Elyesa Bazna - Life

Life

Of Albanian origin, Elyesa Bazna was born to Albanian parents in Kosovo (at the time part of the Ottoman Empire) and moved to Turkey at a very young age. He served as a valet first to the Yugoslav ambassador to Turkey and then to a German counsellor who fired him for reading his mail.

From 1942, Bazna was the valet of the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in Ankara. Sir Hughe had been the British ambassador in Riga, Latvia until the Red Army extinguished its independence in 1940. The embassy in Riga shared a building with the ambassador's residence and there he developed the habit of taking secret papers to his home. Bazna began photographing these secret British documents in Ankara on 21 October 1943. He approached Ludwig Moyzisch, an attaché at the German Embassy in Ankara, indicating that he wanted £20,000 for fifty-six documents he had initially photographed. He became a paid German agent in 1943 and was given the codename "Cicero".

He claimed that his hatred of the British was because his father had been killed by a Briton. This was untrue. His father died peacefully in his bed. His real motive may have been money, or perhaps that he was also working for the British.

Bazna cherished no illusions. He admitted that he came from a poor background, with minimal education, no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance. But he had the courage to take chances and was happy to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated by his Nazi paymasters who paid him in counterfeit sterling.