(Teheran is also sometimes spelled ‘Tehran.’)
World War II didn’t end until late 1945, but it was already clear in late 1943 that the Allies would win, so they began to make plans for a postwar world.
Eastern Europe was a topic at this meeting. Instead of wanting to liberate these countries from Nazi oppression, the Soviet Union wanted to keep them under socialist dictatorships. In the end, these countries would not enjoy freedom at war’s end. They would simply be ruled by a different regime.
Two cases were especially important at Teheran: Poland and Yugoslavia. In order to dominate these countries, Stalin had to trick Churchill into thinking that the USSR enslaving millions of Poles and Yugoslavs was a good idea.
Churchill was typically anti-Communist and pro-liberty. But in this case, the Soviet espionage agencies had managed to plant ‘moles’ inside the government of the UK.
These Soviet agents controlled and shaped the reports about Yugoslavia: reports which went to the key policy-makers inside England.
Inside Yugoslavia during WW2, the resistance effort against the Nazis was led by General Draza Mihailovich. His men used guerilla tactics against the occupying Nazi troops.
Toward the war’s end, a second would-be resistance leader emerged: Josip Broz Tito, a communist. Tito’s forces competed with Mihailovic’s, but Mihailovic’s troops did far more damage to the Nazis than Tito’s.
Tito wanted to be the unchallenged dictator of Yugoslavia at war’s end, while Mihailovic wanted a republic with freely-elected representatives. To ensure his chances at power, Tito started spending more time fighting against Mihailovic than against the Nazis.
Stalin gave Tito some help: Stalin’s spies inside the British government began falsifying reports about the Yugoslav situation and about the Polish situation. As historian Stan Evans writes,
In both states, fierce internal conflicts were developing between Communist and non-Communist factions for supremacy when the war was over, identical in key respects to the struggle shaping up in China. At the era of Teheran, the Yugoslav battle was the more advanced, though Poland wasn’t far behind it. Making the Yugoslav contest still more distinctive, the case for Communist victory there would be not merely accepted by the Western powers, but promoted by them, with Churchill incongruously in the forefront. The way this was accomplished provides a classic study in disinformation tactics and the vulnerability of the Western allies to such deceptions.
Churchill, who normally favored liberty over communism, had been fed misinformation by the Soviets. The communist spies inside the British government told Churchill that Tito was a more effective fighter, and would establish a free nation after the war. They told him, too, that Mihailovic was actually sympathetic to the Nazis, and would establish a dictatorship after the war.
Churchill was being played.
Eventually, the misled Churchill would consent to Tito’s rise to power. Yugoslavia would not be freed, but would suffer under communism as it had suffered under the Nazis.
Stalin’s network of intelligence operatives had done their job: Stalin had tricked Churchill into giving Yugoslavia to a murderous socialist dictator, and casting aside Mihailovic, the leader who could have achieved political liberty in that nation.
This is the type of fateful dealing which happened at Teheran in late 1943.
