13
According to the British files, they were first alerted to a possible security problem in Ankara towards the end of December 1943. The US State Department reported that an agent at the Hungarian Legation in Stockholm revealed a leakage from the Cairo talks and that the Germans ‘appeared to have full details of the conference’.1
The British in Ankara first believed it was more likely a Turkish problem. However, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen himself reported on 31 December that the German ambassador, Von Papen, knew too much. The British economic warfare agent in Turkey at the time, John Lomax, was informed by one of his Turkish agents, who worked close to the Turkish president Ismet Inonu, that there was a spy at the British Embassy. But this came later, towards the end of January 1944.2
It was Fritz Kolbe, who worked at the German Foreign Ministry while in Bern, Switzerland, in August 1943, who offered important ministry documents to the British. But the British military attaché, Colonel H.A. Cartwright, turned him away − a bad blunder. Kolbe was not to be so easily dissuaded, however, and turned to the Americans. Allen Dulles was the OSS man in Bern and he snapped up the offer. Kolbe’s work at the Foreign Ministry included screening cable traffic for OKW, the military high command. Codenamed ‘George Wood’, Kolbe was strongly opposed to the Nazis and was willing to supply anything he felt important to the Allies in a bid to hasten the end of the war. He supplied another batch of material in October and kept in touch with Dulles for over a year, with the American often sharing material with the British.
Another batch came from Kolbe in December and contained some of Cicero’s work. In January, Dulles gave these documents to an MI6 agent in Bern, Fredrick Vanden Heuvel, known as ‘Fanny’.3 Dulles says that, a few days after this, Heuvel came to see him, asking him to forget Cicero as London was ‘aware’ of the case. Dulles thought that ‘the British were playing some sort of game with Cicero’.4
Heuvel was a papal count and director of Eno’s Fruit Salts. He had been recruited for MI6 by Colonel Claude Dansey, who would become assistant chief of the wartime SIS, and in his career he worked for both MI5 and MI6. He was a bellicose man and colleagues found ‘there was nothing he’d enjoy more than having a scrap’. He hated intellectuals and felt ‘every man had his price and every woman was seducible’.5 Heuvel’s actions were on the orders of Dansey, who disliked Dulles and dismissed the Kolbe material as a plant − a mistake that marked the end of his career.6 He passed the material to Felix Henry Cogwell to prove his theory; it is clear he did little with the documents, but passed them to a junior at SIS.
That junior was later to be the notorious Soviet spy, Kim Philby, who studied the documents on their ‘merits’. He did a rather obvious thing and had them checked by cryptographic experts to see ‘whether they had already received intercepted messages matching the Dulles material’. The majority were telegrams received by the German Foreign Office from missions abroad. He then sent a series of messages from the German military attaché in Tokyo to OKW through diplomatic channels.
Two days later, Commander Alexander (‘Alistair’) Denniston, head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) at Bletchley Park, contacted Philby in ‘a state of some excitement’ with news that three telegrams matched already deciphered telegrams. The others would help in breaking the German diplomatic code, and could he have more.
Philby circulated the documents to other departments as genuine. Dansey soon got wind of this and a cold interview took place with Philby, in which he still tried to dismiss the OSS findings.
Philby found this strange, after all, ‘Not even our own circulating sections, let alone departments, knew that OSS was involved. They regarded it as our stuff, they were asking for more. It seemed that the credit was ours.’ This appeared to be Dansey’s biggest concern, so he finally conceded the point. It was then left to Philby to handle any more material:
To my surprise, the case was by no means closed. Our German friend [Kolbe] proved to be an intrepid operator, and paid several more visits to Bern with his useful suitcase.7
The much heralded exploits of Station X, Bletchley Park, through the ‘Ultra’ decrypts, a carefully guarded secret during the Second World War and for many years after, had no direct effect on Cicero. No intercepted signals revealed the source, only that a breach in security at Ankara had occurred. Cicero operated for a relatively short period and so, given the wealth of information arriving at Bletchley Park, it was probably given a low priority and the bird would have long flown before much was revealed. ‘Ultra’ referred to the breaking of the German Enigma machine cipher. From June 1941 the term ‘Ultra Secret’ was used; this is said to have been the idea of Commander Geoffrey Colpays and taken from the fact that the codebreaking success was considered more important than the highest security classification at the time, ‘Most Secret’.8
General William Donovan, head of the OSS, had passed the Dulles report to President Roosevelt, who, in turn, informed Churchill about the likely leak in Ankara, and that the Germans had details on the Cairo Conference and, in particular, the 6 December minutes on ‘Operation Saturn’. Churchill replied in a telegram drafted for him by ‘C’, Sir Stewart Menzies:
Thank you for drawing my attention to this matter. I am assured that our respective Intelligence Services are closely collaborating on this subject and an investigation has been ordered.9
Despite Churchill’s wishes, the various security services did not work together well on Cicero, or often on matters other than at the highest level under the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), formed in 1936. Although the JIC did not get off to a good start, badly misjudging the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Polish crisis at the outbreak of war, it was better during the war, though often slow to grasp the significance of intelligence.10
Below the JIC were MI5, the Security Service responsible for counter-espionage at home, and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, in charge of espionage abroad. MI5 worked closely with the Home Office, MI6 with the Foreign Office, and both with various military branches. The Special Operations Executive, however, came under the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
Section V of MI6 was responsible for the security of embassies, while SIS attachés working from these buildings often conducted field operations. Lieutenant Colonel Montague (Monty) Chidson was the assistant military attaché in Ankara and the MI6 man in the area. He tried to tighten security, but often fell foul of Sir Hughe and, by the time of the leaks, they were barely on speaking terms. He was far from being a top drawer SIS operative, with one account labelling him as a ‘disastrous’ station agent.11
The friction between Chidson and the ambassador was over document security. Working practices were improved and a search conducted for listening devices, though Sir Hughe still felt the Turks were the more likely source. However, once the Kolbe papers had revealed Cicero, the Foreign Office informed him of the discovery, and that they were sending out two experts to investigate.
‘Genial’ and ‘jovial’ Sir John Dashwood, Foreign Office security officer, and Chief Inspector Cochrane of Special Branch duly arrived.12 They tried to find out how the Germans got hold of the papers, and their second task was to further tighten security.
Sir Hughe was not pleased with the arrival of the team and Dashwood had to proceed ‘with considerable tact’ in dealing with the ambassador.13 Using the enemy telegrams, they tried to find out where the corresponding papers had been when copied, and thus who might have access to them. Here Sir Hughe may have led them astray with his conviction that the leak had most likely taken place on a train ‘either on the way to or from Cairo’, as the German documents ‘corresponded closely to the briefs he had carried in a brown travelling box’ when he had gone to Adana in December. He had left the box ‘unattended, in his carriage while he was in the restaurant car’.14
It was noted rather ‘wearily’ in the security files: ‘We must recognise that His Excellency does not habitually differentiate between convenience and security’.15 Sir Hughe went on to point the finger of suspicion at one of Inonu’s staff who had left the restaurant car early; it was surely he who had photographed the documents.
Dashwood was not convinced by this, but there was no way to prove or disprove it. He and Cochrane questioned all the embassy servants and searched all their rooms. Beforehand, Cicero had moved everything that might incriminate him, while the money had been taken to the villa and locked in a desk.
Sir Hughe called Bazna to his room for the interview on the pretext that they required coffee. In the room Bazna found three other men with the ambassador who were intent on examining the safe. Bazna felt they were all scrutinising him, before Sir Hughe asked him how long he had been his valet.
‘Three months, Your Excellency,’ he answered in French.
Sir Hughe said he was satisfied with him. Bazna says they tried him with English, which he answered, then German, asking for sugar, to which he replied, ‘I hardly understand German’.
The ambassador intervened in French that they required milk and sugar. Bazna commented that Sir Hughe ‘… seemed to disapprove of these secret service methods; he had too much delicacy of feeling for this world’.16
It appears they dismissed Bazna as a suspect because ‘the valet was too stupid to make a good spy and did not, in any case, speak or understand English’.17
However, why was Sir Hughe not more suspicious of Bazna? The leaks had started roughly when he arrived, although he had been in the Busks’ service before. In 1930, Knatchbull–Hugessen had been appointed minister to the three Baltic States with his legation at Riga. In this decade, the countries became coveted as a buffer zone by both Germany and Russia, and, with the rise of Hitler, ‘Sections of them became sympathetic to Nazi ideals, especially in Estonia where certain groups were active enough to cause anxiety’.18
It was against this background that the ambassador’s new valet, who had outstanding references but questionable habits, became an agent of the Abwehr. The valet, called Tony, had been a prostitute to wealthy homosexuals and was no doubt blackmailed into becoming a spy. Again a duplicate key was used to copy documents from dispatch boxes.
However, Tony’s antics with boyfriends in the residence attracted the attention of the SIS man at the legation, Captain Arthur Leslie Nicholson, a career intelligence man, who alerted the ambassador. Tony was warned but not sacked, and remained there until 1940.19
Had Sir Hughe forgotten Tony? Or did he not take Captain Nicholson’s warnings seriously? Or did he think it could not happen twice? The affair was reported to higher authority, but it appears no one knew about the copied documents, and the Germans were only just being looked on as a serious threat.
Dashwood returned to London far from satisfied with the investigation. Later he wrote a report on the matter, laying much of the blame for the leaks at Sir Hughe’s door: ‘… having cleared all other elements of the British staff’.20 By the time he did conclude that Bazna was Cicero, the valet had resigned and disappeared. A story did circulate that Dashwood almost caught Cicero in the act by sitting in Sir Hughe’s study in the dark. Yet even if this did happen, there would be all sorts of reasons a valet would enter the room, so it is really fanciful and surmised with the benefit of hindsight.21
Given that Bazna continued his work after the investigation finished, he must have somehow by-passed the electrical device on the safe. He says it was he, with Esra’s help, who identified which fuse in the fuse box controlled the safe lock. Bazna argued with the electrician doing the work that he needed to press Sir Hughe’s suits, but there was no power for the iron, and the ambassador would be angry if they were not ready.22 Esra had removed the fuses at the workmen’s request and, while she watched, they replaced all the others except the safe fuse.
Cicero confided to Moyzisch that an investigation was being conducted at the British Embassy, and told him about the updates to the safe and a ‘lucky chance that enabled him to find out how to open the safe once more’.23 He had listened in on conversations about the safe’s new mechanism, but he did not mention Esra’s part in the discovery.
Moyzisch picked up on this, for Cicero had told him before that he could not speak English, although the SD man had never really believed that. He withheld this information from Berlin for it would have ‘meant more trouble for me’. He felt this was just a ploy by the artful Cicero to increase the price and, sure enough, a few days later, he insisted the work was much more dangerous and wanted £20,000 per roll of film. Moyzisch refused.
The quality of the material was also not as good as it had been. A roll of film developed after the investigation contained a ‘statement of accounts of petty expenditure’. Moyzisch felt the British ambassador would not keep such papers in the safe and Cicero was just after easy pickings. He told him he could not pay ‘for that sort of rubbish’. However, he sent the roll of film with a covering letter to Berlin, and was surprised by the reply: ‘I was curtly told to pay Cicero his £10,000 and informed that this roll had proved extremely valuable’.24
About this time in January, Bazna took Esra to the ABC department store on Ataturk Boulevard and bought her a ‘beautiful, soft, fur lined coat’. Snow was on the ground and the ‘Siberian winter that prevails in Anatolia was at its height’. He questioned her as they walked along, the snow crunching beneath their feet. Could she remember which fuse it was that controlled the safe?
She said she was ‘not sure’.
Bazna replied, in that case, ‘I have to make up my mind whether I can use you or not.’25
By now the war had turned decisively against Germany. In December, the last big German warship, the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, was sunk in the Battle of the North Cape by a British fleet. While in January, the Russians broke the two-year German siege of Stalingrad, and the RAF launched its biggest raid on Berlin, with 600 bombers dropping 2,300 tons of bombs on the city.
It was about this time that Cicero says he began to see increased references to ‘Overlord’ in the documents he photographed.26 The Germans were aware of the codename by November 1943, and it may well have been the Cicero documents that alerted them.27