1943 Plot To Kill Churchill Claimed

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30841, 28 August 1965, Page 20

1943 Plot To Kill Churchill Claimed

CN.Z.P.A.-Reater—CopgrtghO MOSCOW, August 24. Soviet intelligence agents broke up a plot to kill Sir Winston Churchill and Stalin and kidnap President Roosevelt in 1943, according to a Soviet magazine.

Germans under the war hero, Otto Skorzeny, were being trained in a special school in Copenhagen to carry out the plot during the Teheran summit conference in 1943, said the weekly magazine, “Ogonyok.”

The Soviet and British leaders were to be assassinated, but President Roosevelt was to be held “so that it would be easier for the Fuehrer to come to an agreement with America” after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The attempt was foiled, said “Ogonyok,” because of information from a Soviet agent, Nikolai Kuznetsov, who had joined the German Army under an assumed name and was asked to take part in the plot. Kuznetsov, other Soviet agents in the Baltic States, and the mistress of a Nazi S.S. officer, Fritz von Ortel, supplied enough information to intelligence headquarters in Moscow to thwart the plotters.

Soviet agents flooded into Teheran before the conference, and many German agents were assassinated. The magazine did not make it clear who killed them.

President Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s invitation to stay in the Soviet Embassy. Churchill stayed in the equally heavily-guarded British Embassy. "Ogonyok” said Nazi intelligence in Teheran at the time was directed by a German archaeologist, Dr. Max von Oppenheim.