Page 15 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

INTRODUCTION

encoded messages. For telephone dispatches snooping, some preliminary activities are required
to allow the listening of conversations and phonograms, followed by the translation and eventual
interpretation of concealed languages or, in some cases, by the solution of coding.
The results obtained from COMINT activity should be compared and integrated with all other
available data for creating consistent and meaningful overall pictures. Moreover, as every other
kind of information, those results must be accurately evaluated before being confirmed, since the
enemy often tries implement deceptive activities also by means of telephone and radiotelegraphic
communications.
With the purpose of reacting to the enemy offensive actions, the belligerents struggled to increase
the security of their transmissions by preventing unauthorized access to the communication links
and to the messages transmitted over them, as well as protecting dispatches by codes and ciphers.
Today this kind of defensive actions - widely exploited by all belligerents during WWI - go under
the name of COMSEC or ‘Communication Security’.
To effectively perform each of the accomplishments mentioned above, several technical and
managerial undertakings were required, such as the eavesdropping services arrangement along
the entire front line, the development of ability in decrypting enemy dispatches and, finally the
training of many operators.
It is understandable that, during the war, the organisation needed to effectively perform all the
tasks outlined above took shape gradually within the various armies, with ups and downs in the
framework of the tremendous efforts produced by the bitterly competing belligerents. Delays in
innovation implementation, mistakes or simply inaccuracy in new tools usage sometimes led to
grievous losses.

lIMITs of The hIsTorIcal and lITerary ProducTIon
The account of the war fought on the Austrian-Italian front in the fields of Communication
Intelligence and Security has generally followed, until now, a one-sided view, due to the lack of
studies and researches in the Italian archives investigating, for instance, the work of the Army’s
Cryptographic Units as well as the strategy for telecommunications usage on both fronts and its
consequence on Communication Intelligence performances.
Among Italian publications some significant passages can be found only in the book by O.
Marchetti, published in 1937, and in the 1947 edition of the Manuale di Crittografia (Manual
of Cryptography) by Luigi Sacco who headed the Italian army’s Cryptographic Unit from its
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creation up to the Armistice. Brief references are also contained in works dealing with other topics.
On the other hand, some publications, mainly of Austrian origin, cover cryptology issues often
overlooking the contributions to intelligence by other already mentioned COMINT components.
Therefore, we saw the opportunity to conduct a research including all the aspects of Communication
Intelligence and Security, analysing the documents preserved in the archives and museums of Italy
and Austria, the memoirs written by the main protagonists in this field and other publications on
the topic that are quite scarce.
Moreover, the literary production on the overall performance of the Italian army’s Intelligence
during WWI does not show a complete and shared view. Very few publications take into due
account factors like the information flow provided by the Intelligence branches of the Armies

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5 Luigi Sacco, Manuale di Crittografia - terza edizione aggiornata e aumentata (3 edition, updated and augmented), Rome,
1947,

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