Churchill.19 Meanwhile, Churchill’s RAF York aircraft was given an especially strong escort of P-38 fighters to Gibraltar, and then accompanied by a veritable phalanx of Spitfires on the final leg back to England. The prime minister insisted on helping to fly the plane, to the consternation of senior RAF officers.20
Even as Churchill landed back in Britain, the Nazis were planning another operation against him. ‘Operation Long Jump’ was one of their most ambitious. The NKVD, the Soviet internal security agency, boasted to the British about having uncovered a plot in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin would be simultaneously assassinated during the November 1943 Tehran Conference, at which the principal item on the agenda would be the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, had learned of the time and place of the conference, having deciphered the American naval code, and put the operation to assassinate the Allied leaders in the hands of one of its most trusted special force commanders, Otto Skorzeny. Although the British had troops in southern Iran to guarantee the flow of supplies to Russia via the Persian Gulf, the conference was principally the responsibility of the Soviets, who had sent troops into the north of the country in August 1941 to shut down German influence. This was the only time Stalin left Russian-occupied territory during the war, precisely because he was paranoid about assassination attempts.
Some have remained sceptical about whether ‘Operation Long Jump’ was a real plot, or merely a Russian propaganda ploy. It did, however, create consternation in London, and Roosevelt was clearly briefed on the episode.21 It has since transpired that from 1941 a team of NKVD intelligence officers known as ‘the light cavalry’, on account of the fact that they constantly whizzed around Tehran on bicycles, identified more than four hundred Nazi agents.22 Some of their operations were conducted with the assistance of the British, as Churchill had authorised careful but effective cooperation with the NKVD – rather to the distaste of Menzies. Their final success was the arrest of Franz Meyer, a top German agent in Iran, in August 1943. By the time of the conference three months later, German intelligence was thin on the ground, albeit the last German parachute team was not rounded up by the British until early the following year.23
Skorzeny later admitted that there had been an assassination plot, but he had thought it hare-brained, and refused any part of it for his commandos.24 In 1968, he recalled irritably, ‘My part in the whole damn thing was to turn it down rather bluntly,’ adding that the basis of a successful commando operation was always good intelligence. ‘We had no information.’ The Germans only had two remaining agents in Tehran, and so ‘had nothing to go on’.25 The plan was taken up by Walter Schellenberg, the brigadier general in charge of the Waffen SS. Schellenberg sent Germany’s top expert on Iran to prepare secret landing sites and conduct the commandos. This was Major Walter Shultz of the eastern section of the Abwehr, who would travel under the alias of a Swiss businessman. Shultz – whose real name was Ilya Svetlov – was actually a long-term agent of the Soviet secret police who had been infiltrated into Germany in 1928 under an assumed identity. His application for the Nazi Party was signed by none other than Rudolf Hess. Therefore the Soviet secret service commander in Tehran, General Vassili Pankov, was informed of precisely when and where the assassination squad would be arriving. An unmarked German J-52 was shot down by the Soviets as it crossed into Iran. The wreckage, littered with the plane’s load of automatic weapons, mortars and ammunition, continued to explode for some time after it went down.26
Gevork Vartanyan, one of the NKVD officers, recalled that the Germans nevertheless dropped a team of assassins by parachute near the city of Qom, eighty miles by road south-west of 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.’ All the members of the group were arrested and forced to contact their handlers under Soviet supervision. Vartanyan claimed that in this revised version of the plot, Churchill and Stalin were to be killed, while Roosevelt would be kidnapped. He claimed that the NKVD arrested hundreds of people prior to the conference, and unearthed a German secret service team of six, including radio operators. The Allied leaders were certainly safe by the time of the conference, with some 3,000 NKVD troops saturating the streets.27
Soviet claims that Germany launched an elaborate plot sit uncomfortably with the involvement in it of Schellenberg. He was about to take over most of Germany’s foreign intelligence from the Abwehr, and it has recently emerged that in the same year he launched a covert operation codenamed Modellhut, or ‘Model Hat’, which sought to get a message to Churchill from the SS stating that a number of leading Nazis wanted to break with Hitler and negotiate a separate peace with England. The channel of communication was to be the infamous collaborator Coco Chanel, with whom he had a close relationship, and who remained in Paris throughout the war.28 His plan was to send her to neutral Madrid to meet the British ambassador and former MI6 officer Sir Samuel Hoare, whom both she and Churchill knew well. Although Chanel was brought to Berlin, the plan failed, and Churchill never received the letter. In any case, MI6 was tired of receiving such missives, and Churchill, scenting eventual victory, was certainly in no mood to negotiate.29
If the assassination plot at Tehran had not progressed very far, why did the Soviets make such a fuss about it when Churchill and Roosevelt arrived in Iran? Perhaps it was part of an elaborate Soviet ruse to persuade Roosevelt to move his personal accommodation into the Soviet diplomatic compound, to facilitate bugging. The conference itself, codenamed ‘Eureka’, was held in the Soviet embassy. This gave the Russians the opportunity to bug everything, and transcripts were handed to Stalin personally by Lavrentiy Beria, his intelligence chief, by eight o’clock each morning.30 At one point during the conference, Stalin observed Roosevelt passing a handwritten note to Churchill, and was desperate to know what it said. He ordered his NKVD station chief in Tehran, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, to get hold of a copy. He succeeded, and reported the message to Stalin. It read: ‘Sir, your fly is open.’31
Further assassination attempts are still coming to light. Newly declassified MI5 documents reveal that one of the last assassination plans of the war was launched by Zionists in Palestine, where the militant Jewish Stern Gang wanted to end the British mandate and establish the state of Israel. One member, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, decided in 1944 to send an agent to Britain to assassinate Churchill. MI5 soon became aware that ‘he proposed a plan for assassination of highly placed political personalities, including Mr Churchill, for which purpose emissaries should be sent to London’. The Stern Gang were indeed training their members for assassination attempts, and Bet-Zuri was later executed for the murder of Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, in November 1944. Moyne was a close confidant of Churchill.32
Churchill, who was often cavalier about his personal safety, had finally got the message. In December 1944, he visited Athens to have preliminary talks with the various Greek factions, including the prime minister Georgios Papandreou and the Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos, in what was an emerging civil war between left and right. Some locals worked for the British by day and for ELAS, a militant leftist partisan movement, at night. The women reportedly carried hand grenades in their shopping baskets or under their black dresses. The British delegation drove through areas controlled by the ELAS guerrillas escorted by heavily armed troops, and Churchill opted to sit in an armoured car ‘with a giant 45 Colt revolver on his knees and a look on his face that suggested he would love to fire it’.33
Churchill was willing to pay the Germans back for their plots. The military were more cautious. ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff