ABC/Randy Holmes(WASHINGTON) — Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supports Bill O’Reilly’s idea of a global anti-terrorism mercenary force, the Fox News host told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“I was with Henry Kissinger last night,” O’Reilly said Sunday on This Week. “And he told me my idea of a worldwide anti-terror force paid for by the coalition of nations under the supervision of Congress — Kissinger has endorsed that for years.”
“Bill O’Reilly and Henry Kissinger on a mercenary force?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Simpatico,” O’Reilly said. He also predicted that a mercenary force would eventually happen, though not under President Obama.
ABC News has reached out to Kissinger for comment.
O’Reilly also said he believes the subject his new book, Gen. George Patton, would handle terrorist threats differently than President Obama if he had the chance.
“If George Patton were alive today, he would be saying to President Obama, ‘Give me the Third. I’ll go into Syria, and I’ll wipe ‘em all out,’” O’Reilly said.
The star of Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor also said he believes Patton’s sudden death was an assassination by the Soviets, possibly assisted by the American OSS — the predecessor to the CIA. OSS did, as O’Reilly notes, cooperate with Soviet intelligence during the Second World War. This theory is the topic of O’Reilly’s book, Killing Patton.
“I think Stalin killed him,” O’Reilly told Stephanopoulos. “Patton was going to go back to the United States and condemn Stalin and the Soviet Union…and Stalin wanted him dead, and I think Stalin got him dead.”
Patton’s death is widely believed to have resulted from injuries from a car accident that happened while he was on a hunting trip in Mannheim, Germany. But O’Reilly in Killing Patton notes that some U.S. sources had pointed to a Soviet plot to kill the general. Immediately after the accident, despite having suffered quadriplegia, the general was improving, and doctors expected that he would survive.
O’Reilly told Stephanopoulos that the general was laughing with hospital nurses and drinking cognac and then died suddenly. He said that under Stalin, the Soviet Union had been hard at work on untraceable poisons.
Medical records obtained by ABC News — records also cited in Killing Patton — show that the afternoon of his death, the general “told nurse several times that he was going to die.” His doctors at the time found “Pulmonary embol[ism] and Right Heart Failure.”
Col. Thomas Frank, an Army historian and Chief of the Department of Medicine at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, told ABC News that the general’s death is consistent with pulmonary embolism following the paralysis caused by the car accident.
Patton’s death remains the subject of debate, in part because Patton’s wife requested that no autopsy be performed, and at least some of the records of subsequent investigations into his death have disappeared.
“What are the odds of that happening to a four-star general?” O’Reilly asked.
Stephanopoulos and O’Reilly also discussed whether Patton could have been poisoned with guards outside his hospital room 24/7; O’Reilly maintained that the guards were there primarily to fend off reporters.
O’Reilly is hoping that his book will provoke the Army to reopen the investigation into the death of one of America’s greatest military heroes, and said that modern science could determine whether his theory is right or wrong.
“Stalin had a factory that produced traceless poisons back then,” he said. “But now, with our advanced technology, we could see if there was something in Patton’s remains.”
Conspiracy theories aside, O’Reilly says there is no one like Patton today.
“General Patton interested me because he was the last no-spin general,” O’Reilly said. “[And it] got him killed.”
More ABC news videos | Latest world news
Follow @ABCNewsRadio
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio
