Obituaries: Gevork Vartanyan
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.
Gevork Vartanyan with his wife and fellow intelligence agent Goar
Photo: WW/PERSONA STARS/ CAPITAL PICTURES6:34PM GMT
11 Jan 2012
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.’
Gevork Vartanyan, born February 17 1924, died January 10 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9008287/Gevork-Vartanyan.html