The Nazi Conspiracy

On November 28, 1943, a motorcade rolls through the streets of Tehran, Iran, lined with thousands of Allied soldiers. The tall, gray-haired man visible in the sedan appears to be President Franklin Roosevelt, but he is a Secret Service agent in a bulletproof vest. The real President races through backstreets in a nondescript car. The night before, Soviet intelligence warned American security that disguised Nazi agents were in Tehran to assassinate Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin during their first-ever joint wartime summit. Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch use this scene to open a narrative tracing how the war brought these three leaders together and how a Nazi assassination plot threatened the Allied alliance at its most critical moment.

The story begins two years earlier with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when a secret fleet launched 183 warplanes toward the Hawaiian island of Oahu, devastating the U.S. Pacific Fleet and killing over 2,000 servicemembers. Roosevelt delivered his "Day of Infamy" speech the next day, and Congress authorized war within 33 minutes. The authors trace American isolationism, noting that as late as April 1941, 81 percent of Americans opposed entering the European conflict. Days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States in a speech before the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. Churchill, who had spent two years leading Britain's lone fight against the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, phoned Roosevelt, who said they were now "in the same boat" (38).

The authors devote considerable attention to the Eastern front, where Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union produced destruction on an incomprehensible scale. Nazi forces deliberately destroyed food supplies to starve civilians, and the Siege of Leningrad trapped 1.7 million citizens, of whom an estimated 900,000 perished. The Nazi regime also systematically murdered Jewish populations across Europe. Mobile death squads called the Einsatzgruppen, operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi paramilitary organization, massacred civilians by the hundreds of thousands, and at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, officials formalized the Final Solution, a plan to exterminate an estimated 11 million Jewish people.

Against this backdrop, Roosevelt pursued a face-to-face summit of all three leaders. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, he and Churchill announced a policy of unconditional surrender, but Stalin was absent. The central tension was the cross-Channel attack into Nazi-occupied France: Stalin demanded it as essential relief for the Eastern front, but Churchill repeatedly delayed in favor of Mediterranean operations. Stalin's fury at these delays nearly fractured the alliance. Roosevelt even proposed a secret one-on-one summit with Stalin, excluding Churchill. When Churchill learned of the plan, Roosevelt falsely claimed Stalin had initiated the idea to preserve their partnership.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, Franz Mayr, a young German law graduate recruited into the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi intelligence service, had been operating undercover since 1940. After the Allies invaded Iran in 1941 to secure supply routes to the Soviet Union, Mayr built a pro-Nazi resistance network called the Melliun. His girlfriend, Lili Sanjari, served as his crucial liaison but unknowingly passed information through a secret affair with Robert Merrick, an American GI who doubled as an informant for U.S. Counter Intelligence.

In Berlin, Walter Schellenberg, chief of SD foreign intelligence, launched Operation Franz, parachuting six agents into Iran to join Mayr. He also recruited Otto Skorzeny, an imposing officer in the Waffen-SS, the armed combat branch of the SS, to lead expanded Special Operations. Skorzeny became a Nazi legend after rescuing the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop prison using gliders, earning the nickname "the Most Dangerous Man in Europe." Nazi signals intelligence intercepted Allied communications about the proposed summit as early as April 1943, and in August, Berlin instructed Mayr to confirm reports of an imminent meeting among all three leaders.

On August 15, 1943, British agents arrested Mayr in Tehran, crippling Nazi ground capabilities in the city. Berlin did not learn of the arrest until October, meaning the Germans continued planning with a compromised network. Around the same time, the personal valet of the British ambassador to Turkey began selling photographed confidential documents to Berlin, an intelligence windfall code-named "Cicero" that revealed Allied conference planning. In early November, Hitler summoned Schellenberg and Skorzeny to the Wolf's Lair, his military headquarters in East Prussia, to discuss the Tehran summit. Separately, undercover Soviet spy Nikolai Kuznetsov learned from a German officer that a secret mission under Skorzeny would take place in Iran, intelligence Moscow connected to the upcoming conference.

Stalin agreed to the summit but insisted on Tehran as the only acceptable location. When Secret Service chief Mike Reilly arrived to prepare security, Soviet General Dmitri Arkadiev informed him that German parachutists had been dropped near the city, with at least six still at large. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov separately warned the American and British ambassadors of a possible assassination attempt, urging Roosevelt to move to the walled Soviet embassy compound.

Roosevelt agreed, seeing a strategic opportunity to build rapport with Stalin. Reilly orchestrated the decoy motorcade while the real President raced through backstreets in a small sedan. At the Soviet embassy, the conference was dominated by the question of Operation Overlord, the planned cross-Channel invasion of France. Roosevelt and Stalin pressured Churchill until the Prime Minister yielded on November 30: Overlord would launch during May 1944, with coordinated Soviet offensives to pin down German forces. Churchill declared that "truth deserves a bodyguard of lies!" (288), referring to the deception operations needed to mask the real invasion.

According to the later account of Gevork Vartanian, a 19-year-old agent of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police and intelligence service, who led a team of bicycle-riding young operatives called the Light Cavalry, the Soviets tracked six Nazi radio operators to a safehouse in Tehran, decrypted their communications, and learned a second team led by Skorzeny was en route to assassinate the Allied leaders. The NKVD raided the safehouse and forced one captured agent to radio Berlin that the mission was compromised.

The three leaders departed Tehran without incident, signing a declaration promising to destroy German forces and secure lasting peace. The commitment bore fruit on June 6, 1944, when the largest amphibious invasion in history landed on the beaches of Normandy. Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, as Allied armies closed in from both sides.

Roosevelt never saw the war's end. Exhausted and visibly declining after winning a fourth term, he met Churchill and Stalin one final time at Yalta in February 1945 to plan postwar Europe. On April 12, while sitting for a portrait at Warm Springs, Georgia, he said he had "a terrific pain in the back of my head" (333) and collapsed. He was pronounced dead at 3:35 p.m. In Washington, 500,000 people gathered to mourn the President who had led the nation through its darkest days.

The historical debate over the plot persists. Joe Spencer, the British intelligence chief in Tehran, dismissed press reports as baseless, though his jurisdiction did not cover areas where the NKVD operated. A separate skeptical theory holds that the Soviets fabricated the threat to lure Roosevelt into the bugged Soviet embassy. The authors argue that both things can be true simultaneously: The NKVD genuinely feared an assassination plot, and Stalin seized the opportunity to eavesdrop. In 2003, Vartanian publicly confirmed the plot at a Kremlin press conference, though some details in his account proved inconsistent. Neither Schellenberg nor Skorzeny ever mentioned the plot during postwar interrogations. The authors conclude that the evidence supports the reality of a Nazi plot but acknowledge that many specifics remain unverifiable, assessing that its failure rested largely on the British arrest of Mayr, which destroyed Nazi ground capabilities in Tehran without Berlin's knowledge.