Elyesa Bazna

The details for the Tehran Conference were important for Operation Long Jump, the unsuccessful plot to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill.

Bazna had also conveyed a document that carried the highest security restriction (BIGOT list) about Operation Overlord (the code name for the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944).

It included intelligence that the British ambassador was to request the use of Turkish air bases "to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern Mediterranean until Overlord is launched."

The German Foreign Office questioned the reliability of the intelligence provided by Cicero due to the large quantity of transmitted documents, which meant that apparently little, if any, of it was acted upon.

However, she was loyal to him and passed important information to him twice, once about the upcoming arrival of British security men at the embassy and the second time when she said that she had heard rumors that the Germans had a good source of intelligence.

In 1942, he worked as a valet for Albert Jenke, a German businessman and later embassy staff member, who came to fire Bazna for reading his mail.

[10] Before he worked for Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in 1943,[c] Bazna was hired to do some household and vehicle repairs for Douglas Busk, the First Secretary of the British Embassy.

[28] Busk agreed to recommend Bazna for the open position of valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British ambassador to Turkey, who hired him in 1943[c] assuming that a background check had been performed.

[31] Anthony Cave Brown, author of Bodyguard of Lies, wrote, "Soon, Bazna had ingratiated himself to the extent that Sir Hughe elevated him from purely household duties to a position of some power within the residency and embassy.

He dressed him in an imposing blue uniform, gave him a peaked cap, and used him as a guard to the door of his study; Bazna excluded visitors when Sir Hughe was thinking or napping.

For ceremonial occasions, Sir Hughe dressed him in richly embroidered brocade, shoes with turned up toes, a fez with a tassel, gave him an immense scimitar, and placed him on the main door.

Sir Hughe also paid him more than the 100 Turkish lira that was standard for a valet, and quietly turned a blind eye to the fact that Bazna was having an affair with Lady Knatchbull-Hugessen's nursemaid in the servants' quarters.

[40][f] British historian Richard Wires wrote that Bazna was motivated entirely by greed, as he had dreams of becoming rich by selling secrets to the Germans.

Wires described Bazna as a typical petty criminal from the Balkans, a man of low intelligence with no values except greed who was apolitical and opportunistic, taking advantages of whatever chances he found to try to get rich but who was easily duped by the Germans.

[34] Ultra, the British codebreaking system based at Bletchley Park, routinely read German messages, coded by the Enigma machine.

[46] Guy Liddell, who worked for MI5, recorded that there was a breach in security at the embassy on 17 October 1943, which was later reported by ISOS, Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey.

[48] The intelligence provided by Cicero included a document instructing Knatchbull-Hugessen to request the use of Turkish air bases "to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern Mediterranean until Overlord is launched."

Being able to postpone Turkey's alliance with the Allied forces and the use of their airfields, von Papen told Ribbentrop that the way was now clear to take the Balkans.

[57] Author James Srodes states in his biography of Allen Dulles that some British historians believed that Cicero was "'turned' into a double agent to send disinformation via von Papen".

Brown states that "Bazna was indeed under British control within a short time after he started to photograph the documents",[62] and he was a participant in Plan Jael and Operation Bodyguard.

[67] British intelligence, which was asked by Dulles to interrogate Cicero, gave the impression that it believed Bazna could not speak English and, furthermore, was "too stupid" to be a spy.

They implemented a sting in January 1944 using a false Cabinet Office document that was drafted by the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, and given the forged signature of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

Kapp had gathered and shared a lot of information with the OSS over the months that she worked at the embassy, including all she felt she could expect to learn about Cicero.

[74] One of the best-known spy stories of our time is that of Operation Cicero, a textbook exercise in spycraft set in neutral Ankara, Turkey, during World War II.

It is, perhaps, of little importance that the exercise remained rather academic – that the information pilfered in the best traditions of the cloak-and-dagger business was never fully used by the Nazis; that the British, warned of the Ciceronian activity, took no effective action to stop it and that Cicero himself was never brought to book.

As a matter of fact, the academic nature of the exercise makes Operation Cicero a nice, neat package to handle, uncomplicated by consequences and relatively free of loose ends.

Turkish airfields were important to maintain their strategic advantage in the area, particularly to support Operation Accolade, the British assault on Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands.

Many of the other documents were considered by Ostuf Schuddekoft, head of the British section of Amt VI [one of the 11 departments of Hauptamt Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle], to be too old to be of much value to the Germans.

[74] Moyzisch was aggressively interviewed by the Allies and was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, after which he wrote a book to address rumours and explain his role during the war.

[75] Knatchbull-Hugessen's reputation was severely affected by the Cicero Affair,[74] particularly as he had been previously warned about leaving his keys and document boxes unattended.

Pristina around the turn of the century
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Turkish President İsmet İnönü in conversation during a two-day conference in a train at Adana , circa 30 January 1943.
Allied leaders at the Cairo Conference held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 1943. Seated are Gen. Chiang Kai-shek , Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill .
Fritz Kolbe , a German diplomat who became America's most important spy against the Nazis in World War II . Office of Strategic Services ' Allen Dulles said of him, "George Wood (our code name for Kolbe) was not only our best source on Germany but undoubtedly one of the best secret agents any intelligence service has ever had." [ 64 ] Kolbe identified that there was a spy operating out of a British Embassy in December 1943. [ 65 ]