AT THE DECIDEDLY UNDIPLOMATIC HOUR of nine a.m., Ambassador Harriman knocked on the door of the president’s bedroom in the American legation. He needed to report on the emergency meeting to which he’d been summoned from his warm bed in the middle of the night by the Soviet foreign minister. He had received a warning. And a threat.
The warning, as relayed by Harriman, was succinct: “The risk of assassination of Mr. Churchill and Marshal Stalin while coming to visit President Roosevelt was very real.”
And the threat was no less ominous: “We would be responsible for any injury that Marshal Stalin might suffer in driving through the town to consult with President Roosevelt.” And by “injury,” Harriman explained helpfully, in case the president had missed the point, Molotov meant “assassination.”
The foreign minister, however, had not just thrown thunderbolts. Without so much as a smirk of vindication, he’d also offered a suggestion—which happened to be identical to one he’d previously made. He reiterated the Soviet invitation for the president to stay in their embassy. Only now, the rationale for the move was no longer for convenience’s sake; with Nazi assassins on the loose, it was a necessary precaution. “It would bring the three Heads of State,” said Harriman, relaying the Russian’s logic, “so close together that there would be no need for any of them to drive about town.”
On that morning of the first full day in Tehran, the British swiftly chimed in, too. They made it clear to the president that they were also anxious. Churchill, of course, had been jumpy from the moment he’d arrived in the city, brooding about “determined men with pistols or a bomb.” Then Molotov had informed Ambassador Kerr that the prime minister’s fears were not just sensible but could be prophetic. “Soviet Secret Intelligence,” as Churchill would recall the disconcerting news he’d received, “had uncovered a plot to kill one or more of the Big Three.” Churchill now had all the confirmation he needed to realize that he hadn’t been seeing things out of proportion: the threat was very real. And it wasn’t only his life that was in jeopardy, he knew, but the entire future of the war. Was it too much to say that the three of them, all in the later acts of their lives, had been given a mission to hold the world together at a perilous moment in history? What would happen, he wondered with dread, if the Nazis succeeded in murdering the three Allied leaders in Tehran?
Goaded on by that dire vision, by the fact that all his inchoate suspicions had been given a terrifying life, the prime minister made it clear to Roosevelt where he stood. “I strongly supported Molotov,” Churchill would declare, “in his appeals to the president to move forthwith inside the Soviet Embassy, which was three or four times as big as the others, and stood in extensive ground, now ringed by Soviet troops and police.”
Pressured by both his allies, FDR turned to Mike, the man in charge of his security, for advice. And Mike was only too glad to give it. For on the morning of his second day in Tehran, he had awakened to the dismaying notion that he was little more than a mystified spectator unable to bring a halt to the crisis building all around him. He’d arrived in this nightmare of a city only to have been swiftly confronted with the news that six Nazi commandos had managed to parachute into Iran. Then with the passing of each new hour the initial intelligence had turned more despairing: the six men could not be found. A house-to-house search had been initiated, and so far it had not turned up any sign of the assassins. It was as if they had vanished not just from the city, but from the planet. They must have help; someone must be hiding them, he surmised. But who—a single contact? A network? Locals? Embedded German agents? His inability to locate the six men despite all the extraordinary efforts that were being taken coupled with the fact that the assassins had not launched an immediate attack only served to reinforce the creeping horror that he now accepted as truth: the killers were waiting, patiently biding their time for the single moment that had been carefully predetermined in Berlin, a time when they’d be able to slip past the Allies’ security and strike.
So when the question was posed, Mike did not hesitate to tell the president what he thought: he was “in complete agreement” with a move into the heart of the city. At this tense moment, any act that would reduce the risks, he was convinced, was worth taking. Eliminating the need for the Boss to travel through the streets of Tehran as he drove back and forth from meetings at the other embassies was at the very least a prudent start. Dozens of other worries continued to assault him, but for now Mike found a degree of reassurance in putting one potential catastrophe to rest.
“Do you care which embassy I move to?” FDR asked.
“Not much difference, sir,” said Mike. All that mattered was putting the Boss behind the high, protective walls of the joint compound.
“All right,” announced the president. “It’s the Russian, then. When do we move?”
It was not until that moment that Mike realized he had, as he put it with a professional’s cool understatement, “a problem.” How would he manage to get the president to the Russian embassy? “It would have been a tough enough job normally, but with six Nazi paratroopers around somewhere,” he sensibly expected the journey would be a lot riskier. “I had no stomach for sending him through the crowded streets of Tehran,” Mike confided. But he had no choice.
He went to work devising a plan.
THE BUILDING WHERE THE WRESTLER had taken the commandos was a zurkhaneh. It was the gymnasium where Ebtehaj trained, and the name was meant to convey the demanding mix of mind and body discipline required of Pahlevani athletes; the word meant “house of strength.”
In the initial predawn hours after Holten-Pflug, bone weary, a man on the run in a strange city, had settled in, it was as if he, too, had tapped into a revitalizing flow of inner strength. At last he felt safe. The entrance door was deliberately cut low, forcing one to bow as was required when entering a holy place; which, the Nazi major assessed, would also make it impossible for a platoon of soldiers to come charging in without warning. The pit where the athletes trained—called a gowd, he would learn—was lined with a layered composite of weeds, dried straw, coal ash, and clay that, he discovered, was as comfortable as the mattress in his apartment in Berlin; his men, who had been looking over their shoulders since they had landed in Iran, were at last able to grab some much-needed sleep stretched out across this cushion. And, putting a damper on his greatest concern, he felt confident that the Allied patrols would never bother poking their noses into an Iranian sports club; they’d be too busy investigating more obvious hideouts. Cheered by his excitement that Long Jump was back on track, he had found his house of strength. He pushed aside any lingering apprehensions. His resolve intensified. His confidence in the mission’s success was restored.
But an assassin never lives for too long on a steady plane. As the hours of waiting ticked away, as the attack drew closer, doubts were invariably rekindled. That was what Holten-Pflug tried telling himself as his previously quieted concerns once again erupted. Yet despite all his efforts at self-persuasion, Holten-Pflug couldn’t help but think he’d made a crucial operational mistake in coming to the zurkhaneh. No less demoralizing, he admonished himself, it was a situation he should have anticipated.
For in the very hours when across the city Mike was struggling to come up with a scheme for the dash to the Russian embassy, Holten-Pflug’s own safety was increasingly being put in jeopardy. His men were no longer alone. Athletes kept coming to the gymnasium. The mat was crowded with beefy men swinging Indian clubs, grappling with one another, a deer-skinned drum all the while pounding out an accompanying cadence with a portentous rhythm. The athletes stared at the six commandos, never daring to approach. But Holten-Pflug was certain nonetheless that his once cherished hideout was no longer secure. It was the oldest maxim of the game: a secret stops being a secret once it has been shared.
Ebtehaj tried to calm the major’s fears. Each zurkhaneh, he explained, had its own political affiliation. This one was aligned with the Melliyun movement, the pro-Nazi party. The athletes lauded Hitler Shah as Iran’s savior. They celebrated the Reich’s soldiers as heroes. They could be trusted not to talk about the visitors to their club.
Besides, he continued earnestly, Pahlevani athletes adhere to a strict moral code, their lives guided by firm principles of honor and duty. They would never betray their guests. But it was the wrestler’s concluding argument that struck Holten-Pflug as the most convincing: There’s nowhere else to go, he said definitively. The Allies are combing the city. You leave here, you’ll be caught, he guaranteed.
Holten-Pflug did not trust any Iranian, especially one whose allegiance had been bought with 1,000 pounds and the ridiculous promise of the police chief’s job. He would have had no compunction about taking his knife and driving it with one swift lunge into the wrestler’s broad chest, aiming right above the left rib and twisting the razor-sharp blade up into the heart. That would have been a fitting payment for leaving his team exposed to this public scrutiny. But then where would they go? In two days he would make history. He just needed to wait until then. He just needed to adhere to the plan. In the meantime, all he could do was hope no one would dare betray him. We’ll stay, he told the wrestler.
He told his men to stay alert. Be on guard, he ordered. Keep your weapons in your hands at all times, loaded and ready to fire. And he shared with them the promise he had sworn in his own secret heart: In two days we will make history. They listened, and it was as if the words reverberated through their thoughts, another insistent drumbeat setting the cadence as they waited until they could claim the destiny that would be theirs.
IN DESPERATION, MIKE HAD LINED the entire route to the Russian embassy with soldiers. He made sure the armed men stood shoulder to shoulder. An assassin would have a difficult time bullying his way through to get off a round at the president’s car. If, however, a well-trained German sniper was crouched furtively on a rooftop or peering through a window, the odds of his getting off a kill shot, Mike conceded, were damn good. And the chances of preventing it were pretty close to nonexistent. But at three that afternoon Mike, resigned, ordered the presidential cavalcade to pull out of the American legation.
Two jeeps filled with armed, attentive soldiers led the way. Two more, similarly loaded for war, had the rear. The soldiers’ eyes darted about, scanning the rooftops, gazing into the crowd, looking for a gun. In the middle of the motorcade was the president’s limousine. He sat in the rear seat, a smile fixed on his face, a hand raised to acknowledge the cheers of the locals.
Only the man in the back seat of the president’s car was not the president. It was Secret Service agent Bob Holmes.
The moment the cavalcade had pulled out, Mike had bundled the president into a dusty army sedan. Keep your head down, sir, he ordered, and FDR, enjoying the adventure, obeyed. With only a single jeep leading the way, the two vehicles raced at a mad speed through Tehran’s side streets. The president was being wheeled into his suite of rooms at the Russian embassy while Bob Holmes continued to wave to the crowd assembled along the official route. The agent would have had enjoyed the charade, he said, if he hadn’t been worried all the while about a bullet suddenly crashing through the window and lodging in his skull.
LATER THAT NIGHT, MIKE WAS standing watch at a dinner the president was hosting for Churchill and Stalin. For the first time since he’d arrived in Tehran he was feeling pretty good about things, thinking that maybe he had the situation under control. After all, he’d succeeded in getting the Boss to the safety of the Russian embassy without incident. He was “happy to see our own Filipino boys working on our own food in our own kitchen.” “You get that way in the Secret Service after a while,” he explained without embarrassment. And the inveterate drinker that he was, he couldn’t help but be both amused and a bit awed as he observed his old friend Churchill throughout the festivities. “His Britannic Majesty’s First Minister could easily drink toast for toast with any given battalion of Russians,” he noticed with admiration. But then Mike’s short-lived calm was shattered.
As the party was breaking up and the president was being wheeled to his bedroom, an American CIC officer approached. You remember the German spy who had been picked up when we raided the house where Lili Sanjari had been living? he asked. He’s started talking. And you need to hear what he’s saying. Now!