Servizio Informazioni Militare
The Military Intelligence Service was the military intelligence organization for the Royal Italian Army of the Kingdom of Italy from 1925 to 1944. Established by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, it was the Italian equivalent to the German Abwehr.
In the early years of the war, the SIM scored important intelligence successes; among its most notable achievements was cracking the United States Black Code used by Colonel Bonner Fellers to communicate plans for British military operations in North Africa in 1942, which substantially aided Axis forces in the theater.
The SIM was highly efficient and performed favourably to its German counterpart. Bernard Montgomery's Chief Intelligence Officer, Brigadier Edgar Williams, remarked that the Italians "made far more intelligent deductions from the information they received than did the Germans." According to historian Thaddeus Holt, the SIM was the ablest Axis secret service on the technical level, and it exceeded by far any other secret service in Europe outside the USSR.
History
The Servizio Informazioni Militari was instituted in October 1925 under the Fascist regime. Its activity was supported by the Air Force Information Service and the Navy Secret Information Service. The SIM had its headquarters at Forte Braschi, in the Quarter Q. XIV Trionfale, within the Municipio XIV. Within ten years, SIM evolved from a purely military intelligence and counter-intelligence service into a modern comprehensive structure capable of offering full intelligence coverage on domestic and overseas issues. On February 6, 1927, it was placed directly under the head of the High Command and charged with responsibility for internal and external security for all three armed forces. In 1934 funds available to the new service were doubled, as also was the number of specialised sections and personnel.During the second half of the 1930s the activities of SIM, in particular under the leadership of Mario Roatta, took a rather sinister direction: SIM was implicated in an impressive chain of crimes and acts of violence, including the assassination of the most active anti-Fascist exile, Carlo Rosselli, together with his brother Nello, on 9 June 1937. SIM was also behind the assassination in Marseille of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.
SIM experienced its greatest interwar successes during the Ethiopian Campaign and the Spanish Civil War, managing to cut off the flow of arms to both Ethiopia and the Spanish Republic and providing the Italian command with a complete picture of the enemy forces. During the Ethiopian war it participated in the subversion of local chieftains who should have been loyal to Haile Selassie.
Shortly before Italy's entry into World War II, Brigadier general Giacomo Carboni, chief of the SIM, wrote a series of reports to Benito Mussolini wherein the Italian preparation to the war was described as inadequate. Carboni drafted pessimistic reports on Italian and German military capabilities. As a result Carboni was dismissed from his post at the SIM.
During the war SIM, whose sphere of action was generally limited to military objectives, is credited with operational efficiency. This included the forecasting of the Allied landing in North Africa, a contingency not considered by the Abwehr. However, this service often was not consulted by Mussolini and the military hierarchy.
SIM was dissolved in 1944 and was replaced for a few years by a small intelligence office within the General Staff. Only in 1949 did the Allies allow the service to be re-established as SIFAR .
Just before the Italian surrender, Pietro Badoglio put his protégé Giacomo Carboni back in charge of SIM. After the Armistice, many SIM agents continued to work on behalf of the Kingdom of the South and of the Italian resistance. SIM spy Rodolfo Siviero coordinated the Italian partisans' intelligence activities from the Jewish art historian Giorgio Castelfranco's house on the Lungarno Serristori in Florence. Today he is known mainly for his role in the recovery of artworks stolen from Italy during the Second World War as part of the 'Nazi plunder'.
Intra-Axis co-operation
In 1938 General Gamba, chief of the SIM Cryptographic Bureau, requested cooperation in the cryptanalytic field at the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The Germans agreed to share results on French diplomatic and military systems. This collaboration was expanded and provided the Germans with important cryptologic material like the U.S. Military Intelligence code. OKW/Chi had previously worked hard on solving the code, but had set it aside as too difficult. The Servizio Informazioni Militare provided also OKW/Chi with a captured Swedish diplomatic codebook and with a Turkish code that Chi was trying hard to break. There was less cooperation between SIM and the Abwehr on the working level. The SIM did not trust the Abwehr to honour agreements such as not to run clandestine networks in Italy. They monitored German intelligence activities and agents in Italy. Nor were the Germans apprised of any of the doubling of Allied agents which SIM conducted with great success. As the war went on relations became strained since the Germans came to distrust the Italians. After the Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy when Benito Mussolini was deposed on 24–25 July 1943, the Servizio Informazioni Militare turned to OKW/Chi for help and cooperation. Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, however, forbade any further liaison, and from that point on, no agency contact was made or material exchanged.During the war SIM also cooperated with other Axis intelligence agencies, including those of Japan, Finland and Hungary. At regular intervals, technological and information exchanges occurred at the Penang submarine-base in Japanese-occupied Malaya, which served Axis submarine forces of the Italian Italian Regia Marina, German Kriegsmarine and Imperial Japanese Navy. The Hungarians maintained liaison officers in Rome and made the results of their work available to the Italians.
SID
On 1 December 1943, after the creation of the Italian Social Republic, the new government established the SID, the new Republic of Salò intelligence service. The SID was operational a month before its formal establishment, and its headquarters were located in Volta Mantovana. The SID was the only RSI Armed Forces information body, with espionage, counterintelligence and military police tasks. It was headed by Vittorio Foschini, a former journalist known for his anti-German attitudes. In late February 1944, Foschini was kidnapped by the SS as he left Rodolfo Graziani's villa on Lake Garda and disappeared to Germany. He was replaced by Lt-Colonel Candeloro De Leo, a Carabinieri officer described as 'capable and unscrupulous'. De Leo signed an agreement with the German Abwehr, but SID activities were hampered by Nazi Germany's intense hostility toward Italy after the armistice.In March 1944 the SID departments were briefly as follows:
- Sezione OMEGA : supposed to run offensive intelligence operations abroad, but the Germans disapproved of this and it existed in name only.
- Sezione DELTA : this was the most important branch of SID, with the majority of its officers seconded from the Carabinieri. The Rome office of the section was headed by Carabinieri Captain Colombini, probably one of the few fervent Republican Fascists in SlD.
- Sezione SIGMA : this section collected information on civilian morale and the reactions of the various classes to the Mussolini regime and to the Germans, who were naturally keenly interested in its reports.
- The Centro Raccolta e Elaborazione Notizie, which was purely an HQ section concerned with evaluating intelligence received. It included however a section carrying out the breaking of Allied codes and cyphers, headed by Frigate captain Luigi Donini - a very lukewarm Republican who had an English wife and was closely supervised by the Gestapo. This section enjoyed constant and close German supervision at all levels.
- Sezione KAPPA : this section installed W/T sets to enable Mussolini to keep in direct touch with SID HQ, and also similar facilities to the offices in Rome, Florence and other important centres, using codes supplied by the cryptographic branch. There was, however, a sad deficiency in radio sets, both in quantity and quality.
- Sezione ZETA: Postal Censorship throughout Republican Italy, using mainly retired Army officers.
Human rights abuses
SIM elements committed a whole series of crimes. On the direct order of Mussolini SIM arranged the assassination of the brothers Carlo Rosselli and Nello Rosselli in France. The murder was carried out by French fascist-leaning and anti-communist Cagoulards, in exchange for 100 semiautomatic Beretta rifles and the promise of future shipments. Before the start of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War SIM supplied Ethiopians with faulty gas masks. During the Spanish Civil War, it sunk Spanish Republican ships by loading explosives in the holds and it introduced bacteria in food destined for Spain in order to spread epidemics.Organization
SIM was subordinate to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for the performance of strictly military functions and to the Undersecretary of War for the performance of duties of a non-military nature. SIM had five major sections:- Sezione Calderini.
- Sezione Zuretti ;
- Sezione Bonsignore. For a brief period in 1940-41 this section was detached from SIM and became an autonomous service under the name "CSMSS". In January 1941, it was restored to SIM.
- Sezione Crittografica : this section attacked foreign crypto-systems and produced enciphered codes for the Royal Italian Army and the Regia Marina;
- Sezione personale e amministrativa.