CICERO AFFAIR. Widely acknowledged as Nazi Germany’s most
successful wartime enemy penetration, the cicero Affair revolved
around Elyesa Bazna, code-named cicero by the Germans, because
of the eloquence of the documents he appropriated from the Brit-
ish ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. Bazna,
born on 28 July 1904 in the Balkan town of Pristina in the western
Ottoman Empire, had held a series of odd jobs before becoming a
servant to a number of European diplomats based in Ankara. Without
undergoing a background check, he was employed as a personal valet
by the British ambassador. On 26 October 1943, Bazna visited the
German embassy with two rolls of film and asked for £20,000 as pay-
ment (each subsequent roll would cost £15,000). Ludwig Moyzisch,
an Austrian journalist who had joined Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Se-
curity Service) and was assigned to the Ankara embassy two years
earlier, became Bazna’s case officer. Until late February 1944, Bazna
continued to photograph papers that the ambassador had removed
from his embassy offices for study at his residence.
These documents contained correspondence, telegrams, and re-
ports about top-level conferences in Moscow, Cairo, and Tehran,
planned war strategies, and Allied efforts to persuade Turkey to enter
the war as a partner. While they also indicated that there would be
no invasion against Nazi forces in the Balkans but rather somewhere
in the West, no mention was made of Operation overlord (the Nor-
mandy invasion) as often claimed. Even after the British ambassador
began to suspect a leak and new security measures were put in place,
Bazna escaped scrutiny and left his employ a free man. By that time,
he had accumulated roughly £300,000 (or $1.2 million). More than
half of that amount, however, had been paid in counterfeit bank notes
produced by Operation bernhard.
While the British operated under a false sense of security, the
Germans managed to gain very little from this extraordinary cache
of documents. The main problem derived from the strong personal
rivalry between Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and SD
chief Walter Schellenberg, which affected the ultimate evaluation of
the papers. Besides the deep suspicion that Bazna might be an agent
provocateur, too many points ran counter to basic Nazi assumptions
about the war and its winnability. Further complicating this situation
was the figure of Cornelia Kapp, who had concluded an espionage
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