BAZOFT, FARZAD • 37he had been paid. He later wrote his memoirs,I Was Cicero, as did
his SD handler, Ludwig Moyszisch (Operation Cicero). His exploits
were depicted in the movieFive Fingers, his role played by James
Mason. Bazna died in 1971.BAZOFT, FARZAD.Originally from Iran, Bazoft worked as a free-
lance journalist for theObserverin England. He was arrested on espi-
onage charges in Baghdad and was hanged on 15 March 1990. Bazoft
had been detained after visiting Al-Qaqaa State Establishment at
Iskandariya, half an hour south of the capital; there, he had attempted
to take soil samples, apparently in an effort to find out what had
caused a massive explosion at the site on 17 August 1989, when sev-
eral hundred people were rumored to have been killed. Saddam Hus-
sein ignored pleas for clemency and Bazoft, who was traveling on
temporary British travel documents, was executed, sparking much
debate about who had paid for his numerous trips to the Middle East
as a freelancer and about his own links with intelligence agencies.
The Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, released an extract
from Bazoft’s personal address book containing the London tele-
phone number of Yaacov Nimrodi, a legendary Israeli intelligence
officer who had spent much of his career running the Mossad station
in Tehran. The controversy increased when the British government
disclosed that Bazoft had maintained contact withSpecial Branch,
reporting on Iranian refugees and political activists, and had con-
cealed from theObserverhis criminal conviction for armed robbery,
a sentence he had served at the very time he was pretending to take
a course in journalism at Birmingham University.
According to Simon Henderson’sInstant Empire, Bazoft was
working for theSecret Intelligence Serviceand on the day of his
arrest at Baghdad airport had successfully delivered the Qaqaa soil
sample to the British Embassy, which had promptly dispatched it to
London for analysis. There is also some evidence that Bazoft was
working for Mossad, citing his expulsion from Tunisia after taking
covert photographs of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s head-
quarters at Hammam ash-Shatt, only days before it was attacked by
eight Israeli F-16 fighter bombers on the morning of 1 October 1985.
Escorted by a squadron of F-15 fighters, the aircraft flew nearly
4,000 kilometers, conducted several complex midair refueling opera-