred Ayer Jr. [in
Before the Colors Fade
] provides considerable details on the press conference and concludes that the distorted press accounts were used by key U.S. officials to justify removing General Patton and ending his anti-Soviet campaign.”
³⁷
Patton’s alleged anti-Semitism was injected in the controversy, arousing “the ire of American Jews such as Henry Morgenthau, [FDR advisor and financier] Bernard Baruch, and [Supreme Court Justice] Felix Frankfurter,” adds Farago. Leftists and anti-Pattonists from every corner joined in and the overwhelming cry from the press became, “General Patton should be fired.”
³⁸

Eisenhower was quick to comply—so quick that he unexpectedly phoned Patton after assuring him the reassignment would unfold gradually and said it would have to be immediate now because the news had somehow been leaked. The October 2 call prompted Patton to write, “Eisenhower is scared to death, which I already knew, and believes that a more prompt announcement of my relief than the one he had originally planned will be beneficial to him. The alleged leak is nothing but a figment of the imagination which is a euphemism for a damned lie.”
³⁹
Among those lauding the firing, and Eisenhower for doing so, was the now-Soviet controlled newspaper,
Berliner Zeitung
, according to a story by Russell Hill of the
New York Herald Tribune
. “The democratic peoples do not let the wool be pulled over their eyes, particularly
in such a vital matter as the fight against Nazism,” it proclaimed. “If there are American officers who believe they can make their own policies, they are taken to task for it. In its resolute stand against Patton’s behavior, the American people showed a sure feeling for justice.”
⁴⁰

Patton himself wrote:

Patton was now deposed, officially disgraced amongst his own, and banished to relative obscurity—making him that much easier a target should an assassination plot be afoot.

Of all the questions
surrounding Patton’s mysterious death, why he might have been assassinated is the easiest to answer.

Patton’s Third Army ended the war by capturing the Nazi’s hidden cave vaults laden with gold, priceless art, and other riches, as well as finding the Germans’ secret weapons factories buried within vast mountain installations. Some of the recovered gold was stolen that summer in what the
The Guiness Book of Records
reportedly calls the greatest robbery on record.
¹
It involved billions calculated at today’s values. Rumors have connected the theft to Patton’s demise. He was on the robbers’ trail, they say. That was the basis for the plot of the 1978 movie
Brass Target
, which speculated that renegade U.S. officers stole some of the gold and featured an assassination attempt on Patton much like Bazata describes. The actual robbers have never been found.