Operation Long Jump by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne [Yenne, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621574408
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Mike Reilly had sensed that Cairo was filled with Axis agents, but he found Tehran teeming with NKVD agents and Soviet troops. A thousand-man contingent of NKVD agents flooded into Tehran in October, and by late November, when General Dmitri Vasilevich Arkadiev of the NKVD arrived, the number had tripled. With these men dragging their dragnet through the streets of Tehran, it would greatly complicate matters for the Long Jump teams.

As Wanda Pollack and Winifred Oberg had learned the hard way two months earlier when the Soviet presence was much less, the NKVD approach to security was straightforward and ruthless. They had come, not to protect Stalin from a specific threat, but to literally sweep the streets clear of any conceivable threats. Lacking the finesse of the British or the Americans, they went about the task as they had during Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s or in occupied Poland in 1939. The NKVD set out to seize everyone who was the least bit suspicious—or the least bit German—as well as everyone else who happened to be in the way.

In a 1965 article in the Moscow weekly illustrated magazine Ogoniok, a former NKVD man named Alexander Lukin wrote that “one after the other the influential members of the German colony disappeared without leaving any trace. When the valet of one of them entered the bedroom in the morning he found nothing but a pajama button, and not a single suit had gone from the wardrobe.”

Had it not been for the loose lips of Hans Ulrich von Ortel, who would soon be gathering up his parachute in the wind-blown dry lakebed of Daryacheh-ye Namak, Arkadiev and the NKVD resident agent in Tehran, Colonel Andrei Mikhalovits Vertinski, might not have been running their targeted campaign against the Germans in Tehran with such merciless furor. When he had unwittingly confided in Nikolai Kuznetsov that he would be working with Otto Skorzeny on “something big,” it could have been anywhere. When he whispered to Lydiya Lissovskaya—Kuznetsov’s girlfriend—that he would bring her a Persian rug, he compromised the whole operation.

The NKVD had to have known that the British had already rounded up most of the German agents in Tehran and that those Germans who remained were mainly anti-Nazis or German Jews. This, however, did not seem to matter. After the war, Laslo Havas interviewed Jakob Kupferstein, a successful clothier who was abducted along with his wife, mother-in-law, and two sons. When he told a Soviet officer that he was Jewish, the man replied that “If you are both a Jew and a German, you have two good reasons to shut up.”

As Kupferstein explained, his family was “put into a single-story building belonging to the Russian barracks in the town of Meshed. There was room for 30 people at the most, but while I was there—I was released at the end of December—some 200 people were brought in. Those for whom there was no room in the building were taken away every three or four days, I still don’t know where.

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