The Kremlin on Wednesday paid tribute to a late Soviet intelligence officer it credits with helping foil a Nazi plot to kill Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, saying her career may have changed the course of history. Goar Vartanyan, who died on Monday at the age of 93, was an undercover field operative for decades and allegedly helped thwart a plan backed by Adolf Hitler to assassinate the allied leaders at their first “Big Three” conference in Tehran in 1943. Born in Armenia in 1926, Vartanyan moved to Iran in the 1930s where, at the age of 16, she joined an anti-fascist group led by her future husband, Soviet spy Gevork Vartanyan, that was tasked with ensuring security for the World War Two conference.
