Night of the Assassins
The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
