However, Cicero had enough to feed the curiosity of the leaders of the Reich. In particular, he provided rather detailed reports of the major summit conferences of the Allied camp in Cairo and Teheran in November and December 1943, about which Turkish leaders knew a good deal because of their close contacts with the British. Thanks to Cicero, the Germans were able to grasp the broad outlines of their enemies’ diplomatic strategy: Churchill wanted to open a front in southeastern Europe by trying (without success) to include Turkey in a vast Mediterranean offensive against Germany. The Americans did not share this view. Roosevelt was relatively uninterested in Turkey and was concentrating on an invasion of the European continent from Great Britain. Despite some not insignificant differences of opinion, the Allies’ determination to crush the Axis forces was absolute. Those German leaders who paid attention to Cicero’s revelations could have no illusions on that subject. “Cicero’s documents described with clarity the fate that awaited Germany,” Franz von Papen wrote in his memoirs after the war. “I trembled with emotion before the spectacle of the vast historical prospects opened to me by those stolen documents,” Ludwig Moyzisch wrote many years after the events.
Bern, December 1943
The Allies learned of the existence of the spy in Ankara thanks to “George Wood.” The first mention of Cicero in an Allied document followed another visit to Bern by Fritz Kolbe, which took place over the Christmas holiday. Kolbe brought to the Americans from Berlin a series of cables, some of which came from the German embassy in Ankara. Among the documents that Allen Dulles transmitted to Washington, several mentioned the existence of Cicero.
On December 29, OSS Bern sent to Washington headquarters a coded message mentioning the name of Cicero, with no explanation of the nature of this mysterious source. A few days later, in a cable sent on New Year’s Day 1944, Allen Dulles provided details for his Washington colleagues, referring to a series of documents “on which Milit [Ambassador von Papen] clearly placed great value and which, seemingly, were taken from the Zulu [British] Embassy through a source designated as Cicero.” These details, Dulles added, had been immediately turned over to the British intelligence services based in Switzerland (designated as 521 in OSS language), for transmission to London.
On learning of the content of the information provided by Cicero, the leadership of the Allied intelligence services felt a chilclass="underline" the spy had given his German contacts a list of documents prepared by the “Zulu ambassador” (Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen) in preparation for the second Cairo conference of early December 1943, a conference that had unsuccessfully considered Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Also included in the “deliveries” by the Ankara spy was a Foreign Office memorandum dated October 7, 1943 with the title “A Long-Range View of Turkish-British Policy.” All the steps taken by the English to encourage Turkey’s entry into the war were set out in detail. These ultraconfidential materials had been transmitted by von Papen to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin (Grand), between November 3 and 5, 1943.
The identity of Cicero, and what exactly the Germans knew through him, were questions that reached the highest levels of the Allied command during the first weeks of 1944. But the British were slow to react. They waited until the end of January before asking Dulles to ask his Berlin agent for “additional available messages from the Cicero sources.” Almost a month later, they asked for more details about the exact time of the November cables. On January 10, 1944, OSS Bern informed London and Washington that “Wood is ignorant of the identity of Cicero.” Several weeks later, in late February 1944, Dulles wrote: “We are informed by Wood that there is no way of finding out who Cicero is or where the information about Cairo and Teheran originated. He suggests, in connection with this, that the leak might have come from an Albanian-born private secretary of Inönü whom the President took with him to Cairo.” Although fairly close to reality, these details were not sufficient to identify the spy.
Feeling the vise tighten around him, Elyeza Bazna left his position in March 1944. Since mid-January 1944, the British had been actively looking for the source of the leak. At the very moment that Allen Dulles had informed Washington and London of the existence of a mole in the British embassy in Ankara—at the very beginning of January 1944—Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen had learned from his Turkish interlocutors that von Papen “knew too much to be honest.” Two British counterespionage agents were sent to Ankara to carry out an investigation in his entourage. In Bern, Allen Dulles had asked them to be discreet and to behave as though the visit were a routine inspection. His concern was to protect his source, Fritz Kolbe, who might be identified by the Germans in case the network were dismantled. The two British agents also had to deal tactfully with the extreme sensitivity of the British ambassador, who could not understand how his embassy could be under suspicion. The detectives questioned Elyeza Bazna but found him too stupid and too ill at ease in English to consider him a suspect.
The Cicero affair could have been a disaster if the leak had not been discovered in time thanks to “George Wood.” “Nothing indicates that the Germans got from Cicero the slightest detail about the plan for a landing in Europe, except perhaps the code name of the operation: Overlord,” Dulles wrote after the war.
Berlin, December 1943
After his October visit to Bern, Fritz thought that it would be a long time before he would be able to come back. Nor did Allen Dulles expect to see him again. It had been agreed that Fritz would thenceforth send what he knew through his friend Albert Bur, the surgeon from Alsace. This complicated means of transmission was probably never used.
Berlin was in a state of chaos. The bombing was more and more terrible. Late November was particularly hard, with thousands of dead, more than two hundred thousand people made homeless, and tens of thousands of buildings destroyed. The central neighborhoods of Alexanderplatz and Charlottenburg (Fritz’s neighborhood) were the most heavily damaged. Railroad stations were one of the favorite targets of the flying fortresses. Even the zoo was hit. A bomb landed directly on the crocodile house during the night of November 23. There were rumors of wild animals roaming through the streets of the city.
The Foreign Ministry was the target of several destructive raids. Only the offices on the second floor could still be used. That winter some of the chandeliers in the ministry began to resemble fountains. The carpets were saturated with water. Pieces of cardboard were hung in the windows in place of glass. It was cold. The diplomats worked with their coats on. Some of the ministry’s departments were evacuated to Silesia. But most heads of departments remained in Berlin, and Fritz Kolbe, as a result, also stayed in the capital of the Reich.
The Charité hospital, where Maria Fritsch lived, had not emerged unharmed from the rain of fire. “All the windows were broken,” wrote the surgeon Adolphe Jung in his notes for December 1943. “Most of the window frames and doors were torn out. Curtains and camouflage cloths for the windows, torn out as well. Cabinets opened and overturned. Plaster fallen from ceilings and walls. A strong wind full of smoke and soot blew through the corridors and the rooms open on all sides…. All the patients were in the cellars. The laundry and storage rooms were emptied out and the patients’ beds set out in them. Long rows of beds were in the corridors, men, women, and soldiers all mixed together.”