Richard Wires. The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Vera Laska

Richard Wires. The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in Worm War II. Perspectives on Intelligence History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. xiii+265 pages. $27.95

From times immemorial, there have been spies; they were patriots if they spied for their own country and traitors if they did so for another. Recently a most sensational case was discovered--that of the F.B.I. agent Robert P. Hanssen, uncovered in January 2001 after having spied for the Soviet Union, then Russia since 1985.

The book under review deals with the spectacular case of the Turkish spy Elyesa Bazna, code named "Cicero" by the German ambassador to Turkey, the highest paid spy in history up to that time. He served as valet to the British ambassador in Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. This valet photographed secret documents, selling them to the Germans during 1943-44 and earning an estimated $1.2 million, paid in British pounds and some diamonds. He left his job in April 1944 undetected. His role remained unknown until long after the war when his former German contact, Ludwig Moyzisch, at the German embassy in Ankara, published his memoir in 1950 in Germany. It also appeared in English under the title Operation Cicero (New York: Coward-McCann, 1950) and followed by Cicero's own memoir, I Was Cicero (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Both books were self-serving; both had their own axes to grind; both contained misinformation. There was also a motion picture about the case entitled "Five Fingers," with James Mason and Danielle Darrieux, containing considerable "artistic liberties." While this earned a profit for the studio and an Oscar nomination for the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, it earned nothing for Cicero, who viewed it with the comment: "Exciting, but untrue."

Richard Wires is a former professor of history at Ball State University and has a wartime intelligence background. He undertook the painstaking task to disentangle the numerous bits of misinformation to present us with the true picture of what really happened and how.

Cicero, who did not know his codename until the 1950 book appeared went under the name of "Pierre" while he was spying, got hold of the British ambassador's safe key, while Sir Hughe, the ambassador, was absent from his bedroom. Sir Hughe was careless to bring secret documents to his residence rather than study them at his office at the embassy. Cicero made a wax imprint and a key of his own, thus gaining access to the safe. The photographed documents were delivered to Herr Moyzisch at clandestine meetings at which he also was paid.

The documents contained correspondence, telegrams and reports about the Allied conferences in Moscow, Cairo and Tehran, about planned war strategies, and Allied efforts to get Turkey into the war on the Allied side. They also indicated that there would be no invasion against Nazi forces in the Balkans but rather somewhere in the west. They did not contain plans about Overlord (the Normandy invasion) as some of the memoirs indicated.

Operation Cicero was full of ironies: before hiring Bazna as a valet the British did not run a background check; had they done so they would have had plenty of reasons to suspect him as a shady character and thus not hire him. The ambassador was highly careless and negligent of his strict instructions not to remove confidential materials form his embassy office. The Germans did not utilize the precious information they gained because of the deep rivalry between the personnel of the military and diplomatic corps. Some Nazi officials suspected that Cicero was a British plant.

The greatest irony was the denouement after the war: the fortune that Cicero gained for his efforts at the risk of his life, those British pounds, were counterfeit money. Cicero's dreams of a rich life turned into a nightmare as he was sued for replacements of his bogus payment to creditors. He actually went to court to be reimbursed by the West German government for his spy services, but not surprisingly, he was unsuccessful. He died at the age of 66 as a poor night watchman in Munich.

The author devotes a chapter to the story of "Operation Bernhard," that is the manufacturing of about $600 million worth of false British pounds at the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen near Berlin. The Nazis intended to flood Britain with the bogus money from the air, then changed their plans. Instead, they used it for purchases abroad and paying Cicero. At the war's end, "Bernhard" was moved to the concentration camp of Nauthausen in Austria. As the Allies neared, plates and cases of money were thrown into Lake Teplitzsee. Several expeditions retrieved some of them after the war.

This is a brilliantly researched and reconstructed piece of history. Both the text itself and the notes let us into details and side issues, such as the example of Moyzisch's assistant secretary who turned out to be a spy for the Americans. There is a detailed analysis of the complex Turkish situation. The dramatis personae are well characterized as to personality and motivation. The shadow war of intelligence in World War II is crowded with spies on all sides and there is a rich literature published especially in England about the subject. This book deserves a place of honor among them. It clarified for the first time the story of the so-called "spy of the century," "the highest paid spy," the man codenamed, unknown to him at the time, Cicero.