Page 214 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

“Army’s Turkish four-figures” reported in line 15 of the list in question, for communications
within Turkey. In the logs, there is a reference to the translation of radiotelegraphic interceptions
in Turkish that corroborates such an assumption .
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10.3 A DISCLOSURE OF AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN CODES AND CIPHERS

a relevanT rePorT froM secTIon r
The concise and unfortunately incomplete story of the Austrian codes and ciphers, known
to and broken by the Cryptographic unit during WWI until April 1918, emerges from
a communication that Section R sent in early May of the same year to the Intelligence
Services of French General Headquarters and of the American Task Force Headquarters in
response to some precise questions from the Allies concerning “Austrian radiotelegraphy and
cryptography”. The report contains a cover letter and eight short appendices .
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The request might have been occasioned by news regarding the potential deployment of
Austrian troops to the Western front, which happened in the following months. The famous
American cryptologist and later diplomat J. Rives Childs owned this document, translated
into English, along with a large amount of cryptographic material he had gathered during
the war.
The author of the message - possibly Sacco or one of his colleagues - opens the cover letter
by stressing the scarcity of available cryptographic material due to the limited amounts of
Austrian radiotelegraphic transmissions, which occurred more abundantly on the Italian front
for just a few months of 1916 and from November to 1917 on. More frequent transmissions,
useful to break the Austrian army’s field ciphers, were intercepted, in the periods of silence
on the Italian front, above all from Austrian stations operating on the Albanian and Russian
fronts (Ukraine and Bessarabia).
The same introduction to the section R report points out that “the Austrian radiotelegraphic
service, unlike the German one, does not display a strictly centralized and uniform
organization, as it would seem that Austrian subordinate units have great freedom of action,
especially regarding service and ciphering rules”. The Italian analysts also noticed “a certain
inferiority of the Austrian service compared to the German one in terms of operators’ skills,
as well as of stations operation regularity” . These characteristics could be accounted for
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with the infringement of the strict rules about radio transmissions by some Austrian combat
units under particularly difficult operational circumstances. Moreover, it seems evident
that when radio operators are mainly employed for interceptions, their performance in the
sporadic cases of transmission may result to be inadequate.
The document in question also conveys a certain sense of restraint on the part of the
Cryptographic Unit in providing the Allies with entire codes that were apparently available.
The Unit sent only codes and cipher parts related to the examples of decrypted dispatches
included in the appendices, as can be understandable in terms of secrecy, although it is also
possible that the Italians preferred to maintain a certain reserve with the Allies as well.

30 Section R Logs, 4 January 1917, AUSSME, Series B1, 101S, Vol. 255c.
31 General Headquarters, Intelligence Service, Section R, Notes on Radio Telegraphy and Cryptography of the Austrian Army,
Rome, May 6, 1918, Reply to. no. N.1753, of 27 April 1918, Childs Cipher Paper, Vol. 1, Chapter 3. The letter was signed by
the Chief of the Intelligence Service, a Colonel whose name is not specified but evidently was O. Marchetti.
32 ibidem.

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