Adolf to Azov

Breaking the enigma code had led to many discoveries of how the Germans were working, but the Germans did the same thing to the allies.

They were able to break American Naval codes which led them to the discovery of a conference being held Tehran in mid-October 1943. At this conference Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, known as the “Big Three” would attend. Hitler spent no time wasting to plan an assassination and put Ernst Kaltenbrunner who was currently running the Reich Security Main Office. They recruited an agent from Turkey, Elyesa Bazna, who was code named “Cicero” to organize a partisan network to pull off the kill.

The Soviet NKVD were the first to find out about this, simply by taking an SS-Sturmbannführer named Ulrich von Ortel out drinking were he would always get overly talkative. Very little is known about this man, some people do speculate that he could possibly never existed.

Another person who was able to get more information on this plan was Gevork Vartanian, who was 19 at the time, had seven other spies working underneath him. During his active time, he identified around 400 Nazis partisan working in the region, which the Soviets were quick to round up and execute. His biggest fine would be a few years later, when his team discovered a team of six German highly skilled radio operators who had dropped by parachute near Qum. They decided to tail the team instead of initiating an arrest. The German team was followed to Tehran, were they move to a Villa near the capital of Iran. From there they operated the villa as an observation post.

One of the Soviets Spies was quoted as saying:

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. While we were watching the group, we established that they had contacted Berlin by radio and recorded their communication…When we decrypted these radio messages, we learnt that the Germans were preparing to land a second group of subversives for a terrorist act—the assassination or abduction of the ‘Big Three’. The second group was supposed to be led by Skorzeny himself.

As October came closer, and the plan date for the execution was approaching the German team was arrested by the Soviets, and the plan never went through.