Page 118 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

THE SECRET WAR ON THE ITALIAN FRONT IN WWI (1915 – 1918)

using the interference produced by its powerful transmitter to prevent the alert diffusion from the
enemy boat to the bulk of Japanese forces which attacked and defeated the Russian fleet in front
of the Tsushima Island .
11
Since the early months of the World War I, radio interception had shown its effect, both on the
eastern and the western front. The Russian army’s unencrypted radio communications had provided
the Germans with the opportunity to know the enemy’s plans and movements, which helped them
win the Tannenberg Battle in August 1914.
On the western front, the German armies that invaded Belgium and France were compelled to use
the radio, as telegraph and telephone lines were inoperable because had been destroyed during
the battles or by the French army before the retreat . However, the German encoding system
12
resulted to be too complex, making the work of cipher offices difficult and lengthy so that, due to
the frequent mistakes, many telegrams needed to be transmitted repeatedly. At the end, delays and
inefficiency in communication sometimes forced to transmit messages even as plaintext, which
made French interceptors incredibly happy .
13
What had happened in the early stages of war proves the importance of radio communications
but also their intrinsic exposure to interception, leading all armies to protect radio dispatches by
more effective codes and ciphers, frequently changing systems, and keys, as well as to develop
organizations and techniques for intercepting and interpreting enemy dispatches.
Moreover, the activity of telephone eavesdropping developed by all the belligerents, after the
beginning of the war, without any physical tapping of the enemy lines, induced to adopt specific
measures for protecting the secrecy also of those communication means.

coMMunIcaTIon InTellIgence: whaT Is IT abouT?

Intelligence gathering through enemy telecommunication became extensive and elaborate during
the conflict, to such an extent as to allow the allocation in the years of the war of the origin and
first development of what is named, in modern terms, Communication Intelligence or COMINT .
14
Actually, terms analogous to Communication Intelligence were introduced in common usage in
the last months of WWI, for instance by the American Expedition Force deployed to France which
identified its cryptologic branch as “Radio Intelligence Section” .
15
At present, specialist publications and relevant Committees define Communication Intelligence
in various ways. In very general terms, COMINT means the collection of information by subjects
other than the recipients to whom the communication is originally addressed, thanks to interception
and analysis of signals emitted by persons in different ways (voice, text, etc.). Telephone and
telegraph communications belong to this category .
16

11 Mario de Arcangelis, Electronic Warfare, From the Battle of Tsushima to the Falklands and Lebanon conflicts, Blandford
Press, 1985, pp. 11-18. The name of the Russian Admiral was Zinovij Petrovič Rožestvenskij.
12 The number of German transceivers at the beginning of the war amounted to 30 average-power transceivers and 33 low-
power trans receivers.
13 The German cipher called ÜBCHI by French analysts, used column-based double transposition, as explained in the
following pages.
14 This added to the traditional source of information that is nowadays termed HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and which
relies on espionage, questioning of prisoners and deserters, etc.
15 D. Kahn, op. cit., p.333. The term Radio Intelligence refers to that part of Communication Intelligence obtained with radio
instruments.
16 In current use, the term Signal Intelligence or SIGINT is sometimes preferred to COMINT. According to current definitions.
SIGINT includes, in addition to COMINT, also ELINT (Electronic Intelligence), that is the collection of information through
interception and analysis of signals emitted by devices such as Radar, which developed after World War I. In this context, it
seems more appropriate to use the term ‘Communication Intelligence’.

116