Servizio Informazioni Militare

In 1938 General Gamba, chief of the SIM Cryptographic Bureau, requested cooperation in the cryptanalytic field at the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW/Chi). The Germans agreed to share results on French diplomatic and military systems.[16] This collaboration was expanded and provided the Germans with important cryptologic material like the U.S. Military Intelligence code. OKW/Chi had previously worked hard on solving the code, but had set it aside as too difficult. The Servizio Informazioni Militare provided also OKW/Chi with a captured Swedish diplomatic codebook and with a Turkish code that Chi was trying hard to break.[17] There was less cooperation between SIM and the Abwehr on the working level. The SIM did not trust the Abwehr to honour agreements such as not to run clandestine networks in Italy. They monitored German intelligence activities and agents in Italy. Nor were the Germans apprised of any of the doubling of Allied agents which SIM conducted with great success.[18] As the war went on relations became strained since the Germans came to distrust the Italians. After the Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy when Benito Mussolini was deposed on 24–25 July 1943, the Servizio Informazioni Militare turned to OKW/Chi for help and cooperation. Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, however, forbade any further liaison, and from that point on, no agency contact was made or material exchanged.[17]

During the war SIM also cooperated with other Axis intelligence agencies, including those of Japan, Finland and Hungary. At regular intervals, technological and information exchanges occurred at the Penang submarine-base in Japanese-occupied Malaya, which served Axis submarine forces of the Italian Italian Regia Marina, German Kriegsmarine and Imperial Japanese Navy. The Hungarians maintained liaison officers in Rome and made the results of their work available to the Italians.

On 1 December 1943, after the creation of the Italian Social Republic, the new government established the SID (Defensive Information Service), the new Republic of Salò intelligence service.[19] The SID was operational a month before its formal establishment, and its headquarters were located in Volta Mantovana. The SID was the only RSI Armed Forces information body, with espionage, counterintelligence and military police tasks. It was headed by Vittorio Foschini, a former journalist known for his anti-German attitudes. In late February 1944, Foschini was kidnapped by the SS as he left Rodolfo Graziani's villa on Lake Garda and disappeared to Germany.[20] He was replaced by Lt-Colonel Candeloro De Leo, a Carabinieri officer described as 'capable and unscrupulous'.[20] De Leo signed an agreement with the German Abwehr, but SID activities were hampered by Nazi Germany's intense hostility toward Italy after the armistice.[21]

In March 1944 the SID departments were briefly as follows:

• Sezione OMEGA (Offensive Intelligence): supposed to run offensive intelligence operations abroad, but the Germans disapproved of this and it existed in name only.
• Sezione DELTA (Defensive Intelligence): this was the most important branch of SID, with the majority of its officers seconded from the Carabinieri. The Rome office of the section was headed by Carabinieri Captain Colombini, probably one of the few fervent Republican Fascists in SlD.
• Sezione SIGMA (Internal Political Intelligence): this section collected information on civilian morale and the reactions of the various classes to the Mussolini regime and to the Germans, who were naturally keenly interested in its reports.
• The Centro Raccolta e Elaborazione Notizie, which was purely an HQ section concerned with evaluating intelligence received. It included however a section carrying out the breaking of Allied codes and cyphers, headed by Frigate captain Luigi Donini - a very lukewarm Republican who had an English wife and was closely supervised by the Gestapo. This section enjoyed constant and close German supervision at all levels.
• Sezione KAPPA (Communications): this section installed W/T sets to enable Mussolini to keep in direct touch with SID HQ, and also similar facilities to the offices in Rome, Florence and other important centres, using codes supplied by the cryptographic branch. There was, however, a sad deficiency in radio sets, both in quantity and quality.
• Sezione ZETA: Postal Censorship throughout Republican Italy, using mainly retired Army officers.

The SID was dismantled soon after the liberation of Italy, on 25 April 1945.

The biggest Italian intelligence victory scored during World War II was the acquisition of U.S. encipherment tables obtained through the break-in of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in September 1941 authorized by General Cesare Amè, head of the SIM. These tables were used by U.S. Ambassadors worldwide to communicate back to Washington, D.C. In October 1940, Colonel Bonner Fellers was assigned as military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Egypt and was to report to his American superiors the details of British military activities in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. The British, hoping to eventually get the Americans into the war against the Axis powers, were very accommodating to Fellers giving him nearly full access to British operations in North Africa. Fellers, who was something of an Anglophobe, usually authored his dispatches in a less than favourable manner casting great doubt about the long-term success of the British and her Commonwealth allies fight against the Italo-German army in North Africa. His reports were read by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the head of American intelligence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Using the encipherment tables the Italian SIM was able to decipher Fellers’ communiques with Washington in a matter of hours often gleaning important information about the British in North Africa such as its current positions, sustained losses, expected reinforcements, current supply situation, future plans, morale, etc. which it quickly reported to the Italian and German military in North Africa. The leak ended on June 29, when Fellers switched to the new U.S. code system.[32] During the 8 months or so of reading Fellers’ dispatches to Washington, Rommel would refer to Fellers as “die gute Quelle” (the good source).[33]

Shortly before the start of World War II, SIM had broken Yugoslav military codes. When, in April 1941, Italian forces in Albania were threatened by a planned Yugoslav strike, SIM operators sent coded messages to the Yugoslav divisions, ordering them to postpone the scheduled offensive and return to their start-lines. By the time the Yugoslavs realised they had been duped, the Italian defences had been restored.[34] During the occupation of Yugoslavia, the SIM turned its attention to the communications of partisan groups and by mid-1943 had solved two systems used by the Chetniks and one used by Tito’s Partisans.

SIM played an important role in Italian guerrilla war in Ethiopia. Francesco De Martini, captain of the SIM, was one of the leaders of Italian insurgency in East Africa. In January 1942, he blew up a British ammunition dump in Massaua (Eritrea). After crossing the Red Sea in the motorboat Zam Zam, De Martini fled to Saudi Arabia. He made contact with the Italian consulate in that country, and from the Yemeni coast organized a group of Eritrean sailors (with small boats called sambuco) in order to identify, and notify Rome with his radio, of the Royal Navy movements throughout the Red Sea.[35] Major Max Harari, head of the British military intelligence, offered a reward for his capture. On 1 August 1942, while attempting to come back to Eritrea, De Martini was captured on Dahlak Island by sailors from HMS Arpha and imprisoned in Sudan until the end of the war.[36]

Excerpt of the Sunday Times of Malta about Borg Pisani's execution

On 18 May 1942, Maltese irredentist and SIM spy Carmelo Borg Pisani was sent on an espionage mission to Malta, to check British defences and help prepare for the planned Axis invasion of the island (Operazione C3).[37] Borg Pisani was recognized by one of his childhood friends, Cpt. Tom Warrington, who denounced him. British Intelligence kept him under arrest in a house in Sliema till August. He was then transferred to Corradino prison, accused of treason. On 12 November 1942, he stood trial under closed doors in front of three judges, headed by Chief Justice of Malta Sir George Borg, and defended by two lawyers.[38] His plea that he had renounced British citizenship by returning his passport and acquisition of Italian citizenship (which would have granted him the status of prisoner of war) was not upheld by the military court. On 19 November 1942, he was publicly sentenced to death for espionage, for taking up arms against the Government and forming part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.[39] His execution by hanging took place at 7:30AM on Saturday, 28 November 1942.[39] Borg Pisani was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor, the highest Italian military award, by King Victor Emmanuel III a few days after his death.[40]

SIM had a large, well-organized cryptanalytic department, Sezione 5, which attacked foreign crypto-systems.[2] This section was headed by General Vittorio Gamba, a published student of cryptology who had been breaking codes since World War I, and was located in Rome.[41] Also under Gamba was a subsection headed by the elderly Colonel Gino Mancini that produced codes and ciphers for the Royal Italian Army and higher-level enciphered codes for the Regia Marina. SIM's cryptographic section concentrated on military and diplomatic traffic. By the time the war was at its peak, SIM's interception and decryption operations had taken on immense proportions. On average 8,000 radio messages were intercepted each month, 6,000 were studied and out of these 3,500 were translated.[2] The flow was so large that Colonel Cesare Amè, the head of SIM, began to publish a daily bulletin - Bulletin I - that summarized the most significant information. Copies of the bulletin were sent to Mussolini, to the Chief of General Staff and to king Victor Emmanuel (via his aide-de-camp Paolo Puntoni), while a good portion of the diplomatic traffic was sent to Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister. The codes of several countries were attacked including France, Turkey, Romania, United States, Britain and the Vatican. Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary that Sezione 5 cryptanalysts routinely read British, Romanian, and neutral Turkey's diplomatic traffic.