Elyesa Bazna
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Elyesa Bazna (1904 in Kosovo - December 21 1970 in Munich) was a spy employed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. He hated the British and sold secret information to the Germans through their ambassador in Ankara, Turkey, Franz von Papen.
Albanian by birth, Bazna was 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. Bazna began photographing secret British documents on October 21 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 photographed initially. He became a paid German agent in 1943 and was given the codename "Cicero". He leaked important information about many of the international conferences and bombing raids such as Ploesti but only fuzzy information about "Operation Overlord", the codename for the Battle of Normandy. The British "intelligence" believed that Bazna could not speak English and furthermore was "too stupid" to be a spy.
Bazna resigned from his position at the service of the ambassador at the end of April 1944 when he feared betrayal by Moyzisch's secretary, who defected to the allies. He was paid £300,000 by the Abwehr with counterfeit British Pounds (see Operation Bernhard). After the war he unsuccessfully tried to sue the German government for outstanding pay.
His memoirs were entitled I was Cicero. The book was later made into the 1951 movie 5 Fingers, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, in which Bazna was played by James Mason.
See also
References
- L’affaire Cicéron by François Kersaudy, ISBN 2262019215.