Page 325 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

of the code and tables adopted in 1918, which evidently were never broken. The only mention of
a “not yet decoded grey code” appeared in the last part of Ronge memoirs, for he believed it was
used within the 4 Army alone .
th
25
One can infer that during the planning and development phases of the decisive events that culminated
into the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, the Austrian analysts could not break any relevant dispatch from
the Italian Headquarters down to Divisions, as well as any service dispatches encoded with the SA
or T1, in addition to D and R codes.
Replacing the most important codes and ciphers on the eve of the last battle on the Italian front - in
fact, a long-planned initiative to win the last resistance of the Austro-Hungarian army - may not
have happened by chance, but instead demonstrated the maturity reached by the Cryptographic
Unit and its Chief.

a new code for The InTellIgence servIce
Given the widespread adoption of the SI code, the Intelligence Service asked the Cryptographic
Unit to generate a new code for communications with the Intelligence Centres abroad and among

14.6 Over-encoding method for the S.I.B. Code (ISCAG Library)

25 M. Ronge, Der Radiohorch, op. cit., p.41.

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