Operation Long Jump

Operation Long Jump (Unternehmen Weitsprung) was a German plan to simultaneously assassinate Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt at the 1943 Tehran Conference during World War II. The operation to kill the "Big Three" Allied leaders in Iran was to be led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny from the Waffen SS. Agents from the Soviet Union uncovered the plot before its inception and the mission was never launched. However, the actual existence of the plan has been a subject of debate among historians, as many believe that the plan never existed and was part of a Soviet disinformation campaign launched first by the NKVD and later the KGB.

The assassination plan has been popularized today by the Russian media with appearances in films and novels.

Beginnings
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. Based on this information, Adolf Hitler approved a scheme to kill all three Allied leaders. Operational control was passed to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, who chose Skorzeny to head the mission. The German agent Elyesa Bazna (codenamed "Cicero"), in Ankara, Turkey, was also brought into the operation.

Counter-intelligence
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. He got the information from an SS-Sturmbannführer named von Ortel, who was known to become "talkative" when drinking. The Soviet agent learned about the operation by getting him drunk.

The Soviets got more information from 19-year-old Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian, who had recruited a small number of agents in Iran, where his father, also a spy, was posing as a wealthy merchant. In 1943, Vartanian's group located an advance party of six German radio operators who had dropped by parachute near Qum, 60 km from Tehran. The Soviet agents tailed the German spies to the Iranian capital, where an existing Abwehr network set them up in a villa.

From this location, the German observers radioed intelligence reports back to Berlin. However, unknown to them, all their transmissions were being intercepted, recorded and decoded by NKVD operatives. The decrypts revealed that a second group of operatives, led by Skorzeny, would be dropped into Iran for the actual assassination attempt in mid October. 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.

Cancellation
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 discovered they were under surveillance.

In 1984, Vartanian was recognised for his role in uncovering Operation Long Jump. He was awarded the Gold Star medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union for his service in World War II and the Cold War.

Western scepticism
When Stalin informed Churchill and Roosevelt about the plan, some members within the American and British delegations doubted the existence of a plot because all evidence of its existence was provided by Soviet intelligence. 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".

Historical veracity
There have been debates about the veracity of the story. The skeptics brought up a number of arguments in this regard. Firstly, the German espionage network in Iran had been destroyed in mid-1943, well before Tehran was chosen as a meeting place. Secondly, more than 3,000 NKVD security troops guarded the city for the duration of the conference without incident. Thirdly, both Roosevelt and Churchill travelled on foot or open jeep throughout their four-day stay in Tehran.

Otto Skorzeny denied the story after the war. 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. But Skorzeny said he told the Fuhrer the idea was unworkable and Hitler agreed with his assessment. Skorzeny wrote "Long Jump has really only existed in the imagination of a little bunch of truth-loving hacks [...]". He also castigated Russian sources for continually referring to Sturmbannführer Paul von Oertel, who Skorzeny said simply never existed.

To Russians the story remains a subject of great interest. In 2003, the Russian writer Yuri Kusnez held a press conference in the Foreign Intelligence ministry in Moscow to promote his book:Tehran-43. In 2007, a Russian television company promoted a documentary with the working title The Lion and the Bear. It documented Long Jump and was to be presented by Churchill's granddaughter Celia Sandys.

Pavel Sudoplatov in his memoirs brings up the details of how Kuznetsov recruited German officer Oster. According to Sudoplatov the trainings of German saboteurs were taking place on the foothill of the Carpathian Mountains where the group led by the intelligence officer Kuznetsov, who was disguised as a Wehrmacht lieutenant, was working. Oster, who had owned Kunetsov some money, offered to pay back the debt by Persian carpets after his trip to Tehran; this suggested that the plot about the assassination attempt during the Tehran conference was quite feasible.

There are also a number of Western sources that have likewise confirmed the existence of the plot.

After the war French journalist Laslo Havas wrote a book about the operation Long jump, where he confirmed that the Soviet intelligence had disrupted the German plot.

Political scientist Miron Rezun believes that operation Long Jump could not have been a part of Soviet misinformation campaign. Rezun notes that this was not the only planned and daring operation by German commandoes. As an argument supporting the existence of the operation Rezun cites Roosevelt’s confession in which he said that Stalin had informed him personally about the planned attempt. Another important source cited by Rezun is the diary of Alexander Cadogan, famous British diplomat, where he mentions about the information he received from the Russians on the plan to murder the leaders of the Big Three. According to Rezun some researchers and journalists in Germany deny the existence of the planned operation and accuse Laslo Havas of believing the Soviet misinformation. As an example of this Rezun cites German historian, famous specialist on the history of the Third Reich (and author of a complete biography of Wilhelm Canaris) Heinz Höhne, who in his article in Der Spiegel denied the existence of the German plot. Rezun notes that in this article Höhne for some reason omits the fact that Canaris had visited Tehran on the eve of German attack on the Soviet Union.