From her interrogation and from the postwar capture of the telegrams to Berlin in which von Papen summarised some of the photographed pages, it appears that they consisted of briefing papers for, and reports on, the discussions in Cairo in November 1943 between Churchill, Roosevelt and I·nönü and probably that in January 1944 between Churchill and the Turks, together with telegrams between the Ambassador and Whitehall about the subsequent negotiations, day to day business and reports from the Embassy about Turkey’s trade relations with Germany . . . According to Maria Molkenteller there were between 130 and 150 telegrams and they included one in which the Foreign Office warned the Ambassador that Berlin had copies of important documents that had been taken from his Embassy.
Hinsley adds authoritatively that there is no foundation for the claim made by both Moyzisch and Basna that Cicero’s material enabled the Germans to break the FO ciphers.8 The converse, however, is reasonably certain: the translated, re-enciphered and re-translated and re-re-enciphered material enabled the British finally to break the German diplomatic cipher, as will be demonstrated later in this chapter.
The earliest claims about the content and importance of the material came from Moyzisch.9 He reported they contained the signals passed between the FO in London and the British embassy in Ankara at a time at which German cryptographers were trying to break the British diplomatic code: ‘The intercepts enabled the German SS to break an important British cipher.’10 He also reported that the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, knew about Cicero11 and ‘Turkey was the key place in global politics’. He confirmed that December 1943 was the crucial period for Cicero’s work, and that the material was validated when the Allied air raid on Sofia on 14 January 1944 was correctly predicted. This intercept was not shown by Moyzisch to von Papen, who thus knew some material was getting direct to Berlin and drew his own conclusions about the working of the SD.
Von Papen noted that Moyzisch did not know in any detail of the content and importance of the material. Von Papen himself assessed it very highly indeed, from the moment when he realised he was:
. . . looking at a photograph of a telegram from the British Foreign Office to the Ambassador in Ankara. Form, content and phraseology left no doubt that this was the genuine article. It consisted of a series of answers from the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Eden, to questions which Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen had asked in another telegram, requesting guidance on certain aspects of his country’s policy, particularly as regards Turkey.
I realised I had come across a priceless source of information.
He then named Basna (whom he refers to as Diello in his book) as ‘Cicero’. Von Papen adds: ‘during the period of the Foreign Ministers’ meetings in Moscow, of the Tehran and Cairo Conferences, and, indeed, right up to February 1944, the flow of Cicero’s information was of priceless value.’ He learnt of Moscow’s decision to force Turkey to declare war against the Axis by the end of the year, communicated to Sir Hughe in FO telegram No. 1594 of 19 November and of Sir Hughe’s reply (in telegram No. 875) which he proceeds to quote at length, and without permission. A footnote informs the cautious reader that von Papen’s own files were lost during the war and the quotation is taken from ‘an incomplete photostat copy of an article by Dr Paul Schwarz which he was given to understand appeared in the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung’.12 Subsequent pages show von Papen fully apprised of the complex politics surrounding Turkey’s continuing neutrality, the main political debate between the Big Three at Tehran concerning the unconditional surrender formula, the differences of opinion between the service chiefs at the same conference and the imminent launching of Operation ‘Overlord’.13
Thanks to Basna the Turkish government’s reply to the Allies about supplying the Turkish forces ‘lay on my desk a few days after’ 12 December when it was communicated to the Allies. As a result of reading Cicero’s telegrams, von Papen concluded he should do all in his power to end the war, an ambitious project in which he failed. But he gave two reasons for his belief in the value of Cicero. One was the revelation of Allied intentions towards Germany postwar – intentions which differed sharply between each of the Big Three. The other ‘of even greater and more immediate importance was the intimate knowledge it gave us of the enemy’s operational plans.’14
Ten years later Basna, helped unspecifically by a German journalist, Hans Nogly, described what he had photographed nearly twenty years earlier. Despite Dashwood’s statement that he was stupid and unable to understand English (a judgment of breathtaking ineptness) he knew, and describes in convincing detail, what it was he was looking at. Perhaps Herr Nogly had done some relevant research, because he quotes aptly from Churchill’s war history. I Was Cicero gives evidence to the trained eye of care in research and narrative structure. Hindsight and subsequent editorialising may exaggerate Basna’s feat in 1943, but the following passage could be endorsed by any reader of FO telegrams. On page 21 he writes: ‘I put down the file beside me. It contained memoranda received at the British embassy. It gave me a clear picture of the little game in which Turkey, my country, was involved . . . I read what Churchill had to say . . .’15
He photographed everything he could lay his hands on. Telegram No. 1594 from the FO told Hugessen, ‘You will recall our obligation under the protocol signed in Moscow to bring Turkey into the war before the end of the year’ and directed him to tell the Turkish foreign minister the bad news. It was signed by Eden himself. Hugessen went to see Numan Menemencioğlu, the Turkish foreign minister, with a heavy heart, but later telegraphed the FO that ‘M. Menemencioğlu assures me that the Turkish government will be prepared to take part as soon as it is clear that the allied landings in the west have been successful.’16 Basna continued: ‘The telegrams and memoranda deciphered for Sir Hughe passed through my room in the servants’ quarters’ and commented on his association with ‘the great ones of the world’: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Eden, Hopkins. He went on: ‘The cover-name “Overlord” kept recurring in front of my camera . . . One telegram said, “if Turkey came in on our side it would free the escort vessels we need so urgently for ‘Overlord’.” A Hugessen memorandum recorded a conversation with the Turkish Foreign Minister. It said that the Turks were hesitating. If only they could be brought in, it would be a dreadful blow for Germany. This phrase echoes Churchill’s signal to Stalin on the same subject and at the same time.’
The circumstantial description of what Basna was photographing contrasts with Hugessen’s memories of the filched documents. Unfortunately Basna and Nogly provided verifiable references as well as descriptions of some of the documents, which are difficult to square with Hugessen’s dismissive comments in two documents in the possession of the FO, and withheld from access, but which were provided to the present writer by Hugessen’s daughter.17 Hugessen’s notes were compiled after the publication in August 1947 of Moyzisch’s Operation Cicero. He emphasised that no British ambassador would have been privy to Operation ‘Overlord’:
My own connection with this consisted in receipting a telegram from the FO in which the word ‘Overlord’ occurred. No clue was given as to its meaning, of which I remained in complete ignorance . . . The main subject . . . related to schemes in the Balkans.
He added: ‘I can categorically confirm that on no occasion whatsoever was a telegram sent by the FO announcing that the Western offensive was to take place on any given date.’ Hugessen set down his observations ‘based on a clear recollection of what took place’. He dismissed Moyzisch’s list of filched documents as ‘possible but doubtful’. He never learnt that ‘Elias’ (he did not know Basna’s surname) spoke English, still less sang. He found it incredible, though he did not specifically deny, the suggestion that he was shown the first minutes of the Moscow Conference. The leakage of documents had been known to him and the FO in early November 1943 and a watch was kept on two likely sources. As to the minutes of the Tehran Conference, mentioned by Basna and Nogly, he had no recollection of ever having seen them or advance warni
ng of the bombing of Sofia in mid-February 1944.
Who was right about the documents? Hugessen, the FO, or Basna/von Papen? Though no one can be positive, it is quite clear what Basna was photographing. The files of FO371 and FO195, and the BJs referring to Turkey in DIR/C between October 1943 and February 1944, contain many papers written or read by Hugessen, and some of these were undoubtedly photographed by Basna, and consequently read in Berlin, Berne, London and Washington. Reading I Was Cicero is like browsing through PREM3/446 at the PRO.
How He Did It
Before assessing German reactions to the material, it is necessary to answer some still unresolved questions about how he managed to do it.
Great ingenuity, courage, daring and expertise were required to copy the ambassador’s safe key, purloin the documents, take them through the residence to the servants’ quarters, insert them one by one on a makeshift tripod and photograph them with a hand-held camera before returning them undetected to their proper place. The chances of discovery were ever present, the likelihood of poor definitions of the negatives almost certain, and there was nothing in Basna’s previous career or character to indicate such a combination of qualities. How did he do it? He was not even interviewed by Sir John Dashwood, head of the FO security team who investigated in the spring of 1944, and was told he must be stupid and ignorant. The Germans believed he must have a secret collaborator – the evidence of a pair of hands on one positive suggesting another conspirator – but this possibility is ruled out by Basna’s own account of how he did it.
He had already removed the briefcase of his previous employer (a senior British diplomat also stationed in Ankara called Busk) and photographed secret documents page by page, climbing on to a kitchen stool to photograph them vertically from above, with an old camera previously only used to take snaps of his children: ‘when I had finished I put the camera back in the saucepan, took the documents and the untouched brandy back to the study, and carefully put everything back exactly where I had found it.’ So he was well able to handle the similar situation he found at the British ambassador’s residence. The key in both cases was an intimate knowledge of his masters’ habits, and in Knatchbull-Hugessen he had a man ‘whose ways were so regular that you could have set your watch by them’.18 Basna records that Hugessen always played the piano in the drawing room for an hour and a half after lunch. This is confirmed in Hugessen’s manuscript diary for 1943 now in Churchill College, Cambridge. He was a keen musician, who provided a fortnightly concert for his wife, and was defeated only by the complexities of the last movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto.19 Basna built a home-made tripod and obtained impressions of the safe key. On 26 October 1943 he took 52 photos to the German embassy. His operation continued till February 1944. Even then, he was never found out, and later resigned more because he was bored and anxious and recently enriched by the Germans.20
So the answers to the two questions – how did he do it? And, how could he have done it on his own? – are that he was seriously underestimated by both his employers, and successfully exploited Hugessen’s idiosyncracies. It could be argued that taking Basna at face value is somewhat ingenuous, particularly when he asserts it took him less than three minutes to process one day’s documents. But possibly that day’s haul was a small one, and Basna’s English publisher got it right in his blurb: ‘Nobody trained him, nobody briefed him. A piece of wax, a Leica camera and a 100 watt bulb was all his equipment. And with it he made himself free with the top secrets of World War Two.’21
The foregoing account of Basna’s modus operandi makes no claim to be definitive for it is less important to establish how he did it than the evidence his photography provided that the FO – both in London and Berlin – highly regarded the Turkish diplomatic intercept traffic which supplied much of the raw material on which Turkish foreign policy was based.
Berlin Assessments
Further evidence of the significance of diplomatic eavesdropping by Britain is furnished by the excitement caused in Berlin by the arrival of Moyzisch’s material. The first policy maker to see the documents was von Papen, and his view of them has already been noted. But Moyzisch reported not to von Papen but direct to the head of the SD in Berlin. He showed only some of the material to his local employer, who summarised and commented on what he was shown in telegrams to Berlin, while Basna’s rolls of film travelled there from Moyzisch by diplomatic pouch.22 There, no one was sure of their authenticity. Schellenberg, as has been noted earlier, exploited them to expand his flow of intelligence and was given credit for the success of the whole operation.23 But Hitler and Ribbentrop used the telegrams to discuss Turkish neutrality with Hungarian and Bulgarian diplomats.
Hitler had known all along of the importance of Turkey and had been building up his forces in the eastern Mediterranean before Cicero appeared; as we have seen, he won back the Dodecanese by December 1943, just when Cicero was in full spate. Goebbels wrote enthusiastically about the Cicero material, shown by the fact that German archives contained files which included intelligence summaries derived from Cicero. Gen Jodl noted in his diary: ‘Results from Cicero: “Overlord” = major invasion from Britain.’24 Competition and discord among the different organs of the German government arose over Cicero, according to Allen Dulles. The intelligence community under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner, and the diplomatic service under Ribbentrop were at odds, ‘as a result of which anything Kaltenbrunner thought was good, Ribbentrop thought was bad.’25
While all this was going on Eden cabled the substance of an MSS (most secret source – i.e. BJ) telegram that Ribbentrop read. Von Papen’s telegram from Ankara to Oshima in Berlin contained the following:
(i) Churchill and Roosevelt carried out Tehran decision by pressing strongly for Turkish entry into the war, which USSR also desired earnestly. Churchill threatened to suspend supplies to Turkey and Eden took a menacing stand but Roosevelt adopted no such attitude.
(ii) Turkish Foreign Minister told Papen that he was firmly convinced that even England was not strong enough to risk Turkish enmity by applying sanctions and that USA would in any case refuse to participate.
Turkey had given absolutely no promise of entry into the war. (Ribbentrop’s comment was that Germany had made it clear that Turkey would be considered to have entered the war if land and air bases were granted even without direct participation.)26 Eden’s despatch could have made no difference to ‘Colonel Warden’ or to the course of the war, but Churchill relied on such summaries, and, as soon as possible thereafter, the actual Oshima BJs.
Washington Assessments
A number of Cicero telegrams were later removed, together with other secret documents, from the German Foreign Ministry in Wilhelmstrasse by Fritz Kolbe, a trusted senior civil servant there. Kolbe’s motive for running this dangerous liaison remain obscure. He claimed to have hoped for a place in postwar diplomacy by revealing Nazi diplomatic secrets to the Allies. In fact his espionage was ill-rewarded.
In Washington the National Security Agency had by 1943 set up an effective interception operation targeting the secret diplomatic telegrams passing from the Soviet Vice-Consul in New York to Moscow Centre. Through this the Americans learned Soviet reactions to the Allied Conferences which formed the subject matter of the last part of Chapter 7. This material, codenamed ‘Venona’ later led to the unmasking of Donald Maclean – codenamed ‘Homer’ or ‘Gomer’ (a confusion arising from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet). But the arrival twelve months previously, in 1943, of the Kolbe/Cicero material seems not to have alerted the NSA to the possibility of breaking the German diplomatic cipher, this being anyway a British assignment.
The material was brought by Kolbe to the American consulate in Berne. It is now possible to reassess what the Americans thought of the Cicero material. Their previous role, as related by Moyzisch and von Papen, was something of a cowboy exercise, involving spying on their British allies in Ankara and seducing a German employee of von Papen who happened also to be Ribbentrop’s sis
ter-in-law. But now Dulles was to introduce an American dimension to the Cicero material. According to OSS’s war report, declassified in 1976, Kolbe went to Switzerland every few weeks.27 Dulles, as we have seen, was in no doubt that he had a spy coup on his hands, and undertook the task of translating and encoding Kolbe’s material which occupied the entire staff at Berne for weeks after each batch was received.28 From it Dulles learnt of Basna’s activities, and so did the British:
As the Franco-Swiss frontier was not opened to Allied traffic until September 1944, no letters were sent or delivered before that date; instead all information for transmission abroad was enciphered and sent by wireless. In order to ensure their integrity during transmission from Geneva, the Kolbe/Cicero telegrams were divided equally between the British and Americans, half going to Washington and half to London.29
No extant files reveal American State Department reactions to Kolbe, but the recent release on the Internet of some early Venona intercepts, referred to above, dated autumn 1942 and extending to October 1943, show that the NSA at Arlington, Virginia took a lively interest, on behalf of the State Department, in foreign diplomatic intercepts and monitored the reports from the Russian consulate in New York to Moscow with something of the same zeal and expertise that the diplomatic and commercial departments of GCCS plied the FO and MEW in London with BJs.30
The Russians were running many agents supplying details of American war production and monitoring the communist activities of some of the British who worked in BSC (British Security Co-ordination) under Sir William Stephenson. One such intercept listed the NSA departments charged with intercepting and processing diplomatic material, indicating four departments, which:
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