The Greatest Teenage Spy of WWII
The Tehran Conference, November 28th to December 1st, 1943 was the first meeting of the “Big Three” Allied leaders of WWII, FDR, Stalin, and Churchill. Over the course of multiple sessions major issues of common strategy were hammered out. Chief among them was a solid commitment by Roosevelt and Churchill to invade France in 1944 in order to open a major second front against Germany. Also addressed were the envisaged postwar settlement, and smaller issues such as operations in Yugoslavia, relations with Iran and Turkey, plus Japan. All in all, it was a successful conference that bore fruit and advanced the Allies’ cause.
It almost ended in disaster. The Germans got wind of the planned conference, and put their extensive intelligence network in Iran to report on the security measures in place to protect the Allied leaders. German agents were parachuted into Iran to lay the groundwork for a commando strike led by Otto Skorzeny, Germany’s premier special forces operative, to take out the Big Three. It did not happen, because the Nazis’ plans were foiled by a teenage Soviet spy, Gevork Vartanian (1924 – 2012).