Mon 5 Oct 2009
A Review by Dan Stumpf: ELYESA BANZA – I Was Cicero.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Suspense & espionage films , True crime[6] Comments
ELYESA BAZNA, with Hans Nogly – I Was Cicero. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1962. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1964.
In I Was Cicero Elyesa Bazna relates how he angled himself a job as valet to the British Ambassador in Turkey so he could spy for Germany in 1943 under the code name “Cicero” — employment that became famous in 1950 when L. C. Moyzisch, his German contact man, wrote Operation Cicero, and even more famous in ’52 when Joseph L. Mankiewicz filmed it as 5 Fingers.
But it was “Cicero” who became famous, not Bazna. So I guess Bazna, toiling in obscure poverty in Turkey, looked around at everyone getting rich off his story and decided to cash in on it if he could. I Was Cicero (co-written with Hans Nogly) never found the popularity of 5 Fingers, but it’s a generally engrossing and often insightful look inside the mind of a spy.
Bazna cherishes no illusions about himself; he admits from the start that he was a lower-class working man of minimal education, with no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance, who had the ambition to take a chance when he had it, and the smarts to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated outrageously by his Nazi paymasters, for whom he insists he worked in good faith.
So where Moyzich’s Operation Cicero is mostly about Moyzisch and his growing realization that his superiors in Berlin were mad — and the moral dilemma of trying to serve his country in such times — Bazna’s I Was Cicero is just about a guy doing a job that happens to be incredibly dangerous.
And though Bazna was stealing secrets instead of robbing banks, he admits, like Alvin Karpis, to getting hooked on the excitement of it, and the sheer visceral pleasure of having money. Like Karpis, he makes no excuses for his work; he just takes pride in a job well done.
Afterword: When Joseph Mankiewicz filmed 5 Fingers (1952) he pretty much cut out Moyzisch’s part, added some incidental characters and a sub-plot to move things along, plus a suspense-evoking score by Bernard Herrmann to lend the whole thing a creepy mood.
His biggest change, though, was to turn the character of working-class schlub Elyesa Bazna into the suave, classy James Mason, who played the part to sinister perfection.
Basically, Mankiewicz turned the story inside out, and no one complains because he made a good movie out of it:
5 FINGERS. 20th Century-Fox, 1952. James Mason, Danielle Darrieux, Michael Rennie, Walter Hampden. Based on the book Operation Cicero by L. C. Moyzisch. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
October 5th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Although it is not generally known, this book was part of a Brit intelligence operation to protect the Double Cross System and the Ultra Secret even long after the war. If you read Sir John Masterman’s The Double Cross System you will find Banza was a Brit agent from early on being operated by the same group under Masterman that ran Eddie Chapman, Dusko Popov, and Juan Madrid.
In addition to feeding the German’s false information Banza and others were used to mislead them so no one suspected the Brits had broken the Enigma code machine at Bletchly Park with Alan Turing’s computer and could read German secret correspondence.
Ian Fleming was very nearly prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for From Russia With Love when he wrote about Bond stealing a Russian code machine (the Lektor) and came a bit closer than some liked to revealing the truth. In the end it was decided prosecuting him would generate too much publicity.
The Ultra Secret was kept under their hats until the early seventies.
Among other films and books designed to mislead the public and the Soviets and East Germans was the film and book The Two Headed Spy a wholly fictional story of a British agent who infiltrates the German High Command. In truth the man in question only posed as a German general among German POW’s in England to gather information as he had posed as a Boer in POW camps in South Africa in the Boer war.
The Five Fingers and Two Headed Spy are terrific films, but as far as history goes both were parts of one of the more successful intelligence operations of the 2oth Century. But they are still well worth watching — even though there isn’t a word of truth in either of them.
October 7th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Dave,
How you know this? Do you have connections we never suspected?
October 7th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Dan
Well, I did meet Masterman (who also wrote a mystery novel), but much of this is revealed in his book The Double Cross System in which he gives the names and code names of many of the operatives. Some of it is also covered in Anthony Cave Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies and F. W. Winterbottom’s The Ultra Secret, and several standard histories of the British Secret Service — and when he wasn’t busy mistakenly ID’ing the Hitler Diaries as real, Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper told me some of it.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
So given this, David, which would be correct way to classify the book? Is I WAS CICERO fiction or non-fiction?
It’s not in Al Hubin’s CRIME FICTION IV, for example. Should it be?
How about THE TWO-HEADED SPY? I think that was only a movie, and not a book — am I wrong on that? If it is a book, then maybe it should be in CFIV as well.
Are there any other books that would fit into the category of “fiction disguised as fact in order to keep top espionage secrets out of the hands of enemy governments” — or anything similar?
It’s a category that had never ever occurred to me before.
— Steve
October 8th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Two Headed Spy was based on a a series of articles — I forget where they appeared. Their primary purpose was to mislead the Soviets, the East Germans, and former Nazi’s about the fact the Enigma code had been broken fairly early in the war. Both it and the Banza book were designed as part of a on going disinformation operation to protect war time secrets.
This one is mostly non-fiction, Banza just leaves out the fact he was turned fairly early by British intelligence and fed the Gerans a mix of legitimate information and false leads throughout the war, again to protect some aspects of Enigma and the Double Cross System. Some of the book however is the purest of fiction, though I doubt it belongs in Hubin.
The book was written mostly for Banza to cash in on the German book and the film, but also in part to further the intelligence goals. The Moyzisch book had left some questions open that it was felt should be answered lest some clever journalists or operatives started adding things up.
It may seem overly cautious in retrospect, but it has to be remembered that many of these secrets were supposed to be kept for 150 years after the event, and to recall that prior to the German Invasion of Russia and Pearl Harbor the Brits had been going it virtually alone in the war.
When Eddie Chapman wrote his book, Triple Cross, a furor developed and there were attempts to suppress it under the Official Secrets Act. When Chapman won his case bits and pieces of the story began to slip out and eventually Masterman decided to write his book setting forth the story of the Double Cross System he ran during the war. By the end of the war every German agent in England was working for the Brits. They were so effective that during the war even Admiral Canaris, head of German naval intelligence, was passing them information.
In the case of Engima it was considered so important that they city of Coventry was allowed to be destroyed in order to keep the German’s from discovering Enigma had been cracked. Since the Japanese were using a version of Engima to code their messages it was literally the most most important secret of the war with the possible exception of the Bomb and D-Day. You can understand why they were a little paranoid about it long after the war ended.
In the case of the Double Cross System some of the agents such as Juan Madrid and Dusko Popov continued to operate after the war, usually in the role of Nazi hunters. Madrid, who was never uncovered in his lifetime, moved to Argentina where his contacts with Nazi war criminals provided intelligence to the war crimes trials and eventually played a key role in the Israeli kidnapping of Eichmann.
Wars don’t always end just because peace treaties are signed.
October 8th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Steve
Re the other books that might have been part of intelligence operations, it is hard to tell at times. It’s been suggested that Graham Greene’s anti-Americanism in his books was a cover for the fact he was secretly a spy master running Kim Philby as a triple agent (that one’s a little too convoluted for me).
For a while the Soviets were convinced the James Bond novels were disguised versions of the exploits of an actual British agent in order to mislead them, and Simon Harvester’s novels were considered so reflective of actual operations in the middle east that the KGB purchased multiple copies of each of his books as it came out.
Duff Cooper’s novel Operation Heartbreak revealed so much of the real Operation Mincemeat that Ewen Montagu was persuaded to write The Man Who Never Was — in part to obscure the role Enigma and the Double Cross System played in the real operation.
James Leasor’s book Nemesis is sometimes listed as fiction and sometimes as non-fiction. Since Leasor writes both it can be hard to tell.
Considering writers such as A.E.W. Mason, John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Graham Greene, and John Bingham all were intimately involved in British espionage it can be hard to tell where fiction ends and fact begins. It’s an old tradition in England — even Christopher Marlowe was a spy.
After all Conan Doyle made Stapleton a butterfly collector in The Hound of the Baskervilles in honor of Sir Robert Baden-Powell who had sketched enemy fortifications into his drawings of butterflies in one famous exploit. Mystery novelist Basil Thompson was head of Scotland Yard’s spy catching Special Branch, and during the Russian Revolution Sir Paul Dukes imitated the techniques of the Scarlet Pimpernel to smuggle Russian aristocrats out of harms way — which in turn was fictionalized in James Hilton’s Without Armor.
The KGB even tried their hand at the game with a singularly unsuccessful spy novel whose hero piloted a bike instead of an Aston Martin.