A host of spies led by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin paid their last respects Friday to one of the Soviet Union's most legendary agents as he was laid to rest in Moscow will full honours. Gevork Vartanyan - who protected the Allied "Big Three" in the World War II Tehran conference - died earlier this week aged 87 after spending most of his professional life under cover abroad.
Putin, who served in the KGB in the former East Germany, attended the ceremony at Moscow's Troyekurovskoye cemetery to pay his last respects to the "outstanding Soviet intelligence officer," a government statement said. Putin was shown on national television arriving with a bunch of red roses and kissing a woman - apparently Vartanyan's widow and fellow agent Goar - three times on the cheeks while holding her hands with his.
At a ceremony complete with military honours, mourners filed by Vartanyan's casket covered with the Russian tri-colour flag, with his numerous decorations including the top state award - the Hero of the Soviet Union - displayed on red velvet pillows nearby. Mikhail Fradkov, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) - the successor to the Soviet KGB, as well as former service heads Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Lebedev were also in attendance, said NTV television channel.
Vartanyan's greatest exploit was his role in thwarting a Nazi assassination plot at the 1943 conference in Tehran between the Allied "Big Three" of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill and US president F.D. Roosevelt. "He was a professional of the highest calibre," Putin said in a telegram to Vartanyan's relatives, adding he had lived a "great, bright life full of heroic events."
The son of an Iranian factory owner of Armenian origin, Vartanyan is survived by Goar, who he married three times under different names and in different countries as part of their career undercover, according to government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta. They had no children.