Elyesa Bazna, Agent Cicero: The Valet Paid in Counterfeit Nazi Pounds

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Elyesa Bazna was born in 1904 in Pristina, then in the Ottoman Empire, and claimed a noble lineage that historians doubt. His family fled to Allied-occupied Istanbul, and after stealing cars he served three years in a French penal labor camp in Marseille, then learned locksmithing at the Berliet motor company. Back in Turkey from 1925 he drove taxis, led a fire brigade and learned French, which got him work with diplomats. In 1942 Albert Jenke, brother-in-law of Joachim von Ribbentrop, fired him for reading his mail, yet the British hired him without checking, and Douglas Busk recommended him as valet to ambassador Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen in neutral Ankara.

Bazna made wax impressions of the ambassador's keys and photographed papers from his dispatch box with a Leica. In October 1943 he offered the Germans two rolls of film for 20,000 pounds, and ambassador Franz von Papen named him Cicero. He passed material from the Moscow, Tehran and Cairo conferences and a document from the Bigot list on the plan to seek Turkish air bases before D-Day, but German rivalries and suspicion blunted its use. Fritz Kolbe alerted Allen Dulles, a British sting failed, and Bazna quit after a new alarm went on the safe. Most of his roughly 300,000 pounds turned out to be Operation Bernhard forgeries.

• He sang German lieder while the ambassador played piano after lunch.
• Turkey's gold reserves rose from 27 tons to 216 tons during the war.
• Hitler used Cicero material in December 1943 and predicted a spring 1944 invasion in the west.
• MI6 chief Stewart Menzies later claimed Cicero was a British-controlled double agent, a claim historians dispute.
• Bazna was imprisoned for passing the fake notes and died in Munich in 1970, having worked as a night watchman.