A great Soviet secret service man, Hero of the Soviet Union and Stalin's saviour, Gevork Vartanian, died in Moscow at age 88. The officer had cancer. He died on Tuesday, January 10, at the Botkin Hospital.

      Gevork Vartanian was born February 17, 1924 in Rostov-on-Don in the family of Andrei Vartanian, an Iranian citizen, the director of an oil pressing plant. Gevork's father was connected with the Soviet external intelligence, so he was conducting intelligence work under the guise of a businessman in Iran.

      Gevork followed in his footsteps and started working with the Soviet intelligence when at the age of 16. In February 1940, he established a direct contact with the residency of the NKVD in Tehran.

       In 1943 at the Tehran Conference, Vartanyan's group prevented attempted assassinations of the leaders of the Group of Three - Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. 19-years-old Vartanyan managed to disclose one of the most secret operations of the Third Reich and so to ruin Hitler's plans.

      Those events later were imaged in a well-known Soviet film - "Tehran 43" starring Igor Kostolevsky, Natalia Belokhvostikova, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan and Alain Delon. 

      Howerever, Vartanian kept invisible then, as his name was declassified only in 2000, on the 80th anniversary of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Most of his operations are still classified.

      After the war's end, Vartanyan graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Yerevan University (Armenia) and continued serving as a spy in extreme conditions and challenging environment in many countries of the world. There was never a moment in those years when he made the smallest mistake or was close to failure. His wife Goar was always with him. The couple served abroad for more than 30 years. 

Sources: InoSmi KP.ru Image: postsovet.ru