More from the National Archive

[emad]

April 01, 2005

Times
Ambassador is finally exonerated

The British ambassador who was reputed to have given away one of the big secrets of the Second World War — the date of the Normandy landings — was not guilty, according to MI6 files released yesterday.

Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the Ambassador to Turkey during the war, employed a valet who was working for the Germans with the codename Cicero. Between October 1943 and March 1944 the embassy in Ankara was the source of information leaks that could have proved disastrous for the Allied cause. The valet, whose real name was Ilyas Bazna, was able to photograph a large number of secret documents, which he sold to the Germans.

Gill Bennett, the chief historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said that the newly released files showed that reports on the imminent D-Day landings were not among the documents that Cicero photographed.

Odd jobs fund

In 1913 the British Embassy in Washington discovered a secret fund available for relieving distressed British subjects, buying wreaths for “defunct colleagues” and — most intriguingly — “little secret service jobs”. It wondered where the money came from because the fund was running short of cash, and was told to close it down.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1549705,00.html