Elyesa Bazna (), sometimes known as Iljas, Ilyaz and Iliaz Bazna (; 28 July 1904 – 21 December 1970), was a secret agent for Nazi Germany during World War II, operating under the code name Cicero.
In 1943, Bazna was hired as a valet by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British ambassador in Ankara, Turkey. He photographed British documents in Knatchbull-Hugessen's possession, and sold them to the Germans through their attaché Ludwig Carl Moyzisch in what became known as the Cicero affair.
As Cicero, Bazna passed on important information about many of the Allied leaders' conferences, including the Moscow, Tehran and Cairo Conferences. The details for the Tehran Conference were important for Operation Long Jump, the unsuccessful plot to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill.
Bazna had also conveyed a document that carried the highest security restriction (BIGOT list) about Operation Overlord (the code name for the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944). It included intelligence that the British ambassador was to request the use of Turkish air bases "to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern Mediterranean until Overlord is launched." The information about the Normandy Invasion was not known by the Germans until after the war. Had it been provided in time, Operation Overlord (the preparations for D-Day) would have been compromised. He also provided intelligence that might have made the Germans believe that there was no danger of attack in the Balkans.
The information that he leaked is believed to have been among the more damaging disclosures made by an agent during WWII. The German Foreign Office questioned the reliability of the intelligence provided by Cicero due to the large quantity of transmitted documents, which meant that apparently little, if any, of it was acted upon. It seems likely that he had received some intelligence training from the Italian secret intelligence service, SIM. This would explain much, for as Wilfred Dunderdale later stated, "We always thought Cicero was an Italian agent because of his modus operandi - they gave their agents special training in locksmithery and in infiltrating diplomatic households."
After the war, Bazna lived in Ankara with his family for many years and obtained work doing odd jobs. Much of the money the Germans had paid him was revealed to be counterfeit. He moved to Munich in 1960 and worked as a night watchman before dying in 1970 of kidney disease. In 1962, Bazna published a memoir about the Cicero affair.
Early life and family
Bazna was born in 1904 in Pristina, Kosovo Vilayet, Ottoman Empire (now Kosovo). His parents were of Albanian heritage. His father was a teacher of Islamic doctrine and a landowner. He later stated that his father was a Muslim mullah named Hafiz Yazan Bazna, one of his uncles was Major General Kemal. His grandfather was Tahir Pasha the Brave. Both his grandfather and uncle were Young Turks who served under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
When he was 14, Serb forces captured Bazna's birthplace and his family relocated during the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to Istanbul, which was then occupied by British, French, Italian and American Allied forces of World War I. The Turkish nationalists opposed the occupying forces.
According to Bazna, he attended a military academy in Fatih, Turkey, before 1919. At age 16 he joined a French military unit in Istanbul. He claimed to have stolen British weapons and cars for the Turkish National Movement, which was led by Atatürk.
Richard Wires, author of Cicero, stated that Bazna was not motivated to steal for political or patriotic reasons. When he was caught stealing he was sent to a penal labor camp in Marseille, France, for three years. He reportedly worked at the Berliet motor company after he left the labor camp. While there, he learned locksmithing skills.
In 1925, Bazna moved to Istanbul, where he worked for the Istanbul Corp. in the transportation department. He then worked as a fire brigade chief in Yozgat before returning to Istanbul to drive taxis.
Bazna spoke Albanian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and French, the latter of which was the standard language of diplomacy at that time. He knew a little German from singing Lieder and said that he could read basic English but had difficulty speaking it. He was trained as an opera singer.
Bazna married twice; with his first wife, whom he later divorced, he had four children. He had several live-in mistresses, one of whom, Mara, was a nursemaid to the children of Douglas Busk, a British ambassador. Mara lived with him in the Kavaklıdere hills in a small house that he called "Cicero Villa". Their relationship was tumultuous and Bazna ended the affair due to their fighting and her jealousy. However, she was loyal to him and passed important information to him twice, once about the upcoming arrival of British security men at the embassy and the second time when she said that she had heard rumors that the Germans had a good source of intelligence. Once he began seeing a new mistress, Esra, his relationship with Mara ended permanently.
After Esra, he took a woman named Aika as his mistress and set her up in an apartment. She left after his pound notes were determined to be counterfeit. He married for a second time to a woman named Duriet and had four more children.
Espionage career
Background: Turkey during World War II Turkey was neutral during much of World War II, although in October 1939 Britain signed a treaty to protect Turkey should Germany attack it. Turkey maintained its neutrality by preventing German troops from crossing its borders into Syria or the USSR. During this time Turkey had lucrative trade relationships with Germany and the UK.
Germany had significant business interests in Turkey, including banks, and beginning in 1941 it was reliant on chromite, chromium ore, from Turkey for its armament production. In 1943 all of the chromite Germany imported for its weaponry came from Turkey.
Throughout the war Turkey's economy was reliant on and prospered by virtue of its affiliation with both the Allies and the Axis powers. As a result, the country's gold reserve had risen to 216 tons by the end of 1945, from 27 tons at the beginning of the war.
Starting in 1942 the Allies provided military aid, and then began imposing economic sanctions in 1943 to force Turkey to enter the war. The Allied powers wanted Turkey to become engaged in a fight against Germany's eastern flank; however, Turkey was afraid of being overrun by the Russian and German armies, both of which were led by dictators.
The Allied and Axis powers became increasingly involved in espionage in Turkey to protect their own strategic interests beginning in 1943. There were two Allied factions, the western Allies and the Soviet Union. Germany was the third entity engaged in intelligence gathering. The Germans were able to fund their espionage, propaganda and diplomacy efforts from the profits of its banks in Turkey and through counterfeiting.
By August 1944 Turkey broke off relations with Germany, as its defeat began to seem inevitable. In February 1945 it declared war on Germany and Japan, a symbolic move that allowed Turkey to join the emerging United Nations.
Employment by diplomats Bazna worked for foreign diplomats and consulates as a doorman, driver and guard upon his return to Turkey. Aided by his ability to speak French, he served as a kavass or valet, first to the Yugoslav ambassador to Turkey. In 1942, he worked as a valet for Albert Jenke, a German businessman and later embassy staff member, who came to fire Bazna for reading his mail.
Before he worked for Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in 1943, Bazna was hired to do some household and vehicle repairs for Douglas Busk, the First Secretary of the British Embassy. Due to Bazna's poor English, he answered all interview questions in French. Although he supplied some written biographical information, excluding having been employed and fired by Jenke, none of the biographical information was checked. The Turkish secret service apparently warned the embassy at some point about Bazna. Over the few months that he worked for Busk, Bazna secretly photographed a few documents and, with the help of Mrs. Busk's nursemaid Mara, he tried to gain access to more valuable forms of intelligence.
Busk agreed to recommend Bazna for the open position of valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British ambassador to Turkey, who hired him in 1943 assuming that a background check had been performed. Knatchbull-Hugessen had been the British ambassador in Riga, Latvia, until 1935.
Anthony Cave Brown, author of Bodyguard of Lies, wrote, "Soon, Bazna had ingratiated himself to the extent that Sir Hughe elevated him from purely household duties to a position of some power within the residency and embassy. He dressed him in an imposing blue uniform, gave him a peaked cap, and used him as a guard to the door of his study; Bazna excluded visitors when Sir Hughe was thinking or napping. For ceremonial occasions, Sir Hughe dressed him in richly embroidered brocade, shoes with turned up toes, a fez with a tassel, gave him an immense scimitar, and placed him on the main door. Sir Hughe also paid him more than the 100 Turkish lira that was standard for a valet, and quietly turned a blind eye to the fact that Bazna was having an affair with Lady Knatchbull-Hugessen's nursemaid in the servants' quarters." Bazna often sang German Lieder after lunch while Knatchbull-Hugessen played the piano, much to the ambassador's enjoyment.
Beginning of espionage career While at Riga, Knatchbull-Hugessen had developed a habit of taking secret papers to his home from the British embassy, and continued that practice in Ankara. Bazna gained access to documents in the ambassador's document box and safe using his locksmithing skills, including making impressions and then copies of the key for the document box. He began photographing secret documents about war strategy, troop movements and negotiations with Turkey to enter the war. He took the photographs while the ambassador slept, took a bath or played the piano.
Bazna approached the German Embassy in Ankara on 1943, indicating that he wanted two rolls of film of the ambassador's documents. He became a spy through the connection with his former employer, Albert Jenke. Jenke was the brother-in-law of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister. Although Bazna was fired by Jenke, his wife contacted German intelligence officer Ludwig Carl Moyzisch, serving as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) officer attached to the German embassy in Ankara, and told him of the photographs that Bazna had taken of classified information at the British Embassy. He became a paid German agent under Moyzisch and was given the SD code name "Cicero" by German Ambassador Franz von Papen due to Bazna's "astonishing eloquence". His Nazi paymasters made about of his payments in counterfeit bank notes under Operation Bernhard.
According to Muammer Kaylan, author of The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey, Bazna said he had begun spying for the Germans because he needed the money and, although he was not a Nazi, he liked Germans and disliked the British. He also alluded to involvement with the Milli Emniyet Hizmeti, which became the Turkish National Security Service in 1965.
British historian Richard Wires wrote that Bazna was motivated entirely by greed, as he had dreams of becoming rich by selling secrets to the Germans. Wires described Bazna as a typical petty criminal from the Balkans, a man of low intelligence with no values except greed who was apolitical and opportunistic, taking advantages of whatever chances he found to try to get rich but who was easily duped by the Germans.