The planned assassination of the Big Three did not work out for Skorzeny – Epochaplus.cz

The effort to ensure maximum security during the preparations for the Allies conference in Tehran, Iran is definitely in order. After midnight on November 27, 1943, the day before the conference begins, the atmosphere is tense.

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) telephones the American ambassador in Moscow Averell Harriman (1891–1986) and his British colleague To Archibald Clark Kerr (1882–1951). “The German agents are preparing either a demonstration or even an assassination,” warns the two men, who are already in Tehran by then.

However, none of the respondents believe him, because according to their information, the Iranian police have enemy agents, if not under lock and key, then at least under surveillance.

However, Harriman pretends that he believed the information and goes to the suite for the American president just to be sure Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) to see in person.

He finds him safe, but the American president is the first to send a car with his doppelganger. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965) stays in the British residence opposite.

The police close the street between the Soviet and British embassies, fence it with barbed wire and block it with a six-meter metal fence.

The passage between the embassies is guarded by anti-aircraft guns so that all conference participants can move safely to and from meetings.

Undertaker in connection with Berlin

The Nazis learned about the time and place of the Allied conference in mid-October 1943, after they managed to decipher the secrets of the American naval code.

Hitler immediately rejoices at the possibility of killing three birds with one stone – the Soviet leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1878–1953), Churchill and Roosevelt.

As Hitler’s best man for dirty work will confirm in 1966 Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975), the planned operation included either the kidnapping or the outright murder of the trio. The plan was prepared in advance.

At the time, a certain German was hiding in the Armenian cemetery in Tehran Franz Meyer, who maintains a network of spies. For cover, he makes a living as a gravedigger.

When, before the start of the conference, six German radio operators, an advance group for the preparation of the assassination, drop a plane by parachute near the city of Qum, about 100 miles from Tehran, Meyer is tasked with coordinating them.

The men, whose goal is to link up with Berlin as soon as possible, will travel to Tehran. An operation called “The Long Jump” begins.

The brave seven

He immediately enters the game Gevork Vartanian (1924–2012), only 19-year-old Soviet agent working since 1940 under the cover name Amir.

He has the best prerequisites for this, his father was also an agent, who himself worked in Iran for 23 years under the guise of a rich businessman. The young spy had earlier gathered six men of his own age communicating in Russian and Persian.

They are most often descendants of refugees from Stalin’s gulags. They made their lives available for the sake of their country without the right to any reward. Due to the fact that they often travel quickly on bicycles, they are nicknamed the “light ride”.

Together, long before the start of the conference, from February 1940 to August 1941, they identified more than 400 Nazi agents and arranged for their arrest the moment Soviet troops entered Iranian soil in August 1941. A group of seven agents are now ordered to find a German radio.

Bad news is flying to Hitler

Vartanian’s group begins ant work. He is in action for 14-16 hours a day until he pinpoints the exact location in a Tehran villa where the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, has set up its intelligence center.

He is also in contact with a group of radio operators from the cemetery, who communicate with Berlin via radio. “We must decipher their messages at all costs,” Vartanian instructs himself and his colleagues.

The NKVD (Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence) agents are busy and eventually succeed in intercepting and decoding all the information flying into the German capital. Now it’s about destroying the enemy cell.

“We arrested all the members and ordered them to make contact with the enemy under our supervision. We gave the radio operator the opportunity to announce the failure of his mission,” recounts Vartanian years later.

The Berlin command, under the influence of bad news, finally decides that the main group of assassins led by Skorzeny will not travel to Tehran at all. The planned “long jump” did not work out.