What would have happened if Nazi spies had killed the three Allied presidents, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, at the Tehran Conference in late November 1943?
The meeting of the three, which took place at the British embassy in the Iranian capital, had a single purpose:to rid the world of Adolf Hitler. Of course the three came out alive from that encounter. But it wasn't because the Nazis didn't try.
A new book by historian Bill Yenne analyzes Operation Long Jump , conceived by Hitler to behead the allies in Tehran, and which failed thanks to a Swiss double agent coming across the whole plot, almost by accident.
Throughout the war heads of state had to be on the alert for possible assassination attempts. Churchill rightly thought that Hitler wanted to kill him. Stalin had enemies inside and outside his country. And Hitler, well, everyone wanted to kill Hitler, even the Pope.
That is why when the meeting of allied presidents was proposed, a neutral place had to be chosen, one that was far enough away from the war scenes and more or less close to Russia, since Stalin hated to travel and it even seems that he was terrified of flying. Tehran's election was almost all or nothing in this regard.
And yet Tehran in those days was a nest of spies of all nationalities, as were other cities like Lisbon or Madrid.
The Operation Long Jump it was conceived by the Nazis after the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Casablanca in 1943. If they met again in another city there was a chance to finish them off. But they needed a spy who would not arouse suspicion, who was a citizen of a neutral country, who could travel without raising suspicion, and who spoke several languages. They found it in Ernst Merser, a Swiss businessman whom they recruited in the belief that they had beaten the British. Unfortunately for them, the English had already recruited him before and they were able to have a double agent at his service.
The opportunity came when German intelligence learned that the three presidents were going to meet somewhere in the Middle East. As soon as they were sure it would be in Tehran, the plot was launched. They put Otto Skorzeny in charge of the operation, who had proved himself effective by rescuing Mussolini in Italy. The plan was to drop a commando of paratroopers into Iran, who would then head to Tehran to hide in German-controlled safe houses. Among these paratroopers would be some Soviet deserters wearing Red Army uniforms.
The Germans even knew the details of the summit arrangements, having obtained copies of correspondence between London, Washington and Moscow from a valet at the British embassy in Ankara.
But as the date of the summit approached, the plan began to unravel. First of all the Germans had to move the supplies for the paratroopers to Tehran. And here they made a crucial mistake, because to get them into the Iranian capital they turned to Ernst Merser . He immediately notified the British as soon as he opened the boxes and saw that there were weapons in them.
The Russians had also planted a couple of agents in the group of deserters that was to accompany the Nazis to Tehran. Finally, it was these who were in charge of liquidating the Nazi paratroopers, with which the plan was completely unusable and would never come to fruition.
But what would have happened if he had been successful? Yenne claims that it would have spelled chaos, because neither the British nor the Soviets had an established succession mechanism. She also believes that the war would have ended much sooner than it did, yes, with an undefeated Germany and still controlling much of Europe, although forced to negotiate peace.