Elyesa Bazna - Spying For The Germans

Spying For The Germans

Bazna obtained important information about many of the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin conferences and an instruction to the British ambassador to request the use of Turkish airbases in order to bomb the Romanian oilfields at Ploiești. He gave information on planned bombing raids, possibly including the first Ploiești raid in August 1943 by the USAAF, which was met by heavy concentrations of flak and successive raids on the Bulgiarian capital Sofia from 17 November 1943 until 14 April 1944. Both the USAAF Flying Fortresses and RAF Lancasters could reach Ploiești from existing bases in Cyprus and North Africa and after the invasion of Sicily also from southern Italy.

The RAF tried to confuse the Luftwaffe night-fighter command about its target cities. On the occasions when it succeeded, aircraft and crew losses were sharply reduced. Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, routed the main bomber force with last-minute dog-legs where their direction would alter towards another target. Squadrons of Mosquitos were also flown in towards secondary targets to divert the night fighters. Both types of plane dropped "window", (thousands of small aluminium strips), to blind the German radar. There were also native German speakers who had learnt to mimic the actual night-fighter sector controllers, with false orders. Targets were a closely guarded secret, revealed only to the squadron commanders involved a day or two before the nightly missions and subject to change due to unexpected weather. If Bazna passed over genuine target information from the British ambassador's safe, it is possible that this was provided in order to build up his reputation so that later false information about something much more important could be fed through the same channel.

Bazna later provided only fuzzy information about "Operation Overlord", the codename for the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

British intelligence gave the impression that it believed that Bazna could not speak English and furthermore was "too stupid" to be a spy. Bazna himself claimed to speak Turkish, Serbo-Croat and French. He knew a little German from singing Lieder and said that he could read basic English, but had difficulty in speaking it. Much of his conversation in both embassies was in French, then the standard language of diplomacy. Moyzisch, in his 1950 book, pointed out that Bazna was both intelligent and very daring; he was also convinced that the spy had someone else helping him to locate and photograph the documents, but the second man could never be identified. Perhaps that was because he was a British intelligence operator. According to Moyzisch, the German Foreign Office did not make much use of the documents because officers there were divided about their reliability, the personal antipathy between the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop and von Papen only added to the inefficiency.

Von Ribbentrop showed the photographs to Hitler, (the two accepted 'Cicero' documents as useful intelligence). The material came either in a sealed diplomatic bag or by coded radio messages which were being read by the British. Franz von Papen believed that the Cicero documents helped postpone Turkey's entry into the war. Hitler entered a conference of OKH officers with some 'Cicero' materials in December 1943 and declared that the invasion of France would come in spring 1944. He dismissed the likelihood of staged attacks on Norway as a feint.

Hitler persisted in his belief that the Allies would attack somewhere in the Balkans. He feared that Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria might defect to the Allies as Italy had done. It could also threaten the flow of oil, copper and bauxite into the Third Reich.

During the first three months of 1944, 'Cicero' continued to supply the Germans with copies of documents taken from his employer's dispatch box or his safe. The money continued to flow in and dreams of future wealth seemed assured. Photographs of top secret documents were generally handed over in Moyzisch's car which was parked inconspicuously on an Ankara street. On one occasion, this led to a high-speed chase around Ankara as some other organisation was taking an interest in the hand-over. Bazna, who had perhaps been tailed, escaped.

When the 'Cicero' documents predicted specific Allied bombing missions in the Balkans which took place on the predicted date, the authenticity of the information was supported and his reputation enhanced. Indeed, Moyzisch told 'Cicero' that at the end of the war Hitler intended to give him a villa. However, the real use the Germans made of the information was rather limited, and Cicero's role has been much exaggerated in later spy literature.

At this time, British Intelligence had an operation known as 'Double Cross'. It used double agents and fake documents to mount a series of deception operations to confuse the OKW, OKH and Hitler about Allied plans. In 1943, it needed to conceal the target of the first Anglo-American landings on continental Europe. They were all too well aware that Sicily was the obvious target, as it was well within the patrol range of British fighters based in Malta and a short distance from North African ports for landing craft.

The British developed a decoy plan to persuade the Germans that the invasion would come in Greece, with a diversion in Sardinia as a secondary target. As part of this, Operation Mincemeat involved floating a corpse from a submarine off the southern coast of Spain. The corpse was given the false identity of 'Major William Martin' of the Royal Marines, who sat on the planning staff of Combined Operations in London and was carrying papers for General Alexander chained to his wrist. (Alexander was to lead Operation Husky, the actual invasion of Sicily.) Martin had supposedly died in a flying boat accident with plans for the fake invasion of Greece. The location of his "accident" was carefully chosen near the port of Algeciras in neutral Spain. MI6 knew that there was a particularly energetic German Abwehr agent located there, who was likely to be able to induce friends in the Spanish Navy to allow him to photograph the documents.

Cicero's role in Turkey, another neutral country with some pro-German members of the government and armed forces, appears to fit into the Double Cross strategy, with many of the same patterns. Franz von Papen, the German ambassador was close to Hitler, whilst not a Nazi. Moyzisch, an Austrian Nazi, was known to be diligent and effective. So any documents leaking out of the embassy would quickly find their way to Hitler. 'Cicero' perhaps unwittingly played a supporting role in the deception over Sicily. His papers suggested that the invasion would be in Greece and that the British ambassador was involved in attempts to persuade Turkey to join the Allies in the attack.

In the event, the Abwehr was rightly sceptical of 'Cicero', believing that he might be a double agent. They were at that time already running 'Garbo' (Juan Pujol), 'Zig-Zag' (Eddie Chapman) and 'Tricycle' (Dusan Popov), supposedly German agents, to whom they were paying large sums but who were actually working for the British. They were supplying a careful mix of true and false information. 'Cicero', an Albanian like 'Tricycle', who was a Yugoslav national, had good reason to hate the Germans because of events after the Axis invasion of his country. It was obvious that such important papers should not have been left in the insecure embassy residency safe. It should have been inconceivable that any mere ambassador would have been given access to top secret invasion plans. However, they did accept that 'Major Martin' was genuine, and several Wehrmacht divisions were routed away from Sicily and southern Italy to the Balkans, making Operation Husky on the night of July 9/10, 1943 the least costly seaborne invasion of World War II.

'Ultra', the British code-breaking system based at Bletchley Park was routinely reading coded messages between German ambassadors and von Ribbentrop in Berlin; they were sent by the 'Enigma' code machine. This was how Juan Pujol Garcia, alias Garbo, was discovered in Lisbon, where he was sending the Germans such information as "Glasgow dockers would do anything for a litre of red wine" and was subsequently employed by the British. They also knew about Eddie Chapman, alias 'Zig-Zag', a Briton who was recruited by the Germans in Jersey, where he was imprisoned for safe-cracking before the German invasion, and later parachuted into Norfolk by the Luftwaffe at night, thanks to Enigma intercepts. They would have known about 'Cicero' from the same source. Their inept attempts to foil his thefts appear altogether too incompetent.

The biggest wartime deception was over Operation Overlord, where the use of a British naval officer, apparently embittered into becoming a turncoat, (but the son of von Ribbentrop's doctor and so personally known to him during his pre-war stint as ambassador in London), helped to persuade Hitler that the actual attack would come in the Pas de Calais. In this case, some of the true information provided to the Germans seems to have concerned the timing and placing of the disastrous raid on Dieppe (Operation Jubilee) by Canadian forces in 1942. If 'Cicero' were in fact a trusted double agent, he could have been deployed as a supporting actor in this dramatic delusion also. With the British aware from Ultra and Miss Kapp (Moyzisch's new secretary) that he was working for the Germans, he would only have known about Overlord, about which the British ambassador to Turkey would never have been informed, just what Department XX of MI6 wished to reveal. British Intelligence believed that the repeated presentation of many clues in multiple locations served to increase the illusion of authenticity.