Free Target by Robert K. Wilcox Page A

although newspaper reports indicate Smith might have been there.

    The Cadillac limousine in which Patton was injured is, in all this, a witness for the prosecution, albeit a silent, unfortunately inaccessible one. For decades, the car, repaired, was thought to be on display at the Patton Museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky. But Cadillac’s expert determined along with obvious signs of fraud, including the crude obliteration of its identifying VIN number, that the car is a fake. It will never yield crucial answers. Why was this done? Was the filing down of the VIN and phony workmanship tags on the car at Fort Knox just to facilitate a Black Market swap? Or was it part of an assassination plot in order to get rid of crucial evidence? The real car might have answered key questions. How was Patton injured? Not only how had his neck been broken, but how had he gotten such a vicious gash on his face, the exact nature of which is still debatable? Did it start at the nose and rip a V-like patch of bone-exposing skin up to the top of the head? Or had it started on the top and ripped downward? The nature of his wound has some bearing on whether he might have been shot by a non-lethal object like Douglas Bazata claims.
    The Soviets are among the most elusive part of this story. If Patton was murdered, it was most likely because he posed a political threat to the Soviets, as well as a personal and professional threat to some in his own camp who might therefore have participated or, just as easily, looked the other way. He also was hated by some in authority in the U.S. for his indiscretion and his desire for war with the Soviets, which very well could have sparked World War III. Given what is now known about NKVD-OSS cooperation and America’s manipulation, if not near domination, by Stalin during the war and the U.S. administration’s Left-led belief that the communist dictator’s favor was essential for a peaceful and prosperous postwar world, it is not hard to imagine such factors combining to hatch a plot whose aims could morph from being purely
non-lethal “Stop Patton” into a begrudging secret order for his “elimination.”
    Such an assassination scenario, of course, is speculation based on political and military realities from the still-emerging story of World War II. In the past, such speculation could not be substantiated beyond rumor. But now, in addition to the mysteries and questions that have emerged from studying Patton’s accident and death—something not adequately done by prior historians—two members of the clandestine world, Bazata and Skubik, have added personal witness to the scenario. They are not kooks. Their testimony is not rumor. Bazata was at the heart of the clandestine assassination world during the war, and he was in Germany near Patton in the occupation. Skubik, while more policeman than undercover operative, worked for what could be called, in effect, the military’s covert FBI—the CIC—during the war and in Germany when Patton died.
    Both were there at the crucial time.

    Bazata, after twenty-two years at the Mumm Estate and Baron Mumm’s suicide, exited Europe abruptly around 1970, cd some say under suspicious circumstances. Given the life he had led as a mercenary, head of his secret “Co-Op,” and a flamboyant artist patronized by jet-setting European high society, rumors, hazy and impossible to check, were plenty. He and Marie-Pierre flew to Saigon to stay with, among others, William Colby, then a CIA official running the infamous “Phoenix” assassination program of counter-insurgency against the Viet Cong. He and Colby, who would soon head the CIA, had been Jedburghs together. Bazata’s
stated reason for the trip was to study Vietnamese art, specifically “lacquers,” an ancient Asian technique using thick tree sap for paint. “The list of owners of [Bazata’s] paintings reads like the Almanach de Gotha [royalty list], barons and princes galore,” wrote Joy Billington, who