Page 14 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

with the purpose of including not only all War Theatres but also all countries where the interests
of the belligerents could collide” . However, this evolution addressed not only the geographical
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expansion of investigative systems, but also the modernisation of information structures through
the implementation and/or improvement of processes and tools not adequately developed before
going to war.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the conflict, the entities dealing with information activities
and interrelations in the Italian army were the result of a process which started in the Sardinian
army even before the unification of Italy, and reached maturity in the late 19 century when up
th
to date intelligence organizations replaced traditional espionage-based behaviors. Nowadays the
events that determined this complex development deserve an adequate in-depth analysis also
aimed at clarifying the Italian army Intelligence structure, culture, and practice in 1915. In fact,
when Italy entered the WWI, the Intelligence Office was already a long-established institution, but
as in the previous decades, the Army continued to assign intelligence tasks to different military
bodies, which were at times in competition with each other. The resulting critical condition - not
immune from misoneism and personalism - was gradually overcome during the war, but it required
several progressive and difficult reorganisations at the cost of operational uncertainties and some
crisis periods.
The history of these troubled events also outlines the context in which the Italian army provided
itself with one of the main new ‘branches’ of Intelligence, namely the exploitation of the enemy
telecommunication by means of information tools offrered by technological advances which
influenced the Intelligence evolution during the war.

new TechnologIes
The impressive spreading of telecommunications in the armed forces during the WWI was due
to the undisputable achievable advantages such as the extension of Headquarters’ command and
control action over the ever-growing troops deployed in wide operational areas and the possibility
to communicate with naval units navigating in oceans far-away from their bases.
The growth of military telephone and radiotelegraphic communications , encouraged all Intelligence
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Services to implement adequate techniques and layouts to extract the greatest amount of intel from
the enemies’ communication systems, by relying on some inherent weaknesses of those media
namely the relative ease of interception. Even the earliest episodes of the war, which took place
on both Western and Eastern fronts in 1914 showed, often surprisingly, what type of impact the
eavesdropping and interpretation of the enemy’s transmissions could have on military operations.
Because this new information technology was widely used and improved during the war, we
can assume the beginning at that time of the intelligence category today commonly known as
COMINT or ‘Communication Intelligence’, primarily understood as a collection of information
gathered and analysed through the interception and interpretation of enemy voice signals and text
messages.
The techniques employed to attack the enemy’s communication differ according to the type of
system involved. In radiotelegraphy, intelligence on the enemy could be achieved by signals
eavesdropping, analysis of traffic and finally by cryptanalysis techniques exploited to interpret the

3 Odoardo Marchetti, Il Servizio Informazioni dell’Esercito Italiano nella Grande Guerra, Tipografia Regionale, Rome, 1937,
p.102.
4 Wired telephone communications were largely used in the front line and eavesdropped by enemies. Wired telegraph
communications were especially useful in the rear lines. The transmission of voice via radio, whose experimentation started
even before the beginning of the hostilities, found limited application on the battlefields only towards the end of the conflict.

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