Foiling the Nazis
In 1943, German intelligence parachuted an advance party of six radio operators near the Iranian city of Qum, about 40 miles from Tehran. Their immediate task was to link up with other German cells and assets in and around the Iranian capital. They were then to coordinate the activities of various agents on the ground, and reconnoiter routes to and from their targets’ expected locations. Once the advance team laid the groundwork, they would be joined by Otto Skorzeny, who had visited Tehran on a different mission and been tailed by Gevork’s team in 1942.
In the fall of 1943, Gevork Vartanian found out about the Germans who had parachuted into Qum. The teenage spy then followed up on their trail, which took him to a villa in Tehran, where Operation Long Jump’s advance team had moved in with an existing Abwehr cell. From that base, the Germans radioed intelligence reports back to Berlin. Unbeknownst to the Germans, their transmissions were intercepted and decoded by the NKVD. The intercepts revealed that Skorzeny was scheduled to arrive in mid October, along with the actual kill team.
The Soviets raided the German spy nest and arrested all its occupants. The NKVD then sought to turn the radio operators into double agents, and forced them to continue transmitting to their handlers in Berlin, but now under Soviet supervision. It was an ambitious plan, that sought among other things to lure the Nazis’ star special forces operative into a trap that would have made for a great propaganda coup. It was derailed, however, when one of the Germans managed to slip a prearranged code in one of his transmissions, alerting Berlin that the messages were being sent under duress. Operation Long Jump was cancelled, and Skorzeny never returned to Tehran.
After the war, Ernst Kaltenbrunner became the highest ranking SS member to face justice at the Nuremberg trial. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and hanged in 1946. Otto Skorzeny carried out special missions for the Nazis’ until war’s end. He was captured, but escaped from an internment camp in 1948, went on the lam for a few years, and finally settled in Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain. He spent time in Argentina, as an advisor to president Juan Peron, and as a bodyguard to his wife, Eva Peron. Versatile, he also worked as a military and security consultant for various Arab regimes, and performed the occasional gig for the Israeli Mossad. He died of lung cancer in Madrid, in 1975.
As to Gevork Vartanian, he received his country’s highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union, in recognition of his services. He met and married another NKVD agent, and the duo spent more than three decades after the war working for Soviet intelligence, as it evolved from NKVD to MGB to KGB to SVR. The couple got married several times during their career as part of their cover. Gevork retired from the SVR in 1992, after which he trained young agents. His identity was kept secret until 2000, when his role in foiling Operation Long Jump was finally revealed. He died in 2012, aged 87. His funeral was attended by Russia’s then prime minister, and former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev described Vartanian as: “a legendary intelligence agent, a genuine patriot of his country, a bright and extraordinary person… He took part in splendid operations, which went down in the history of the Russian foreign intelligence service” .
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading
BBC, January 11th, 2012 – Soviet Spying Legend Gevork Vartanian Dies at 87
Independent, The, January 14th, 2012 – Gevork Vartanian: Spy Who Helped Foil Churchill Death Plot