Page 131 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER SIX

Baudot code . With fewer consecutive words a lower number of combinations can be achieved:
39
four words give rose to 16 letters or symbols and so on.
Accepting a higher level of complexity, the letters obtained with the above-mentioned method
could be, for instance, assembled in couple, developing a small code where the combinations of
two letters correspond to syllables, words, or entire sentences.
Concealed ciphers are not suitable to convey long and complex messages. In order to increase,
although to a limited extent, the amount of information contained within a concise telegram, the first
letter of each word of the transmitted text may be associated with a number, according to an easily
memorized table (d, t = 1; y, n, z = 2; m, w = 3; etc.). In this case, with five words one can transmit
the same number of group of figures from 0 to 9, obtaining a number of combinations much greater
than that of the previous examples. Since each code group of many secret and commercial codes
in use between 1914 and 1918 usually comprised five figures, the just mentioned dissimulation
allows to transmit a secret word or an entire sentence with only five words in the dispatch .
40
To make concealed ciphers ineffective, censorship tried to change, in suspect telegrams, the order
of words, or alter them while maintaining - a as far as possible - the original meaning of the
message.

concealed languages

Dispatches using these kinds of language can hide military information concerning movements
of troops, ships, etc. into text that apparently regards innocuous topics. During WWI, in order
to increase the security of telephone communications, all Armies systematically used concealed
vocabularies where words commonly occurring in military communications were replaced by
names related to different domains, such as historical, geographical, foods, beverages, etc.
Intelligence operators would also use even simpler concealed languages appropriate for short
telegraph communications. As the Head of Intelligence Service of the Italian 1 Army Tullio
st
Marchetti describes in his book , fiduciaries operating in the Austrian territories transmitted to him
41
information on Austro-Hungarian troops activities by telegrams written in a concealed language
and conveyed through other agents at designated addresses in Switzerland .
42
Italian officers, prisoners of war in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, frequently offered an unexpected
Intelligence contribution by means of telegrams sent to their families containing some relevant
information in concealed languages, probably product of customary practice in telephone
communications on the front line. At times, this information proved to be effective, despite the

understandable difficulty and danger in collecting and telegraphing it from a prison camp.

39 In 1874 Emil Baudot patented the first numerical code made up of a sequence of five bits, namely 1 or 0. The 32 possible
combinations allows encoding alphabet letters but not 1-to-10 numbers. This problem was solved by means of a symbol
marking the transition from letters to numbers.
40 . During WWI, some German spies applied this method to telegraph dispatches, using ABC, a commercial code widespread
at international level. One of them was the famous Maria de Victorica or Baroness Maria von Kretschamn, probably the
daughter of a German general. She was arrested in New York in April 1918 and died two years later in prison. She became
famous after the leading character in spy stories transposed in some films. (H.O. Yardley, op. cit.,183 -187).
41 Tullio Marchetti, Ventotto anni nel Servizio. op. cit., p.153 -155.
42 According to Tullio Marchetti, “fiduciaries” were often “Unredeemed” (in Italian “Irredenti” i.e., people living in Italian
territories making part of the Austrian Empire), who provided information for patriotism, while “informers” did that for
money.

129