The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II (Reviews of Books)

Albion; 3/22/2002; Winks, Robin W.

Richard Wires. The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II. (Perspectives of Intelligence History.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. 1999. Pp. xiv, 265. $27.95. ISBN 0-275-96456-6.

Richard Wires, Professor Emeritus of History at Ball State University, has written a full, complex, and judicious account and analysis of one of the best-known intelligence episodes of World War II. "Cicero" appears in virtually every reference work on intelligence, has at least a walk-on part in a hundred or more books about wartime intelligence, was the focus of a popular film, Five Fingers, and until now continues to entertain readers and, often, to baffle writers because of post-war romanticized accounts of what Wires himself concludes was the greatest spy of the war. In all judgments except this last one Wires is superb, with research as definitive as a field riddled with intentionally misleading sources will permit, with analysis that asks all of the right and important questions, and with lively, cool prose that retains the drama inherent in the story without a hint of exaggeration. This book, which appears in David Kahn's series, Perspectives on Intelligence History, is a model for the field.

Cicero was the code name the Germans gave to Elyeza Bazna, valet to the British Ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, who from October 1943 to some point in early- to mid-1944 photographed the confidential contents of a variety of documents the ambassador, in violation of security expectations, often took from the embassy to his residence. The German Ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, deemed the early selections of this material so valuable, he gave Bazna the code name of Cicero, for his eloquence. Bazna became (or more correctly, believed himself to be) the most highly-paid spy in the war, receiving upwards of [pounds]300,000 in payoffs. A very substantial portion of this money proved to be counterfeit, however, and after the war he was in trouble with the law for attempting to use forged currency to meet many imprudent undertakings and was reduced, it is thought, to being a night watchman in Munich when he died in 1970.

The above paragraph is couched in almost conditional language, because nearly everything about Bazna is open to doubt. He is often referred to as an Albanian, yet as Wires shows, he did not know any ethnic Albanian language. He is said to have cleverly selected the best intelligence information to transmit to the Germans, and yet, as the author makes clear, Bazna's English was deficient in the extreme. Some accounts have him transmitting information until April 1944 and others say he stopped in February. Time and again Wires presents the evidence, weighs it with care, and gives us has own considered conclusions. Wires no doubt is helped in his balancing act by having degrees in European history and in law, and having served in southern Germany in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, as well as having lived in London, but his best ally is a sturdy commonsense. The result is an astute, sensible, very readable book that is unlikely ever to be overtaken by the work of others.

Wires states that his purposes are to "assemble the available evidence, identify in the course of a comprehensive narrative important issues that have produced disagreement and controversy concerning the [Cicero] affair, and offer closure to some past disputes and credible solutions to questions that remain" (p. xiii). In all this Wires succeeds admirably. Wires also examines why the "fame of the Cicero affair came to transcend the historical facts" (p. 203), shows why the Germans failed to use effectively any of the genuinely valuable information Cicero supplied, reveals a man blinded by greed and over-confidence who bears only scant similarity to the actor James Mason in Five Fingers, takes gently to task in powerful end-notes a number of romanticizing authors, reviews the significance of the defection from the German embassy of Cornelia Kapp, a secretary with a complicated personal history, confirms that the American Office of Strategic Services knew about Cicero's activities but behaved amateurishly, and in the end evaluates the importance of Cicero's work. The Germans first learned of the term Overlord (the code name for Allied landings in Normandy) from Cicero, but did not pursue it, and they gained a considerable understanding of British policy toward Turkey and some information on Allied planning for the Cairo and Tehran conferences. The result is a fine book: were that there were more like it in this crowded and often murky field.

2002 North American Conference on British Studies

alternative review

The Historian; 3/22/2001; Boyd, Carl

The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II. By Richard Wires. (Westport and London: Praeger, 1999. Pp. xiii, 265. $27.95.)

The genre of spy literature in the Second World War is inevitably varied and usually intrinsically interesting; less common, however, is the type of care for the accuracy of detail and judiciousness of interpretation that the author of this study presents here. The Cicero Spy Affair is a historically sound, lucidly written account that needs no "journalese" or sensationalism to make it both entertaining and informative.

This is the classic spy story of the war. Cicero, the covername for the valet of the British ambassador to Turkey, photographed secret embassy documents while the ambassador was out of his office. For some four months in 1943-1944, Cicero sold his film to the Germans for huge sums of British money; most of it was counterfeited by the Sicherheitsdienst, as he learned after the war. This is one of several ironic twists in the spy affair, for money was Cicero's basic aim. On the other hand, the information Cicero sold to the Germans was genuine, but they failed to use it effectively because of vicious political-competition among Hitler's subordinates and because Hitler himself invalidated any Cicero-produced documents that forecast defeat for the Third Reich, as inevitably many of them did.

This is the kind of grist that makes thrilling spy stories, and embellishment is unnecessary to capture a good audience. Yet, as Richard Wires demonstrates so convincingly, popular enhancement of the basic Cicero story has been the norm since it first came to public light in the early 1950s.

Perhaps the best-known of the popular enhancements is the Twentieth-Century Fox feature film, Five Fingers, which was released in 1952. Artistic liberties abounded. The screen-play glamorized some characters and invented others, and, in general, the screen version distorted the truth to satisfy the not- infrequent profiteering criteria for the commercial film-making industry. Wires sets the record straight. For example, the Allied Overlord invasion plans for the Normandy landings were not photographed in the Cicero affair nor was the Cicero operation a British trick of strategic deception. Cicero was not a British double agent. Whether or not these historical truths are new to the reader, this account of the Cicero spy affair is a very good read by all standards.

Carl Boyd

Old Dominion University

2001 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.