Operation Long Jump
According to Soviet sources, German military intelligence discovered, after breaking a U.S. Navy code, that a major conference would be held at Tehran in mid-October 1943.
The NKVD alleged that, despite German secrecy, it quickly uncovered the plot following a tip-off from Soviet agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, who was posing as Paul Siebert, an Oberleutnant in the Wehrmacht from Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
[2] In 1943, in their efforts to foil the assassination plot devised by the Nazis, Vartanian’s group located an advance party of six German radio operators who had dropped by parachute near Qum, 60 km (37 mi) from Tehran.
The NKVD claimed that this supported existing intelligence about the involvement of the SS commander because Vartanian's group had already tailed Skorzeny during his own reconnaissance mission to Tehran.
[citation needed] According to the NKVD, with October approaching the mission was aborted; Berlin is said to have received a secret code from Tehran indicating that its agents had been discovered and they were under surveillance.
[2] In 2003, relying on declassified documents, Yuri Lvovich Kuznets published a book called Tehran-43 or Operation Long Jump, which detailed Vartanian’s role at the Tehran Conference.
In Britain, the Joint Intelligence Committee of the War Cabinet, considering the matter afterwards in London, concluded that the so-called Nazi plot against the Big Three was "complete baloney".
In his memoirs, he recalled a meeting with Hitler and SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, from the foreign intelligence branch of the Sicherheitsdienst, when they did discuss the feasibility of assassinating Churchill.
According to Sudoplatov, the training of German saboteurs was taking place in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, where the group led by the intelligence officer Kuznetsov, who was disguised as a Wehrmacht lieutenant, was working.
[12] French journalist Laslo Havas wrote a book about Operation Long Jump after the war and confirmed that Soviet intelligence had disrupted the German plot.
[3] Professor Miron Rezun, a political scientist from the University of New Brunswick, states that Operation Long Jump was not the work of a Soviet disinformation campaign because German commandos had carried out other daring raids.
Rezun says some researchers and journalists in Germany deny the existence of the planned operation and accuse Laslo Havas of believing Soviet disinformation.
For example, Heinz Höhne, a historian specialising in the history of the Third Reich (as well as writing a biography of Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr), wrote in an article in Der Spiegel that no such German plot ever existed, but Rezun notes that Höhne omits from the article the fact that Canaris had visited Tehran on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union.
[13] British military historian Nigel West wrote about the plot in the book Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence.
However, Roosevelt insisted on staying at the US embassy on the other side of the city, but the planned ambush of the Big Three was disrupted because the British arrested Holten-Pflug and his group on the night of 31 November [this date is incorrect; there is no Nov. 31].
[15] The novel Stormtroop Edelweiss - Valley of the Assassins, by Charles Whiting (writing as Leo Kessler), presents a heavily fictionalized version of Operation Long Jump, substituting a unit of elite German mountain troops for Skorzeny and his party.
Book-length publications include Operation Long Jump (2015) by Bill Yenne[16] and Night of the Assassins (2020) by Pulitzer-winning author and journalist Howard Blum.
