They Asked Skorzeny About the Plot to Kill Eisenhower. He Admitted One Thing.

In December 1944, as German armor pushed into the Ardennes, Allied counterintelligence in Paris got word of a plan to kill Dwight Eisenhower. The source was a handful of German prisoners taken at roadside checkpoints in Belgium, men caught wearing American uniforms and driving captured jeeps. The officer they named was Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando who had pulled Mussolini off a mountaintop at the Gran Sasso in 1943. 43 roadblocks went up around Paris. The Supreme Commander was moved into guarded quarters beside his own headquarters while a look-alike was driven through the city as bait. Three of the captured men were shot by firing squad on 23 December. And the brigade at the center of it never got near the bridges it was built to take. This is the full story of Operation Greif, and what Skorzeny told a U.S. Army interrogator about it in August 1945.