Page 140 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

780 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

Synthetic historical review of the technical and political
evolution of the Italian intelligence Services since the

beginning of the Kingdom of Italy to the last reforms in
2007 and 2012

maria gabriella PASQUAlINI

he history of ‘spying’ – a simplistic and misleading term -, both the military one
T and the domestic one with the aim to maintain the stability of Institutions, doesn’t
consist only in particularly brilliant undercover operations. It is also this, but it is above
all a daily work, almost ad horas, of collecting, coordinating and analyzing informa-
tion; a continuous and constant commitment, which cannot accept Sundays or holidays’
interruptions, which must be timely and updated with the use of every source, open or
classified: even simple news published in a newspaper or by other means of communi-
cation can be a piece, or the missing piece. Not for nothing even in the more ‘sensitive’
conflicts, it is often planned the presence of embedded journalists, recognizing the right
to information, but with a necessary attention to what can be published, which could
indicate and has indicated, especially in the past, enemies’ intentions and positions.
In a synthetic historical review it has to be remembered that, well before the
constitution of the Kingdom of Italy, there were many ‘secret services’ in the pre-
unification States, when the word intelligence had not yet entered into use, and above
all, that from immemorial time information has been an integral part of every clan or state
structure. You cannot ever forget Sun Tzu who in 500 B. C. in his Art of War wrote …
there are secret agents of five kinds: local agents, agents, agents of counterintelligence,
killing agents and security agents… to arrive at nearer times recalling the Tudors, with
their efficient very branched informational services, as well as Louis XIV who had very
articulated bodies for the ‘large-scale spying’ and ‘micro observation’ on the ground.
The Sun King created the Police of Paris, a domestic service, which availed itself of
agents, trustees and… even the very first ‘collaborators of justice’.
Napoleon was not less so: he organized a widespread military information service
and a domestic one, having in this way six distinct institutions for this purpose.
An historical curiosity for Italy: when did the common expression ‘secret service’
begin to be used in an institutional way in Italian unitarian and pre-unitarian legal orders?
In April 1855 the Royal Command of the General Staff of the Sardinian Army issued,
1
publishing it on the official Military Newspaper, a Short Instruction about the Service
of the Officials of the Royal Command of the General Staff in wartime edited by the

1 Instruction no. 21 of April 1855, in Military Newspaper, i.e. Official Collection of laws, regulations and
land and sea regulations, [GM] published by the Ministry of War, year 1855, Volume One, Turin, Giuseppe
Fodratti’s Typography and Lithographic Laboratory, p.775 -793.