related thread: General Patton Asassinated To Keep Him Quiet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_LehmanJohn F. Lehman, Jr. (born September 14, 1942) is an American investment banker and writer who
served as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and in 2003-4 was a member of the 9/11 Commission.
He was also involved in the Project for the New American Century, that claimed the absence of a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" in the document "Rebuilding America´s Defenses", which was released in September 2000.
His most famous quote according to NNDB is: "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."related see above Target Patton -
Douglas DeWitt Bazata Obit 1999http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/22/world/douglas-dewitt-bazata-artist-and-oss-officer-dies-at-88.htmlDouglas DeWitt Bazata, Artist And O.S.S. Officer, Dies at 88By ERIC PACE
Published:
August 22, 1999Douglas DeWitt Bazata, who served with the United States Office of Strategic Services behind enemy lines in France in World War II and later became an artist, died on July 14 in his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 88.
The death of Mr. Bazata was belatedly reported to The New York Times.
He was described as ''a red-haired soldier of fortune who called all colonels 'Sugar' '' in a 1978 book, ''Honorable Men,'' by William E. Colby, a former Director of Central Intelligence, and Peter Forbath.
Mr. Bazata had already served in the Marines and was a skilled boxer and marksman when he became an Army officer in 1942 and also joined the O.S.S., the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He went on to be
one of a daring group of about 50 American parachute officers who volunteered for what Mr. Colby described as ''a highly hazardous mission'' in Nazi-occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Other members of the group included Stewart Alsop, later a noted journalist,
and Mr. Colby.http://www.robertkwilcox.com/article-patton2010.htmlWAS GEN. PATTON ASSASSINATED?CONTROVERSY
By Robert K. Wilcox:
...
Douglas Bazata was the first of these two witnesses to go public. An Office of Strategic Services (OSS) “Jedburgh” in World War II, the forerunners of US Special Forces,
he claimed that as an OSS assassin, he was asked to kill Patton by OSS chief Gen. William“Wild Bill” Donovan. The order was the culmination of a long-running plot during the war that had started as a non-lethal “stop Patton” plan. Later, in interviews with me, he enlarged that scenario, claiming that he, along with an NKVD (Russian military intelligence) accomplice, set up the December 9 “accident,” and that others – he believed the Soviets – had completed the task in the hospital.
It is not well known except amongst certain historians that Donovan forged a cooperating alliance between the OSS and NKVD, beginning in 1943. And despite the fact that he was sometimes
played for a fool by the Russians, whose spies already riddled the OSS (and therefore the NKVD did not need the cooperation), he continued working with them throughout the war and after. The other witness was Stephen J. Skubik, a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent attached until war’s end to Patton’s armies. Afterward
he continued working as a CIC agent among Soviet-dominated Ukrainians whom, he said, warned him that Stalin had put Patton on an NKVD hit list. Skubik, who wrote a privately-printed book entitled, The Murder of General Patton, claimed three top Ukrainians – Gen. Pavlo Shandruk, Prof. Roman Smal-Stocki, and the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera – each separately warned him that Patton was marked for murder. But when he reported the plot to Wild Bill Donovan himself, instead of being grateful, Donovan had him jailed. Following Patton’s death, Skubik was forced to flee Germany for fear of being murdered himself. For several years he lived in hiding in America.
These two witnesses are highly credible. Their stories mesh without either having known about the other. Bazata, who left the army as a major, was one of the most decorated Jedburghs, having jumped into, among other harrowing missions, Nazi-occupied France to help organize local resistance in preparation for D-Day.
He spent 25 years after WWII in Europe as a clandestine, was a good friend of fellow Jedburgh and ex-CIA director William Colby, and ended his career as an aide to Secretary of the Navy John Lehman during the Reagan Administration.
Skubik, after emerging from hiding, rose to a top managerial position in the Prudential Insurance Company in Washington D.C., and aided Republican presidents from Eisenhower through Reagan as an expert on Eastern European affairs. I vetted both men extensively through secret documents at places like the National Archives and through interviews with those who knew them. They both died in the 1990s. But if this case were ever brought to a grand jury, their preserved testimony, I believe, would be enough to get an indictment.
Even without such testimony, Patton’s death remains an unsolved mystery.
In the months before he died, for instance, he was involved in at least two other highly suspicious accidents. On
May 3, 1945, Patton was almost decapitated when a farmer’s wagon with some sort of scythe-like instrument protruding from it suddenly rolled out unattended from a side street towards his passing jeep and “missed us only by about an inch,” he wrote in his diary. The other “accident,” just a few weeks before, on
April 10, 1945, is even more suspicious.
Patton was visiting units in his light observation plane when four Polish Spitfires supposedly mistook his tiny aircraft for a Nazi fighter and attacked it. While three circled and acted almost as lookouts, the fourth Spitfire made repeated attacks. If not for the ground hugging and evasion skills of Patton’s pilot, the general surely would have been killed. As it was, the attacking Spitfire couldn’t pull up after one of its steep diving attacks and crashed. The Russians by that time controlled Poland. Patton was livid, and an aide accompanying him in the plane vowed to find out what happened. But to this day, there is scant information about the attack beyond what both wrote in their diaries.
http://www.specialforcesroh.com/browse.php?mode=viewawards&sort=n&catid=42&page=1JEDBURGH - Jedburgh Teams (BCRA,OSS,SOE)
Douglas DeWitt (Doug) BazataOSS Jedburgh Team CedricDistinguished Service Cross,Croix de Guerre with 2 palmes (Fr),Croix de Guerres with gold star (Fr),Purple Heart
born 17.2.1911 Wrightsville,Pennsylvania
educated Syracuse University
USMC 1933-37
commissioned US Army 1942
codename Vesdre
WIA 1944
left Army 1947 as Major
married Diana Chirieleison 1943 (divorced)
married Penelope Grant 1948 (divorced)
married Marie-Pierre 1970
father of Nicholas of Northumberland,England
artist postwar
died 14.7.1999 Chevy Chase,Maryland
Arlington National Cemetery,Virginia Section 66 Site 793
Colby
William Egan (Bill) Colby - for biography
see OSS AwardsOSS Jedburgh Team Bruce The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 [Hardcover] Will Irwinhttp://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/oss/OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War IIBy John Whiteclay Chambers II 2008
U.S. National Park Service
Washington, D.C.
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/oss/chap8.pdfOSS in Action: The Mediterranean and European Theaters
OSS casualties in FranceOf the 83 American Jedburghs, 5 were killed in action, 6 percent, almost double the 3 ½ percent overall death rate; 3 were missing or captured; and 6 were wounded
...
Captain Douglas (“Doug”) DeWitt Bazata, head of Team Cedric in eastern France was badly wounded in action...
Major William E. Colby, who would later become head of the CIA under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was an “Army Brat,” born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised at military facilities around the world, including China. On a
scholarship, he went to Princeton University, spent a summer in France, and obtained a commission through Army ROTC. He had just finished his first year at Columbia Law School, when he was called to active duty in 1941. Bored with the field artillery, he joined the paratroops, from which OSS recruited him in September 1943. By December, the 23-year-old paratroop officer had completed SO training at Areas F and B and was bound for England as a Jedburgh.151 The
youthful, scholarly looking major was assigned to head Jed Team “Bruce” with two French soldiers. Their mission was to aid the French Resistance in the Yonne Valley some sixty miles southeast of Paris.
Instead of being dropped into a rural area, the plane on a mid-August night, dropped them right into the
center of a German-occupied town. The falling supply containers woke up the townspeople as well as the Germans, and the Jedburgh team had to dodge patrols for two days until they were able to reach the maquis. Although it was later discovered that the local Resistance had been run by a collaborator working with the Germans, by August
1944, Colby realized the Nazis would be defeated and he did not endanger the Jeds.
