Was Clayton Bissell a Soviet stooge?

Clayton Bissell was the man that Claire Chennault, his Flying Tigers, and AVG buffs over the years have loved to hate. As much as anything, it was Bissell's arrogance that persuaded AVG veterans not to sign on with the 23rd Fighter Group in China when their mercenary unit was disbanded in July 1942. Afterward, as commander of the 10th Air Force in India, Bissell made Chennault's life miserable.

Now comes an email from Waldemar Pajdosz in Poland, following up our earlier exchange about the massacre of Polish officers and sergeants at Katyn. That was Stalin’s way of obliterating the country's potential leaders, the better to take it over after Germany’s defeat. With admirable chutzpah, the Russians persuaded a gullible West that it was the Germans who'd murdered those thousands of Polish young men. (I blogged earlier about the magnificent feature film.)

Well, guess what? Clayton Bissell (by then a major general and the USAAF’s intelligence chief) was part of that coverup. See the website Katyn Memorial Wall for how Bissell classified a report on the massacre ‘and made it disappear--instantly, permanently and without a trace'. Not until the Korean War put the final nail in the coffin of Soviet-American friendship was the US public ready to accept the truth about Katyn.

The website goes so far as to suggest that Bissell was on the Russian payroll. More likely he was only gullible--there was a lot of that going around in the 1930s and 1940s. The Biographical Dictionary of World War II--hardly a font of conspiracy theories--concludes it short biography by saying: 'Testifying before Congress in 1950, [Bissell] admitted helping cover up Soviet guilt in the Katyn Forest Massacre by misusing the top secret classification.' Blue skies! – Dan Ford