Page 141 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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ActA
Royal Command of the General Staff and approved by the Ministry of War, widely
known as ‘La Marmora Instruction’: this Instruction will produce its effects for many
years to come, at least until the First World War. The Instruction divided the War Service
into five parts and the Sixth one was the secret service: probably from here it comes the
official use to call the military information activity… ‘secret service’.
All things considered, everybody really liked the aura of ‘secrecy’ as it gave a sense
of prominence both in saying and whispering even not particularly sensible military
information.
Little, however, remained definitely ‘secret’ ...
The service for special missions and the secret service, in accordance with the above
mentioned Instruction, were those services starting, in a more organized way than in the
past, the collection of military information in the Sardinian Army, just during the Eastern
Campaign organization, i.e. the Crimean war, first official presence of the Piedmont
army in an international field.
Since this war, an Office responsible for military information was always present in
the Royal Command of the General Staff, even if it was never officially added to the
organization charts or in service orders until August 23, 1906, when the Office came out
2
definitively from clandestinity.
The Sixth Chapter about the Secret Service of the ‘La Marmora Instruction’, perhaps
the most interesting for our synthetic historical path, indicated among other things: the
secret missions; the exits [i.e. , inspections]; the spies’ service to explore the enemy’s
means and strength, and the political condition of foreign provinces; the rules for
preliminary negotiations, armistices, conventions with the enemy; the examination of
prisoners and enemy deserters, and the exchange of prisoners ... a true vade-mecum of
the military information and the ‘spies’ service that had to be channeled and provided
with a series of ‘rules’ to reach effective results. These ones, although revised and
updated according to time needs, were at the basis of informative collection until the
end of the Second World War.
In the new organization of the Italian Army (not yet Royal Army), no Information
3
Office was put into as such in an official chart, nevertheless it existed and took inspiration
from the ‘La Marmora Instruction’: this is precisely clear reading the numerous
documents from the 1866 archives regarding the organization of military information
in that period.
As regards the domestic security, with the advent of the Kingdom of Italy, Cavour,
whose father had been the chief of the Piedmont police, knew very well the art of
collecting intelligence, in the dual sense of collecting news or persuading, by means of
evident or less evident special envoys (among them the famous glamorous Countess of
Castiglione, Virginia Oldoini), foreign politicians (like Napoleon III) to side with the
Kingdom of Piedmont. Count Cavour was a member of the High Statistics Commission
(word that repeatedly occurs in the informative military structure before and between
the two world wars, to conceal centers of counter-intelligence: Sections or Centers of

2 AUSSME, L3, b.301, Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Agenda of August, 23, 1906.
3 See Note no. 76, May 4, 1861, signed by Manfredo Fanti, Minister of War.