THE NKVD’S NIGHT PATROLS IN wartime Tehran were long, dreary duty. Nothing ever happened. It was the hours before dawn, though, life lived in the half-light of a new day, that brought their own unique tedium: the realization that another tour had passed uneventfully, yet it was still not over. It was a time when it was easy to grow lax, to feel there had been no sign of peril and there never would be. Lookouts started pining for their beds.
The Light Cavalry, however, were formed from a different mold. They were all young men, none older than twenty, and their ties to the Soviet intelligence service were not just loose, but officially nonexistent: they were unpaid volunteers whose work was tolerated with amused smiles by the professionals at the Tehran station. Yet they were gung ho, secret agents in the making. They’d come of age at a time when Mother Russia was fighting for her life against an evil and vicious enemy. The fact that they were far from the battlefields only encouraged their zeal. They wanted to do their share, to contribute as best they could for the cause they believed in. Under the earnest leadership of nineteen-year-old Gevork Vartanian, they took every assignment, no matter how trivial, as a call to action. When they hit the streets with clockwork regularity at eight each evening, it was as if a bugle had blown “Charge,” and from then on the pace barely slowed. The Light Cavalry kept at it till seven each morning, cycling through the city, vigilant, conscientious pickets on patrol.
Their orders were vague. This was not because Andrei Vertinski, the NKVD station chief (or rezident, in Moscow Center’s spy speak) was dismissing the young men with small regard, but more that he simply had no specific idea of what they should be looking for. Other than an obvious calamity, one of Rommel’s Panzer tanks bulldozing its way into the bazaar, for example, he had little concrete guidance to offer; and from his expert’s perspective, there was no advantage to be gained by conjecture. So he told the boys to use their judgment. Poke around, look for anything that doesn’t seem right, and then sound the alarm. We’ll take care of the rest, he said with a rock-hard confidence.
It was before dawn on November 27, the sun rising over the mountains and breaking through the darkness, that young Vartanian, as watchful as when he’d started his patrol, saw something that caught his eye. He had no inkling that it was anything untoward, but with nothing better to fill his time he pedaled closer to get a better look. But not too close. He knew better than that; after long practice, he’d mastered the art of street watching, a discipline in which naturalness rules.
His first thought was that the caravan seemed . . . odd. Trucks full of Russian soldiers, nothing out of the ordinary there. But why were tribesmen at the wheel? He couldn’t imagine a Soviet commander allowing natives to chauffeur Red Army soldiers. Then there were the camels loaded down with crates. That was what had caught his eye in the first place. It wasn’t just that camels were prohibited by the shah from entering the city. It struck him as, again, odd that the animals had been recruited for a military caravan. The Soviet motor pool out by the airfield had battalions of trucks parked in orderly rows. Why bother with camels? And with that question, he noticed something he chided himself for not having previously spotted: there were no military markings on the vehicles; the red stars were absent from the bumpers.
All of which, he realized, could mean nothing. He could think of a dozen, no, two dozen reasons why the army would be setting out in unmarked trucks, putting natives at the wheel, and recruiting camels for transport. But none of the explanations he hurried to process made any sense. The entire circumstances left him perplexed. He pedaled off in haste to round up the rest of his crew.
Tehran is a good city for surveillance. A maze of side streets and alleyways offer the watcher protection, natural static posts that allow him to lay back behind his prey, out of sight, while still keeping the target in close range. And when the watchers are on bicycles, not only do they have the benefit of perfect cover—who pays attention to kids on their bikes?—but they also have the invaluable asset of mobility. In the twisting city streets, a cyclist is not likely to be outraced by a truck, or, for that matter, a camel. The Light Cavalry kept discreet pace with the caravan.
Still, the South Team led the boys on quite a chase. They drove down a broad avenue, then made a succession of sharp lefts and rights into side streets. For a moment, it looked like the caravan would be heading straight to Syroos Street, the NKVD headquarters, and Vartanian had the unsettling notion that he’d inadvertently barged into an ongoing intelligence operation and there’d be hell to pay. But the trucks avoided the street and continued on through the city. At just before seven a.m., on a narrow road parallel to the western boundary of the bazaar, the trucks came to a halt. Down the block, cautiously peering around the corner of a stubby, sandstone-shaded building, the boys watched with great attention as the soldiers unloaded the trucks and disappeared into what appeared to be a rug warehouse. If they still harbored any doubts that they had stumbled onto something that was all wrong, those disappeared when they saw the tribesmen drive off in the trucks, the mounted camels following closely behind.
With the resolute determination of an officer mobilizing his troops, young Vartanian began barking out orders. Two of the boys were dispatched to keep an eye on the rear of the building in case there was a back door that offered a chance for escape. Another shimmied up to an adjacent roof; it offered a view into the warehouse’s top floor. The rest would stay in place, sheltered, but eyes glued to the front door. Anyone left, they were to follow; and, he warned, they’d better not be seen. In the meantime, he’d pedal over as fast as he could to Syroos Street and share with the NKVD his certain knowledge of what the Light Cavalry had discovered: German operatives, disguised as Russian soldiers, had sneaked into Tehran.
THE LOUDEST NOISE WAS OFTEN not the boom that demolished the door, but the muffled, deliberately secretive sounds that preceded it: footsteps creaking on the stairs; whispers too faint to decipher; the click releasing the rifle’s safety. In the taut silence, small noises were enhanced.
This was what Hans von Ortel heard. This was what alerted him. In the first shock of recognition, did he peer furtively out the window for confirmation of all his worst fears? Did he spot NKVD agents, some with rifles on their shoulders, some already taking aim, fanned out along the street? Did he rouse the Vlasov Russians, tell them to prepare for a firefight?
All that is known with authority is that when the pack of Russians came charging in, Ortel was at his transmitter. He was reporting to Berlin, giving the word code he’d been instructed to use in the direst of emergencies. Abort! Abort! Mission Canceled! he signaled.
Then the shooting started. The NKVD regulars along with Russian troops led the way into the room, and in the back of the pack, Vartanian, stoking up his courage, was a shocked witness to all that happened. He watched as one, then a second of the men disguised as Red Army soldiers raised their submachine guns and at that same instant were slammed backward by an unerring burst of gunfire. He saw the others throw down their weapons and raise their hands high in quick, meek surrender. In that same long moment, his eyes darting wildly about, he glimpsed the man at the radio shouting frantically into the microphone even as bullets riddled the transmitter and there was no longer any point. When it was over, Vartanian was up close, staring, as the anxious prisoners, faces as pale as invalids, were marched out, loaded into genuine Red Army trucks, to be taken to the house on Syroos Street.
In the course of their detention, he came to hear, they told the entire story of Operation Long Jump, and how it had come to its sudden end when the soldier at the transmitter had sent his desperate message. The boy never learned what happened to the prisoners. No one did. They just vanished, like so many others who had been led at gunpoint to the bloodstained Syroos Street basement.
THE JU-290 WAS ON THE Simferopol runway, ready for the commandos to board, when Skorzeny received the news: Ortel had sent the signal to abort the mission. He was already aware that no transmissions had so far been received at the Wannsee radio center from either the North Team or Holten-Pflug and his men. He’d been sorting through the operational implications of this silence for the entire afternoon. All his experience in the field reminded him that there were many logical reasons why the teams had failed to communicate. They could’ve gone to ground in the city, and security required a radio blackout. Perhaps they’d landed far from the drop zones and were trudging through the desert, their transmitters damaged in the jump. That and a dozen other scenarios were reasonable, nonalarming explanations for the teams’ quiet. But in the aftermath of Ortel’s stunning message, he could no longer have any doubts. There was no need to rely on instincts, or on theories. With a soldier’s dispassionate battle sense, he understood what had happened. The men were dead. Or they were prisoners, staring death in the face and wishing it would come swiftly.
But what should he do? The question—no, Skorzeny quickly realized, the challenge—remained. The plane was on the runway. He could board with his hard men and still attempt to fulfill the mission. If he succeeded, his legacy would be assured. Hadn’t he faced impossible odds in the past and yet prevailed? Courage and boldness were a soldier’s virtues. Recklessness went hand in hand with victory. He was the Most Dangerous Man in Europe. He could outsmart them all.
Or could he? There was, Skorzeny firmly believed, honor in a soldier’s death. But there was little honor, and certainly no fame, to be won walking stupidly into a trap. By now the captured men would have talked, their resistance broken by torture. The Allies would know he was coming, and they’d be waiting. He would not have a chance. He and his men would be slaughtered. Or worse: captured and put on taunting display, fools mocked by the world for their incompetence.
Skorzeny told the men to head to the plane. When they were on board, he approached the pilot. Change of plans, he ordered. Take us back to Berlin. As the plane headed west over gray clumps of forests and weary, war-ravaged towns, Skorzeny began to put Long Jump out of his mind. He was already turning the page, imagining the next fresh adventure, the triumph that would guarantee his legend.
IN IRAN, STURMBANNFÜHRER RUDOLF VON Holten-Pflug sat by the warming campfire, growing increasingly concerned as he waited for his recon man to return. He had sent Gorechi, the native translator who’d parachuted into Iran with his team, to Tehran to get a sense of things. At the time, after the disaster of the drop, after the failure to rendezvous with Ortel, all his military instincts had told him it was a sensible plan. That was what a good field officer did. He reacted to tactical reversals. Yet he’d expected Gorechi to have returned by now, and Holten-Pflug found himself wondering if he had made a mistake. Had Gorechi been captured? Would he lead the enemy to his camp? The surrounding desert was quiet, only the buzz of small night sounds. But he knew it offered no safety. Peril felt as if it were closing in.
But what else could he have done? There had been one setback after another. The pilot had dropped them wildly off course, at least thirty miles from the dry lake landing site outside Qom. Then it was the radio; either it’d been broken when they came in hard on rough ground, or it had been defective when they’d flown off from Simferopol. They couldn’t get it to transmit. And when they’d finally trudged their way to the designated drop zone, the sun was coming up bright and strong and there was no sign of Ortel or the trucks. Holten-Pflug had the location of the safe house in Tehran, a rug warehouse. But would he and his men be able to make the journey in daylight without being detected? They’d be on foot, and, one more reason for caution, they were not wearing intimidating Russian uniforms like the Vlasovs. In their native clothes, haphazard outfits put together by Section F, the SD technical staff, they looked like locals. That could mean trouble. Without the hulking Vlasovs to scare off the Iranian police, there was always the risk they’d be stopped at one of the checkpoints guarding the entrance to the city. The authorities start asking questions, what would they do? It seemed more practical to send Gorechi, who had lived in Tehran before the war, to the safe house. With luck, he’d be able to get his hands on a truck. Then they could drive into the city under the cover of darkness, Gorechi handling things if they were stopped by a patrol. In the meantime, Gorechi would get Ortel to send a message back to Berlin confirming their arrival; he imagined Schellenberg and Skorzeny pacing about, waiting for a report. But Gorechi had not returned, and Holten-Pflug was faced with improvising another fallback plan with only rickety options to choose from.
Nevertheless, the resilient major tried to come to terms with his situation. He was thinking it all through when Gorechi, soundless as a ghost, plunked himself down by the fire. The report he delivered was worse than anything Holten-Pflug had imagined.
The translator had made his way into the city without attracting any attention. Then, rather than barge into the warehouse, he hesitated. With shrewd caution, he took a table at a nearby café. A previous life spent in the city had taught him that this would be the best place to gather intelligence. The tables were filled with animated patrons, many of them recounting the chilling events that had unfolded just down the block. Heavily armed Russians had stormed the rug warehouse. There had been enough gunfire, or so the rapidly inflating accounts suggested, to have laid siege to the entire city. But in the end, only a dozen or so subdued, frightened soldiers, outfitted in Russian uniforms, had been marched out. The uniforms, it was explained with a knowing authority, were disguises. The prisoners were in fact German saboteurs. When Gorechi heard all this, he finished his coffee in a gulp, and without even glancing at the warehouse, headed back to the makeshift camp in the desert.
Holten-Pflug now took stock. He realized Long Jump was blown. Ortel and the Vlasovs would have surely divulged all they knew. But what did they know? They could reveal the existence of the North Team and the location of the safe house where they were hiding. He could assume those men had been rounded up, too. Clearly the mission was no longer a secret. The Allies had been warned that commandos were planning to assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The element of surprise was gone.
Or was it? he asked himself, even after he’d just written off the possibility. He still had advantages. Yes, it was a certainty that under torture the South Team had revealed that they had been scheduled to rendezvous with his six-man squad. But they wouldn’t have been able to disclose his whereabouts, because they didn’t know. No one knew, not even Berlin. And that was not all about which the captured men had no idea. The key elements of the plan had been shared only among Schellenberg, Skorzeny, and himself. At the time, this operational security had seemed necessary because the Vlasovs might have withdrawn if they had learned precisely what they were heading into, and how their lives would be sacrificed in the firefight. But in the light of all that had happened, this secrecy now seemed inspired. The interrogators would never be able to learn the day of the attack, or how it would be launched. Surprise was still very possible. The Allies would hear there were six commandos on the loose in Iran, but they’d still need to stop them. And he had a crate of Gammon bombs, as well as automatic weapons and rounds of ammunition.
Of course, the dangers had grown. Now that the Allies knew an assassination was planned, the protection of the Big Three would be ramped up. In the end, however, only one question mattered: Could his team penetrate the security screen? He reviewed the plan that had been worked out in Oranienburg, and he decided it was foolproof. It would still work. It would get his men staring into the faces of the Big Three.
That was all that mattered. He did not concern himself with the question of whether six men could complete a mission that had been planned for fifty. As long as there was the possibility, it was a soldier’s duty to persist. And what if he succeeded? His name would live on forever in the histories of the Fatherland.
Holten-Pflug told his men to prepare to move out. They were heading into Tehran.
Man’s desire to be remembered is colossal.