Mike Reilly was wrestling with a more immediate problem than the strategic decisions before the three Allied partners. The burly Irishman who lifted the President, as he would a child, in and out of limousines, on and off trains, and up stairwells had come to the Iranian capital in advance of the presidential party to work out security arrangements. Upon his arrival, his Soviet counterpart, General Artikov of the NKVD, told Reilly that thirty-eight German agents had recently parachuted near Tehran. They had two missions, Artikov claimed: One was to sabotage the railroad connecting Basra and Tehran, thus cutting the lifeline for shipping American lend-lease armaments and supplies through Iran to the Soviet Union. The second mission was to assassinate the Allied leaders.
Hitler was fatalistic about his own life. In 1942 he told his staff: “There can never be absolute security against fanatics and idealists… . If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with a bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” However, he had shown no taste for killing enemy heads of state, at least in the early part of the war. But as the crimes of his regime became known, Hitler’s position shifted. He recognized that should Germany lose, he could expect no mercy from the victors. Thus, there was no point in exempting their leaders from assassination.
By the fall of 1943, the SD, the intelligence wing of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, had discovered that the Allied leaders planned to meet in Tehran sometime toward the end of November. With this intelligence in hand, an assassination plot had hatched in the fertile imagination of SS officer Otto Skorzeny, the daredevil Hitler favorite who had recently snatched the deposed Mussolini from his Allied captors off a stoutly guarded Italian mountaintop. Under Skorzeny’s tutelage, a hit team began training near Vinnitsa in German-occupied Ukraine. Its members practiced assassination by explosives, firearms, knives, and poison. By September 10, SS chief Himmler had secured Hitler’s approval of the plot. The mission to murder the Allied leaders was code-named Long Pounce.
Even before his arrival in Tehran, FDR had found himself at the center of a hospitality tug-of-war. Churchill wanted him to stay at the British embassy, and Stalin wanted him at the Soviet diplomatic compound. FDR declined both. As he told his staff, “I like to be more independent than a guest can hope to be.” He and Churchill had shared quarters at the August 1943 Quebec conference, and FDR had found the Prime Minister’s drop-ins at all hours, however stimulating, crowding his freedom to maneuver. The President chose to stay in Tehran at the American legation as the guest of the minister, Louis G. Dreyfus.
At nine-thirty the following morning, a Sunday, Averell Harriman found the President breakfasting on corned beef hash served on his own White House china and silver flown in on the Sacred Cow and sipping coffee from his giant mug. Harriman explained that he had an urgent message from Stalin. The Soviet and British embassies in Tehran were practically next-door neighbors, but the American legation was almost two miles away. Stalin feared, Harriman said, that the three Allied leaders, in traveling back and forth through Tehran, could face an “unhappy incident.” What sort of incident? FDR asked. “Assassination,” Harriman replied. The pro-Allied shah, Reza Pahlavi, had many enemies, Harriman added, and Tehran teemed with Nazi agents and sympathizers. Therefore, Stalin wanted Roosevelt to be safe at the Soviet compound.
FDR declined, still resisting becoming a prisoner of either British or Soviet hosts. Until now, Mike Reilly had hesitated to alarm the President. But upon hearing Harriman, he was emboldened to make a rare intrusion into a Roosevelt conversation. He told the President about General Artikov’s report of German agents parachuted into the area. All the more reason for the President to move, Harriman urged. Suppose Stalin was attacked by these assassins en route to the American embassy to see Roosevelt? The responsibility would be on the President’s head, Harriman noted. The argument carried the day. Roosevelt decided to move.
The legation became a whirlwind of motion as Reilly’s Secret Service agents, military attachés, and embassy staff swung into action. By 3 P.M., a motorcade had been assembled—jeeps armed with machine guns, military police revving their motorcycles, three automobiles full of Secret Service agents cradling tommy guns, and in the middle the gleaming black limousine of the President. The caravan rolled out of the legation grounds onto Ferdousi Avenue, the main route to the Soviet compound. Russian and American troops lined the thoroughfare shoulder to shoulder, a human wall sealing off the presidential party from the Iranian masses. The Red Army alone, under security chief Beria’s orders, had brought in three thousand men to protect the Allied leaders.
Few of the enemy parachutists trained by Skorzeny in Ukraine were German; most were anti-Communist Russians recruited from Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps. They had been outfitted with Russian army uniforms to blend into the Soviet security force in Tehran, where they would reassemble to carry out their mission. However, in a conspiracy within a conspiracy, several of the presumed collaborators were actually loyal Communists who, upon arriving in Tehran, immediately betrayed the plot to the Soviet army command. All but six of the hit men were quickly rounded up. But the six remaining, led by a German SS Sturmbannführer, Rudolf von Holten-Pflug, who hoped to become the next Skorzeny, remained determined to fulfill their mission.
Any soldier, Russian or American, in that human cordon on Ferdousi Avenue who hoped to catch a glimpse of Franklin Roosevelt was doomed to be deceived. The figure in the limousine wearing the familiar Roosevelt fedora was Robert Holmes, a Secret Service agent, posing as FDR, on only the second known occasion during which the President used a double, the first being during the 1941 Atlantic conference. As the motorcade left the American legation, the President, Harry Hopkins, Major Boettiger, and Admiral Leahy, slipped out of a back entrance. The President was lifted into a nondescript Army staff car and the others piled in after him. Reilly instructed the driver to get the President to the Soviet embassy as swiftly and inconspicuously as possible, stopping for nothing. No escort accompanied the lone car as it plunged into narrow back streets, alleyways, and at one point bumped along a dirt path. FDR grinned the entire way, reveling in the excitement, while the others tried to share his enthusiasm. For a man condemned to a wheelchair, it was a rare treat to experience physical adventure. The car slid through the gates of the Russian compound just ahead of the official entourage.
Stalin gave up the main residence, the only steam-heated building in the city, to Roosevelt and moved his party into a smaller villa. “The servants who made the President’s bed and cleaned his room,” Harry Hopkins later noted, “were all members of the highly efficient OGPU [secret police] and expressive bulges were plainly discernible in the hip pockets under their white coats.” Along with the comfortable accommodations and attentive servants, every room in the villa was bugged by hidden microphones.
The President had barely settled in when Stalin came calling. FDR was wheeled into a commodious sitting room to meet the source of all power in the Soviet Union. Approaching him was a compact figure, two hundred solid pounds packed onto a five-foot six-inch frame. Stalin wore a plain but well-tailored brown uniform adorned with a single medal, a gold star suspended from a red and gold ribbon. However lacking in stature, the man projected a palpable presence. As he extended his hand to FDR, the President smiled eagerly and said, “I have tried for a long time to bring this about.” Harry Hopkins has left a sharply etched sketch of the marshal. “There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly co-ordinated machine, an intelligent machine… . No man could forget the picture of the dictator of Russia … an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, [and] stout baggy trousers… . He laughs often enough, but it’s a short laugh, somewhat sardonic, perhaps. There is no small talk in him.” They made an odd pair: the revolutionary who had robbed banks to topple the czar and who had the blood of millions of his countrymen on his hands, and the Hudson River patrician, governed by humane, idealistic impulses. It was as if little Lord Fauntleroy in his velvet s
uit was determined to show fairness and fraternity toward a streetwise urchin.
That night, the President hosted a dinner for Stalin and Churchill. The Filipino mess stewards, having managed to prepare the meal in a strange kitchen on short notice, were clearing away the plates when all eyes turned toward the President. “Roosevelt was about to say something,” one guest recalled, “when suddenly, in the flick of an eye, he turned green and great drops of sweat began to bead off his face; he put a shaky hand to his forehead,” and complained of severe stomach cramps. Had the assassins succeeded? Had the President been poisoned? Harry Hopkins had FDR quickly wheeled to his bedroom and summoned Admiral McIntire. The President’s physician examined his patient, and minutes later a smiling Hopkins returned to the dining room to report that the President had suffered only from acute indigestion.
The Tehran conference ended on December 1. Stalin won assurance that Overlord, the invasion of France, would occur in May 1944, six months off. Poland’s postwar borders were not agreed upon, and the Turks were not lured into the war. At one point the President had thrown out a suggestion that must have appealed to Stalin. Maybe the way to spike Germany’s aggressive impulses in the future, he said, would be to break the country into the five separate states existing before Bismarck had forged them into modern Germany.
Back home, holding a press conference after the Tehran meeting, the President gleefully took a reporter’s question allowing him to segue into the assassination plot. He was asked, “Is there anything you can tell us about the method of your travels?” He could not give a direct answer, FDR replied, because the enemy “would know that you were leaving, and you are always, the whole distance—you are under—practically under the range of German planes. And it’s like—like shooting a duck sitting on the water for a German pursuit plane to go after a transport plane without any guns on it.” He then described how Stalin had persuaded him to leave the American embassy for the Soviet compound. “And that night,” he added, “I got word from Marshal Stalin that they had got word of a German plot. Well, no use going into details,” he ended with a mysterious smile.
When news of the alleged assassination plot hit the newspapers, the Iranians were outraged. The foreign minister cabled his ambassador in Washington, in a message stamped “Secret,” but broken by Arlington Hall cryptanalysts: “Do you realize what a bad impression this statement will make in the circumstances in Iran and the whole world? Also the truth is that there was no plot against these three persons in Iran.” But as for publicly repudiating the charge, the Iranians felt stymied. As the ambassador put it, “The author of the statement was the American President and the originator of the report the Russian Premier.” He feared that “denying of statements made by the heads of the two states” could prove rash for a small country squeezed between American power and the Soviet border. The closest to an apology that Iran could eke out was Cordell Hull’s private assurance to the Iranian envoy that “whatever was said was concerning each of the three persons, and was not at all intended to reflect upon the Iranians.”
The six surviving Skorzeny parachutists managed to elude capture for three months by hiding among mountain Bedouins. Eventually, they were tracked down by Russian troops and executed.
*
One of the war’s most speculated-upon secrets was sealed inside a single mind, that of the President. As Henry Wallace had said, the only certainty in dealing with Roosevelt was uncertainty. At Tehran, Churchill had presented Stalin with a magnificent sword forged by English craftsmen to honor “the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.” Stalin had appeared deeply touched, tears clouding his eyes upon gripping the splendid weapon. But sentimentality in the Soviet dictator was short-lived. At a subsequent meeting, Stalin had asked bluntly, “Who will command Overlord?” Roosevelt answered, “It has not been decided.” “Then nothing will come out of these operations,” Stalin replied.
His impatience over the Allied failure yet to launch a second front was understandable. As far back as 1942, FDR had pressed General Marshall and Admiral Ernest King to prepare Sledgehammer, the code name for a limited landing in northwestern Europe. “I do not believe we can wait until 1943 to strike at Germany,” FDR told the two chiefs. In an aide-mémoire shared with Roosevelt, Churchill seemed to agree, saying, “We are making preparations for a landing on the Continent in August or September 1942.” Then Churchill had backed off. “No responsible British general, admiral or air marshal,” he subsequently wrote FDR, “is prepared to recommend Sledgehammer.”
In August 1942, Churchill had gone to Moscow for his first encounter with Stalin, a mission he described as “like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” His chilling message for the Soviet leader was: no second front that year. Churchill later described this visit in a secret cable to FDR. Stalin, the Prime Minister reported, had been insulting, “especially about our being too much afraid of fighting the Germans, and if we tried it like the Russians, we would find it not so bad… .” Stalin had also reminded Churchill “that we had broken our promise about Sledgehammer.” It was true, and thereafter, Roosevelt had insisted at least on the invasion of North Africa, which served Britain well in keeping its Mediterranean lifeline open, but hardly satisfied the Soviet Union.
Though Churchill had finally agreed at Quebec to the cross-Channel invasion, after extracting from FDR a full partnership on Tube Alloys, the PM still remained unenthusiastic. Two factors explained his continuing resistance. Still fresh in his mind were the World War I slaughterhouses, Passchendaele and the Somme. He feared a frontal attack on Europe would turn the English Channel into a “river of blood.” At one point, he stood in the House of Commons and looked about “at the faces that are not there,” the generation that perished between 1914 and 1918. In the summer of 1943, FDR had sent Henry Stimson to England to press the argument for a second front. Stimson reported back that Churchill and his military advisors believed “Germany can be beaten by a series of attritions in northern Italy, in the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece, in the Balkans, in Rumania and other satellite countries and that the only fighting that needs to be done will be done by Russia.” Stimson saw clearly the flaw in the British argument. “None of these methods of pinprick warfare,” he counseled the President, “can be counted by us to fool Stalin into the belief that we have kept [our] pledge.”
Churchill may well have preferred nibbling Hitler to death in southeastern Europe, believing the job could be accomplished with far fewer lives lost, but his fierce anti-communism suggests the real reason. Ernest Cuneo was a member of FDR’s outer circle, a stocky, onetime all–Ivy League football star, an aide to New York’s Mayor La Guardia, and, during the war, a liaison man for Bill Donovan. On one errand for the OSS director, Cuneo went to London to meet with Sir Desmond Morton, who prepared Churchill’s daily intelligence digest. Late of an evening, Cuneo and Sir Desmond were descending the Duke of York steps, discussing where the Allies should strike next. “Why is the Prime Minister so anxious to go up through the Balkans?” Cuneo asked. Sir Desmond stopped abruptly, grabbed Cuneo by the shoulders, and said, “Because the Prime Minister says that if we send ten divisions up the Vardan Valley, we can crush the retreating right flank of German armies and save middle Europe from the Russians!”
As for Stalin’s query, “Who will command Overlord?” though Roosevelt had not yet declared himself publicly, his choice was no secret. Everybody knew. Churchill had agreed, as U.S. transports poured GIs, tanks, artillery, and ammunition into England in quantities vastly outweighing British resources, that the leader had to be an American. FDR set forth his preference in a long message to Churchill. “The importance of the command of Overlord cannot be disclosed to the American people without grave, perhaps disastrous violations of security,” he began. Nevertheless, he went on, “I believe General Marshall is the man who can do the job, and should at once assume operational control of our forces in the war against Germany.” The choice of Marshall had appeared confirmed when FDR met
with Churchill at Quebec at the same time that the Prime Minister had finally agreed to Overlord. As Henry Stimson remembered the moment, the Prime Minister also wanted Marshall to command Overlord, and the matter appeared settled.
Roosevelt’s preference, however, was not universally applauded. Retired General John J. Pershing, who had led the American Expeditionary Force to victory in World War I, learned of the President’s leaning, and on September 16 wrote FDR “to transfer [Marshall] to a tactical command in a limited area, no matter how seemingly important, is to deprive ourselves of his outstanding strategical ability and experience. I know of no one at all comparable to replace him as Chief of Staff.” FDR handled the old soldier with customary suavity. “You are absolutely right about George Marshall—and yet I think you are wrong too,” Roosevelt replied. “As you know, the operations for which we are considering him are the biggest that we will conduct in this war… . More than that, I think it is only a fair thing to give George a chance in the field… . The best way I can express it is to tell you that I want George to be the Pershing of the second World War—and he cannot be that if we keep him here.”
Roosevelt supported his choice even more emphatically to General Eisenhower. In November 1943, during a stopover in North Africa on his way to the Tehran conference, he had asked Eisenhower to give him a tour of the Tunisian battlefield. As they drove past the burnt-out detritus of war vanishing under the desert sands, FDR said casually, “Ike, you and I know who was the Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War but practically no one else knows, although the names of the field generals—Grant, of course, and Lee, and Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan and the others—every schoolboy knows them. I hate to think that 50 years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. That is one of the reasons why I want George to have the big command—he is entitled to establish his place in history as a great General.” Roosevelt confided to Eisenhower that he had big plans for him too. Ike would be coming back to Washington to replace Marshall as acting Chief of Staff.
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