Target (21 page)

Whatever the case, in late August, Donovan apologized to the Joint Chiefs
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and promised to consult with them on such matters in the future. Hands tied, they reluctantly gave approval to the deal and to “liquidation” of the network, which apparently meant killing the unsuspecting Balkan agents. But beyond that, the public documentary trail goes silent. Donovan and Hoettl, who lived the affair, are now dead, so they can not be consulted. Hoettl’s
Secret Front
, an autobiography first published in 1953 and criticized as self-serving, does not mention the spy net. The wily Hoettl, however, who had dealt first with Patton, whose troops had captured him, and then Donovan through Dulles, was not “liquidated.” In fact, by October, according to Cave-Brown, he had been freed from the Nuremberg prison where the European war’s criminals were being kept and given a letter by U.S. officials allowing
him free range within that city.
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Somehow he had survived Donovan’s attempt to help the Soviets.

Why was Donovan so pro-Soviet?

Not even a Soviet spy could have handled the Hoettl matter better for Russia than Donovan.

Was he simply following the administration’s line of appeasing the Soviets in gratitude for their contribution toward winning the war and in hopes of maintaining their friendship in the post-war world? Did he really just not realize the Hoettl matter was that important to the U.S., as he implied in his apology to the Joint Chiefs?
⁴⁹

Or might he have had some secret agenda?

Donovan was the enigmatic leader of a secret spy organization. The truth, therefore, is not easy to discern. But as the war drew to a close, events began to back the OSS director into a corner from which he knew he would be hard pressed to successfully emerge. He began fighting what ultimately would be a losing battle. His great love, OSS, would be disbanded. In the midst of such mounting pressure, who knows what an ambitious, opportunistic, sometimes reckless risk-taker like Donovan might have done?

Since starting the OSS, Donovan had been under fire by a multitude of military and civilian intelligence chiefs, the FBI’s Hoover being the most vocal among them. They resented or envied both him and his encroaching organization and wanted both toppled. On April 12, his sole, staunch supporter, President Roosevelt, died. It was not just a personal blow to Donovan, but a major professional one. Prior to his death, FDR had begun planning with Donovan a post-war super intelligence agency which, in fact, several years later, would become the CIA, and which Donovan, with good reason, expected to run. It would be simply an extension of OSS. As far back as August 1944, according to an item in the
OSS Society
⁵⁰
newsletter, Donovan had begun working on creating the new post-war agency. It was, by all accounts, one of his most important future projects.

However, confidential plans Donovan had drawn up by February 1945 were surreptitiously leaked to some of his enemies (he never found out by whom but it was a source of great frustration for him) and consequently became the basis for sensational news stories: “NEW DEAL PLANS SUPER SPY SYSTEM; SLEUTHS WOULD SNOOP ON U.S.,” blared one of the many headlines. “SUPER GESTAPO AGENCY IS UNDER CONSIDERATION,”
⁵¹
warned another. Most newspapers in this pre-TV era treated the news like an assault on personal privacy. Donovan was painted as an SS commander; his newly planned organization, a brutal secret police designed to prey indiscriminately on innocent Americans. The furor was loud and damning. The FBI’s Hoover, Army and Navy leaders, and sincere and opportunistic legislators, led the attack. Compounding Donovan’s problems was a secret study of the OSS done by army colonel Richard Park, Jr., an intelligence officer assigned to the White House. Just before his death, FDR mysteriously had commissioned the study. “Certain information had been brought to his attention which made such an investigation both timely and desirable,” Thomas F. Troy, a CIA historian, quotes Colonel Park as saying in
Donovan and the CIA
, a formerly secret CIA history of the organization that has been declassified.
⁵²
What that information was has never been disclosed. But Parks’s report accused the OSS, according to Troy, of incompetence, bad security, and corruption. In addition, the fact that communists were working in and with the OSS was spotlighted by the report as were Donovan’s “special secret funds,” which were said to be almost unlimited and for which he had mostly no accountability. He could disperse the unvouchered funds at will for whatever he
wanted. Hiring and working with communists and the specter of a blank check for anything he desired while most Americans tightened their belts for the war effort was not a winning image for the OSS director. The report damningly recommended that “General Donovan be replaced at the earliest possible moment.”
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By Roosevelt’s death, Donovan’s plan to establish and head a post-war super spy agency seemed dead in the water—but not to the director. He took the plan underground, fully expecting to see the agency—and his hoped-for appointment of director at its head—resurrected. At his first chance, he took his plans personally to presidential successor Harry Truman. But Truman had been given a copy of the Park Report and unexpectedly—to Donovan, at least—rebuffed the director. The meeting, according to Richard Dunlop in
Donovan: America’s Master Spy
, “could not have taken more than twenty minutes.”
⁵⁴
Truman, upon assuming office, had vowed to continue Roosevelt’s policies, especially treating the Soviets with care in naive hopes of insuring a post-war peace and world tranquility. But the new U.S. leader was insulted by the idea of a super spy agency—at least in the early days after his sudden ascension. He would be damned if he allowed a “Gestapo” in his administration. Donovan, the ambitious head of a kingdom he had built from scratch, now realized he was going to lose it all. It had to be a desperate situation. What could he do to save it, or at least reconstruct it into the new super agency? He began lobbying fiercely within the government—but with little success. With FDR gone, he needed important allies; new friends whom he could help and who in turn could help him.

In June of 1945, as one of the lawyers involved with prosecuting war criminals at the upcoming Nuremburg Tribunal, he traveled to the Soviet Union. Did he only do work related to Nuremburg while there? I have not been able to find any more
about the trip than the fact that he went.
⁵⁵
Donovan was the most elusive American leader in the war. Shortly after the trip, the Hoettl matter came to a head. What had he done in Moscow? Who had he seen? What had they discussed?

As fall of 1945 began, Donovan was a man on the verge of his own professional demise, hoping and scheming to try to stay the execution, or, if it became inevitable—as it did—to take the reigns of whatever would follow. Undoubtedly, he made moves to help himself and his cause. He was in a good position as head of America’s most secret clandestine agency, crumbling as it was, and willing and able—perhaps feeling duty-bound—to do the bidding of the leaders of the various factions, Right and Left, that were vying for control of U.S. policy direction at that very critical stage in the immediate post-war period. The intrigues must have been incredible.

This then was the hidden but pertinent background into which Skubik found himself immersed as he kept coming into conflict with Donovan and the OSS. Donovan, as part of OSS’s dying machinations, was trying, for whatever reason, to placate the NKVD, which Skubik, unaware, considered an enemy. The OSS director was also presiding over a crumbling personal empire which he desperately hoped to revive and continue to dominate one way or another.

What secrets of that struggle, waged in the tumultuous period of time that gave birth to the Cold War and CIA, were buried in the OSS’s demise?

Did some of them involve Patton?

It’s not clear exactly when
Skubik had the second confrontation with Donovan. Probably it was sometime in the late summer or early fall 1945. In September, however, Skubik, Toombs, and May were charged by a fellow CIC agent with stealing and looting. An investigation was launched. According to formerly top secret documents I obtained from the National Archives, the charges stemmed from the mass exodus out of Zwickau when the Russians, per the Yalta agreements, were to be given that territory. In helping many to escape, the team had broken rules about transporting refugees, moved the refugees’ possessions under their own names rather than the owners (which looked suspicious) and had strong-armed people to get them to do what they wanted. Some they had strong-armed were German officials.

The rival CIC accuser, in whose territory Skubik’s team had sometimes surreptitiously worked—thus incurring his anger—brought in witnesses like Walter Ulbricht, the communist organizer
Skubik had arrested, to claim that he had seen them packing railroad cars with loot and even carting off entire factories, a charge CIC investigating officer, Major Donovan Ault, found ludicrous. Testifying on behalf of the three were many Zwickau refugees who swore the so-called “stolen loot” was what was being transported for them. Not only did they have no other way to get their own posessions out, but everything had been given back to them after they reached their destination. While Major Ault wrote that the three acted as “big shots” and “displayed poor judgment,” he concluded that there was no evidence to substantiate the charges and declared them innocent. Skubik was exonerated, and in fact he was promoted on November 3 to sergeant.
¹

November 3 was a little more than a month before Patton’s fateful accident. What Skubik had been doing in regard to the warnings about Patton is unclear. He does not address it per se in his book. Presumably he had to spend considerable time defending himself from the looting charges. He also had a full plate continuing his daily job of hunting Nazis and countering Russian espionage, which was on the increase. The Russians were now in firm control of Eastern Europe and stepping up espionage in the Western sectors. In the meantime, Patton had been fired by Eisenhower and exiled to Bad Nauheim, which made him more vulnerable. As the governor of Bavaria, he had been bowed to, pampered, and attended by many who could protect him. But the clerical 15
^th
Army had few such amenities. “Patton’s bodyguards were removed,” wrote Skubik. “I have spoken to Bert Goldstein, one of Patton’s bodyguards at that time. Bert told me that... had the bodyguards not been removed Patton would not have been murdered.”
^ae
2

The stage, in Skubik’s opinion, had been set. But before anything happened to Patton, Skubik would have a final row involving Donovan after accusing a Russian general of planning Patton’s assassination.

A few weeks before Patton’s accident, Skubik was ordered to arrest his own driver, Alfred Schoenstein, a Yugoslav refugee. Schoenstein was one of several “camp followers” Skubik’s CIC team had acquired. The camp followers were “happy to share our billets . . . food . . . and were generally useful,” including as sources of local information. Skubik had commandeered a large Horch automobile which he believed had belonged to [Nazi Air Force chief] General Herman Goering. “It was a real beauty, grey with red upholstery... bullet proofed.”
^af
The internet indicates it might have ended up in Russia, which is pertinent here, or in the hands of a private U.S. or other collector. When Schoenstein, hoping to catch on with the CIC, had presented his papers, Skubik writes he realized they were “tainted, thus I learned Schoenstein was a Russian spy” and, since he would be working with American intelligence, “a double agent.” But it did not bother Skubik. “I used him and he used me.” For instance, it had been through some crafty manipulation of their relationship that Skubik caught the two Russian spies who had the U.S. codebooks. Skubik thus had made Schoenstein his Horch “chauffeur.” Eventually, his superiors, who either knew of the game or found out about it, wanted the relationship ended. But when he went to Schoenstein’s room to arrest him, he found that someone had tipped off the double agent and he had taken flight in the Horch, which Skubik prized.

Schoenstein was Jewish. Back in April, prior to Germany’s surrender, Skubik had saved two Jewish teens from the SS who, though resistant, released the imperiled teens in a bargain with Skubik.
³
Audi and Lilli Weil were now grateful camp followers. He went to them. “I explained that [Schoenstein] was a Russian spy and that he must have gone over to them for safety. Audi promised to go to the Jewish underground to get their help.”
⁴

Three days later, the teen reported that Schoenstein had been spotted at the headquarters of a Russian colonel in Regensburg. “The Horch was parked in the back.” He and Audi sped there in a jeep. But while Skubik was talking with the colonel, Schoenstein escaped again. Audi had seen him driving “out at full speed in the Horch . . . heading for the autobahn.” They gave chase but the Horch could do 120 mph.