WND by Chuck Norris 8/1/2022
Exclusive: Chuck Norris explains how patriot John Wayne dealt with commies trying to kill him-----
There's one fact about the Duke you can take to the bank: he was tough, and he proved it on screen and off screen.
There's a legendary moment in his life when he faced off with actual Russian assassins. No kidding. A few people think what I'm about to share is from Duke folklore, but it was as real as the writing on this page.
Remember the Russian dictator Josef Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953? According to a Stanford historian, he was responsible for the deaths of at least 9 million people through mass murder, forced labor and famine, but the true figure may be as high as 60 million.
Well, apparently Stalin hated John Wayne. Why? Because Wayne was a true-blue American patriot, who hated communism. And because of the power and influence of stars on stage and screen, Stalin considered Duke a huge global threat to his rule and the spread of communism.
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Stalin ordered an actual hit on the movie star by dispatching two KGB assassins in 1951. The FBI uncovered the plot from an unnamed Soviet source, which was years later verified by Stalin's successor himself, Premier Nikita Khrushchev. When Khrushchev met John Wayne in 1958, he apologized for the killing contract, telling him, "That was the decision of Stalin in his last mad years. I rescinded the order." But not before the Russians tried to take out the Duke.
The FBI notified Wayne about the KGB assassination plot. He responded to the FBI by asking them to let the two hit men show up and he would deal with them himself.
Military.com explained, "Obviously not one to let a thing like Communist assassins get him down, Wayne and his scriptwriter Jimmy Grant allegedly abducted the hitmen [some say with additional help of a few stuntmen], took them to the beach, and staged a mock execution. No one knows exactly what happened after that, but Wayne's friends say the Soviet agents began to work for the FBI from that day on." (They feared retribution back in the USSR, so pleaded to remain and became FBI informants.)
Unfortunately, this was not the only Soviet assassination attempt of the Duke. There were other plots to kill him, including an attempt in Mexico on the set of the film "Hondo" (which was released in 1953), led by a communist cell. There was also a sniper attack when Wayne visited Vietnam in 1966, though it's difficult to say if that was a Soviet-based plot because it was a decade after the contract on Wayne's life was apparently rescinded.
More:
https://www.wnd.com/2022/08/hero-faced-off-real-russian-assassins/
