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By mid-1943, Nazi Germany confronted existential crises on every front. Stalingrad ended with the surrender of the German 6th Army, roughly 91,000 troops captured, with total Axis losses exceeding 800,000. At Kursk that summer, Hitler committed nearly 3,000 tanks but suffered some 200,000 casualties and lost the initiative to the Red Army. Allied landings in Sicily and Italy's armistice further drained German resources and manpower. The conventional strategy was failing. With orthodox options exhausted, Hitler grew desperate for war-winning gambits. It was from that desperation that Hitler allegedly
approved a secret plan to kill the "Big Three" designated Operation Long Jump. The Tehran Conference From November 28th to December 1st of 1943, a conference was held in Tehran, marking the first face-to-face meeting of the Allied "Big Three": U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The leaders coordinated strategies against the Axis, notably committing to Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of Western Europe. While Roosevelt sought North Africa as the venue, Stalin refused to fly long distances due to security and health concerns and would only meet in Tehran, conveniently in Iranian territory occupied by the USSR. German intelligence reportedly learned
of the Tehran Conference in mid-October 1943 after cryptanalysts broke an encoded U.S. Navy communication revealing the date and location. Hitler was allegedly presented with Operation Long Jump, a plan to assassinate all three Allied leaders. Who first conceived it remains unknown, but operational responsibility fell to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, drawing on the combined resources of the Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo. As for who would lead the mission on the ground, there was really only one choice.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny In 1939, Otto Skorzeny joined the Waffen-SS, entering the Leibstandarte. He saw combat in Holland, France, and the Balkans, where he captured a large Yugoslav force, earning the Iron Cross and promotion to Obersturmführer. In 1941, Skorzeny fought with the 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In December 1942, he was wounded by shrapnel from a Russian rocket near Moscow. While recuperating in Vienna, he studied unconventional warfare and submitted ideas to superiors. His concepts reached Ernst Kaltenbrunner and SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg,
who appointed him commander of the new Waffen Sonderverband Friedenthal in 1943. His unit's first mission, Operation François, aimed to incite Iranian tribes to sabotage Allied supply lines but failed due to lack of local support. However, Skorzeny's greatest achievement was Operation Eiche, the daring rescue of Benito Mussolini. After Mussolini's arrest on July 25, 1943, Hitler personally selected Skorzeny to retrieve him. Mussolini was eventually located at the remote Campo Imperatore Hotel atop Gran Sasso in the Apennine Mountains, reachable only
by cable car. On September 12, Skorzeny led 107 commandos in a silent glider assault, overwhelming the Italian guards without a shot being fired. Mussolini was evacuated by a Fieseler Storch light aircraft and delivered to Hitler. The operation earned Skorzeny a promotion, the Knight's Cross, and Hitler's personal gratitude, making him the natural choice for Long Jump. The Alleged Operation Long Jump Plan According to Soviet accounts, the operational plan involved a compact team of 6-10 SS commandos, primarily Abwehr-trained parachutists, to be dropped near Qom in early November, likely aboard a long-range Junkers Ju
290. The team would carry radio equipment for coordination and exfiltration and draw on the substantial pro-German intelligence network that maintained some 400 agents in Tehran alone. Once on the ground, the commandos would move to prearranged safe houses, arm themselves with submachine guns, pistols, and explosives, and work to identify exploitable gaps in the conference's security arrangements before striking at all three Allied leaders. In late November, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin arrived in Tehran, each taking up residence in their respective embassy. Stalin occupied the Soviet embassy, a fortified compound under the
watch of thousands of NKVD personnel. Churchill was housed at the adjacent British Legation, which shared a perimeter with the Soviet compound close enough that the two leaders could move between their quarters without ever entering a public street. However, Roosevelt's position was considerably more vulnerable. The American Legation sat roughly a mile away on the other side of the city, meaning every meeting with his counterparts required a motorcade through open urban streets. Both Stalin and Churchill had anticipated this problem and extended invitations
for Roosevelt to stay with them. He declined, concerned that accepting either offer would signal favoritism toward one ally, and mindful of the importance of an independent American presence at the summit. His physical circumstances added another issue. Wheelchair bound and living with the effects of polio since 1921, Roosevelt's health had been deteriorating through 1943. Because of this, on November 27th, Molotov arranged for both Stalin and Churchill to travel across the city for the opening sessions rather than require the President to make the journey.
The commandos planned to disguise themselves as Red Army soldiers to bypass the Soviet security perimeter and work their way into the leaders' immediate circles. Within, they would exploit the brief windows of exposure created by Roosevelt's daily movements between the American Legation and the conference venues, transit that required a motorcade through open streets, with limited protection compared to Stalin's sealed, heavily guarded compound. Local agents were expected to track the schedule and signal timing to waiting commandos, who would position themselves along
the route or near the meeting sites, including the British Legation, where joint sessions were held. According to some accounts, a variation of the plan proposed kidnapping Roosevelt to use him as a bargaining chip to force a separate peace with the United States, while killing the other two. Discovery and the Soviet Response The earliest alert to the assassination plot came not from Tehran but from Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Operating undercover in German-occupied Ukraine was Nikolai Kuznetsov, a Soviet intelligence officer fluent in German who
posed convincingly as Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Paul Siebert. In late October 1943, Kuznetsov cultivated a friendship with SS-Sturmbannführer Ulrich von Ortel, identified as the chief of a sabotage group in Copenhagen that was allegedly involved in preparatory work for Operation Long Jump. Over drinks, a loosened Ortel disclosed details of the plot: that multiple groups would fly into Tehran, that Stalin and Churchill would be assassinated and that Roosevelt would be abducted to bring America to terms. This intelligence was relayed to Moscow immediately.
Meanwhile in Iran, Soviet counterintelligence was already alert. A network headed by the 19-year-old NKVD agent Gevork Vartanian, codenamed "Amir" was monitoring Abwehr activities in and around Tehran. Vartanian's group located the first German insertion team, 6 radio operators who had been parachuted near the town of Qom, approximately 60 to 70 kilometres south of Tehran. Soviet agents shadowed the group as they made their way towards the city by camel, observed a prearranged truck collecting their equipment, radios, weapons, explosives and tracked them to a safe house in
Tehran. There, the Germans set up communications equipment, dyed their hair, changed into civilian clothes, and began transmitting back to Berlin. Soviet signals intelligence intercepted and decoded the transmissions. The decrypts revealed that the Germans were awaiting a second, larger group to be led by Skorzeny himself, who was to arrive for the actual execution of the assassinations. Once Roosevelt and his delegation arrived in Tehran, General Dmitry Arkadiev, head of the NKVD's department of transportation, approached Roosevelt's chief of security,
Mike Reilly, and Churchill's bodyguard, Walter Thompson, briefing them on the plot. Subsequently, around midnight, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's top aide, notified the British and American ambassadors to the USSR, Archibald Clark-Kerr and Averell Harriman, of the plot. Molotov informed them that several assassins had already been apprehended, but reported that additional assassins were at large and expressed concerns for Roosevelt's safety. Molotov advised that Roosevelt should be moved to the safety of the Soviet embassy. All parties agreed the conference would proceed, but that security had to be
dramatically overhauled. The Soviets deployed an additional 3,000 troops under General Andrei Krulev to tighten perimeter control across the city, while a joint Allied reward of $20,000 was offered for information leading to the capture of any remaining German operatives. Roosevelt agreed to leave the comparatively exposed American legation and move into the Soviet embassy compound, a decision that placed him under NKVD oversight for the duration of the conference and, as later evidence of Soviet eavesdropping devices would confirm, within range
of their listening equipment. His transfer was handled carefully: a decoy motorcade of two jeeps flanking a limousine carrying a security agent drove through Tehran's streets while Roosevelt travelled separately in a low-profile sedan with a single jeep escort. For the remainder of the conference, U.S. Secret Service agents worked in direct coordination with NKVD personnel. Rather than immediately rolling up the network, the NKVD chose to continue surveillance and allow the operation to develop further, gathering additional intelligence on local contacts
and Abwehr support infrastructure. When the time came, all members of the first German group were arrested. Critically, Soviet operatives then forced the captured agents to maintain radio contact with Berlin under close supervision, a classic double-cross technique designed to manipulate German perceptions of the operation's status. The deception worked. Berlin eventually received a coded message from Tehran indicating that the agents had been discovered and were under surveillance. The main assault group, reportedly led by Skorzeny,
never departed for Iran. The operation was aborted before the second wave could be launched. The Case Against Operation Long Jump's existence Whether Operation Long Jump was a genuine Nazi assassination plot or a Soviet intelligence fabrication remains a hot debate. The most fundamental problem for those who accept the Soviet account is the complete absence of any corroborating German documentation. No reference to Unternehmen Weitsprung has ever surfaced in the captured archives of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the RSHA, the Abwehr, or any
Luftwaffe operational files. Comparable German special operations left substantial paper trails: Unternehmen Eiche generated detailed records in captured Abwehr and Luftwaffe files, while Operation Valkyrie, the July 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler, produced a ton of OKW and Gestapo documentation through subsequent internal investigations. If such an ambitious operation to assassinate the Big Three had been planned at the RSHA level, one would expect at least some evidence in the surviving record. Likewise, the circumstances under which the Soviet
evidence was generated are also problematic. The confessions from arrested German agents in Tehran were extracted by the NKVD, whose interrogation methods in the Stalinist era were notorious for producing whatever confessions the interrogators wanted. The agents identified as key planners, among them Ludwig Geigner and Bernhard Klitzsch, in some accounts, were reportedly executed shortly afterward, conveniently ensuring they could never contradict the Soviet version of events. After the Tehran Conference concluded, Harriman pressed Molotov on whether a genuine assassination
threat had ever existed. Molotov acknowledged that Soviet intelligence was aware of German agents operating in Tehran, but stopped short of confirming any specific plot against the Allied leaders. Molotov reframed the matter as a straightforward security precaution, suggesting that Stalin had simply believed the President would be better protected there. Skorzeny categorically denied that the operation ever existed. In his 1957 memoirs, Skorzeny's Secret Missions, he recalled attending a briefing with Hitler and SS-Brigadeführer Walter
Schellenberg in which the idea of disrupting the Tehran Conference was briefly raised, but stated that he dismissed the idea as logistically infeasible and that no operational orders were ever issued. He went further, claiming that the Soviet-cited German operative, Sturmbannführer Paul von Ortel, was an entirely fictitious identity invented by Soviet authorities, a claim later echoed in several Western scholarly assessments. Skorzeny argued his own name had been invoked simply to add credibility: the NKVD understood that his reputation as an SS
commando would make the operation seem plausible. The geopolitical context is also suspicious. The USSR held total control over northern Iran, which meant any fabricated threat would be extraordinarily difficult to disprove or independently investigate. Stalin had proposed Tehran as the conference site and rejected all alternatives with unusual firmness, at one point telling Roosevelt there would be no summit if the location changed. Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, reviewing the matter after the conference, concluded that the Nazi plot against the Big Three was "complete baloney." Ambassador Reader Bullard went further,
suspecting the entire episode had been fabricated by Molotov for a specific and calculable purpose: to manoeuvre Roosevelt into staying in the bugged guest quarters of the Soviet embassy. If Stalin's objective was to eavesdrop on the Americans, he had both the motive to lure Roosevelt to his villa and the means to advance, at the last minute, a threat that could not easily be disproved. Tehran was the only venue that gave him both simultaneously. Scholars have reinforced this narrative. London-based espionage historian Alexander
Vassiliev has argued that Stalin spread rumours of the plot in order to draw Roosevelt closer and diminish Churchill's influence over the conference. Historian Adrian O'Sullivan, in two books on German intelligence activity in Iran, catalogued twelve German operations in the country, almost uniformly unsuccessful and described Long Jump as an "elaborate literary hoax" by Soviet counterintelligence. He cited both the operational infeasibility of coordinating simultaneous assassinations across heavily guarded compounds and the absence of any viable infiltration routes given Allied air superiority in the region.
The Case for Operation Long Jump's existence Defenders of the Soviet account note that Nazi authorities ordered the widespread destruction of sensitive documents in 1945 to prevent them falling into Allied hands, which could theoretically account for the archival silence. It is not, on its own, proof of absence. The more compelling argument, however, is contextual: the operation fits. By late 1943, Hitler had already authorised multiple plots against enemy leaders, including at least one attempt against Stalin, and had demonstrated throughout the war a
consistent willingness to endorse high-risk, unconventional operations when conventional warfare faltered. The idea of striking at all three Allied leaders simultaneously, however reckless, was not out of character. The Soviet security response in Tehran also lends some weight to the reality of the threat. The rapid arrest of suspected German agents, the dramatic decision to relocate Roosevelt to the Soviet embassy compound, and the extensive fortification of conference venues all suggest authorities responding to what they genuinely believed was actionable intelligence, not a theatrical performance. Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch, in The Nazi Conspiracy, argued that the operation's
reported components, paratrooper drops, locally recruited agents, and pre-positioned explosives, all closely mirror Nazi escalatory tactics documented elsewhere during the same period. They also argue Stalin would not have risked destroying his credibility by flagrantly lying for such a minor reward, and that a near 70-year conspiracy held together by generations of Russian intelligence services, all covering up a lie by a former leader, seems preposterous. Conclusion Operation Long Jump is historically unverifiable, but its grip on the popular imagination has proven remarkably durable. It has inspired a steady
stream of books and movies, drawn precisely by the ambiguity that makes it so frustrating to historians. Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch's The Nazi Conspiracy recently brought the story to a mass readership, cementing the plot's place in popular culture. However, the historiography of Operation Long Jump remains hampered by the total absence of corroborating German documentation and an over-reliance on Soviet intelligence. Until independent archival evidence emerges, historians are left to weigh plausibility against proof. Operation Long Jump ultimately raises more
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