Legendary WWII Soviet spy dies at 87

The "Big 3" at Tehran.

from AFP.

One of the legendary Soviet agents of World War II, who infiltrated a British spy school and protected the "Big Three" in the Tehran conference, died aged 87, Russia's intelligence service said Wednesday.

Gevork Vartanyan, working under the codename Amir, in 1942 managed to attend an entire British training course for Russian-speaking spies in Tehran whom London then wanted to send all over the Soviet Union.

According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) - the successor to the Soviet KGB - his work helped expose the British network which existed despite London's wartime alliance with Moscow.

But Vartanyan's greatest exploit was his role in ensuring security at the 1943 conference in Tehran between the Allied "Big Three" of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President F.D. Roosevelt that started to draw up the map of postwar Europe.

Vartanyan - aged just 19 at the time - led a group of young Soviet agents who exposed in its early stages a Nazi plot codenamed "Operation Long Jump" to assassinate the three Allied leaders at the conference.

Operation Long Jump
The plot was approved by Adolf Hitler and headed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. German intelligence had learned of the time and place of the conference in mid-October 1943, after breaking a US Navy code. Otto Skorzeny was chosen by Kaltenbrunner to head the mission. Also involved was German agent Elyesa Bazna (better known under the codename "Cicero"), who transmitted key data from Ankara, Turkey concerning the conference.

However, Soviet intelligence quickly uncovered the plot. The first tipoff came from Soviet agent Nikolai Kuznetsov. Posing as Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Paul Siebert from Nazi-occupied Ukraine, he got SS Sturmbannführer Hans Ulrich von Ortel - who was described as "talkative" and "a drinker" - to tell him about the operation while drunk.

Nineteen-year-old Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian had recruited a small number of agents in Iran, where his father, also a spy, was posing as a wealthy merchant. It was Vartanian's group which located an advance party of six German radio operators who had dropped by parachute near Qum, 60 km (37 mi) from Tehran, and followed them to Tehran, where the German spy network provided a villa for them. They established that the Germans were in contact with Berlin via radio and recorded their communications; when decoded, these revealed that they planned to drop a second group of operatives led by Skorzeny for the actual assassination attempt. Skorzeny had already visited Tehran to reconnoiter and had been followed by Vartanian's group.

Following that, all German transmissions were intercepted by Soviet and British intelligence. However, one of the Germans radioed a message with a secret code indicating that they were under surveillance and the operation was called off. Skorzeny himself considered the intelligence coming from Tehran to be inadequate and did not believe the complex scheme could have worked.(Wikipedia)

"Everyone in foreign intelligence will remember Gevork Andreyevich for his overwhelming love for the motherland and his fidelity to his duty," the spokesman of the SVR, Sergei Ivanov, said in a statement.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described Vartanyan as a "legendary spy, a true patriot of his country and an extraordinary personality."

"He participated in stunning special operations which have gone down in the history of our foreign intelligence," he said in a letter of condolence to Vartanyan's family.

The SVR said in a statement on its website that Vartanyan died on Tuesday. A source in the service told the state RIA Novosti news agency that he died at a Moscow hospital Tuesday afternoon.

During a life remarkable even by the standards of a spy and parts of which are still shrouded in secrecy, Vartanyan worked in tandem with his wife Goar, who was also an agent.

According to the SVR, they worked undercover together for 30 years in different foreign countries as "illegals" after World War II.

The SVR still gives no specifics about this work, saying only that it was in "extreme conditions" and in "complicated circumstances."

They only returned to the Soviet Union in 1986 with Gevork Vartanyan continuing to work in the service until 1992.

"Everything we did was important for the motherland. But the most important things cannot be discussed at the moment," he said before his death in comments broadcast by Channel One television.

He was born in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the son of an Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin, and received top honours from the Soviet Union as well as Russia and Armenia for his work.

His father had also carried out espionage work for the Soviet Union and it was for this that he took the family back to Iran in the 1930s. By the age of 16 the young Gevork was already working to expose "Fascist spies" in Iran.