The cracking of the Black Code The biggest Italian intelligence victory scored during
World War II was the acquisition of U.S. encipherment tables obtained through the break-in of the
U.S. Embassy in Rome in September 1941 authorized by General
Cesare Amè, head of the SIM. These tables were used by U.S. Ambassadors worldwide to communicate back to
Washington, D.C. In October 1940, Colonel Bonner Fellers was assigned as
military attaché to the U.S. embassy in
Egypt and was to report to his American superiors the details of British military activities in the
Mediterranean Theater of Operations. The British, hoping to eventually get the Americans into the war against the
Axis powers, were very accommodating to Fellers giving him nearly full access to British operations in
North Africa. Fellers, who was something of an
Anglophobe, usually authored his dispatches in a less than favourable manner casting great doubt about the long-term success of the British and her
Commonwealth allies fight against the Italo-German army in North Africa. His reports were read by
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the head of American intelligence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Using the encipherment tables the Italian SIM was able to decipher Fellers' communiques with Washington in a matter of hours often gleaning important information about the British in North Africa such as its current positions, sustained losses, expected reinforcements, current supply situation, future plans, morale, etc. which it quickly reported to the Italian and German military in North Africa. The leak ended on June 29, when Fellers switched to the new U.S. code system. During the eight months or so of reading Fellers' dispatches to Washington,
Rommel would refer to Fellers as "die gute Quelle" (the good source).
Operations in Yugoslavia Shortly before the start of World War II, SIM had broken
Yugoslav military codes. When, in April 1941, Italian forces in
Albania were threatened by a planned Yugoslav strike, SIM operators sent coded messages to the Yugoslav divisions, ordering them to postpone the scheduled offensive and return to their start-lines. By the time the Yugoslavs realised they had been duped, the Italian defences had been restored. During the occupation of Yugoslavia, the SIM turned its attention to the communications of partisan groups and by mid-1943 had solved two systems used by the
Chetniks and one used by
Tito's Partisans.
Guerrilla in East Africa SIM played an important role in
Italian guerrilla war in Ethiopia.
Francesco De Martini, captain of the SIM, was one of the leaders of Italian insurgency in
East Africa. In January 1942, he blew up a British ammunition dump in
Massaua (Eritrea). After crossing the
Red Sea in the
motorboat Zam Zam, De Martini fled to
Saudi Arabia. He made contact with the Italian consulate in that country, and from the
Yemeni coast organized a group of Eritrean sailors (with small boats called
sambuco) in order to identify, and notify
Rome with his radio, of the
Royal Navy movements throughout the
Red Sea. Major Max Harari, head of the British military intelligence, offered a reward for his capture. On 1 August 1942, while attempting to come back to Eritrea, De Martini was captured on
Dahlak Island by sailors from
HMS Arpha and imprisoned in Sudan until the end of the war.
The Borg Pisani affair about Borg Pisani's execution On 18 May 1942,
Maltese irredentist and SIM spy
Carmelo Borg Pisani was sent on an
espionage mission to Malta, to check British defences and help prepare for the planned Axis invasion of the island (
Operazione C3). Borg Pisani was recognized by one of his childhood friends, Cpt. Tom Warrington, who denounced him. British Intelligence kept him under arrest in a house in
Sliema till August. He was then transferred to
Corradino prison, accused of
treason. On 12 November 1942, he stood trial under closed doors in front of three judges, headed by
Chief Justice of Malta Sir
George Borg, and defended by two lawyers. His plea that he had renounced
British citizenship by returning his passport and acquisition of Italian citizenship (which would have granted him the status of
prisoner of war) was not upheld by the military court. On 19 November 1942, he was publicly
sentenced to death for
espionage, for taking up arms against the Government and
forming part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. His execution by
hanging took place at 7:30AM on Saturday, 28 November 1942.
Sezione 5 SIM had a large, well-organized
cryptanalytic department, Sezione 5, which attacked foreign
crypto-systems. Also under Gamba was a subsection headed by the elderly Colonel Gino Mancini that produced codes and ciphers for the
Royal Italian Army and higher-level enciphered codes for the
Regia Marina. SIM's cryptographic section concentrated on military and diplomatic traffic. By the time the war was at its peak, SIM's interception and decryption operations had taken on immense proportions. On average 8,000 radio messages were intercepted each month, 6,000 were studied and out of these 3,500 were translated. The flow was so large that Colonel Cesare Amè, the head of SIM, began to publish a daily bulletin -
Bulletin I - that summarized the most significant information. Copies of the bulletin were sent to Mussolini, to the Chief of General Staff and to king
Victor Emmanuel (via his
aide-de-camp Paolo Puntoni), while a good portion of the diplomatic traffic was sent to Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister. The codes of several countries were attacked including France,
Turkey,
Romania,
United States, Britain and the
Vatican. Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary that Sezione 5 cryptanalysts routinely read British, Romanian, and neutral Turkey's diplomatic traffic. ==Chiefs==