13. The Nazi Plan to Send Spies to Assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin
The Germans learned of the Big Three’s meeting after their military intelligence, the Abwehr, cracked a US Navy code. They discovered that a major conference was to be held in Tehran in October, 1943. The result was Operation Long Jump, which aimed to assassinate the Big Three Allied leaders. It was coordinated by SS general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA – the Reich Main Security Office). To carry out the actual attack, Kaltenbrunner turned to SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who had rescued deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity in a mountaintop ski resort. Skorzeny was a highly capable, and highly dangerous, operative. Fortunately, the Allies got wind of the German scheme, and Gevork Vartanian was put on the trail of German spies in Iran. In 1943, German intelligence parachuted an advance party of six radio operators near the Iranian city of Qum, about forty miles from Tehran.
Vartanian followed up on their trail. It led the teenage spy to a villa in Tehran, where Operation Long Jump’s advance team had moved in with an Abwehr cell. From that base, the German spies radioed intelligence reports back to Berlin. Unbeknownst to the Germans, their transmissions were intercepted and decoded by the NKVD. The intercepts revealed that Skorzeny was scheduled to arrive in mid-October, along with the actual kill team. That was derailed when the Soviets raided the German nest of spies and arrested all its occupants. The NKVD then sought to turn the radio operators into double agents. They forced them to continue their transmissions to their handlers in Berlin, but now under Soviet supervision. It was an ambitious plan, that sought among other things to lure Skorzeny, the Nazis’ star special forces operative, into a trap. His capture would have made for a great propaganda coup.
