Operation ‘Cicero’ (Elyesa Bazna)

The valet and the ambassador’s safe

According to the CIA publication Footnote to Cicero (Dorothy J. Heatts), ‘Cicero’ was the codename the Germans gave to the valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey. He sold them photographed negatives of secret documents from the embassy in Ankara for large sums, paid in English pound notes.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesEncyclopaedia Britannica identifies him as Elyesa Bazna (born 1904 in Pristina, died 1970 in Munich), valet to the ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, who photographed documents from the embassy safe and passed the film to the German ambassador, Franz von Papen.⁴

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn 1962 Bazna’s memoirs appeared (in German as Ich war Cicero, written with Hans Nogly; in English I Was Cicero); the French edition, Signé Cicéron, is listed in the catalogue of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces libraries.^5,6

‘A new walk-in’

In a CIA article on Fritz Kolbe, a German Foreign Office official who worked with the OSS, Anthony Quibble quotes von Papen’s telegram of 4 November 1943: the Germans had received a number of official British documents from a new walk-in (see walk-in). Von Papen assigned the case to the SD officer Moyzisch and said that the source would be called ‘Cicero’. The first report was sent on 3 November 1943.²

The leak reaches the British

Kolbe brought the telegram to Allen Dulles in Bern in late December 1943. Two reports on ‘Cicero’ documents and the telegram itself were given to MI6 to transmit to London. Quibble judges the British reaction to have been slow: on 25 January 1944 London queried the precise reading of the reports, and on 29 February asked for the exact hour at which the first of them had been sent.²

The UK National Archives hold the MI5 file ‘Investigations into leakage of information to the German Intelligence Service from British Embassy Ankara (CICERO case)’, covering 1945–1952 (reference KV 6/8).³

Counterfeit pounds and Berlin’s distrust

Heatts writes that the Germans suspected Cicero’s motives and held back until they were convinced the documents were genuine, and that in practice they never really used them. After the war Cicero sought real money in place of the counterfeit notes the Nazis had given him.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to Britannica, Hitler’s government paid him large sums in British money, most of it counterfeited in Germany, and some of the information concerned Allied invasion plans (the landings of 6 June 1944).⁴

The end of the affair

According to Heatts, the operation was exposed by a woman: Nele Kapp passed information to an American contact and fled Turkey via Izmir and Cyprus to Cairo; the boat from Izmir was arranged by an OSS man. The British had been warned but did not act effectively.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesHeatts adds that Cicero later did small jobs for Turkish intelligence and was last heard of as a poor man living in Ankara; Britannica says he spent his last years in Munich as a night watchman.^1,4