Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen had developed the unsafe habit of bringing official papers home to the ambassador’s residence in his dispatch box, and reading them in bed before turning in for the night. Elliott liked the ambassador, but later conceded that he should have been ‘instantly dismissed’ for this flagrant breach of security. Bazna identified the nature of his boss’s bedtime reading, and spotted a money-making opportunity. In October 1943 (at about the time that Elliott first encountered Bazna laying out his dinner jacket) the Albanian valet made contact with German intelligence and offered to hand over photographs of the documents in exchange for cash, lots of it. Over the next two months, Bazna made some ten deliveries of documents and was paid a fortune in cash, which he carefully stashed away, unaware that the Germans had taken the precaution of paying him in forged notes. Since he spoke almost no English, Bazna was ignorant of precisely what secrets he was spilling, but he knew what the word ‘Secret’ meant: reports on British diplomatic efforts to bring Turkey into the war against the Germans, infiltration of Allied personnel into Turkey, and US military aid to the USSR. The Albanian spy – codenamed ‘Cicero’ by the Germans – even furnished accounts of decisions taken by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Tehran conference, and the codename of the impending D-Day invasion: ‘Overlord’. The impact of these revelations was limited by German scepticism: having been badly misled by the deception plans covering the Sicily invasion (most famously ‘Operation Mincemeat’, in which a dead body carrying false papers was put ashore in Spain) there were some in the German High Command who suspected that Cicero might be another fiendish British ruse to mislead them at a crucial juncture in the war. The Bletchley Park intercepts, and a spy in the German Foreign Office, eventually alerted the British to the leakage at the British embassy in Ankara. Suspicion swiftly focused on Bazna who, sensing the danger, shut down his espionage operations. He survived the war, and later tried to sue the West German government when he discovered that he had been paid in worthless notes. He gave singing lessons, sold used cars and ended his life working as a doorman at one of Istanbul’s seedier hotels. The Cicero affair was an embarrassing debacle, and further evidence of Germany’s proficient spy network in Turkey. British propaganda later tried to claim that Bazna had been a double agent, but Elliott was under no illusions. ‘The information obtained by Cicero was completely genuine,’ he wrote, and ‘the plain truth is that the Cicero case was probably the most serious diplomatic security leak in British history.’
British intelligence fought back, reinforced in 1943 by the arrival of the OSS. The head of Turkish operations for American intelligence was Lanning ‘Packy’ Macfarland, an extrovert Chicago banker with a taste for trouble and a spy’s wardrobe, including a trench coat and slouch hat: ‘If he had not been a spy, dressed like that he would have had to become one,’ remarked a fellow officer. Aided by British intelligence, Macfarland began setting up his own agent network, starting with a Czech businessman named Alfred Schwartz, codenamed ‘Dogwood’, who claimed to have access to anti-Nazi resistance groups inside Germany, Austria and Hungary. Elliott liked Macfarland, despite his ‘penchant for involving himself in unfortunate escapades’, and established an effective working relationship with the Americans. Together, they successfully introduced a Turkish informant into one of Leverkühn’s sabotage cells. ‘The names of the Azerbaijanis, Persians and Caucasians who work for German intelligence are now known,’ reported OSS officer Cedric Seager, ‘where they congregate of an evening, where they work and what they look like.’
Iraq was a particular focus of Abwehr interest. In 1941, British forces had invaded the country, fearing that a pro-Axis government in Baghdad might cut off oil supplies. Elliott discovered that Leverkühn was attempting to foment anti-British rebellion among Iraq’s Kurdish tribes, while encouraging and financing the revolutionary underground. Three German agents were parachuted into Iraq, and intercepted soon after they landed. Next, Elliott planted a double agent within the revolutionary cell, codenamed ‘Zulu’. On 3 September 1943, Leverkühn picked up Zulu in his Mercedes at a pre-arranged rendezvous in Istanbul. As they drove around the city, Leverkühn delivered a propaganda lecture, insisting that ‘the Arab cause depended on German victory’, before instructing the agent on how to identify British military units in Iraq and handing over a radio code along with $2,000 in cash. The British authorities in Baghdad duly rounded up the entire revolutionary ring.
The duel between Nicholas Elliott and Paul Leverkühn was ferocious and unrelenting, but it was also oddly gentlemanly. If Elliott spotted his rival dining in Taksim’s, he would always send over a bottle with his compliments. Each side wanted the other to know who was on top, and sometimes made the point in ways that were deeply silly. When Leverkühn discovered that Britain’s secret wireless code for Germany was ‘1200’, he immediately informed his colleagues: henceforth, whenever Elliott or another British intelligence officer walked into an Istanbul bar where German officers were drinking, they faced a humiliating chorus of ‘Twelve-land, Twelve-land, über alles’. The tit-for-tat battle raged, without a clear winner. But as 1943 drew to a close, Elliott pulled off a feat of espionage so remarkable that it rocked the Third Reich, tipped Hitler into a towering rage, crippled the Abwehr and sent Elliott’s stock soaring at MI6. The first hint that such a spectacular coup might be in the offing came from Kim Philby.
See Notes on Chapter 5
6
The German Defector
In the spring of 1943, Kim Philby learned that a young German named Erich Vermehren had turned up in Lisbon, where his mother was working as a journalist, and made a tentative approach to British intelligence. The Vermehrens were a prominent family of Lübeck lawyers with known anti-Nazi leanings, and Erich Vermehren hinted that he was thinking of defecting to the British. This first contact went no further. Vermehren had little of intelligence value to offer, his wife was still in Berlin, and he soon returned there. But the approach was intriguing, and Philby filed it away for future use.
Erich Vermehren was one of those rare people whose conscience expands and strengthens under stress. In body he was fragile, the result of a gunshot injury suffered as a youth; but his soul was made of some tensile, almost impossibly resilient, material that never broke or even bent in its certainty. Patriotic and pious, Vermehren was convinced of his own moral rectitude. In 1938, at the age of nineteen, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, but was prevented from taking it up because his repeated refusal to join the Hitler Youth had rendered him, in Nazi eyes, ‘unfit to represent German youth’. Hitler himself is said to have ordered that his name be struck off the list of scholars. Unfit to serve in the army on account of his injury, he worked in a prisoner of war camp. In 1939 he converted to Catholicism and married the aristocratic Countess Elisabeth von Plettenburg, a devout Catholic thirteen years his senior whose loathing for Nazism was as staunch as his own. Elisabeth had come to Gestapo attention before the war for distributing religious tracts critical of the pagan Nazis. The Plettenburgs were deeply implicated in the anti-Nazi resistance, as were the Vermehrens. Adam von Trott zu Solz, a German foreign office official who would become a key player in the plot to oust Hitler, was Vermehren’s cousin. The marriage of Erich and Elisabeth thus brought together two wings of the secret anti-Nazi resistance – which was, in part, a family affair. In this small band of German resisters, religious and moral outrage fused with politics. These were not liberals: they were deeply conservative, often wealthy, fiercely anti-communist, old-fashioned German families, fearful that Hitler was leading Germany into a calamity that would usher in rule by the godless Bolsheviks. The plotters dreamed of ousting Hitler, making peace with Britain and the US, and then defeating the Red menace from the East, to create a new German state that was democratic, anti-communist and Christian. Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren decided, along with a handful of like-minded conspirators, that Hitler must be destroyed, before he destroyed Germany.