What shocked me the most as I researched this story is how close they came. I found it absolutely chilling when I realized how easily history could have been changed.
Author Howard Blum on the Nazi plot outlined in his new book
Night of the Assassins Howard Blum Harpercollins
On page 148 of historian Howard Blum’s riveting new book, Night of the Assassins, a corpse is dismembered.
A desperate team of killers from Nazi Germany resorts to a machete in order to hack a dead comrade into pieces small enough for the remains to be transported, without raising suspicion, to burial in a deserted field outside the Iranian city of Tehran.
This grisly proceeding, and the reason it happened, provide but one moment in a book that lays out a thread of events that threatened catastrophe for the outcome of the Second World War.
A photograph at the very beginning of Blum’s book evokes another potentially deadly moment. It’s late in 1943 and Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, is celebrating his 69th birthday at the British embassy in Tehran in the company of Soviet leader Josef Stalin and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“You can see the three of them sitting shoulder to shoulder,” Blum says in an interview. “You can see the birthday cake, a generous slice in front of each of these three world leaders. You can almost hear voices singing Happy Birthday, Winston.
“Yet at that moment, six men were trying to get into the water tunnel that would lead them into the compound where the British embassy was. They could have burst into the dining room with their guns and bombs and changed history.”
That didn’t happen. And Night of the Assassins explains why.
But there’s one more significant moment relating to this almost forgotten event in history — an event that is still hotly disputed in some quarters, but not by the author of this book.
On Dec. 17, 1943, Roosevelt met reporters at the White House to answer questions about these historic Middle East talks, and something odd happened: It was almost in passing that the president mentioned that during the meetings he had moved his Tehran residence from the American Legation to the Soviet Embassy after the Russians warned him of threats on his life.
Today, three-quarters of a century after these events, Blum is still puzzled by FDR’S casual reference to Nazi Germany’s top-secret mission to kill the three leaders and by the media’s failure to question him about it.
“He’s maybe 20 minutes into the press conference before he reveals that there was a bit of a security problem. He says it offhandedly and then the conversation moves on to China! It’s astonishing to me that FDR could give a press conference mentioning that assassins were on the loose in Tehran and that the wartime press was that complacent about it.”
Chatting on the phone from his hilltop home in rural Connecticut, Blum says there was no reason for complacency. Not when Adolf Hitler had sanctioned a multi-pronged mission — code-named Operation
Long Jump — to assemble teams of Nazi commandos and parachute them into Iran, where they would murder his most feared enemies.
“What shocked me the most as I researched this story is how close they came,” Blum says now. “I found it absolutely chilling when I realized how easily history could have been changed.”
Blum — a bestselling popular historian whose subject matter ranges from wartime espionage and gangland terror to the Yukon gold rush — faced a particular challenge with Night of the Assassins. That’s because some historians contend that Operation Long
Jump never happened and remain unimpressed by the details of formerly classified Russian intelligence reports released in 2003. Dissenting voices have labelled Russian claims of a Nazi assassination plot against the three leaders to be Stalinist propaganda.
Blum, however, feels the Russian revelations meet the “gold standard” of espionage sources.
“I do flash an amber light of caution about the search for truth,” he tells Postmedia. “You seek the best hypothesis that you can at this point. I went to the CIA and said I was trying to write the true story about what happened, and he laughed and said, ‘There’s always one more file missing.’”
So Blum has written this book, aware that the Wikipedia entry for Operation Long Jump attaches an “alleged” prefix to it. But for him the continuing controversy was a further incentive to carry on. “It intrigued me. What was the truth of the story?”
In a lengthy afterword, he acknowledges the naysayers, and mentions some of the most prominent among them. But he also argues he has found ample corroboration for the Russian claims and provides pages of source material to support his conclusions. “I tried to take the archival information in the Russian documents and see where they intersected with the historical record,” Blum says.
And the historical record is there — in such disparate sources as Churchill’s voluminous war memoirs and in the autobiography of Mike Reilly, the embattled head of FDR’S Secret Service detail.
If the book has a true hero, it is Reilly, a massively built ex-footballer who jokingly described himself as “an Irish cop with more brawn than brains” but was obsessive about protecting his physically disabled boss and terrified about the security risks of the overseas talks. And Reilly had a formidable adversary in Walter Schellenberg, the ruthless SS general who masterminded the assassination mission. In the book these two adversaries emerge as participants in a crucial cat-and-mouse game.
Reilly faced a “unique” situation, Blum says. “The U.S. had never before been in a war where the enemy could fly bombers over Washington and where paratroopers could land on the White House. And he also had a unique president to protect. This president was paralyzed from the waist down. He was literally a sitting target. So Mike had to work out a plan to protect a wartime commander who, despite his disability, is going to travel across the water to combat zones.”
Blum does not consider himself a historian “in the academic sense.” But he tries to be meticulous in “telling true stories that focus on an aspect of history that is little known.”
Yes, he wants people who pick up the book “to have a good read, to be able to immerse themselves in the story and be carried along on the momentum of character and realize that this is true.” But he also hopes to communicate deeper truths about the nature of leadership.
“We are again living through times when we rely on leaders to get us through unsettling days to the other side,” Blum says, “and to show a future that is less grim.”