Night of the Assassins by Howard Blum

Author:Howard Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

“A Jaunt into Persia”

26

THE OPERATIONAL GODS HAD SHINED on Schellenberg. All the pieces had come together as if he had deliberately laid the groundwork, taken one careful step after the other, realizing all along that Operation Long Jump was waiting at the end of the protracted, twisting trail. As if he’d known all along the Big Three would be meeting in Tehran. The reality, of course, was something entirely different. Playing it all back in his mind, he recounted the seemingly unconnected succession of events, the marriage of foresight, timing, and luck, that had set the stage for the final act:

Back in the early years of the war, Abwehr and SD agents had gone undercover in Iran, building networks of assets, finding safe houses. Then, despite the Allied invasion, circumventing the increased risks, two penetration agents had somehow continued to remain active, one in Tehran, the other in the tribal hill country.

In Operations Franz and Anton, commandos had parachuted into Iran, and in the process established the procedures for aerial-insertion missions, delivered radio transmitters capable of communicating with Berlin to the Qashqai tribal compound and a safe house in Tehran, and presented gifts to Nasr Khan—including a gold pistol—that renewed the chieftain’s wavering commitment to the Reich.

Otto Skorzeny, the very tactician who had supervised the training and execution for previous covert missions into Iran, had been chosen by the Führer to direct the assassination of the three Allied heads of state.

And now the Big Three had decided to meet in Tehran.

It was as if unseen forces had been fitting the pieces together, propelling events with the inexorable momentum and inevitability of a Greek drama. It all had worked out to give him an advantage in the field that seemed nothing less than predestined.

Yet even as he enjoyed a sense of confidence, a satisfaction in the rightness of how things had developed, he was also restrained, as any professional would be, by the parts of the plan that remained to be formalized. There were two crucial and, he was forced to concede after much review, still baffling problems that had to be solved.

First, he needed to establish when the assassins would strike. It must be an occasion when all three of the men would be together. It wouldn’t suffice to kill just one of the leaders; he hadn’t come this far, gotten so close, to settle for that. Therefore, while it would be relatively easy to execute, and it was an attack that promised a good chance of success, he quickly ruled out targeting the official motorcades after they’d arrived in Tehran and were making their separate ways to the three men’s accommodations. The hitch was that there was no way of knowing whether they’d arrive at the same time, let alone on the same day. But he had no doubts that in the aftermath of an attack on one of the leaders, the conference would be swiftly canceled, and the security ratcheted up several notches as the two survivors raced out of Iran.

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