FIVE FINGERS!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 9

FIVE FINGERS!

F the hand manipulating.the combination lock on our cover this week appears an unduly literal way of drawing attention to the new ZB spy thriller we can only plead that while there is general agreement on how many beans make five there is not the same unanimity about. fingers-and long experience has shown that if there is room anywhere for an argument, "Listener" readers will argue. If we have erred, therefore, we have erred on the safe side. For news of the, radio version of "Five Fingers" read on.

~ NE night late in 1943, L. C. Moyzisch, attaché to the German Embassy at Ankara, entered a darkened Embassy drawing room and greeted a man seated there. "I have an offer to make you," said the man, "a proposition or whatever you call it, a proposition for the Germans, I can give you extremely secret papers, the most secret that exist. They come straight from the British Embassy. Well? That would interest you, wouldn’t it?" It did interest Moyzisch. It interested his superiors too. Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner agreed to the man’s price. Germany would pay £20,000 sterling for the first delivery of filmed documents. If they proved satisfactory, £15,000 would be paid for each subsequent roll of film. Thus began what the Germans code-named Operation Cicero, the most astonishing and most successful espionage coup of World War II. Afternoon listeners to the ZB stations will’ shortly be able to follow the incredible fortunes of Cicero as he abstracts secret Allied documents from the British Ambassador’s safe, photographs them, and delivers them regularly to Moyzisch for dispatch to Berlin. An Australian-produced serial entitled Five Fingers, based on the 20th Century-Fox film of that name, and also on Moyzisch’s book Operation Cicero, is to be broadcast in the Women’s Hour, at 3.0 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It will start from 1ZB on July 7, 2ZB on July 15, 3ZB on July 28 and 4ZB on August 5. Cicero-the Germans never did learn his* name-was in an ideal position to pick up information, He was the trusted valet of the British Ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, and more important, he had the keys to the Embassy safe. Albanian by birth, Cicero claimed two good reasons for selling Britain’s secrets to her enemies. The first was that his father had been killed by an "idiotic Englishman" who had never learned to handle a gun, and the second that he wanted money. Cicero wanted to live as a gentleman of means in some idyllic part of the globe where there were no Englishmen. The valet never did attain his ambition. He was soon to discover that much of the £300,000 the Germans paid him during the six months he worked for them consisted of sterling notes made in Berlin. Germany’s leaders took the unbelievable risk of paying for information worth a fortune in counterfeit money. But the crowning irony was even less believable. It was the fact that the German leaders never used the information Cicero gave them. Even when events proved the papers to be genuine, Kaltenbrunner and _ Ribbentrop stubbornly clung to their suspicion that they were

a a British plant. This was partly because the stolen documents contained conclusive evidence of an_ ultimate Allied victory, and Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner were not the men to face such unpleasant facts. They believed only what they wanted to believe. From Cicero Germany obtained complete minutes of the Yalta and Teheran conferences, of various. military operations, and of Operation Overlord, the

vital Allied plan for the landing in Europe. The only use to which it was put was to crack the British diplomatic code, As Moyzisch disgustedly sums _ it up: "They were counterfeit politicians. It seems oddly suitable that they should have paid for information they were incapable of using with counterfeit money." Von Papen, German Ambassador at Ankara at the time, fully endorses this view. And what of Cicero? It seems that he unexpectedly cropped up again in

Ankara during the filming of location shots for Five Fingers by a 20th Cen-tury-Fox team in 1951. From behind a pillar in the Uskel Palas Hotel he offered his services to producer Joseph Mankiewicz-for 5000 dollars. Not having heard of James Mason, he offered to play the lead, but would have been content with a position as technical assistant. After talks with diplomatic representatives, Mankiewicz declined. Eliaza Bazna, for that was his real name, went off to give another perform-

ance. The highest-paid spy in history was using his fine baritone voice in an effort to raise money to stave off his creditors! As a footnote it might be mentioned that this story has been (briefly) broadcast before-by the cheerful s&tirists of Take It From Here. One of their recent "film’’ productions was entitled How Green Was My Valet, and dealt with the theft of certain items from the British Ambassador at Brastof. Cicero has indeed made his mark in history.