Elyesa Bazna
Encyclopedia
Elyesa Bazna was a famous World War II secret agent
. An Albanian
from Kosovo who spied
for the German
s during the Second World War, and was widely known by his code name
Cicero. Principally motivated by a feeling of power, he sold information to the Germans through their attaché Ludwig Carl Moyzisch (and then through the ambassador Franz von Papen
), in Ankara
, Turkey in what became known as the Cicero affair. The information that he leaked is believed to have been potentially among the more damaging disclosures made by any single Second World War spy, but conflicts inside the highest echelons of the German government meant that little if any of it was actually acted upon.
origin, Elyesa Bazna was born to Albanian parents in Kosovo
(at the time part of the Ottoman Empire
) and moved to Turkey at a very young age. He served as a valet first to the Yugoslav
ambassador to Turkey and then to a German counsellor who fired him for reading his mail.
From 1942, Bazna was the valet of the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen
in Ankara. Sir Hughe had been the British ambassador in Riga
, Latvia until the Red Army
extinguished its independence in 1940. The embassy in Riga shared a building with the ambassador's residence and there he developed the habit of taking secret papers to his home. Bazna began photographing these secret British documents in Ankara on 21 October 1943. He approached Ludwig Moyzisch, an attaché
at the German Embassy in Ankara, indicating that he wanted £
20,000 for fifty-six documents he had initially photographed. He became a paid German agent in 1943 and was given the codename "Cicero".
He claimed that his hatred of the British was because his father had been killed by a Briton. This was untrue. His father died peacefully in his bed. His real motive may have been money, or perhaps that he was also working for the British.
Bazna cherished no illusions. He admitted that he came from a poor background, with minimal education, no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance. But he had the courage to take chances and was happy to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated by his Nazi paymasters who paid him in counterfeit
sterling.
. He gave information on planned bombing raids, possibly including the first Ploiești raid in August 1943 by the USAAF, which was met by heavy concentrations of flak and successive raids on the Bulgiarian capital Sofia
from 17 November 1943 until 14 April 1944. Both the USAAF Flying Fortresses and RAF Lancasters
could reach Ploiești from existing bases in Cyprus
and North Africa and after the invasion of Sicily
also from southern Italy.
The RAF tried to confuse the Luftwaffe
night-fighter command about its target cities. On the occasions when it succeeded, aircraft and crew losses were sharply reduced. Sir Arthur Harris
, head of Bomber Command
, routed the main bomber force with last-minute dog-legs where their direction would alter towards another target. Squadrons of Mosquitos
were also flown in towards secondary targets to divert the night fighters. Both types of plane dropped "window
", (thousands of small aluminium strips), to blind the German radar. There were also native German speakers who had learnt to mimic the actual night-fighter sector controllers, with false orders. Targets were a closely guarded secret, revealed only to the squadron commanders involved a day or two before the nightly missions and subject to change due to unexpected weather. If Bazna passed over genuine target information from the British ambassador's safe, it is possible that this was provided in order to build up its reputation so that later false information about something much more important could be fed through the same channel.
Bazna later provided only fuzzy information about "Operation Overlord
", the codename for the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
British intelligence gave the impression that it believed that Bazna could not speak English and furthermore was "too stupid" to be a spy. Bazna himself claimed to speak Turkish
, Serbo-Croat and French
. He knew a little German from singing Lieder and said that he could read basic English, but had difficulty in speaking it. Much of his conversation in both embassies was in French, then the standard language of diplomacy. Moyzisch, in his 1950 book, pointed out that Bazna was both intelligent and very daring; he was also convinced that the spy had someone else helping him to locate and photograph the documents, but the second man could never be identified. Perhaps that was because he was a British intelligence operator. According to Moyzisch, the German Foreign Office did not make much use of the documents because officers there were divided about their reliability, the personal antipathy between the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop
and von Papen only added to the inefficiency.
Von Ribbentrop showed the photographs to Hitler, (the two accepted 'Cicero' documents as useful intelligence). The material came either in a sealed diplomatic bag or by coded radio messages which were being read by the British. Franz Von Papen believed that the Cicero documents helped postpone Turkey's entry into the war. Hitler entered a conference of OKH officers with some 'Cicero' materials in December 1943 and declared that the invasion of France would come in Spring 1944. He dismissed the likelihood of staged attacks on Norway as a feint.
Hitler persisted in his belief that the Allies would attack somewhere in the Balkans. He feared that Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria might defect to the Allies as Italy had done. It could also threaten the flow of oil, copper and bauxite into the Third Reich.
During the first three months of 1944, 'Cicero' continued to supply the Germans with copies of documents taken from his employer's dispatch box or his safe. The money continued to flow in and dreams of future wealth seemed assured. Photographs of top secret documents were generally handed over in Moyzisch's car which was parked inconspicuously on an Ankara street. On one occasion this led to a high-speed chase around Ankara as some other organisation was taking an interest in the hand-over. Bazna, who had perhaps been tailed, escaped.
When the 'Cicero' documents predicted specific Allied bombing missions in the Balkans
which took place on the predicted date, the authenticity of the information was supported and his reputation enhanced. Indeed, Moyzisch told 'Cicero' that at the end of the war Hitler intended to give him a villa
. However, the real use the Germans made of the information was rather limited, and Cicero's role has been much exaggerated in later spy literature.
At this time British Intelligence had an operation known as 'Double Cross
'. It used double agents and fake documents to mount a series of deception operations to confuse the OKW, OKH and Hitler about Allied plans. In 1943, it needed to conceal the target of the first Anglo-American landings on continental Europe. They were all too well aware that Sicily was the obvious target, as it was well within the patrol range of British fighters based in Malta
and a short distance from North African ports for landing craft.
The British developed a decoy plan to persuade the Germans that the invasion would come in Greece with a diversion in Sardinia as a secondary target. As part of this, Operation Mincemeat
involved launching a corpse from a submarine torpedo tube off the southern coast of Spain. The corpse was given the false identity of 'Major William Martin' of the Royal Marines
, who sat on the planning staff of Combined Operations
in London and was carrying papers for General Alexander
chained to his wrist. (Alexander was to lead Operation Husky, the actual invasion of Sicily.) Martin had supposedly died in a flying boat accident with plans for the fake invasion of Greece. The location of his "accident" was carefully chosen near the port of Algeciras
in neutral Spain. MI6 knew that there was a particularly energetic German Abwehr
agent located there, who was likely to be able to induce friends in the Spanish Navy
to allow him to photograph the documents.
Cicero's role in Turkey, another neutral territory with some pro-German members of the government and armed forces appears to fit into the Double Cross strategy, with many of the same patterns. Franz von Papen, the German ambassador was close to Hitler, whilst not a Nazi. Moyzisch, an Austrian Nazi, was known to be diligent and effective. So any documents leaking out of the embassy would quickly find their way to Hitler. 'Cicero' perhaps unwittingly played a supporting role in the deception over Sicily. His papers suggested that the invasion would be in Greece and that the British ambassador was involved in attempts to persuade Turkey to join the Allies in the attack.
In the event the Abwehr was rightly sceptical of 'Cicero', believing that he might be a double agent. They were at that time already running 'Garbo', 'Zig-Zag
' and 'Tricycle
', supposedly German agents, to whom they were paying large sums but who were actually working for the British. They were supplying a careful mix of true and false information. 'Cicero', an Albanian like 'Tricycle', who was a Yugoslav national, had good reason to hate the Germans because of events after the Axis invasion of his country. It was obvious that such important papers should not be left in the insecure embassy residency safe. It should have been inconceivable that any mere ambassador would be given access to top secret invasion plans. However, they did accept that 'Major Martin' was genuine and several Wermacht divisions were routed away from Sicily and southern Italy to the Balkans making Operation Husky on the night of July 9/10 1943 the least costly seaborne invasion of World War II.
'Ultra
', the British code-breaking system based at Bletchley Park
was routinely reading coded messages between German ambassadors and von Ribbentrop in Berlin; they were sent by the 'Enigma
' code machine. This was how Juan Pujol Garcia, alias Garbo, was discovered in Lisbon
, where he was sending the Germans such information as "Glasgow dockers would do anything for a litre of red wine" and was subsequently employed by the British. They also knew about Eddie Chapman, alias 'Zig-Zag', a Briton who was recruited by the Germans in Jersey
, where he was imprisoned for safe-cracking before the German invasion, and later parachuted into Norfolk
by the Luftwaffe at night, thanks to Enigma intercepts. They would have known about 'Cicero' from the same source. Their inept attempts to foil his thefts appear altogether too incompetent. Perhaps they wanted Hitler to see the documents that 'Cicero' was photographing.
The biggest wartime deception was over Operation Overlord, where the use of a British naval officer, apparently embittered into becoming a turncoat, (but the son of von Ribbentrop's doctor and so personally known to him during his pre-war stint as ambassador in London), helped to persuade Hitler that the actual attack would come in the Pas de Calais. In this case some of the true information provided to the Germans seems to have concerned the timing and placing of the disastrous raid on Dieppe (Operation Jubilee), by Canadian forces in 1942. If 'Cicero' was in fact a trusted double agent he could have been deployed as a supporting actor in this dramatic delusion also. Aware from Ultra and Miss Kapp (Moyzisch's new secretary), that he was working for the Germans, he would only have known about Overlord, about which the British ambassador to Turkey would never have been informed, just what Department XX of MI6 wished to reveal. British Intelligence believed that the repeated presentation of many clues in multiple locations served to increase authenticity.
whenever he wanted access to the ambassador's safe
. In addition, Moyzisch hired a new, shapely secretary named Nele Kapp (known in the book as Elizabeth or Elsa for short), the daughter of a German consul and anti-Nazi who had spent most of her early life in Calcutta and Cleveland. Nele was neurotic and difficult to work with and Moyzisch decided that she had to go. What he did not know was that this was actually an act. Nele hated the Nazis and had been supplying information to the British and the American OSS
. She eventually defected
and was helped by an OSS agent to board the Taurus Express from Ankara to Istanbul, but alighting before the city, she was taken to an air base that the RAF was then building in Turkey. From there she was driven to Izmir and then by Greek caique to Cyprus and thence to Cairo
, where she was furious to learn that she was to be interned as a German. She eventually reached America where she settled in California and married an American. Fearing Miss Kapp would pinpoint his operation, Bazna left Sir Hughe's service. Although she knew that he telephoned the German most Fridays when the code room doors were locked so that he could report to Berlin, she knew him only as 'Cicero' and that he had a British connection.
Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and courier based in Berlin who had become an American spy after a meeting in Bern, Switzerland with the OSS, also provided information about 'Cicero'. It seems clear that MI6 would have had all the information that they needed in order to identify Elyesa Bazna, if they had wished to do so.
By April 1944, Nazi forces in the Crimea
were in full retreat. The Turkish Government worried that the advancing Red Army might drive through Bulgaria and seize the Turkish Straits
, which the Russians had always coveted. Turkish policy had been to wait and see which side would win, before making any move. Now that they saw the need to reach some accommodation with the Allies, the Turks replaced their pro-German army chief Fevzi Çakmak
with Kazım Orbay
who was pro-British.
In August 1944, Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Germany and by February 1945 had declared war on her, when Cicero's usefulness had already ended.
). Bazna later tried unsuccessfully to sue the West German government for outstanding pay. He lived in Istanbul for the rest of his life, giving singing lessons and working as a used car salesman. After Moyzisch published his book Who was Cicero? which raised a few awkward questions, British Intelligence assisted Bazna in writing I was Cicero the English edition of which was published by André Deutsch, a Hungarian publisher in London who also published von Papen's memoirs and was later asked to publish the memoirs of Kim Philby.
This book was part of a British intelligence operation to protect the Double Cross System and the Ultra Secret long after the war. Sir John Masterman
's The Double Cross System reveals that Bazna was a British agent from the first, controlled by the group under Masterman that ran Eddie Chapman, Dusko Popov, and Juan Pujol Garcia, (Garbo). Masterman, an Oxford history don, was an exchange lecturer at Freiburg University in 1914 when war broke out and spent the entire war in prison.
As well as feeding the Germans false information, Bazna was used to hide the fact that the 'Enigma' code machine at Bletchley Park, coupled to Alan Turing's Colossus computer
, could read German secret correspondence. After the war, the British wished to continue to conceal this from the Russians.
Ian Fleming
was nearly prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act
for From Russia with Love when he wrote about Bond stealing a Russian code machine (the Lektor) and came too close to revealing the truth. It was eventually decided that prosecuting him would generate too much publicity.
The 'Ultra' secret was kept until the early seventies.
A film of these events, based on the book Operation Cicero by L.C. Moyzisch was made by 20th Century Fox
in 1951. It was entitled 5 Fingers
and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
. Bazna, renamed Ulysses Diello, was played by James Mason
. The name 'Cicero' was avoided because 20th Century Fox feared American audiences might confuse it with the Chicago suburb. The 1971 Eastern Block co-production Liberation
also portrayed the Cicero affair, with East German actor Fred Alexander as Bazna.
Secret Agent
Secret Agent is a British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film starred John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young...
. An Albanian
Albanians
Albanians are a nation and ethnic group native to Albania and neighbouring countries. They speak the Albanian language. More than half of all Albanians live in Albania and Kosovo...
from Kosovo who spied
SPY
SPY is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:* SPY , ticker symbol for Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts* SPY , a satirical monthly, trademarked all-caps* SPY , airport code for San Pédro, Côte d'Ivoire...
for the German
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
s during the Second World War, and was widely known by his code name
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Cicero. Principally motivated by a feeling of power, he sold information to the Germans through their attaché Ludwig Carl Moyzisch (and then through the ambassador Franz von Papen
Franz von Papen
Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen zu Köningen was a German nobleman, Roman Catholic monarchist politician, General Staff officer, and diplomat, who served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and as Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler in 1933–1934...
), in Ankara
Ankara
Ankara is the capital of Turkey and the country's second largest city after Istanbul. The city has a mean elevation of , and as of 2010 the metropolitan area in the entire Ankara Province had a population of 4.4 million....
, Turkey in what became known as the Cicero affair. The information that he leaked is believed to have been potentially among the more damaging disclosures made by any single Second World War spy, but conflicts inside the highest echelons of the German government meant that little if any of it was actually acted upon.
Life
Of AlbanianAlbanians
Albanians are a nation and ethnic group native to Albania and neighbouring countries. They speak the Albanian language. More than half of all Albanians live in Albania and Kosovo...
origin, Elyesa Bazna was born to Albanian parents in Kosovo
Kosovo Province, Ottoman Empire
The Vilayet of Kosovo was a vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Peninsula which included the current territory of Kosovo and the western part of the Republic of Macedonia...
(at the time part of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
) and moved to Turkey at a very young age. He served as a valet first to the Yugoslav
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a state stretching from the Western Balkans to Central Europe which existed during the often-tumultuous interwar era of 1918–1941...
ambassador to Turkey and then to a German counsellor who fired him for reading his mail.
From 1942, Bazna was the valet of the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen
Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen
Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen KCMG was a British diplomat, civil servant and author.-Background and education:...
in Ankara. Sir Hughe had been the British ambassador in Riga
Riga
Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...
, Latvia until the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
extinguished its independence in 1940. The embassy in Riga shared a building with the ambassador's residence and there he developed the habit of taking secret papers to his home. Bazna began photographing these secret British documents in Ankara on 21 October 1943. He approached Ludwig Moyzisch, an attaché
Attaché
Attaché is a French term in diplomacy referring to a person who is assigned to the diplomatic or administrative staff of a higher placed person or another service or agency...
at the German Embassy in Ankara, indicating that he wanted £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
20,000 for fifty-six documents he had initially photographed. He became a paid German agent in 1943 and was given the codename "Cicero".
He claimed that his hatred of the British was because his father had been killed by a Briton. This was untrue. His father died peacefully in his bed. His real motive may have been money, or perhaps that he was also working for the British.
Bazna cherished no illusions. He admitted that he came from a poor background, with minimal education, no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance. But he had the courage to take chances and was happy to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated by his Nazi paymasters who paid him in counterfeit
Counterfeit
To counterfeit means to illegally imitate something. Counterfeit products are often produced with the intent to take advantage of the superior value of the imitated product...
sterling.
Spying for the Germans
Bazna obtained important information about many of the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin conferences and an instruction to the British Ambassador to request the use of Turkish airbases in order to bomb the Romanian oilfields at PloieștiPloiesti
Ploiești is the county seat of Prahova County and lies in the historical region of Wallachia in Romania. The city is located north of Bucharest....
. He gave information on planned bombing raids, possibly including the first Ploiești raid in August 1943 by the USAAF, which was met by heavy concentrations of flak and successive raids on the Bulgiarian capital Sofia
Sofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...
from 17 November 1943 until 14 April 1944. Both the USAAF Flying Fortresses and RAF Lancasters
Avro Lancaster
The Avro Lancaster is a British four-engined Second World War heavy bomber made initially by Avro for the Royal Air Force . It first saw active service in 1942, and together with the Handley Page Halifax it was one of the main heavy bombers of the RAF, the RCAF, and squadrons from other...
could reach Ploiești from existing bases in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
and North Africa and after the invasion of Sicily
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...
also from southern Italy.
The RAF tried to confuse the Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1935 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956....
night-fighter command about its target cities. On the occasions when it succeeded, aircraft and crew losses were sharply reduced. Sir Arthur Harris
Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet GCB OBE AFC , commonly known as "Bomber" Harris by the press, and often within the RAF as "Butcher" Harris, was Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command during the latter half of World War...
, head of Bomber Command
Bomber Command
Bomber Command is an organizational military unit, generally subordinate to the air force of a country. Many countries have a "Bomber Command", although the most famous ones were in Britain and the United States. A Bomber Command is generally used for Strategic bombing , and is composed of bombers...
, routed the main bomber force with last-minute dog-legs where their direction would alter towards another target. Squadrons of Mosquitos
De Havilland Mosquito
The de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito was a British multi-role combat aircraft that served during the Second World War and the postwar era. It was known affectionately as the "Mossie" to its crews and was also nicknamed "The Wooden Wonder"...
were also flown in towards secondary targets to divert the night fighters. Both types of plane dropped "window
Chaff (radar countermeasure)
Chaff, originally called Window by the British, and Düppel by the Second World War era German Luftwaffe , is a radar countermeasure in which aircraft or other targets spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminium, metallized glass fibre or plastic, which either appears as a cluster of secondary...
", (thousands of small aluminium strips), to blind the German radar. There were also native German speakers who had learnt to mimic the actual night-fighter sector controllers, with false orders. Targets were a closely guarded secret, revealed only to the squadron commanders involved a day or two before the nightly missions and subject to change due to unexpected weather. If Bazna passed over genuine target information from the British ambassador's safe, it is possible that this was provided in order to build up its reputation so that later false information about something much more important could be fed through the same channel.
Bazna later provided only fuzzy information about "Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the operation that launched the invasion of German-occupied western Europe during World War II by Allied forces. The operation commenced on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings...
", the codename for the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
British intelligence gave the impression that it believed that Bazna could not speak English and furthermore was "too stupid" to be a spy. Bazna himself claimed to speak Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, Serbo-Croat and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. He knew a little German from singing Lieder and said that he could read basic English, but had difficulty in speaking it. Much of his conversation in both embassies was in French, then the standard language of diplomacy. Moyzisch, in his 1950 book, pointed out that Bazna was both intelligent and very daring; he was also convinced that the spy had someone else helping him to locate and photograph the documents, but the second man could never be identified. Perhaps that was because he was a British intelligence operator. According to Moyzisch, the German Foreign Office did not make much use of the documents because officers there were divided about their reliability, the personal antipathy between the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop
Joachim von Ribbentrop
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.-Early life:...
and von Papen only added to the inefficiency.
Von Ribbentrop showed the photographs to Hitler, (the two accepted 'Cicero' documents as useful intelligence). The material came either in a sealed diplomatic bag or by coded radio messages which were being read by the British. Franz Von Papen believed that the Cicero documents helped postpone Turkey's entry into the war. Hitler entered a conference of OKH officers with some 'Cicero' materials in December 1943 and declared that the invasion of France would come in Spring 1944. He dismissed the likelihood of staged attacks on Norway as a feint.
Hitler persisted in his belief that the Allies would attack somewhere in the Balkans. He feared that Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria might defect to the Allies as Italy had done. It could also threaten the flow of oil, copper and bauxite into the Third Reich.
During the first three months of 1944, 'Cicero' continued to supply the Germans with copies of documents taken from his employer's dispatch box or his safe. The money continued to flow in and dreams of future wealth seemed assured. Photographs of top secret documents were generally handed over in Moyzisch's car which was parked inconspicuously on an Ankara street. On one occasion this led to a high-speed chase around Ankara as some other organisation was taking an interest in the hand-over. Bazna, who had perhaps been tailed, escaped.
When the 'Cicero' documents predicted specific Allied bombing missions in the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
which took place on the predicted date, the authenticity of the information was supported and his reputation enhanced. Indeed, Moyzisch told 'Cicero' that at the end of the war Hitler intended to give him a villa
Villa
A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity,...
. However, the real use the Germans made of the information was rather limited, and Cicero's role has been much exaggerated in later spy literature.
At this time British Intelligence had an operation known as 'Double Cross
Double Cross System
The Double Cross System, or XX System, was a World War II anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents in Britain - real and false - were captured, turned themselves in or simply announced themselves and were then used by the British to broadcast...
'. It used double agents and fake documents to mount a series of deception operations to confuse the OKW, OKH and Hitler about Allied plans. In 1943, it needed to conceal the target of the first Anglo-American landings on continental Europe. They were all too well aware that Sicily was the obvious target, as it was well within the patrol range of British fighters based in Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
and a short distance from North African ports for landing craft.
The British developed a decoy plan to persuade the Germans that the invasion would come in Greece with a diversion in Sardinia as a secondary target. As part of this, Operation Mincemeat
Operation Mincemeat
Operation Mincemeat was a successful British deception plan during World War II. As part of the widespread deception plan Operation Barclay to cover the intended invasion of Italy from North Africa, Mincemeat helped to convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and...
involved launching a corpse from a submarine torpedo tube off the southern coast of Spain. The corpse was given the false identity of 'Major William Martin' of the Royal Marines
Royal Marines
The Corps of Her Majesty's Royal Marines, commonly just referred to as the Royal Marines , are the marine corps and amphibious infantry of the United Kingdom and, along with the Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary, form the Naval Service...
, who sat on the planning staff of Combined Operations
Combined Operations
Combined Operations Headquarters was a department of the British War Office set up during World War II to harass the Germans on the European continent by means of raids carried out by use of combined naval and army forces...
in London and was carrying papers for General Alexander
Earl Alexander of Tunis
Earl Alexander of Tunis is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 14 March 1952 for the prominent military commander Field Marshal Harold Alexander, 1st Viscount Alexander of Tunis...
chained to his wrist. (Alexander was to lead Operation Husky, the actual invasion of Sicily.) Martin had supposedly died in a flying boat accident with plans for the fake invasion of Greece. The location of his "accident" was carefully chosen near the port of Algeciras
Algeciras
Algeciras is a port city in the south of Spain, and is the largest city on the Bay of Gibraltar . Port of Algeciras is one of the largest ports in Europe and in the world in three categories: container,...
in neutral Spain. MI6 knew that there was a particularly energetic German Abwehr
Abwehr
The Abwehr was a German military intelligence organisation from 1921 to 1944. The term Abwehr was used as a concession to Allied demands that Germany's post-World War I intelligence activities be for "defensive" purposes only...
agent located there, who was likely to be able to induce friends in the Spanish Navy
Spanish Navy
The Spanish Navy is the maritime branch of the Spanish Armed Forces, one of the oldest active naval forces in the world. The Armada is responsible for notable achievements in world history such as the discovery of Americas, the first world circumnavigation, and the discovery of a maritime path...
to allow him to photograph the documents.
Cicero's role in Turkey, another neutral territory with some pro-German members of the government and armed forces appears to fit into the Double Cross strategy, with many of the same patterns. Franz von Papen, the German ambassador was close to Hitler, whilst not a Nazi. Moyzisch, an Austrian Nazi, was known to be diligent and effective. So any documents leaking out of the embassy would quickly find their way to Hitler. 'Cicero' perhaps unwittingly played a supporting role in the deception over Sicily. His papers suggested that the invasion would be in Greece and that the British ambassador was involved in attempts to persuade Turkey to join the Allies in the attack.
In the event the Abwehr was rightly sceptical of 'Cicero', believing that he might be a double agent. They were at that time already running 'Garbo', 'Zig-Zag
Eddie Chapman
Edward Arnold "Eddie" Chapman was an English pre-war criminal and wartime spy. During the Second World War he offered his services to Nazi Germany as a spy and a traitor whilst intending all along to become a British double agent. His British Secret Service handlers code named him 'ZIGZAG' in...
' and 'Tricycle
Dušan Popov
Dušan "Duško" Popov OBE was a double agent working for MI6 during World War II under the cryptonym Tricycle.-Origins of Tricycle:...
', supposedly German agents, to whom they were paying large sums but who were actually working for the British. They were supplying a careful mix of true and false information. 'Cicero', an Albanian like 'Tricycle', who was a Yugoslav national, had good reason to hate the Germans because of events after the Axis invasion of his country. It was obvious that such important papers should not be left in the insecure embassy residency safe. It should have been inconceivable that any mere ambassador would be given access to top secret invasion plans. However, they did accept that 'Major Martin' was genuine and several Wermacht divisions were routed away from Sicily and southern Italy to the Balkans making Operation Husky on the night of July 9/10 1943 the least costly seaborne invasion of World War II.
'Ultra
Ultra
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by "breaking" high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. "Ultra" eventually became the standard...
', the British code-breaking system based at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...
was routinely reading coded messages between German ambassadors and von Ribbentrop in Berlin; they were sent by the 'Enigma
Enigma
An enigma is a type of riddle generally expressed in radical or allegorical language that requires ingenuity and careful thought for its solution.Enigma, aenigma, or enigmatic may also refer to:-Music:...
' code machine. This was how Juan Pujol Garcia, alias Garbo, was discovered in Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
, where he was sending the Germans such information as "Glasgow dockers would do anything for a litre of red wine" and was subsequently employed by the British. They also knew about Eddie Chapman, alias 'Zig-Zag', a Briton who was recruited by the Germans in Jersey
Jersey
Jersey, officially the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France. As well as the island of Jersey itself, the bailiwick includes two groups of small islands that are no longer permanently inhabited, the Minquiers and Écréhous, and the Pierres de Lecq and...
, where he was imprisoned for safe-cracking before the German invasion, and later parachuted into Norfolk
Norfolk
Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...
by the Luftwaffe at night, thanks to Enigma intercepts. They would have known about 'Cicero' from the same source. Their inept attempts to foil his thefts appear altogether too incompetent. Perhaps they wanted Hitler to see the documents that 'Cicero' was photographing.
The biggest wartime deception was over Operation Overlord, where the use of a British naval officer, apparently embittered into becoming a turncoat, (but the son of von Ribbentrop's doctor and so personally known to him during his pre-war stint as ambassador in London), helped to persuade Hitler that the actual attack would come in the Pas de Calais. In this case some of the true information provided to the Germans seems to have concerned the timing and placing of the disastrous raid on Dieppe (Operation Jubilee), by Canadian forces in 1942. If 'Cicero' was in fact a trusted double agent he could have been deployed as a supporting actor in this dramatic delusion also. Aware from Ultra and Miss Kapp (Moyzisch's new secretary), that he was working for the Germans, he would only have known about Overlord, about which the British ambassador to Turkey would never have been informed, just what Department XX of MI6 wished to reveal. British Intelligence believed that the repeated presentation of many clues in multiple locations served to increase authenticity.
End of spying career
In the meantime, Bazna found it increasingly difficult to carry out his spying activities. A new alarm system in the British Embassy required him to remove a fuseFuse (electrical)
In electronics and electrical engineering, a fuse is a type of low resistance resistor that acts as a sacrificial device to provide overcurrent protection, of either the load or source circuit...
whenever he wanted access to the ambassador's safe
Safe
A safe is a secure lockable box used for securing valuable objects against theft or damage. A safe is usually a hollow cuboid or cylinder, with one face removable or hinged to form a door. The body and door may be cast from metal or formed out of plastic through blow molding...
. In addition, Moyzisch hired a new, shapely secretary named Nele Kapp (known in the book as Elizabeth or Elsa for short), the daughter of a German consul and anti-Nazi who had spent most of her early life in Calcutta and Cleveland. Nele was neurotic and difficult to work with and Moyzisch decided that she had to go. What he did not know was that this was actually an act. Nele hated the Nazis and had been supplying information to the British and the American OSS
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
. She eventually defected
Defection
In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state or political entity in exchange for allegiance to another. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause or doctrine to whom or to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.This term is also applied,...
and was helped by an OSS agent to board the Taurus Express from Ankara to Istanbul, but alighting before the city, she was taken to an air base that the RAF was then building in Turkey. From there she was driven to Izmir and then by Greek caique to Cyprus and thence to Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
, where she was furious to learn that she was to be interned as a German. She eventually reached America where she settled in California and married an American. Fearing Miss Kapp would pinpoint his operation, Bazna left Sir Hughe's service. Although she knew that he telephoned the German most Fridays when the code room doors were locked so that he could report to Berlin, she knew him only as 'Cicero' and that he had a British connection.
Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat and courier based in Berlin who had become an American spy after a meeting in Bern, Switzerland with the OSS, also provided information about 'Cicero'. It seems clear that MI6 would have had all the information that they needed in order to identify Elyesa Bazna, if they had wished to do so.
By April 1944, Nazi forces in the Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
were in full retreat. The Turkish Government worried that the advancing Red Army might drive through Bulgaria and seize the Turkish Straits
Turkish Straits
The term Turkish Straits refers to the two narrow straits in northwestern Turkey, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, that connect the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea on one side and the Aegean arm of the Mediterranean Sea on the other. They are conventionally considered the boundary between the...
, which the Russians had always coveted. Turkish policy had been to wait and see which side would win, before making any move. Now that they saw the need to reach some accommodation with the Allies, the Turks replaced their pro-German army chief Fevzi Çakmak
Fevzi Çakmak
Mustafa Fevzi Çakmak was a Turkish soldier , politician. Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire, National Defence Minister, Prime minister of Ankara government, the second Chief of the General Staff of the Army of the Grand National Assembly and the first Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of...
with Kazım Orbay
Kazim Orbay
Mehmet Kâzım Orbay was a Turkish general and senator. He served as the third Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces.-Biography:Kâzım Orbay was born in Smyrna , Ottoman Empire in 1887...
who was pro-British.
In August 1944, Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Germany and by February 1945 had declared war on her, when Cicero's usefulness had already ended.
After the war
Bazna was paid £300,000 by the Abwehr which he kept hidden. After the war he tried to go into business, but when his sterling notes were checked by the Bank of England they were found to be counterfeit (see Operation BernhardOperation Bernhard
Operation Bernhard was the codename of a secret Nazi plan devised during the Second World War by the RSHA and the SS to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes...
). Bazna later tried unsuccessfully to sue the West German government for outstanding pay. He lived in Istanbul for the rest of his life, giving singing lessons and working as a used car salesman. After Moyzisch published his book Who was Cicero? which raised a few awkward questions, British Intelligence assisted Bazna in writing I was Cicero the English edition of which was published by André Deutsch, a Hungarian publisher in London who also published von Papen's memoirs and was later asked to publish the memoirs of Kim Philby.
In popular culture
The spymaster who Cicero was in contact with, Ludwig Moyzich, published his memoirs in 1950 with a book named Who was Cicero?. Both Allen Dulles, wartime head of the OSS, and Franz von Papen, suggested that there was more to the story than what had emerged in the book. Neither elaborated. Twelve years later, in 1962, I was Cicero was published by 'Cicero' himself.This book was part of a British intelligence operation to protect the Double Cross System and the Ultra Secret long after the war. Sir John Masterman
John Cecil Masterman
Sir John Cecil Masterman was a noted academic, sportsman and author. However, he was best known as chairman of the Twenty Committee, which during World War II ran the Double Cross System, the scheme that controlled double agents in Britain.-Academic background:Masterman was educated at the Royal...
's The Double Cross System reveals that Bazna was a British agent from the first, controlled by the group under Masterman that ran Eddie Chapman, Dusko Popov, and Juan Pujol Garcia, (Garbo). Masterman, an Oxford history don, was an exchange lecturer at Freiburg University in 1914 when war broke out and spent the entire war in prison.
As well as feeding the Germans false information, Bazna was used to hide the fact that the 'Enigma' code machine at Bletchley Park, coupled to Alan Turing's Colossus computer
Colossus computer
Not to be confused with the fictional computer of the same name in the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project.Colossus was the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computer. Colossus and its successors were used by British codebreakers to help read encrypted German messages during World War II...
, could read German secret correspondence. After the war, the British wished to continue to conceal this from the Russians.
Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
was nearly prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act
Official Secrets Act
The Official Secrets Act is a stock short title used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, India and Malaysia and formerly in New Zealand for legislation that provides for the protection of state secrets and official information, mainly related to national security.-United Kingdom:*The Official Secrets...
for From Russia with Love when he wrote about Bond stealing a Russian code machine (the Lektor) and came too close to revealing the truth. It was eventually decided that prosecuting him would generate too much publicity.
The 'Ultra' secret was kept until the early seventies.
A film of these events, based on the book Operation Cicero by L.C. Moyzisch was made by 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
in 1951. It was entitled 5 Fingers
5 Fingers
5 Fingers, known also as Five Fingers, is a 1952 American 20th Century Fox spy film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and produced by Otto Lang. The screenplay by Michael Wilson and Mankiewicz was based on Operation Cicero by L.C...
and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career and is best known as the writer-director of All About Eve , which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six. He was brother to screenwriter and drama critic Herman J...
. Bazna, renamed Ulysses Diello, was played by James Mason
James Mason
James Neville Mason was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes .- Early life :Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the...
. The name 'Cicero' was avoided because 20th Century Fox feared American audiences might confuse it with the Chicago suburb. The 1971 Eastern Block co-production Liberation
Liberation (film series)
Liberation is an epic five-part film series considered the most large-scale World War II film ever made in the Soviet Union. Filmed from 1967 to 1971, the first part was released during 1970 for the 25th anniversary of Victory Day...
also portrayed the Cicero affair, with East German actor Fred Alexander as Bazna.
External links
- Open Library: I was Cicero
- Cicero, as portrayed by James Mason, talks about his roots (Movie clip)
- Bazna's autobiographical book "I Was Cicero" on Amazon.com
- "The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II" by Richard Wires
- Envoy's singing valet was Nazi spy (telegraph.co.uk, 22 May 2003)
- Secret plot to catch out Nazi spy (BBC NewsBBC NewsBBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
, 1 April 2005) - CIA's Footnote to Cicero