Tehran Conference

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tehran Conference, codenamed Eureka, gathered Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill in the same room for the first time on the 28th of November 1943. They met at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran, and remained there through the 1st of December. Roosevelt had traveled roughly 7,000 miles to reach this meeting, arriving by wheelchair with his health in clear decline. Stalin had never met the American president before that afternoon. For more than two years, the three powers had managed a global war through telegrams and emissaries, without a unified strategy. The pressure had become impossible to ignore. "Without American machines," Stalin would declare at Tehran, "the United Nations never could have won the war." That admission, from a man who had not yet shared a room with Roosevelt, points to what drove all three to this city. What held them together was necessity. What threatened to pull them apart was everything they had not yet settled.

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• 2. Getting to the Table

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  Stalin's reluctance to travel had been the primary obstacle to any summit. He was unwilling to leave Moscow and uneasy about flying. He reached Tehran by train to Baku, then boarded a plane. At Baku, two aircraft waited: one piloted by a colonel-general, one by a colonel. Stalin chose the colonel's plane. He explained that colonel-generals did not often pilot aircraft.

  Churchill had no similar hesitation. He was an avid traveler who had already met Roosevelt five times in North America and twice in Africa. He had also held two prior meetings with Stalin in Moscow. Of the three, Churchill had been the most active face-to-face diplomat.

  Roosevelt's difficulty was physical. Disabled and finding long journeys taxing, he had still made the crossing. The conference location had itself required months of negotiation. Roosevelt proposed Cairo; Stalin refused. Baghdad and Basra were also offered; Stalin declined those too. He agreed only to Tehran. Iran had been neutral before the war, but Britain and the Soviet Union had jointly invaded it in August 1941. By November 1943, it was occupied Allied territory.

  The conference was scheduled to begin at 16:00 on the 28th of November. Stalin arrived well before the hour. Roosevelt arrived next, brought from lodgings adjacent to the venue. Churchill walked with his general staff from nearby accommodations and arrived half an hour after the scheduled time. Roosevelt's delegation included interpreter Charles Bohlen and W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Harry Hopkins, who had served as Roosevelt's personal emissary to Churchill, was also present. Three Western women attended: Churchill's daughter Sarah, Harriman's daughter Kathleen, and Roosevelt's daughter Anna Boettiger.

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• 3. A Sword Falls to the Floor

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  On the evening of the 29th of November, at the Tripartite Dinner Meeting, Churchill presented Stalin with a ceremonial sword made in Sheffield. King George VI had commissioned it as a gift from the British people to the citizens of Stalingrad and the Soviet people. It was named the Sword of Stalingrad and honored the Soviet victory there. When Stalin received the sword in its sheath, he took it in both hands and kissed the scabbard. Holding it with the pommel angled downward, he let the blade slide free and fall to the floor. He then handed it to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov.

  Stalin then raised a proposal that broke the mood entirely. He suggested that between 50,000 and 100,000 German officers be executed after the war. His reasoning was that eliminating the officer class would prevent Germany from planning another conflict. Roosevelt, apparently treating it as dark humor, replied that perhaps 49,000 would be enough. Churchill was not amused. He denounced the idea as the cold-blooded execution of soldiers who had fought for their country. He argued that only war criminals should face trial, under the terms of the Moscow Document, which he himself had written. He left the room. Stalin brought him back, insisting he had been joking. Churchill accepted that explanation. He concluded privately, however, that Stalin had been testing what his allies would accept.

  The most consequential debate at Tehran had been running since 1941: when would Allied forces land in France? That answer was one day away.

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• 4. The Date That Settled It

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  Roosevelt and Stalin spent much of the conference pressing Churchill to commit to a landing in northern France. On the 30th of November, Roosevelt announced at lunch that the invasion would take place in May 1944. That announcement ended an argument that had been unresolved for two years. Stalin had pressed his allies to open a second front from the earliest days of their alliance, insisting the Eastern Front could not bear the full weight of the war alone.

  Churchill had not been obstructing for its own sake. A landing in northern France in 1943 was impossible for lack of sufficient shipping routes. He had pushed instead for operations in the Mediterranean and Italy, which were achievable with the resources available that year. His argument was that Overlord could not be launched before the practical conditions allowed.

  Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion of France, would launch in May 1944. Stalin pledged a simultaneous Soviet offensive, Operation Bagration, to stop Germany from shifting troops from the Eastern Front to oppose the Allied landing. Additional plans were also discussed alongside the main invasion. One was an Allied landing in southern France before the Normandy assault, to draw German forces away from the northern beaches. Another was a potential advance through the northern Adriatic toward Vienna. Operation Overlord was initially fixed for the 1st of June, but moon and tides later pushed it to the 5th. With that commitment secured, the three leaders turned to the shape of Europe they expected to govern after the war.

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• 5. Borders That Outlasted the War

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  Stalin pressed for Poland's eastern border to follow a line set in 1920 by British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon. The three leaders agreed to shift Germany's border with Poland westward. The new boundary would run along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Poland would give up marshlands in the east and receive industrialized German territory in the west. These decisions were not formally ratified until the Potsdam Conference of 1945.

  Roosevelt asked to be excluded from the Poland border negotiations. He cited concerns about the effect on Polish voters in the United States, with the 1944 election approaching. The talks proceeded without formal involvement of the Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union had unilaterally stopped recognizing that government just before the conference.

  Stalin and Churchill also addressed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Roosevelt demanded that the incorporation of these Baltic states into the Soviet Union be subject to a public vote. Stalin accepted that condition formally. He refused, however, to allow international oversight of any such elections. He stated that all matters would be resolved in accordance with the Soviet Constitution.

  At one dinner, Churchill asked Stalin directly what Soviet postwar territorial ambitions were. Stalin replied: "There is no need to speak at this present time about any Soviet Desires, but when the time comes we will speak." Division of Germany was broadly accepted as necessary by all three powers. Specific proposals for how many parts to divide it into varied widely and were never settled at Tehran. The powers would effectively divide Germany in two, a division that would persist until the end of the Cold War.

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• 6. A Warning at Midnight

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  Several days before Roosevelt arrived in Tehran, the NKVD, the Soviet counterintelligence service, approached Mike Reilly, Roosevelt's chief of security, with a warning. Reilly had traveled to Tehran early to assess security conditions. The NKVD told him that dozens of German agents had been dropped into Tehran by parachute the previous day. The suspected targets were the Big Three.

  Roosevelt had arrived in Tehran on the 27th of November 1943 and settled into the American legation. Both Stalin and Churchill had offered him accommodations during the conference. Roosevelt declined both invitations. He wanted to avoid appearing to favor one ally over the other.

  Close to midnight, Molotov summoned Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British ambassador in the Soviet Union, and Averell Harriman to the Soviet embassy. He told them several assassins had already been caught but others were still at large, and that President Roosevelt was in danger. He advised moving Roosevelt to the British or Soviet embassy immediately.

  Harriman doubted any real plot existed. He nevertheless urged Roosevelt to move. If Stalin or Churchill were killed traveling to the American legation, he told the president, the United States would bear the blame. Roosevelt did not believe the threat was genuine. He agreed to move because it would place him physically closer to both allied leaders. He relocated to the Soviet embassy, guarded by thousands of secret police and adjacent to the British compound. Stalin found the arrangement convenient. It kept him inside the guarded perimeter. It also gave him easier access to observe the American president.

  After the conference ended, Harriman asked Molotov whether any assassination plot had been real. Molotov said the Soviets knew of German agents in Tehran but not of any specific plot against the leaders. Otto Skorzeny, identified in Soviet accounts as the intended operation leader, later said Hitler had dismissed the idea as unworkable before planning had even started.

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• 7. After the War

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  On the 29th of November, Roosevelt put five questions to Stalin about Japanese and Siberian ports. He also raised the possibility of establishing air bases in the Maritime Provinces for up to 1,000 heavy bombers. Stalin's formal reply came on the 2nd of February. He told the American ambassador that the United States could operate from Siberian bases. That access would become available once the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

  Roosevelt also raised an idea at Tehran that extended far beyond the end of the war. He introduced Stalin to the concept of an international organization comprising all nation states. It would serve as a venue for resolving shared problems and checking aggressive powers. Germany had drawn the world into catastrophic war twice within a generation. All three leaders agreed that something structural had to prevent it from happening again. That conversation fed into what eventually became the United Nations.

  Turkey's entry into the conflict remained a live question throughout the conference. All three leaders agreed it would be desirable for Turkey to join the Allies before the end of 1943. To encourage that step, they offered Turkey the islands of Crete and the Dodecanese. Turkish President Ismet Inonu had met with Roosevelt and Churchill at the Cairo Conference in November 1943. He had promised to enter the war once Turkey was fully armed. Turkey broke off relations with Germany by August 1944 and declared war on Germany and Japan in February 1945. That declaration may have been largely symbolic in military terms. It secured, however, Turkey's place among the founders of the future United Nations.

  Yugoslav Partisans under Josip Broz Tito received the full backing of all three powers. Allied support for the Yugoslav Chetniks was withdrawn. The three leaders judged the Chetniks to be cooperating with German and Italian occupiers rather than resisting them. As German forces retreated from the Balkans through 1944 and 1945, Tito's Partisans took control of Yugoslavia.

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