Page 21 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER ONE

but also the great effort made by the Italian army to decrypt enemy radio telegraphic dispatches.
The author fails to explicitly mention the name of the key player in this undertaking, i.e., Engineer
Corps Officer Luigi Sacco, but provides some useful material to reconstruct the work done by
Sacco and his co-workers.
It should be noted that in Marchetti’s work - instructive in many regards - the description of
information flow and filters in WWI’s Intelligence operations is not always fully consistent and
the history of the Italian Intelligence during the pre-war period is outlined in an incomplete and,
in some respects, simplistic manner.

The lacks In hIsTorIcal sTudIes abouT The ITalIan arMy InTellIgence branch

Even the time frame of the Italian army’s Intelligence Service birth is a frequently discussed topic
but rarely analysed in adequate depth. The booklet about the history of the Service, published
by SIFAR (the previous Armed Forces Intelligence Service) in 1957, says: “The origins of our
Intelligence Service are relatively recent. They date back little more than fifty years, more precisely
to the year 1900, when information activities stopped being fragmentary and rudimentary. Up until
then, intelligence activities were conducted without a clear policy and coordination and there were
no specialised and qualified organisations” .
9
Since AISI (the Home Intelligence and Security Agency) has recently backdated the origin of the
Army General Staff’s Intelligence Office to 1855 , it is not of secondary importance to clearly
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identify the circumstances that led to the beginning of Intelligence activities and their evolution
in the Italian army.
In this last regard, most historians - starting with O. Marchetti and SIFAR itself - commonly
highlighted the limited human and financial resources as well as the reduced efficiency and
operational capacity of the Italian Intelligence Office from its origin to the eve of WWI .
11
Throughout the 20 century, it was accepted without criticism what O. Marchetti wrote in 1937
th
about this matter:

The Intelligence Office was unknown to most officers at that time and thereafter. It was the
terror and disgust of non-experts, who associated it with spies, in the worst meaning of the
term, and was perhaps commiserated by competent allies, friends and enemies. It almost
always lived through difficult times and its creation was not quite justified. It was housed in
two ridiculously small rooms and, for a long time, consisted of a colonel, who was the head of

9 SIFAR, Il servizio informazioni militare italiano dalla sua costituzione alla fine della Seconda guerra mondiale, no place
of printing, 1957, p. 5. Please, see also: Giuseppe Conti, Una guerra segreta. Il SIM nel secondo conflitto mondiale, Il
Mulino, Bologna, 2009. Cesare Amè, who was Head of the Service in the 1940-1943 period, also dates to 1900 the “official
establishment of a simple but central governing and coordinating body” (Guerra segreta in Italia 1940-1943, Casini, Roma,
1954).
10 Ambrogio Viviani is of the same opinion as shown in I servizi segreti italiani 1815-1985, Adn Kronos, Rome, 1985, p. 86:
“The birth certificate of Italy’s secret military intelligence services probably dates back to 1855”.
11 In the 1960 book titled Ventotto anni nel servizio informazioni militari (Esercito), Tullio Marchetti, who was Head of the
Intelligence Office of the First Army, wrote as follows, “The Intelligence Office of the General Staff Corps in Rome was the
central body that had to galvanize the whole organisation. […] But it was created late, only at the end of 1900, under the
direction of Knight and Colonel of General Staff Felice De Chaurand di S. Eustache. It vegetated until 1902 when Knight
and Colonel of General Staff Vincenzo Garioni took over its direction. Since then, it has started living, but what a hard life!
Despite all his good intentions, Garioni accomplished nothing. In 1905 he was succeeded by Knight and Colonel of General
Staff Silvio Negri, who died in office in 1912. Negri also did what he could, but the performance of the office was completely
inadequate to the situation needs”.

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