Lucas Delattre - A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

In late October 1943, Bazna decided to contact the Germans to offer them secret documents from the British embassy. He had managed to steal the key to the personal safe of Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen while the ambassador was sleeping. He had had a copy made and was thus able to get his hands on confidential documents of the greatest importance. He immediately thought of making them available to the enemies of England in exchange for hard cash. On the evening of October 26 he went to the German embassy on Atatürk Boulevard, where he met Ludwig Moyzisch, a former journalist from Vienna with the official title of commercial attaché, who was in fact a permanent agent of the intelligence services. In their conversation, Bazna spoke French and claimed that his name was Pierre. He said that he hated the English, who had “killed his father.” He offered documents of “exceptional quality” in exchange for money, although he had nothing to show for the moment. He was asking for fabulous amounts (twenty thousand pounds for two rolls of undeveloped film). “Pierre” gave Moyzisch two days to think about it, letting him know that he would not hesitate to look for a better client—for example, the Soviets—in the event of a German refusal.

Moyzisch, somewhat skeptical, informed the ambassador, Franz von Papen, of this astonishing offer. Von Papen was very fond of all kinds of intrigue and believed in the virtues of combining diplomacy with espionage. Because of the scope of the affair, von Papen referred it directly to Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin, who turned the file over to his assistant, Horst Wagner, liaison officer between the ministry and the SS. The file was soon turned over to Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign espionage. He decided to pay the twenty thousand pounds “to see,” and was not disappointed by the result. The first “delivery” from the Albanian servant contained many details about conversations at the highest level between British and Turkish leaders. These negotiations dealt with a highly strategic question: Was Turkey finally going to abandon its de facto neutrality? Would it shift into the Allied camp, and if so, at what price? Its strategic interest was to remain outside the war, even though it secretly dreamed of a dual defeat: first of the Soviets and then of Nazi Germany.

Ambassador von Papen could use the documents photographed by the Albanian valet to attempt to thwart the maneuvers of the Allies. Always one step ahead thanks to the information provided by his spy, he was in a position to put very targeted pressure on the Turkish authorities in order to force them to maintain their neutrality. He decided to name this exceptional spy “Cicero,” because of the particularly eloquent nature of the material supplied. In Berlin, Walter Schellenberg hoped to use Cicero to decipher the English secret codes. On November 4, 1943, a plane from Berlin landed in Ankara with the sum of two hundred thousand pounds sterling on board. This treasure was to pay the spy for several months. It turned out much later that these were counterfeit bills expertly produced by a secret agency of the Reich’s espionage services.

In the course of the fall of 1943 and the following winter, Cicero turned over large quantities of invaluable information to the Germans. Ambassador von Papen considered him a first-rate source and used him daily to supply material for his diplomatic cables to Berlin. He informed Hitler in person of the existence of the Cicero file when they met in November 1943. But Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who detested von Papen, whom he saw as a rival, had every interest in minimizing the importance of the affair. “Too good to be true,” he told Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the German secret services. A trap could not be ruled out. It is thus not certain that Berlin drew all the benefit possible from the information provided by the spy in Ankara.

However, Cicero had enough to feed the curiosity of the leaders of the Reich. In particular, he provided rather detailed reports of the major summit conferences of the Allied camp in Cairo and Teheran in November and December 1943, about which Turkish leaders knew a good deal because of their close contacts with the British. Thanks to Cicero, the Germans were able to grasp the broad outlines of their enemies’ diplomatic strategy: Churchill wanted to open a front in southeastern Europe by trying (without success) to include Turkey in a vast Mediterranean offensive against Germany. The Americans did not share this view. Roosevelt was relatively uninterested in Turkey and was concentrating on an invasion of the European continent from Great Britain. Despite some not insignificant differences of opinion, the Allies’ determination to crush the Axis forces was absolute. Those German leaders who paid attention to Cicero’s revelations could have no illusions on that subject. “Cicero’s documents described with clarity the fate that awaited Germany,” Franz von Papen wrote in his memoirs after the war. “I trembled with emotion before the spectacle of the vast historical prospects opened to me by those stolen documents,” Ludwig Moyzisch wrote many years after the events.

Bern, December 1943

The Allies learned of the existence of the spy in Ankara thanks to “George Wood.” The first mention of Cicero in an Allied document followed another visit to Bern by Fritz Kolbe, which took place over the Christmas holiday. Kolbe brought to the Americans from Berlin a series of cables, some of which came from the German embassy in Ankara. Among the documents that Allen Dulles transmitted to Washington, several mentioned the existence of Cicero.

On December 29, OSS Bern sent to Washington headquarters a coded message mentioning the name of Cicero, with no explanation of the nature of this mysterious source. A few days later, in a cable sent on New Year’s Day 1944, Allen Dulles provided details for his Washington colleagues, referring to a series of documents “on which Milit [Ambassador von Papen] clearly placed great value and which, seemingly, were taken from the Zulu [British] Embassy through a source designated as Cicero.” These details, Dulles added, had been immediately turned over to the British intelligence services based in Switzerland (designated as 521 in OSS language), for transmission to London.

On learning of the content of the information provided by Cicero, the leadership of the Allied intelligence services felt a chill: the spy had given his German contacts a list of documents prepared by the “Zulu ambassador” (Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen) in preparation for the second Cairo conference of early December 1943, a conference that had unsuccessfully considered Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Also included in the “deliveries” by the Ankara spy was a Foreign Office memorandum dated October 7, 1943 with the title “A Long-Range View of Turkish-British Policy.” All the steps taken by the English to encourage Turkey’s entry into the war were set out in detail. These ultraconfidential materials had been transmitted by von Papen to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin ( Grand ), between November 3 and 5, 1943.

The identity of Cicero, and what exactly the Germans knew through him, were questions that reached the highest levels of the Allied command during the first weeks of 1944. But the British were slow to react. They waited until the end of January before asking Dulles to ask his Berlin agent for “additional available messages from the Cicero sources.” Almost a month later, they asked for more details about the exact time of the November cables. On January 10, 1944, OSS Bern informed London and Washington that “Wood is ignorant of the identity of Cicero.” Several weeks later, in late February 1944, Dulles wrote: “We are informed by Wood that there is no way of finding out who Cicero is or where the information about Cairo and Teheran originated. He suggests, in connection with this, that the leak might have come from an Albanian-born private secretary of Inönü whom the President took with him to Cairo.” Although fairly close to reality, these details were not sufficient to identify the spy.