The Right Job

In the autumn of 1943, a 39-year-old Albanian-born Turkish national named Elyesa Bazna was working as the valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, British Ambassador to Turkey. He cleaned the ambassador's clothes, drew his bath, and, in the evenings when the ambassador was otherwise occupied, photographed the contents of the despatch boxes the ambassador kept in his bedroom safe.

Bazna was not an ideologically motivated spy. His asking price, which he delivered to the German intelligence attaché in Ankara through a series of careful approaches, was 20,000 pounds sterling per roll of film.

The Germans — specifically the SD officer Ludwig Moyzisch, who ran Bazna — paid him. They gave him the codename CICERO.

What He Delivered

Between October 1943 and April 1944, Cicero provided Moyzisch with an estimated 52 rolls of film containing classified British documents. The material included minutes of the Cairo and Tehran Conferences of November and December 1943, at which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin discussed the timing and location of the cross-channel invasion known as Operation OVERLORD.

The files also contained diplomatic telegrams between the Foreign Office in London and the ambassador discussing Allied attempts to bring Turkey into the war on the Allied side, and reports on Allied military planning in the Mediterranean theater.

"CICERO's material was so sensitive that Schellenberg and Kaltenbrunner initially refused to believe it was genuine. The possibility of a plant was taken seriously for weeks." — Ludwig Moyzisch, Operation Cicero, Allan Wingate, 1950

The German intelligence hierarchy was divided. SD chief Walter Schellenberg and RSHA head Ernst Kaltenbrunner were skeptical. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop reportedly received a report from CICERO's documents outlining the OVERLORD planning and filed it without acting on it. The German failure to operationally exploit arguably the most valuable single intelligence operation of the war remains one of the strangest chapters in the history of the conflict.

The Money

Cicero was paid approximately 300,000 pounds sterling over the course of his operations — an enormous sum equivalent to several million dollars in contemporary purchasing power.

The notes were entirely counterfeit. They had been produced by Operation Bernhard, a German program using skilled prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp to forge British banknotes. The forgeries were of high quality and had been intended for introduction into the British financial system to destabilize the pound. They were also used to pay agents.

Bazna discovered the forgeries only after the war ended, when British authorities informed him that his accumulated salary had no legal value. His attempt to collect compensation from the West German government failed. He later wrote a memoir and worked on construction sites in West Germany to support himself.

Why Germany Failed to Use It

The question of why German leadership did not act more decisively on CICERO's intelligence has been analyzed by historians for decades. Several factors appear significant.

First, the material arrived at a point when Hitler and the senior military were predisposed to skepticism about intelligence that confirmed Allied strength and initiative. Second, Turkey's neutrality — which Cicero's material was partly being used to maintain — constrained German options for exploiting the intelligence aggressively. Third, Allied deception operations had already established an atmosphere in which German decision-makers were uncertain about which intelligence to trust.

The result was that Germany possessed detailed foreknowledge of OVERLORD's timeline and, according to some of the material, its general geographic orientation — and did essentially nothing with it.

The Cover Blown

Cicero's operation ended in April 1944, partly because a secretary at the German Embassy in Ankara — providing information to the Americans — identified the codename. The British began taking countermeasures. The despatch boxes were moved. The supply of material dried up.

Bazna disappeared into Turkey. He was never prosecuted — Turkey's wartime neutrality made any judicial action complicated — and he died in Munich in 1970, still carrying worthless banknotes as evidence of a deal that had never quite paid off.