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

by Howard Blum

Overview

"A truly thrilling expose of the previously unknown Nazi assassination plot that could have changed history." — Edward Jay Epstein, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassination Chronicles

The New York Times bestselling author returns with a tale as riveting and suspenseful as any thriller: the true story of the Nazi plot to kill the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. during World War II.

The mission: to kill the three most important and heavily guarded men in the world.
The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.
The stakes: nothing less than the future of the Western world.

The year is 1943 and the three Allied leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubtedly lost, the Germans believe that perhaps a new set of Allied leaders might be willing to make a more reasonable peace in its aftermath. And so a plan is devised—code name Operation Long Jump—to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.

Immediately, a highly trained, hand-picked team of Nazi commandos is assembled, trained, armed with special weapons, and parachuted into Iran. They have six days to complete the daring assignment before the statesmen will return home. With no margin for error and little time to spare, Mike Reilly, the head of FDR’s Secret Service detail—a man from a Montana silver mining town who describes himself as “an Irish cop with more muscle than brains”—must overcome his suspicions and instincts to work with a Soviet agent from the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) to save the three most powerful men in the world.

Filled with eight pages of black-and-white photographs, Night of the Assassins is a suspenseful true-life tale about an impossible mission, a ticking clock, and one man who stepped up to the challenge and prevented a world catastrophe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063000230
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	134,332
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Howard Blum is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award–winner American Lightning, as well as Wanted!, The Gold of Exodus, Gangland, The Floor of Heaven, In the Enemy's House, and most recently, The Spy Who Knew Too Much. Blum is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. While at the New York Times, he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He is the father of three children, and lives in Connecticut. 

Table of Contents

Prologue: "A Pretty Good Haul" 1

Part I "The Inscrutable Workings of Fate" 3

Part II Sowing the Dragon's Teeth 19

Part III "A Jaunt into Persia" 197

Part IV Six Days 285

Epilogue: Secrets 331

A Note on Sources 335

Sources 345

Acknowledgments 351

Index 353

Editorial Reviews

"A truly thrilling expose of the previously unknown Nazi assassination plot that could have changed history." — Edward Jay Epstein, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassination Chronicles

“[Blum] weaves a fast-paced story of how Nazi intelligence services and special commando units tried to infiltrate an assassination team into Iran…Ian Fleming himself could not have written such an improbable yet actual plot. The moves and counter-moves in this tight and engaging story show that World War II was fought just as much in shadowy back alleys as on the battlefield.” — New York Journal of Books

“Here is a story largely unknown about a plot by Adolf Hitler to murder Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin…Paced like a novel, Mr. Blum will leave you waiting for the big Nazi reveal.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"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....Espionage fans will savor this wide-ranging, novelistic account.."   — Publishers Weekly

"An entertaining story of skullduggery....a breathless drama in novelistic form with insight into the characters' conversations, thoughts, and emotions." — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

03/30/2020

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)

Publishers Weekly

Here is a story largely unknown about a plot by Adolf Hitler to murder Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin…Paced like a novel, Mr. Blum will leave you waiting for the big Nazi reveal.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A truly thrilling expose of the previously unknown Nazi assassination plot that could have changed history."

Edward Jay Epstein

[Blum] weaves a fast-paced story of how Nazi intelligence services and special commando units tried to infiltrate an assassination team into Iran…Ian Fleming himself could not have written such an improbable yet actual plot. The moves and counter-moves in this tight and engaging story show that World War II was fought just as much in shadowy back alleys as on the battlefield.

New York Journal of Books

2020-03-15
The story of Hitler’s 1943 effort to assassinate the three world leaders at their conference in Tehran.

The plot was announced by the notoriously paranoid Stalin, who urged Franklin Roosevelt to move to the well-bugged Soviet Embassy. After a review of Nazi intelligence leaders and their well-documented, generally disastrous, covert operations, journalist Blum introduces his hero, Secret Service agent Mike Reilly, who was obsessively concerned about protecting FDR and accompanied him and worried intensely as the plot unfolded. The author concentrates on events in Iran, a neutral during World War II. In the early fall of 1941, two months after Germany attacked Russia, Britain and Russia invaded, ostensibly to fend off Nazi influence but in reality to ensure Britain’s access to Iranian oil and protect the Trans-Iranian Railway, a major route of supplies to the Soviet army. According to Blum (and a 2003 Russian history loudly promoted by that country’s intelligence service), Operation Long Jump, a Nazi operation to assassinate the three leaders, was already in the works when news that they would meet in Tehran pushed it into high gear. Most of the book concerns the operation in which several heavily armed Nazi teams parachuted into Iran with plans to meet up with agents, infiltrate the embassy through an unguarded water tunnel, overwhelm the guards, and murder the leaders. But Soviet spies gave plenty of advance warning, allowing Stalin’s forces to deal with them. Few survived. The existence of Long Jump remains controversial among historians, except those in Russia. Blum acknowledges this, emphasizing that he “wanted to write a suspenseful, character-driven story of men, heroes and villains, caught up in a tense, desperate time who needed to find the courage and cunning to do their duty for their countries and to fulfill their own sense of honor.” The result is a breathless drama in novelistic form with insight into the characters’ conversations, thoughts, and emotions.

Lowbrow history but an entertaining story of skulduggery in a WWII backwater. (8-page b/w photo insert)

Kirkus Reviews