Page 154 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

In the previous peace period, codes would be seized in the most diverse ways, from commissioned
theft to casual acquisition due to lack of care of the owner. However, the most frequent method was
the purchasing at a picturesquely defined ‘code suk’, where sellers might be one or more disloyal
officials, or free-lance agents who had somehow got hold of such valuable merchandise.
Potential advantages were of course proportional to the size and complexity of the codes. Therefore,
the underground contention between intelligence services, dating back to a period well before the
war, mainly aimed at diplomatic or high commands big codes.
In terms of cryptography, the years between 1900 and 1914 can be defined as “the era of stolen
codes”. Vienna seemingly was the centre of this activity and, in fact, David Kahn could ironically
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point out: “in the […] world of pre - war eastern Europe, codes and ciphers were bid up and up
like speculative shares in a stock market boom. Heading the list were those of Austria-Hungary
which, at the crossroad of Europe, was a virtual ants’ nest of espionage” .
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However, the Italian Intelligence Service was not able to profit from any opportunity to seize
Austrian codes, even in such an outrageous instance as the one involving the Austrian Colonel
Alfred Redl - mentioned in one of the previous chapters.
Conversely, the Evidenzbureau showed a particular skill in getting, during the years preceding the war,
the diplomatic and military codes of other important European countries, including Italy: in 1912 Ronge
purchased the Pocket Military Cipher and immediately later the Red Code. In 1914, the Austrian Officer
scored another success when he got hold of the Carabinieri’s Special Code, a one-part vocabulary with
code groups made of three figures, therefore containing a maximum of a thousand words.
When the war began, the Italian codes available to the Austro-Hungarian decryption service
included the Telegraphic Dictionary of the Royal navy and the Mengarini commercial code, not
only the version in free commerce but eventually that modified by the Italian army .
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The procedure was seemingly different for the Italian diplomatic code knowledge. In this regard,
O. Marchetti reports an episode than would have facilitated its breaking:

On a certain day of 1913, the Italian Ambassador in Vienna visited the Austrian Ministry for
Foreign Affairs and forgot a briefcase containing the text of a plaintext telegram with the
related coded translation. It seems that the cipher used for that telegram was exactly one of
the K-type codes that were for the most part interpreted later .
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Possession of all this material provided the Austrian, in the early phase of war, with a considerable
cryptologic advantage that would also inevitably impact on the following events.

coMInT vs huMInT
In Figl’s memoirs and in many other Austrian papers cited in the first chapter, the pre-war
acquisition of Italian codes is not clearly mentioned, contrary to what Ronge reported in his 1930

54 F. Pratt, Secret and Urgent, The Story of Codes and Ciphers, Blue Ribbon Books, Garden City, N.Y.,1939, p. 231.
55 D. Kahn, op. cit. p.263. One Ronge’s book is completely devoted to the description of several espionage operations
performed by Italy, Russia, Serbia and Romania against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the pre-war period and during the
war (Max Ronge, Les maitres de l’Espionnage, Payot, Paris, 1935).
56 M. Ronge, Spionaggio, op. cit. p.177; M. Ronge, Die Radiohorch, op.cit. p.49. It is not clear which of the many editions
of the Mengarini code, both commercial and military, Ronge had purchased.
57 Intelligence Service, Attività dei Reparti crittografici dell’esercito austro ungarico durante la guerra (Actvities of the
cryptographic units of the Austro-Hungarian army during the war), Ref. N. 951/A of 14 March 1919, signed by O. Marchetti,
AUSSME, Series H4, env.65.

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