A thrilling plunge into the world of the legendary WWII spy
code-named "Cicero," a shadowy figure whose mysteries have
challenged the best efforts of expert intelligence officers,
historians, and journalists. Wires (Emeritus, Ball State Univ.),
who served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps in southern Germany,
corrects discrepancies in previous accounts and fictionalizations
(e.g., the 1952 film Five Fingers) of the Cicero affair. Neutral
Turkey was a center of intrigue and espionage caught between three
giant powers, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the
western Allies during the fateful years 1943-44. The British
Ambassador to Turkey, following Churchill's strategy, tried to
seduce the Turks into entering the war in order to mount a massive,
coordinated attack against Hitler's eastern flank, but the nervous
Turks feared being overrun by the two great dictator-led armies.
The British diplomat, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, had the
careless habit of bringing home top-secret documents from the
embassy in Ankara for study. His trusted valet, Elyess Bazna, a
former convict, had the run of the house when Sir Hughe was not
home. The valet made duplicate keys and photographed documents,
selling the films to a high German official. Wires supplements this
oft-told story with other adventures and other questions: Did the
spy got away, or was he caught? How did the skeptical German high
command, thinking the spy data was a British deception, plan for
D-Day after noting the word "Overlord," code for the Allied
invasion of Normandy during the critical winter of 1943-44? The
Cicero operation, often called the most successful spying episode
of WWII, helped the Germans gain insights on British proposals for
Turkey and plans for winning the war. A great true spy adventure
full of dramatic suspense. Wires has done exhaustive research in
discovering what is known today, despite the web of lies and false
clues of a master spy operating in the guise of a faithful servant.
(Kirkus Reviews)
The episode of the opportunistic valet of Britain's ambassador
to neutral Turkey during World War II--dubbed Cicero for the
eloquence of the top-secret material he appropriated from his
employer Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and sold to the Nazis--is a
staple of intelligence lore. Yet this remarkable and sometimes
comical story has often been recounted with little regard for the
facts, most prominently in the popular film "Five Fingers." Now,
historian and former intelligence officer Richard Wires presents
the first full and objective account of the Cicero spy episode,
offering closure to past discrepancies and credible solutions to
remaining mysteries. Copiously documented, "The Cicero Spy Affair"
provides readers with the true chronology of events and places them
in an international context. It is a story set in the hotbed of
intrigue that was wartime Turkey, replete with a dramatic car
chase, a series of colorful mistresses ever loyal to their lover
the spy, and an old-school British ambassador whose documents are
photographed at night as he plays the piano in the drawing room
and/or slips into a sleeping pill-induced slumber.
Despite the affair's amusing aspects, it is also a sobering tale
in which there are no winners and from which there are serious
lessons to be learned. Germany never made use of the highly
sensitive British documents it obtained during this crucial
four-month period of the war because the handling of the
information was caught up in a bitter and wasteful personal rivalry
between Ribbentrop and Schellenberg. It was sheer luck for the
British that their war effort did not sustain any significant
damage. For, while the book states definitively that security
regarding the Allied invasion of Normandy was not breached in the
Cicero affair, Germany did gain a potential advantage concerning
campaigns in the Aegean and the Balkans. This embarrassed the
British greatly, especially since Cicero walked away a free man.
However, the greedy valet--the most highly paid spy in history at
that time--did not achieve his goals, either; he discovered some
years later that the British banknotes he insisted on as payment
were counterfeited by the Germans as part of a larger
counterfeiting project. Cicero died a desperate man, deeply in
debt--a fitting anticlimax for an espionage episode resulting in
neither bodily injury nor strategic impact, but in humiliation on
all sides.
General
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