Goar Vartanian

Goar Levonovna Vartanian (Armenian: Գոհար Լևոնի Վարդանյան Russian: Гоар Левоновна Вартанян; 25 January 1926 – 25 November 2019) was an Armenian woman who spied for the Soviet Union together with her husband Gevork Vartanian.

Vartanian in 2005

Biography

Goar Vartanian was born in Gyumri, in what was then the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union and is now Armenia. Her family moved to Tehran, Iran in the early 1930s, where she met her future husband Gevork.[1] She became a member of an anti-fascist group in 1942. They uncovered and prevented Operation Long Jump, an attempt by the Nazis to murder Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943.[2]

In 1951 the Vartanians moved to the Soviet Union for which they worked as secret agents around the world. Goar's active career as a spy ended in 1986, but she continued training new recruits afterwards. Gevork, who had received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, died in 2012. Goar died on 25 November 2019 and is buried in the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.[2]

Notes
  1. Seelye, Katherine (2019-12-15). "Goar Vartanyan, Celebrated Soviet Spy, Dies at 93". NYTimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-12-16.
  2. "Soviet spy who foiled Nazi plot to kill allied leaders dies aged 93". The Guardian. AFP. 26 November 2019. Retrieved 2 December 2019.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.