Elyesa Bazna

Elyesa Bazna

Elyesa Bazna , Albanian Iliaz Bazna , code name Cicero , (born July 28, 1904 in Pristina , † December 23, 1970 in Munich ), worked in Ankara from October 1943 to March 1944 as a spy for the German security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) .

Life

prehistory

The von Bazna family moved to Istanbul before the First World War . Elyesa went to school there and later worked for a French military transport unit. Due to various thefts, he was sent to a labor camp in France for three years, where he then worked in a trucking company. Back in Turkey, he worked for seven years as a valet for the Yugoslav ambassador and then for a short time for the American military attaché. During this time he was married and had four children. He took singing lessons from a German professor. However, one concert turned into a financial failure.

In 1942 he worked in Ankara as a valet for the German businessman Albert Jenke, who in 1943 became an employee of the German embassy. He then became valet for the British Embassy First Secretary Douglas Busk, and finally for Ambassador Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen .

October 1943 to March 1944

Elyesa Bazna was employed as the valet of the British Ambassador Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen in Ankara at this time . Sir Hughe took important documents to his private apartment against the regulations. There Bazna was able to secretly photograph them with a normal Leica camera and an improvised tripod. In October 1943 he offered the German embassy in Ankara a roll of film for £ 20,000 and two more for £ 15,000 each . Ambassador Franz von Papen , Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the head of SD Walter Schellenberg agreed to this extraordinarily expensive offer.

Direct contact with the spy was through the attaché of the German embassy, ​​Ludwig C. Moyzisch, who was actually the SD employee responsible for Ankara. Bazna was given the code name 'Cicero'. At the time, he gave alleged hatred of the British as a motive, but later in his memoirs the desire for wealth. In total, he provided the Germans with forty to fifty rolls of film with around 400 photos. With an agent salary of 300,000 pounds , then a counter-value of 1.2 million US dollars , he was the hitherto highest paid spy in the world. However, the majority of these were counterfeit British pound notes that came from Operation Bernhard of the SD.

The importance and secrecy of his documents were very high, including information on British Middle East policy and the attempt to pull Turkey into the Allied camp, the Tehran conference and the planned second front in Europe. However, apart from the code name ( Overlord ), he had no information about the imminent landing of the Allies in Normandy on June 4, 1944 . While SD chief Walter Schellenberg considered the documents to be authentic, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was of the opinion that they were falsifications by the British secret service. Because of this mistrust and the conflict of competence between the SD and the Foreign Office, the knowledge gained by Cicero was not used sufficiently in Berlin.

Around December 20, 1943, the German ambassador von Papen used secret information from a Cicero document in a conversation with the Turkish Foreign Minister Numan Menemencioğlu . This immediately warned the British ambassador of a possible leak in Ankara. A security check at the British embassy revealed that there would be no such leak and that a document had probably been temporarily stolen from the ambassador by an employee of İsmet İnönü who was sympathetic to the Germans while traveling by train . Bazna was eliminated as a suspect because he was not considered intelligent enough. However, the security measures in the embassy were tightened, which made the spy's work a little more difficult.

After December 24, 1943, Allen Welsh Dulles , representative of the American secret service Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Bern, was informed by the German anti-Hitlerite and spy Fritz Kolbe about an agent in Ankara named Cicero. Kolbe was employed in the Berlin Foreign Ministry, where the telegrams from Ankara ran over his desk. He brought copies of some of these telegrams to Bern. On January 15, the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt informed the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the OSS had German papers showing that Berlin was well informed about the Cairo Conference from November 22 to 26, 1943.

At the beginning of January 1944, the OSS succeeded in smuggling the German Cornelia Kapp into the German embassy in Ankara as von Moyzisch's secretary. However, until she fled to the Americans on April 9, 1944, she did not manage to reveal Cicero's identity.

On February 10, 1944, the British press reported that a German secret service worker who had been employed in Istanbul had defected to the Allies with his wife. It was Erich Vermehren , who did not work for the SD, but for the Abwehr , the competing German intelligence service of the Wehrmacht. So he was no threat to Cicero.

Bazna gave up his post as valet in March 1944, on the one hand because he feared that he would be caught doing his job at some point, and on the other hand, he had already made enough money. The British secret service MI6 in Ankara was only informed by the OSS after his departure .

Aftermath

With his cash fortune, Bazna began to build a luxury hotel in Bursa after the war with government support . But after banknotes that could be traced back to him were recognized as counterfeit by the Bank of England , his fortune vanished into thin air. For more than two decades he had to fight for survival and pay off his debts resulting from counterfeit payments. He gave u. a. Singing lessons, trading in second-hand goods and performing as a baritone singer .

The case became known worldwide in 1950 through rumors in the press and shortly afterwards through the memoirs of Ludwig C. Moyzisch, who had been 'Ciceros' contact at the German embassy.

The British ambassador Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen , who had retired in 1947, had not mentioned the Cicero case at all in his 1949 memoir Diplomat in peace and was . Moyzisch's book forced the House of Commons to look into the subject in October 1950. Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin admitted the Cicero case with the remark that the enemy had only received copies and no original documents. He stated that the espionage case would have been impossible if the diplomat had adhered to the rules for handling classified documents. Even if this statement was extremely embarrassing for Sir Hughe, it had no consequence for him.

In 1951 the spy story by Joseph L. Mankiewicz was filmed under the title Five Fingers (Eng. The Cicero case ). The main role was played by James Mason . This film pretends to be authentic, but in terms of the personality of the spy, a fictitious partner and the outcome of the plot, it is far removed from the real events. Nevertheless, he shaped the reception of this espionage case and a. to the effect that Cicero is said to have supplied details of the Allied landing in northern France in June 1944.

In 1954, Bazna wrote to the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . His request for compensation of 150,000 pounds because of the counterfeit payment by the SD was rejected by the State Department after a few months.

In 1962 he contacted Hans Nogly, who published the book Ich war Cicero with him . In this context, Nogly arranged a meeting with Moyzisch in Innsbruck, who identified the former spy. Although the book was published in several languages, it had little financial success.

In the 1970s the theory was launched that Cicero was part of a deception by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Anthony Cave Brown relied on an alleged quote from Stewart Menzies , the head of the SIS at the time of the Cicero affair: Of course Cicero was under our control. Nigel West showed in a book on espionage myths in World War II in 1984 that Cicero could not have been run by the SIS. The double agent theory has now been finally refuted.

Elyesa Bazna was married twice and had eight children. He lived in Munich for the last few years and is said to have worked there as a night watchman. He died in Munich at the age of 66 and was buried under his real name in the Perlacher Forst cemetery.

literature

• Elyesa Bazna: I was Cicero. The Confessions of the Greatest Spy of World War II. Recorded by Hans Nogly. Munich 1962. - English: I Was Cicero. Written with Hans Nogly. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York 1962.
• Anthony Cave Brown: Bodyguard of Lies . New York 1975. - German: The invisible front. Did secret services decide World War II? Munich 1976. Here: Cicero pp. 371-384.
• John C. Masterman: The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945. New Haven 1972.
• Ludwig C. Moyzisch: The Cicero case. The most sensational espionage affair of the Second World War. Frankfurt 1950. - English: Operation Cicero Postscript by Franz von Papen. Translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon and Heinrich Fraenkel. New York 1950.
• Franz von Papen : One Alley to Truth. Munich 1952.
• Walter Schellenberg : records. The memoirs of the last head of the secret service under Hitler. Munich 1979. Here: Cicero pp. 315-324.
• Nigel West: Cicero. A Stratagem of Deception? in: Unreliable Witness. Espionage Myths of the Second World War . London 1984 (US edition: A Thread of Deceit: Espionage Myths of World War II . New York 1985.)
• Richard Wires: The Cicero Spy Affair. German Access to British Secrets in World War III. New York 2009. ISBN 978-1-929631-80-3 .

Movie

• Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Director), Michael Wilson (Writer): Five Fingers . Twentieth Century-Fox. USA 1952. German: The Cicero case
• Rudolf Nussgruber (director), Hans Nogly, Hans-Dieter Bove (script): I was Cicero . Second German Television. FRG 1963.

Web links

• Literature by and about Elyesa Bazna in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Cicero case in: DER SPIEGEL 50/1951.
• The truth about the Cicero case In: DIE ZEIT 50/1950

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) p. 5.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Richard Wires (2009) pp. 30–32.
3. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 112, 116-117, 130-132.
4. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 127–128.
5. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 165-175.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Richard Wires (2009) p. 186.
7. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 10-11.
8. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 210-213.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Richard Wires (2009) p. 187.
10. ^ Anthony Cave Brown (1975) p. 449.
11. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) pp. 133-137.
12. ↑ Richard Wires (2009) p. 188.