by Christopher Andrew
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by Matthew Cobb
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by Antony Beevor
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"The story of the most famous spy of the century--Cicero--has long been haunted by mysteries. Was he a double agent? What role did the long-legged secretary play? What effect did his intelligence have? Now Richard Wires, exploiting fresh scholarly sources, exhausting every aspect, and examining them with a critical eye, takes us to the heart of the Cicero affair--once and for all."-David Kahn, author of Hitler's Spies
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The episode of the opportunistic valet of Britain's ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II - dubbed "Cicero" for the eloquence of the top-secret material he appropriated from his employer Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugesson and sold to the Nazis - is a staple of intelligence lore. Yet this remarkable and sometimes comical story has often been recounted with little regard for the facts, most prominently in the popular film "Five Fingers". Here, historian and former intelligence officer Richard Wires seeks to present a full and objective account of the Cicero spy episode, offering closure to past discrepancies and credible solutions to remaining mysteries. It is a story set in the hotbed of intrigue that was wartime Turkey, replete with a dramatic car chase, a series of colourful mistresses ever loyal to their lover the spy, and an old-school British ambassador whose documents are photographed as he plays the piano in the drawing room and at night slips into a sleeping pill-induced slumber. Despite the affair's amusing aspects, it is also a sobering tale in which there are no winners and from which there are serious lessons to be learned. Germany never made use of the highly sensitive British documents it obtained during this crucial four-month period of the war because the handling of the information was caught up in a bitter and wasteful personal rivalry between Ribbentrop and Schellenberg. It was sheer luck for the British that their war effort did not sustain any significant damage. For, while the book states definitively that security regarding the Allied invasion of Normandy was not breached in the Cicero affair, Germany did gain a potential advantage concerning campaigns in the Aegean and the Balkans. This embarrassed the British greatly, especially since Cicero walked away a free man. However, the greedy valet - the most highly paid spy in history at that time - did not achieve his goals, either; he discovered some years later that the British banknotes he insisted on as payment were counterfeited by the Germans as part of a larger counterfeiting project. Cicero died a desperate man, deeply in debt, a fitting anticlimax for an espionage episode resulting in neither bodily injury nor strategic impact, but in humiliation on all sides.
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The Cicero affair has long held a prominent place in the espionage lore and literature of World War II. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The Cicero affair has long held a prominent place in the espionage lore and literature of World War II. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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