Daily Mail refers to Gevorg Vartanian, who “saved” Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt from assassination

YEREVAN, JANUARY 12, ARMENPRESS:

"Daily Mail" British news agency has referred to the demise of legendary Armenian intelligence agent who foiled a Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Armenpress reports.

Gevork Andreyevich Vartanyan, codenamed Amir, ensured the safety of the three leaders by exposing a plot to kill them at the historic 1943 Tehran conference of the "Big Three" Allies, the newspaper writes.

He was just 19 at the time but he led a group of young Soviet agents to disrupt a German plot codenamed Operation Long Jump to wipe out the leaders of Britain, the USSR and the US.

As his death was announced he received an immediate accolade from the Kremlin signifying his standing as one of Moscow's greatest-ever agents.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev lauded Vartanyan as a "legendary spy, a true patriot of his country and an extraordinary personality." In a letter of condolence to the agent's family, he said of Vartanyan - some of whose espionage achievements remain secret to this day: "He participated in stunning special operations which have gone down in the history of our foreign intelligence."

"Everyone in foreign intelligence will remember Gevork Andreyevich for his overwhelming love for the motherland and his fidelity to his duty," added a spokesman for the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence.

Despite saving Churchill, one of his most famous operations was to infiltrate a British spy academy for Russian-speaking agents in Iran in 1942, learning the identities of agents who London planned to send undercover to the Soviet Union, and exposing the network.

After the war, the agent - whose father was also a Moscow intelligence operative - and his wife Goar, herself a noted spy, worked undercover for three decades in many countries engaged in crucial work for the KGB. Even today the SVR refuses to divulge his role, admitting merely that he worked in "extreme conditions" and "complicated circumstances".

When Vartanyan finally came in from the cold he held an emotional meeting with Celia Sandys, Churchill's granddaughter, in Moscow in 2007. The pair toasted "the great troika - Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt" with Armenian brandy. "It is thanks to them that we live in peace today," he told her, adding that Stalin "was sending Armenian brandy to Churchill by the case" and that the British wartime leader "was very fond of it."

The legendary Russian-born spy was the son of an Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin. His father took the family back to Iran in the 1930s as part of a mission decreed by Stalin.

He enlisted his son who was working undercover by the age of 16, the Daily Mail runs.