Spy Wants A Pension

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32005, 4 June 1969, Page 18

Spy Wants A Pension

MUNICH. A World War II spy is still determined to get a pension from the West German Government for his war-time services, despite rejection last month of his application.

Books and a film about 64-year-old Elyesa Bazna tell how he obtained secrets in 1943 about the planned Normandy invasion. Mr Bazna, whose code name was “Cicero,” had received more than one million Turkish pounds (about $NZ428,000) from the Germans by the end of the war. But he lost the money in a building investment in Istanbul and recently lost his job as a night watchman for a Munich construction firm. Now unemployed, he lives in Munich with his second: wife, Ezra, aged 40, and their’ four children. His first wife also bore him four children. He intends to renew his application for a pension. “I feel I did as much for Germany as any front-line soldier or general, and now I am an old man I am just as

entitled to a pension,” he said. “It is not my fault that the German General Staff did not believe its good luck.” Mr Bazna claims that none of the books or the film about him are as fantastic as the truth. It is true, he says, that he was cheated of part of his reward by the German Embassy in Ankara, but it is not true that German intelligence paid him in forged English banknotes. Not A Countess Although he was helped by a girl, she was not a Polish countess, as the film starring James Mason claimed. Now a balding man with big gaps in his toothy smile, it is hard to imagine Mr Bazna as a spy with ice-cold

nerves whose work was described by the Nazi Intelligence Chief (Walter Schellenberg) as “breathtaking.” From early 1943 to 1945, Mr Bazna was personal valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara, one of whose major tasks was to persuade the Turkish Government to abandon its neutrality and join the allies.

“Every day he would receive about five to six red and black dispatch boxes of secret documents,” said Mr Bazna. “When he was called away for conferences, or even! meals, I would walk in as if I was performing my normal' duties, screw a special strong’ light into the desk lamp, and ! take pictures with my Leica camera.”

He claims that from early 1943 to his last task in Feburary, 1944, he supplied his contact at the German Embassy with copies of: almost every major Allied document. Plans For D-Day Schellenberg’s memoirs bear out that among these, papers were the first tentative 1 plans for D-Day, including the code word "Overlord,” and a report on the Teheran I conference between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt which discussed D-Day.

Schellenberg also claimed that, because of Mr Banza’s work, German intelligencel was able to crack part of the British diplomatic code. British intelligence soon ■ discovered from their owni spies that there was an intelligence leak in Ankara and sent three officers to investigate. However, they were chiefly looking for listening devices aimed at the many top-level military conferences held at the embassy. Mr Bazna said he persuaded a 15-year-old embassy maid to help him.

“She would hold the docu-j ments in place or watch ati the door,” he said. “Every-: one knew we were lovers. I It would never have surprised, anyone to find us together' behind a locked door.”