“These two novice secret agents would play key roles in laying the groundwork for one of the most audacious covert operations in World War II: the Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, Churchill and Stalin.” 

By Howard Blum

THE TWO GERMAN spies arrived in the hectic wartime Iranian port city of Pahlevi (now Bandar-e-Anzali) in November, 1940.

Codenamed Max and Moritz by their Section 6 handlers in the SS Reich Security Service, the names were borrowed from the heroes of a German folktale that celebrated the misadventures of two mischief-making lads.

Both carried identical leather suitcases, wore identical white linen suits issued in Berlin, and hid behind the thin but identical covers of “commercial travellers.”

As they ambled down the gangplank to begin their first covert assignments in a jarringly alien, sun-bleached land, the challenges of their mission were complicated by the facts that they didn’t speak the language, had no previous knowledge of the Middle East, let alone Iran, and that they had only cursory training in the sinister art of intelligence.

No less a problem, they went in barefoot, to use the jargon of their new trade, meaning they had no operational support, no backup personnel in case the roof fell in, and no predetermined escape route.

A rudimentary radio transmitter was their only lifeline to Berlin, but it was, at best, a problematic device. They were behind enemy lines, the whiff of danger always in the air, and they were completely on their own.

Yet three years later, these two novice secret agents, despite all odds and obstacles, would play key roles in laying the groundwork for one of the most audacious covert operations in World War II: the Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at the Tehran Conference at the tail end of November, 1943. Dubbed Operation Long Jump.

Before being christened into the Reich Security Service’s secret world, Max had been Franz Mayr, 26, a law student recruited by Section 6 from a signals platoon in Potsdam.

Moritz, in his overt life, had been Roman Gamotha, 23, a veteran Hitler Youth street brawler who had made the easy transition to black-uniformed Waffen-SS legionnaire.

“A man has to be born for the intelligence services,” chided Julius Berthold Schulze-Holthus as he appraised the two new arrivals to his territory.

Born in 1894 and a veteran of the First World War, Schulze-Holthus was a professional operative who had been sent years earlier to Iran by the Abwehr, the traditional German military foreign intelligence organization. He was in place, plying his covert trade under more substantial diplomatic cover.

Both the Section 6 boy spies and the older Abwehr professional in Iran shared the same vague mission in the early days of the war: They were to plant the seeds for an irrepressible fifth column. They were to ensure that the Iranians would welcome the Afrika Korps with open arms when they came storming in. But how the spies were to accomplish this impressive political feat, how they were to win the allegiance of an entire nation – well, that was left unsaid.

But it wasn’t the Afrika Korps that poured into Iran. On Aug. 25, 1941; British and Russian forces launched Operation Countenance: the invasion of Iran.

For the Allies, the decision to strike preemptively made good strategic sense. At stake were Britain’s crucial pathway to the empire beyond the Suez Canal, while the Russians needed to ensure that the Iranian railroad supply lines that could deliver much needed war materiel from the American would be available. And all three of the Allies coveted Iran’s vast oil reserves to fuel their respective war machines.

The German spies quickly went to ground. For nearly two years, Berlin received no word, no sign of life, from the three agents it had sent to Iran. Then in the Spring of 1943, two of the spies resurfaced.

A message relayed to the Abwehr via Japanese intelligence stated that the resourceful Schulze-Holthus had found refuge with sympathetic Qashqai tribesmen in the remote hills of western Iran. Max – Franz Mayr – had been hiding in plain sight, gone to ground somewhere amid the hustle and bustle of Tehran, a city with about one million inhabitants. As for Moritz – Roman Gamotha – there was no word (although later it would be learned that he’d been captured by the Russians as he tried to make his way to the border to escape).

The spymasters in Berlin rejoiced. It was a miracle that two of their agents were still in place behind enemy lines. And quickly both Section 6 and the Abwehr realized they had received an unexpected tactical gift: a covert network was in place. They had agents on the ground in Iran who could provide safe houses as well as logistical and communications support.

The decision was made to launch a new bold clandestine mission that targeted Iran. From a secret air base in the Crimea, commando teams would fly off in Ju-290s and parachute into Tehran.

The Abwehr’s commandos were recruited from the soldiers based at Lake Quenz, the idyllic lakefront site that was “the special training course for special assignments.”

These were men who had been selected from the tough-guy volunteers in the famed (and feared) Brandenburg Division; resourceful men who had gone behind enemy lines in Belgium, Holland and the Balkans as the vanguard of the invading Nazi armies.

The SS men were selected from the organization’s own special commando school at Oranienburg, located on the outskirts of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This elite course was headed SS Captain Otto Skorenzy, a zealous combat veteran who had brought many innovative (and ruthless) ways to the training program. Skorenzy was determined to create, as he put it, “supermen.”

Days before the first team was to jump from a lumbering Ju-290 in the sky above Iran, a celebratory farewell party was held in a villa in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin.

The head of Section 6, SS General Walter Schellenberg, attended. Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler sent a message conveying his deep regrets at being able to be present, along with the announcement that all the commandos had been promoted one rank higher.

As the festivities grew more raucous, as the beer and schnapps continued to flow, Hauptsurmfuhrer Martin Kurmiss, an SS man who’d be jumping into Iran with the first team, made a public vow. “We’re going to hot the place up a bit,” he promised.

In the late summer and early Fall of 1943, at least seven, possibly as many as 12 commando teams parachuted into Iran — the Wehrmacht archives are, perhaps deliberately, imprecise on the precise numbers. Yet despite the soldiers’ ardent vow and the spymasters’ fervent expectations, the missions never managed to “hot things up.”

Yet these missions, as well as the network of assets and safe houses that the earlier spies had assembled, would have an unexpected, even fateful, benefit. A seemingly unconnected succession of events, the marriage of foresight, timing, and luck had set the stage for the final act.

The Big Three – FDR, Churchill, and Stalin – had decided to meet in  Tehran for four days of conferences in late November, 1943. It would be the first time the three world leaders would ever convene in the same location.

And Germany had the training programs and the logistical apparatus in place to launch a clandestine operation to assassinate the Allied leaders in a single attack.

The complete story of what happened can be found in my book Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, published on June 2 by HarperCollins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Howard Blum is the author of Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin. A former reporter for the New York Times, he is the author of several best-selling non-fiction books.