Page 160 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

As a matter of fact, partial coding was a general custom dating back to the pre-war period and
was applied to all dispatches transmitted via radio and wire, to cope with the scant availability
of coding and decoding personnel within Headquarters and to reduce telegraphists’ workload .
15
This helped enormously dispatch decryption so that Figl admits: “four years after the end of
WWI, I sometimes think that our decryption operations would not have been so quick if complete
ciphering had been applied from the very beginning (by the Italian, A/N)” .
16
The adoption of partial coding by other armies including, sporadically, the Austro-Hungarian one,
is not a justification .
17

The fIrsT ‘servIce cIPhers’

Austrian sources do not mention the fact that, in 1915, two types of service ciphers were introduced
relying on code groups made respectively of figures or letters. The first type - commonly employed
by all radio stations - remained in use from 30 May 1915 until April 1916, while the letters-based
cipher, introduced in early August 1915 - initially reserved for short confidential communications
between the Supreme Command and the Armies on the Isonzo frontline - was modified in April
1916 and from then on, extensively applied to replace the figures one. Until that date, the cipher
based on groups of letters had remained unknown and unsolved by Austrian analysts, also due to
its limited usage.
It does not seem that for these two ciphers the Italian radio telegraphists systematically employed
any acronym usually included in dispatch preambles for helping the decoding process. Only in
cases of possible confusion, the acronyms CFN and CFL were introduced for ciphers consisting
of figures and letters, respectively .
18
Figl and his colleagues focused on the CFN during the early months of the war. Helped by partial
ciphering and, according to what Ronge says, by the seizure of the instruction manual , they
19
managed to decrypt Italian dispatches. The following description of the table structure was possible
partially thanks to data from Austrian sources.
In CFN, alphabet letters, groups of two or three letters, numbers or entire words were replaced
by code groups comprising two or three digits, which could be coupled in cryptograms to form
numbers with 2 to 6 digits. This made the cipher immediately recognizable.
CFN comprises a main table and an auxiliary table. The main table contains one hundred items,
displayed in very regular order, consisting of alphabet letters, two-letter groups with one consonant
followed by a vowel and three-letter groups “qui, quo, qua, que”, as shown in picture 8.2. Each of
these items is coded by two digits corresponding respectively to the column and the line to which
the item belongs .
20
By adding an initial digit varying from 2 to 9, the auxiliary table allows the items in the main table
to be modified, performing the function specified in the column to the right of the auxiliary table.
Adding “0”, or “1” at the beginning of the code group indicates respectively the use of other two

15 Ministry of War, Secretary General, Staff Division, Circular regarding Transmission confidentiality for telegrams and
general correspondence, 27 April 1918, AUSSME, Series E2, env.22.
16 O. Horak, Oberst a.D. Andreas Figl, op. cit., p.96 - 97.
17 M. Ronge, Spionaggio, op. cit. p. 49. The Author explains he had to deal with this kind of stupid behaviour of some
Headquarters.
18 Chief Inspector of STM, Military History Journal, Service Order No.22 of 26 August 1915, AUSSME, Series B1,105 S,
Vol.87.
19 M. Ronge, Spionaggio op. cit. p. 177.
20 For example, the “bi” is ciphered as either 43 or 34 depending on adopted conventional usage.

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