Lend-Lease is certainly in the news given the ongoing shipment of weapons from NATO countries into the Ukraine. This isn't the first time this was done. Author Vladimir Kotelnikov's Lend-Lease And Soviet Aviation In The Second World War offers a superb look into the delivering, modifying, and employing in combat of the various Allied aircraft shipped to the Soviet Union.
Given current events it is hard to find a more timely look at how much effort is involved in arming another country with war material at the same time it is actually engaged in conventional warfare against a peer
Gevork Vartanian died in Moscow at age 87. Vartanian was a veritable legend in Soviet espionage circles whose father and wife also worked as Soviet agents. Vartanian made his name when as a young Soviet agent he played a key role in helping to derail a Nazi plot to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill at their famous conference in 1943 at Tehran.
Vartanian retired in 1992 after an epic career that began in 1940 at the age of 16. Though he also played a key role in exposing a network of British secret agents, he will be most remembered for locating the six