Elyesa Bazna - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The spymaster who Cicero was in contact with, Ludwig Moyzich, published his memoirs in 1950 with a book named Who was Cicero? Both Allen Dulles, wartime head of the OSS, and Franz von Papen, suggested that there was more to the story than what had emerged in the book. Neither elaborated. Twelve years later, in 1962, I was Cicero was published by 'Cicero' himself.

This book was part of a British intelligence operation to protect the Double Cross System and the Ultra Secret long after the war. Sir John Masterman's The Double Cross System reveals that Bazna was a British agent from the first, controlled by the group under Masterman that ran Eddie Chapman, Dusko Popov, and Juan Pujol Garcia (Garbo). Masterman, an Oxford history don, had been an exchange lecturer at Freiburg University in 1914 and spent that entire war in prison.

As well as feeding the Germans false information, Bazna was used to hide the fact that the 'Enigma' code machine at Bletchley Park, coupled to Alan Turing's Colossus computer, could read German secret correspondence. After the war, the British wished to continue to conceal this from the Russians.

Ian Fleming was nearly prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for From Russia, with Love when he wrote about Bond stealing a Russian code machine the Spektor (renamed Lektor in the film), and came too close to revealing the truth. It was eventually decided that prosecuting him would generate too much publicity.

The 'Ultra' secret was kept until the early seventies.

A film of these events, based on the book Operation Cicero by L.C. Moyzisch was made by 20th Century Fox in 1951. It was titled 5 Fingers and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Bazna, renamed Ulysses Diello, was played by James Mason. The name 'Cicero' was avoided because 20th Century Fox feared American audiences might confuse it with the Chicago suburb. The 1971 Eastern Bloc co-production Liberation also portrayed the Cicero affair, with East German actor Fred Alexander as Bazna.