Elyesa Bazna

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Elyesa Bazna

Elyesa Bazna (Albanian: Iljaz Bazna born 1904 in Kosovo - December 21, 1970 in Munich) was an Albanian spy who offered secret documents to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. He hated the British whom he held responsible for the death of his father but, principally motivated by monetary gain (he had always wanted to be an opera singer), sold information to the Germans through their ambassador in Ankara, Turkey, Franz von Papen.

Naturalized Turk of Albanian origin (born to Moslem Albanian parents in Kosovo and moved to Turkey at a very young age), 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 Ploieşti but only fuzzy information about "Operation Overlord", the codename for the Battle of Normandy. British intelligence believed that Bazna could not speak English and furthermore was "too stupid" to be a spy. Moyzisch, in his book published after the war, asserts that the information had been good enough to make preparations against the allied landing in Normandy, but because of personal antipathy between the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ambassador Franz von Papen the German Foreign Office did not believe in the veracity of the documents. Furthermore, the Abwehr, when asked to evaluate the material, pronounced it unreliable, because until the fall of Wilhelm Canaris the Abwehr was secretly working against Hitler and collaborating with the English secret service to make the German government swallow any type of deception, like Operation Mincemeat and Operation Fortitude.

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 sued the German government for outstanding pay, and obtained a modest recompense.

His memoirs were entitled I was Cicero and published in 1962.

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 entitled 5 Fingers , directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Bazna, renamed Ulysses Diello, was played by James Mason.

[edit] See also

Fritz Kolbe

[edit] References

François Kersaudy: L’affaire Cicéron (ISBN 2-262-01921-5)
L(udwig) C(arl) Moyzisch: Der Fall Cicero (Palladium Verlag, Heidelberg, 1952)
Ian Colvin: Chief of Intelligence (Gollancz, 1951)