Hitler's peace

“Then bring him around again and ask him. And if he doesn’t tell you, beat him. Or beat one of the others until you know absolutely everything. How many Ukrainians? How many Germans?” Beria threw the transcript at Melamed’s feet. “And you’d better bring the Americans and the British in on this. The time is past when we could have kept this to ourselves. Only don’t, for Christ’s sake, mention that most of these terrorists are from the Ukraine. They’re SS. Have you got that? SS. And that makes them Germans. Got that?”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman.”

“Now get out of here and do your job before I have you shot.”

Melamed passed the arrest orders to Vertinski and then telephoned the British legation, asking to speak to Colonel Spencer, in command of British security in Teheran. It was the second conversation the two had had about the German parachutists. In the first, Melamed had assured Spencer that the plot had been nipped in the bud and that all the SS troopers were dead or safely in custody. Now he told Spencer that several were still at liberty. Spencer immediately offered 170 British detectives and MPs to help with the search, and Melamed agreed, suggesting that the British concentrate their searches on Abassi Street. Next Melamed called Schwarzkopf’s office and spoke with Colonel L. Steven Timmermann, who promised to assist in any way possible and dispatched a team of American MPs to help search the bazaar. With the whole of Teheran, from Gale Morghe Airfield in the south to Kulhek in the north, being searched by Allied troops, Melamed then turned to the reward notices, and when these had been posted, he began fielding phone calls from some of the search teams. And only gradually did he fall to thinking about why it was that the Germans had betrayed their own assassination team to Beria himself, and about the many unusual preparations that were still taking place within the grounds of the winter embassy under the supervision of Beria’s own son, Sergo.

Stalin was not staying in the main building of the recently redecorated embassy but in one of the several smaller cottages and villas that were on the grounds of what had once been the sumptuous estate of a rich Persian businessman. Until the Big Three Conference, many of these villas and cottages had been empty, and for the last two weeks, Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of NKVD general Leonid Eitingen, had been scouring the local shops for carpets and furniture. New bathrooms had been installed and, unusually perhaps, in one of the villas, a portrait of Lenin had been replaced with one of Beethoven. No less peculiar, in Melamed’s view, had been the decision to refurbish a large underground bunker and to drain and paint a series of secret tunnels that connected the main building with several of the villas; after all, Teheran was protected by as many as a dozen squadrons of Russian and British fighter aircraft, and any air attack of the kind countenanced by the SS general who had sent in the teams of German parachutists would have been suicide. Melamed thought there was less likelihood of Stalin needing to seek the refuge of a bomb shelter while he was in Teheran than there was of Beria requiring the pastoral care of a Russian Orthodox priest.

By late afternoon, several more of the SS parachutists had been arrested. By Melamed’s final account, this left three men, two of them German, still unaccounted for. As night fell, Melamed was informed about the arrival (under cover of darkness) of some early guests at Gale Morghe Airfield that very same evening, but was given no information as to who they were. These guests had been received by Beria, personally, and then, amid great secrecy, had been taken not to the British or to the American embassy but to the grounds of the Russian embassy itself. All of which prompted Melamed to wonder just who it was in the Kremlin that could have been accorded the same level of importance and security as Comrade Stalin himself. Molotov? Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana? His son, Vasily? Stalin’s mistress, perhaps?

But perhaps the strangest of all Melamed’s discoveries that day came just before midnight, when, mindful of Beria’s threats to have him shot, he took a walk around the winter embassy grounds and found, to his astonishment, that one of the NKVD officers patrolling near the gates, with a Degtyarev submachine gun cradled in his arm, was Lavrenti Beria himself.

XXIV

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1943,

CAIRO

I spent three uncomfortable nights in a cell beneath the police station in Cairo’s Citadel. No lack of precedents for a philosopher spending time in prison: Zeno, Socrates, Roger Bacon, Hugo Grotius, and Dick Tracy’s brother, Destutt. None of them had been accused of murder, of course. Not even Aristotle, of whom Bacon had remarked, jokingly, that, like an Eastern despot, he had strangled his rivals in order to reign peaceably.

Philosophers’ jokes are always a real belly laugh.