Elyesa Bazna

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Elyesa Bazna : biography

28 July 1904 – 21 December 1970

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 RAF 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 his 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.