KGB attempted to assassinate John Wayne?

Never mind offing the president, if anything would have started WWIII, this is it!!!

Book tells how John Wayne survived Soviet assassination

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Friday August 1, 2003
The Guardian

Joseph Stalin ordered the KGB to assassinate John Wayne because he considered his anti-communist rhetoric a threat to the Soviet Union, according to a new biography of the film star based on interviews with Wayne's close associates and the movie legend Orson Welles.
Stalin apparently learned of Wayne's popularity from the Russian filmmaker Sergei Gerasimov, who attended a peace conference in New York in 1949. Michael Munn, a film historian and author of John Wayne - The Man Behind The Myth, said Gerasimov told Stalin of Wayne's fervent anti-communist beliefs.

"Stalin decided that he would have him killed," said Mr Munn, who says he was told of the plot by Orson Welles at a dinner in 1983. Welles had said that the KGB was given the task of assassinating Wayne.

www.guardian.co.uk...

WOW!!! The American hero John Wayne was a threat to anti Americanism? No duh, but enough of one to threaten an entire government? D@MN!!!!!!

Well, The Duke lived on to die without a bullet to the head, so Stalin failed. Good. If the KGB did kill him, well, any citizen of America would have pissed us off, but The Duke? Oh boy, hell hath no fury like a nation with nukes pissed off!

Yes, I read this with some wry amusement: it's worth a squint at the whole article.
Now, had a syndicate of drama critics, or the actors' union, put a price on his head, I'd have probably believed it; but I rather think Stalin would have liked him: no one killed more communists than Stalin, after all.

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Sorrry to interrupt,
But I believe it was the Cheka?
And Khrushev next in line, admired 'The Duke'

Oh sorry, I have been up all night and forgot.
Password required!
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Would almost think the US would have regarded such a successful attempt as an act of war.

I would almost bet that a Titan MIRV with "Regards from Duke" written on it would have detonated point-blank over the the Kremlin....

No one messes with the "Duke!"

regards
seekerof