Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin

Edgar Award–winner Blum (In the Enemy’s House) delivers a digressive rundown of Operation Long Jump, the Nazi plot to assassinate Allied leaders Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference in November 1943. After sketching previous assassination attempts (including the downing of a British civilian airplane falsely believed to be carrying Winston Churchill), Blum unravels the Tehran plot as a cat-and-mouse game between Mike Reilly, the U.S. Secret Service agent in charge of protecting Roosevelt, and Nazi foreign intelligence officer Walter Schellenberg, who planned for a team of 50 commandos to sneak into the British embassy through underground water tunnels and launch a grenade attack on Churchill’s birthday. Unbeknownst to Schellenberg, however, the Soviets had gotten wind of the mission from a double agent. Most of the commandos were killed or captured as they parachuted into Iran, but six remained at large, intending to make a last-ditch attack, until they were betrayed by coconspirators and blew themselves up as the Soviets and Reilly closed in. Blum pads the mission’s details—taken from both Soviet and Western sources—with extensive background information on Nazi spy networks, Allied diplomatic negotiations, and WWII in Iran, slowing the pace considerably but providing plenty of intriguing diversions. Espionage fans will savor this wide-ranging, novelistic account. (June)