Page 22 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

the office, a captain, who acted as secretary, and a Carabinieri officer, who performed military
police and counterintelligence duties .
12
Other authors were even more concise. For example, De Lutiis, in referring to what happened after
the Battle of Custoza, wrote: “Military Intelligence Services were never mentioned for 34 years.
The Intelligence Office was re-established in September 1900” .
13
These remarks were mainly based on personal memories and accounts instead of archive research
and were perhaps due to the intention of justifying some uncertainties of the Intelligence Office at
the beginning of WWI. They did not consider the complex structure of the Intelligence organization
inside the General Staff Corps, which, as of the last decades of the 19 century, had included not
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only the Intelligence Office with its truly limited personnel, but also the ‘Colonial Office’ and two
Offices called Scacchieri (War Theatres). Moreover, as early as the end of the 19 century, the
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information structure had subsidiary bodies inside the Army Corps Headquarters located on the
Alpine borders, in Sicily, and in Apulia.
Only in recent times the great amount of documentation produced by the ‘Theatres’ and housed
in three separate collections of the Historical Archives of the Army General Staff, has gained
emphasis .
14
Also, the historical research on the events of the war involving the Intelligence Office/Service does
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not extend much beyond the book by O. Marchetti, despite the significant number of documents
filed in the Historical Office including the daily diaries of the central bodies of the Intelligence and
a substantial number of papers pertaining to the activities performed by the Intelligence Offices
of the Armies.
The historiography has superficially emphasized only the poor performance of the Office/Service
under the command of Cadorna, and the improvement of the intelligence organisation which
occurred in 1918. However, just as the studies on the pre-war period have neglected to analyse the
activities of the ‘Theatres’, likewise the works on the 1915-18 war have ignored the activities of
the Situation Office, which for most of the war, acted as the main body of the Supreme Command
Intelligence, assessing and interpreting the information gathered by the Intelligence Office and
many other military/civilian intelligence institutions operating in Italy and abroad.
The archive analysis shows the profound knowledge on the Austro-Hungarian army acquired by
the Situation Office and through the work of Armies Intelligence Branches which provided prompt
and complete information even on the eve of the major feats of arms, as shown in the following
chapters.

12 Odoardo Marchetti, op.cit., p. 14-15. The almost complete text of this evaluation was also mentioned in the afore mentioned
booklet by SIFAR.
13 Giuseppe De Lutiis, Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1984, p. 4.
14 AUSSME, Series: G-22 Eastern Theatre; G-23 Western Theatre; G-33 Southern Theatre – Colonial Office. This set of
documents - contained in 162 envelopes filed in approximately 30 linear metres - proves the intense and productive work
done by the personnel in charge of the ‘Theatres’ in the effort delivered to acquire and study information about the war
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equipment of the European countries between the last decades of the 19 century and 1915. See also: Filippo Cappellano,
L’imperial regio esercito austro-ungarico sul fronte italiano 1915-1918 dai documenti del servizio informazioni dell’Esercito
Italiano, War Museum in Rovereto, 2002; Maria Gabriella Pasqualini, Carte segrete dell’Intelligence italiana 1861-1918,
RUD, Rome, 2006.
15 The name of the Intelligence Office was changed to Intelligence Service during the war, as described in the following
chapters of this book.

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