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Legendary Soviet WWII spy dies at 87: official

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  • Legendary Soviet WWII spy dies at 87: official

    Agence France Presse
    January 11, 2012 Wednesday 1:47 PM GMT



    Legendary Soviet WWII spy dies at 87: official

    MOSCOW, Jan 11 2012


    One of the legendary Soviet agents of World War II, who infiltrated a
    British spy school and protected the "Big Three" in the Tehran
    conference, died aged 87, Russia's intelligence service said
    Wednesday.

    Gevork Vartanyan, working under the codename Amir, in 1942 managed to
    attend an entire British training course for Russian-speaking spies in
    Tehran whom London then wanted to send all over the Soviet Union.

    According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) -- the
    successor to the Soviet KGB -- his work helped expose the British
    network which existed despite London's wartime alliance with Moscow.

    But Vartanyan's greatest exploit was his role in ensuring security at
    the 1943 conference in Tehran between the Allied "Big Three" of Soviet
    tyrant Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill and US
    president F.D. Roosevelt that started to draw up the map of postwar
    Europe.

    Vartanyan -- aged just 19 at the time -- led a group of young Soviet
    agents who exposed in its early stages a Nazi plot codenamed
    "Operation Long Jump" to assassinate the three Allied leaders at the
    conference.

    "Everyone in foreign intelligence will remember Gevork Andreyevich for
    his overwhelming love for the motherland and his fidelity to his
    duty," the spokesman of the SVR, Sergei Ivanov, said in a statement.

    Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described Vartanyan as a "legendary
    spy, a true patriot of his country and an extraordinary personality."

    "He participated in stunning special operations which have gone down
    in the history of our foreign intelligence," he said in a letter of
    condolence to Vartanyan's family.

    The SVR said in a statement on its website that Vartanyan died on
    Tuesday. A source in the service told the state RIA Novosti news
    agency that he died at a Moscow hospital Tuesday afternoon.

    During a life remarkable even by the standards of a spy and parts of
    which are still shrouded in secrecy, Vartanyan worked in tandem with
    his wife Goar, who was also an agent.

    According to the SVR, they worked undercover together for 30 years in
    different foreign countries as "illegals" after World War II.

    The SVR still gives no specifics about this work, saying only that it
    was in "extreme conditions" and in "complicated circumstances".

    They only returned to the Soviet Union in 1986 with Gevork Vartanyan
    continuing to work in the service until 1992.

    "Everything we did was important for the motherland. But the most
    important things cannot be discussed at the moment," he said before
    his death in comments broadcast by Channel One television.

    He was born in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the son of an
    Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin, and received top honours
    from the Soviet Union as well as Russia and Armenia for his work.

    His father had also carried out espionage work for the Soviet Union
    and it was for this that he took the family back to Iran in the 1930s.
    By the age of 16 the young Gevork was already working to expose
    "Fascist spies" in Iran.


    From: Baghdasarian
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