The Russians win again. On June 13, while Patton is on tour in America selling war bonds,5 his headquarters is informed by cable that the Third Army must immediately account for any German forces in its region. At the same time, army chief of staff George Marshall orders that Patton’s phones be tapped, and even takes the extraordinary measure of requesting that a psychoanalyst from the navy’s Medical Corps observe one of the general’s press conferences to see if Patton is suffering from a nervous breakdown.

Marshall, himself, likes Patton, but his top commander, Eisenhower, has written to him that Patton is a “mentally unbalanced officer.” Ever since the Knutsford incident in 1944, when Patton inadvertently slighted the Russians while speaking to a group of British women, Ike has come to believe that Patton suffers from seizures and bouts of dementia. This serious charge, and Patton’s habit of speaking out in favor of the Germans, has convinced Marshall to investigate Patton’s mental health.

The powerful Wild Bill Donovan also loathes Patton. Donovan and the OSS have been working with the Russians ever since he visited Moscow in December 1943. The American and Russian spy agencies are now exchanging information and helping one another on espionage projects within Germany, including spying on George Patton.

In fact, OSS agent Duncan Lee, an Oxford graduate and descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, is assigned to deliver to Donovan “the monthly confidential report of the military governor in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany.” This includes an OSS accounting of Patton’s personal movements and wiretap recordings.

Wild Bill Donovan’s future is uncertain now that Franklin Roosevelt has died. Harry Truman keeps his distance. With the war over, the OSS may be dissolved. Donovan will do whatever it takes to keep his spy agency intact, including undermining the Truman administration’s increasingly hard-line stance against the Russians by sharing secrets about Patton.

But Donovan himself is being deceived.

The spy war in Germany between Russia and the United States is ratcheting up. It is, as American intelligence officer James H. Critchfield will later write, “the largest, most concentrated and intense intelligence warfare in history.” However, Donovan does little to stop the Russian influence within the OSS. Since the summer of 1944, his security office has made it known to Donovan that forty-seven OSS agents are either Communists or Russian sympathizers. Wild Bill also knows that Joseph Stalin has been planting Russian spies within the OSS since 1942.

What Donovan does not know is that Duncan Lee, his executive secretary and the man who knows all his secrets, is a traitor. Lee is working for the Russian spy agency NKVD, as a double agent. Among invaluable nuggets of information Lee has provided the Soviets over the course of the war was advance warning of the D-day landing date and the exact location of the atomic bomb research in Tennessee. That the Russians would use such a prized asset, Lee, to gather information about George Patton speaks volumes about their eagerness to see him silenced.

In May 1945, Donovan gains shocking information about Patton, of which the general himself is totally unaware. Stephen Skubik, a special agent in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, speaks fluent Ukrainian, and is tasked with developing undercover sources of Slavic ethnicity to report to American intelligence. On May 16 he met with Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who will one day assist the Americans and British in spying on the Russians.6 Bandera specifically told Skubik that “Soviet High Command has been ordered by Marshal Stalin to kill U.S. Army General George Patton.”

Stalin’s reasons are simple: Patton defied Russian authority when he invaded Czechoslovakia back in May, during the waning days of the war.7

But rather than being shocked by Skubik’s news, Donovan orders him to arrest Bandera so that he can be returned to the Russians, thereby silencing the man who is warning about an attempt on Patton’s life.

“I was disappointed with my first visit to OSS,” Skubik will later write with a great deal of understatement.

But the investigation is not over for Stephen Skubik. A few weeks later he meets with Professor Roman Smal-Stocki, an academic and former Ukrainian diplomat, who is on the verge of being expelled from Germany and sent back into Russian hands. Smal-Stocki informs Skubik that “the NKVD will soon attempt to kill General George Patton. Stalin wants him dead.”

Finally, in the middle of the summer, Special Agent Skubik interviews yet another Ukrainian, Gen. Pavlo Shandruk, who fought with the Nazis in the waning days of the war and is now desperately trying to avoid being sent back to Russia. He offers the United States some vital intelligence that he hopes will allow him to remain in the American Zone. “Please tell General Patton to be on guard,” Shandruk tells Agent Skubik. “He is at the top of the NKVD list to be killed.”

Wild Bill Donovan and Special Agent Skubik soon meet again. And once more, Skubik tells him of the threats. But Donovan dismisses them, saying they are “just a provocation.”

*   *   *

Back in Berlin, Patton stands at attention on this crisp morning, watching the Stars and Stripes hoisted over the city he once longed to conquer. Today, Patton is harboring a dangerous secret. Although American undersecretary of war Robert Patterson proclaimed on May 31, 1945, that all Allied POWs had been returned, Patton knows that a top-secret policy instituted by Gen. George Marshall, then tacitly approved by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, effectively abandons all American and British POWs who fell into Russian hands at the end of the war. The Russians are using them as leverage in negotiations with the Allies to ensure that all Soviets who have fled to the West will be returned.

Patton believes that the man to his left, President Truman, has allowed more than twenty thousand American POWs to remain in Russian hands. As a military man, Patton will do whatever it takes to see these men released—even wage war. But he is conflicted, because he understands that Truman’s motivations for allowing these Americans to be held hostage is to ensure that the Russians join in the fight against the Japanese and then, once the war is over, join a new organization to be known as the United Nations, in order to ensure future world peace.8

Patton is becoming more and more certain that the only way he can speak freely about these issues is to leave the military.

Armed with top-secret knowledge and his usual defiant attitude, George Patton has made himself a target—and he knows it.

A few weeks ago, before leaving his daughters in Washington, Patton said something that disturbed them greatly: “Well, I guess this is goodbye. I won’t be seeing you again.”

Patton’s daughters were shocked. “It’s crazy,” they protested. “The war is over.” To which Patton mysteriously responded, “My luck has run out.”

24

IG FARBEN BUILDING

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY

SEPTEMBER 28, 1945

4:30 P.M.

The man with eighty-five days to live is about to be fired.

George S. Patton has been summoned, with prejudice, to meet with his boss Dwight Eisenhower. The same foul autumn rains that stymied Patton one year ago in Metz now make flying impossible, so Patton has driven seven and a half hours to the massive industrial office complex that now serves as Ike’s headquarters. Patton spent the journey through the bombed-out ruins of Germany preparing a plan of attack, thinking of the words he must speak to save his career once again. “The ride reminded me of a similar one,” he will write in his diary tonight, that “I took from Knutsford to London … when I was strongly under the impression I was going to be relieved and sent home—if not tried.”