Page 208 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

known not only to the High Commands of the Armed Forces, but also to the highest offices of the
State.

new challenges ahead
The transfer to Rome facilitated Sacco’s direct and frequent interaction with apical officials
of state offices needing cryptographic support, obviously more effective than if he had
remained in Codroipo. In mid-November “Captain Sacco reported to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and to the Ministry of the Interior to arrange the terms of his service” in their
support . Also the Head of Section R often conferred with Giacomo De Martino, Secretary
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General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who specifically dealt on behalf of the Minister
with Intelligence affairs, to inform him about the results achieved by the Unit in decrypting
diplomatic correspondence.
A large part of diplomatic dispatches was intercepted by the office of Royal Post and
Telegraphs, particularly by the office of San Silvestro in Rome, where the Embassy officials of
neutral countries delivered the dispatches addressed to their governments and the dispatches
travelling the opposite way were received. The coded confidential diplomatic telegrams
posed a hard, yet often won, challenge for Sacco and his colleagues. According to David
Alvarez, during the war, the cryptographic unit managed to break the diplomatic codes of
Vatican State, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, United States and
Bolshevik Russia .
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The Vatican State’s telegraphic correspondence was a specific case, since the Vatican not having
its own network, had to rely on Italian telegraphs to communicate with apostolic Nuncios resident
also in countries that were enemies to Italy. The interception and interpretation of those messages
resulted to be extremely useful source of information about the political, economic, and general
situation of Austria and Germany in particular . The Section R journal only provides one single
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piece of specific information about Vatican’s communications concerning the transmission on
15 August 1917 to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a set of 22 decrypted telegrams exchanged
between the Holy See and the Nuncio in Brussels .
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The other Vatican dispatches belong to the category generally defined as diplomatic which, once
converted to plaintext, were transmitted almost every day to the relevant Ministries, first the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and sometimes to the Allied Mission in Rome. The number of wire
telegrams often exceeded the number of cryptograms intercepted by radio, which shows the
importance, wide scope, and complexity of the Unit’s job.
Moreover, the cryptograms in private letters and telegrams intercepted by the censorship or
taken from enemy agents by the Italian counterintelligence were usually difficult to interpret for
the offices of Public Security. Therefore, Sacco received on his desk a large quantity of letters,
telegrams and correspondence of all kinds that were suspected of being written with cryptographic
or steganography methods.

8 Section R Logs, 15 November 1916, AUSSME, B1, 101S, Vol. 247 c.
9 David Alvarez, Italian Diplomatic Cryptanalysis in World War I, Cryptologia, Vol. XX, no.1, January 1996.
10 David Alvarez, I Servizi Segreti del Vaticano, Spionaggio, complotti, intrighi da Napoleone ai giorni nostri, Newton
Compton, Roma, 2003, p. 100 - 150. By the same author, see: Faded lustre: Vatican Cryptography, 1915 – 1920, Cryptologia,
April 1966, Vol. XX, no. 2, p.97 - 131. These telegrams were usually conveyed through a neutral country, often through
Switzerland.
11 Section R Logs, 15 August 1917, AUSSME, Series B1, 101S, Vol. 294d.

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