Goar Vartanian, who worked alongside her husband, Hero of the Soviet Union Gevork Vartanian, is regarded as one of the best-known figures in Soviet intelligence. According to accounts from participants, she became involved as a teenager in a group operating in Iran against German agents during the war.
Goar Pakhlevanyan was born in Leninakan. In 1932, her family left the USSR for Iran, where they changed their surname to Kandaryan. In Tehran, she met Gevork Vartanian through her older brother Oganes. It was Oganes who later brought her into the group that Soviet intelligence officer Ivan Agayants called the “light cavalry.”
This teenage network, moving around the city by bicycle, tracked German agents and identified their contacts and safe houses. Gevork Vartanian later said their age helped them avoid suspicion, while Goar was the only girl in the group. When Gevork was jailed after a failed operation, Goar brought him parcels and managed to tell him that two members had already been moved to safety.
After Allied troops entered Iran, Vartanian, acting on Agayants’s orders, infiltrated a British special school that Soviet intelligence suspected was training agents for work inside the USSR. One of his main couriers was Goar. The information they gathered led Moscow to send an official note in 1942, after which the British shut the school down.
In the autumn of 1943, Tehran was preparing to host Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. Soviet intelligence received reports of a possible assassination plot linked to Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Otto Skorzeny. A radio team sent toward Tehran from the Qom area was spotted in part by the “light cavalry.”
“We ran through the streets day and night, 14 to 16 hours... And we found them,” Goar Vartanian recalled about the search for the saboteurs.
After the radio operators were detained, they were allowed to send Berlin a message saying they were under close surveillance. The German command then decided not to continue the operation. Later, as Pravda reported on December 19, 1943, citing dispatches from Washington, Roosevelt said he stayed at the Soviet embassy because Stalin had learned of a German plot.
Goar and Gevork married in June 1946, then continued working in Iran and other countries, including Italy, Greece, and West Germany. Their role in foiling the operation became public only in 2000. Gevork Vartanian died on January 10, 2012, and Goar Vartanian on November 25, 2019. They were buried at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.