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calendar   Thursday - January 12, 2012

obit. His name was Gevork Vartanyan,a Soviet spy, and worthy of our time to read his obit.

Here’s an obit about a derring-do sort of guy who worked for the other side.
He had quite a story.  A Soviet, actually once attended Brit spy school.  Helped to foul up a Nazi plot against Stalin,FDR and Churchill at their Tehran meeting.
It makes for some interesting reading and just cos he was on the other side didn’t make him less brave or deserving of attention.

Gevork Vartanyan
Most of Vartanyan’s work remains secret to this day.
February 17 1924, died January 10 2012

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 . ”

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.”

TELEGRAPH OBIT VARTANYAN for the full obit.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 01/12/2012 at 12:03 PM   
Filed Under: • OBITITUARIES •  
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