Gevork Vartanyan has died. (WWII Soviet Intelligence)

[MKSheppard]

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Gevork Vartanyan, who has died aged 87, worked for Soviet intelligence for more than half a century and played an important part in thwarting a Nazi plot to assassinate Churchill, Stalin and President Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

The three Allied leaders convened at Tehran in November that year to discuss strategy, the principal item on the agenda being the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, had learnt of the time and place of the conference the previous month, having deciphered the American naval code, and the operation to assassinate the Allied leaders, code-named Long Jump, was put in the hands of one of their most trusted agents, Otto Skorzeny.

The operation was betrayed, however, when a Soviet intelligence officer, Nikolai Kuznetsov, posing as a German Oberleutnant called Paul Siebert, forged a friendship with an SS Sturmbannführer, Ulrich von Ortel. One evening von Ortel got drunk with Kuznetsov and boasted about Long Jump, revealing that special teams were being trained for the task in Copenhagen.

Security at the conference was principally the responsibility of the Soviets. Under the Russian-Persian Treaty of Friendship of 1921, the Soviet Union had sent troops into northern Persia in August 1941 to curb the operations of German agents. Britain, meanwhile, had deployed troops in the south to guarantee the flow of British-American lend-lease supplies to the USSR from the Persian Gulf.

The Conference itself (code-named Eureka) was held in the Soviet Embassy. One of the buildings in the compound was converted for use as a residence for President Roosevelt, since the American mission was in the suburbs and not considered secure. A tunnel was constructed between the Soviet embassy and the British embassy across the street. The area was heavily guarded.

Vartanyan later recalled: “Tehran at that time was flooded with refugees from war-ravaged Europe. For the most part, these were wealthy people trying to escape the risks of the war. There were about 20,000 Germans in Iran, and Nazi agents were hiding among them. They were aided by the pre-war patronage extended to the Germans by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who openly sympathised with Hitler. The German field station in [Persia], headed by Franz Meyer, was very powerful.”

In 1940-41 Vartanyan’s team of seven intelligence officers (who called themselves “the light cavalry” because they travelled about the city mainly by bicycle) had identified more than 400 Nazi agents, all of whom had been arrested by Soviet troops. Meyer was eventually discovered working as a gravedigger at an Armenian cemetery and arrested by the British.

In their efforts to foil the assassination plot, Vartanyan’s group located six Nazi radio operators shortly before the conference opened on November 28 1943. The German assassins had been dropped by parachute near the town of Qom, 40 miles from Tehran: “We followed them to Tehran, where the Nazi field station had readied a villa for their stay. They were travelling by camel, and were loaded with weapons. While we were watching the group, we established that th ey had contacted Berlin by radio, and recorded their communication.

“When we decrypted these radio messages, we learnt that the Germans were preparing to land a second group of subversives for a terrorist act — the assassination or abduction of the 'Big Three’. The second group was supposed to be led by Skorzeny himself . ”

All the members of the first group were arrested and forced to contact their handlers under Soviet supervision. “We deliberately gave a radio operator an opportunity to report the failure of the mission,” said Vartanyan, “and the Germans decided against sending the main group under Skorzeny to Tehran. In this way, the success of our group in locating the Nazi advance party and our subsequent actions thwarted an attempt to assassinate the 'Big Three’.”

Gevork Andreyevich Vartanyan was born on February 17 1924 in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. His father was a businessman of Armenian origin, and himself worked for Soviet intelligence in Persia from 1930 to the early Fifties, managing an active network of agents. Gevork Andreyevich was recruited into the intelligence service at the age of only 16, and in 1955 graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages at Yerevan, Armenia — during the course of his long career he came to be fluent in eight languages.

In 1942, using the name Amir, Vartanyan succeeded in taking a course in Tehran (set up under the guise of an amateur radio club) for British spies who would be disseminated in the Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Transcaucasian area. After being accepted as a trainee, Vartanyan made a list of the students at the school, thus exposing an important potential network; many of them were subsequently arrested on Soviet territory and turned to become double agents.

Vartanyan later observed: “The British, true to form, continued to do mean things to us despite the fact of their being allies. They established a special group and organised a school where they trained subversives and spies to be dropped over the territory of the Soviet Union. And in that school I went through a six-month training and so I am grateful to the British intelligence.”

The fact that the two nations were allies did not, of course, preclude espionage. During the Tehran Conference, Stalin observed Roosevelt passing a handwritten note to Churchill, and instructed his head of intelligence in Persia, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, to get hold of a copy. He succeeded. It read: “Sir, your fly is open.”

In 2003, relying on declassified documents, Yuri Lvovich Kuznets published a book called Tehran-43 or Operation Long Jump, which detailed Vartanyan’s role at the Tehran Conference. A Soviet film, Tegeran-43, which featured the French actor Alain Delon, was released in 1981.

Most of Vartanyan’s work, however, remains secret to this day. After the war he worked alongside his wife, Goar; they had met when she was 13, and he recruited her when she became an adult. They married in 1946, and, according to the SVR (successor to the KGB), they worked undercover together for 30 years in Europe, Asia and the United States. They returned to the Soviet Union in 1986, Goar retiring shortly afterwards. Vartanyan continued to work for the service until 1992.

He was appointed a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1984; his wife received the Order of the Red Banner.

In 2007 Churchill’s granddaughter Celia Sandys met Vartanyan in Moscow while she was contributing to a Russian-British television documentary about relations between the two countries. At the meeting Vartanyan raised a glass of Armenian brandy to “the great troika — Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt”, adding: “It is thanks to them that we live in peace today.” He said that Stalin had sent Armenian brandy to Churchill “by the case”.

At the end of his life Vartanyan reflected: “We were lucky — we never met a single traitor. For us underground agents, betrayal is the worst evil. If an agent observes all the security rules and behaves properly in society, no counter-intelligence will spot him or her. Like sappers, underground agents err only once.”