Target Churchill

Epilogue

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister again in 1951. He served until 1955. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, accepted the Order of the Garter, and became an Honorary Citizen of the United States. He died on January 24, 1965, at the age of ninety-one, the same day and time as his father, as he had predicted.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was arrested while Nikita Khrushchev was premier of the Soviet Union. He was executed in December 1953 for crimes against the state.

Josef Stalin, who has been blamed for the death of millions, died on March 5, 1953, exactly seven years after the date of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. He is buried in the Kremlin.

Donald Maclean escaped to the Soviet Union from London in the spring of 1955. His wife, Melinda, and their children joined him two years later. He learned Russian, worked in a Soviet foreign policy think tank, and died in Moscow at the age of sixty-nine. His escape was shrouded in mystery, and in the opinion of many, could not have happened without the tacit consent of MI6.

Harry Truman died in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, in 1972 at the age of eighty-eight. Although he left office as an unpopular president, he is now one of the most revered presidents of the twentieth century.

W. H. Thompson died in the seventies. He wrote a book entitled I Was Churchill’s Shadow. The last words in his book stated: “I acknowledge Winston Spencer Churchill as the greatest man I have ever known, and no words can express adequately my pride to have been some service to him.”

Victoria Stewart returned to England, founded a secretarial school in Hampshire. She married an accountant, had two children, and died in 2001.

Franz Mueller’s body was never found, although in 2002, a construction crew building a shopping mall near Jefferson City uncovered a World War II German PPC 7.92 Mauser and a Luger pistol of the same vintage. Some small traces of clothing and paper currency were found nearby. The currency was too damaged to determine the denominations and, therefore, was presumed counterfeit.

Stephanie Brown’s disappearance remained on the books of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department for ten years. Her parents offered a reward of $10,000 for information about her whereabouts, later raising it to $25,000. Both parents died in the eighties, broken-hearted and still believing that their daughter was alive. The area in which she was buried became a national park. Her body was never found.

The “Iron Curtain” speech grew in influence as time went by. It became the clarion call of the Western democracies and made it easier for the Truman Doctrine to succeed and save Europe from further Communist incursions.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1992.