by DAVID KAHN
Also under Gamba was a subsection headed by the elderly Colonel Gino Mancini that produced codes and ciphers for the Italian Army. At the higher levels, these were enciphered codes, also used by the Italian Navy (which at other times used the Hagelin machine). The Italians liked superencipherments that combined transposition with substitution—a preference that can be seen as far back as the Panizzardi telegram of Dreyfus case fame, in which the first placode digit became the second encicode digit and vice versa. In one of their World War II encipherments, for example, with placode groups 12345 67890, the encipherer would pick out 1 and 6, find the encicode for 16 in a 10 × 10 table, and, assuming it to be 38, would set down 3 as the first digit of the first encicode group and 8 as the first digit of the second. He would repeat this with 2 and 7, using, however, a different 10 × 10 table. At first the Italians used five such tables; later, they used ten.
Like their O.K.W. colleagues, the Sezione 5 cryptanalysts had solved the military ciphers of Yugoslavia, with whom Italy’s relations had been strained over Fiume and Trieste practically since Yugoslavia was created after World War I. The Germans used the solutions for a blitzkrieg from the north. The Italians exploited them in a crafty deception that helped avoid a possible debacle in the south.
Almost up to the moment of the Axis invasion, the Italian armies that had occupied Albania had exposed what Churchill picturesquely called their “naked rear” to Yugoslavia in the north. Yugoslavia had no chance against the Wehrmacht, but both Axis and Allies realized that if she struck forcefully against the rather disorganized Italians, she could win a major victory, embarrass Mussolini, delay the Axis conquest, and acquire the munitions and supplies for a large-scale guerrilla harassment of the Nazi occupiers. Thus, when two Yugoslav divisions drove southward on April 7—one from Cetinje toward Shkoder, the other from Kosowska Mitrovica toward Kukes—it was regarded as a serious business. Especially when, by April 12, the Cetinje division had shoved the Italians back to the gates of Shkoder and was pummeling them with attacks of increasing intensity.
At this juncture the Servizio Informazione Militare got an idea. It drafted two telegrams in Yugoslav military style and affixed the signature of General Dusan Simovič, head of the new government. One read:
To the Cetinje divisional headquarters:
Subordinate troops will suspend all offensive action and retire in the direction of Podgorica, organizing for defense.
And the other:
To the Kosowska Mitrovica divisional headquarters:
Withdraw immediately with all subordinate troops back towards Kosowska Mitrovica.
Simovič
Both messages were enciphered in the Yugoslav Army system, and at 10 a.m. on April 13, an S.I.M. station, observing all Yugoslav radio regulations as to wavelength, transmission times, and subordinate stations, contacted the two divisional stations and passed the messages, both of which were receipted for. The drive toward Kukes slackened immediately. The Cetinje division, however, requested confirmation. None came.
Next morning, the confused divisional command, not having received any disavowal of the enciphered orders, and consequently believing that they were valid though incomprehensible, lifted its attacks at Shkoder and began retreating northward. The Italians hastened to fill the military vacuum that was created, and marched the 10 miles from Kotor to Cetinje in a day. Next day the Yugoslav headquarters replied that no retreat had been ordered, but by then it was too late. It only told the Yugoslavs that their ciphers were compromised, and, unable to issue new ones in the fluid situation, they attempted to assure the legitimacy of their communications through onerous controls. Instead they gummed their command machinery at a time when every hour counted. A few days later it was all over. The S.I.M.’s fake messages had saved Italy from a crippling defeat.
In a typical month during the war the S.I.M.’s Sezione 6 intercepted 8,000 radiograms. About 6,000 were considered worthy of study, and of these, Sezione 5 reduced 3,500 to plaintext. So great was the flow that General Cesare Amè, head of the S.I.M., began to publish a daily Bulletin I, which summarized the most significant information. Its three copies went to Mussolini, to the chief of the general staff, and to the king, through his aide-de-camp. The S.I.M. distributed other important solutions individually to the proper parties.
Diplomatic traffic naturally went to Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Foreign Minister, whose many mentions of the solutions in his famous diary testify to their importance. According to the diary, Sezione 5 read British, Rumanian, and Turkish traffic. The Italians drank as deeply of the stream of that neutral’s messages as the Hungarian group that worked for Höttl was to do. For more than two years, Turkish cryptograms told the Italian government of rumored Allied war plans, of Allied views, of an uncommitted observer’s comments on Axis programs and prospects. On January 4, 1943, Ciano jotted in his diary: “The Duce asked me to give [Hans Georg] von Mackensen [German ambassador to Italy] a copy of a telegram the Turkish ambassador Zorlu sent to his government from Kuibyshev. It is a description of the Soviet situation. It seems impartial and quite informative. According to him, the war weighs heavily on the Russians, but Russia is still strong, and, in the judgment of the diplomatic corps in Kuibyshev, Axis stock is falling.”
One entry may indicate the Italian solution of an English solution of a German telegram: “Then, too, he [Mussolini] is angry at Rommel, who, according to English sources, has telegraphed accusing several of our officers of having revealed some of his future plans to the enemy. As always, victory finds a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” Two and a half months later, on December 24, 1942, another British intercept enabled Mussolini to ready a reply to a planned British move: “We are at loggerheads again on the question of the bombing of Rome. From an intercepted British telegram we learn that in addition to the departure of the Duce and the commands from Rome, [British Foreign Minister Anthony] Eden also wants that of the King and of the whole government, with Swiss officers controlling the evacuation. Naturally Mussolini reacted vigorously and is preparing to refuse.” Six days later, Ciano noted: “A good point on the question of the bombing of Rome: from an intercepted telegram we learn that the Americans have said no to Eden’s Draconian request, declaring that they do not intend to bomb the city of St. Peter because there would be more disadvantages than advantages for the Allies. Thus it seems to me that the matter can be tabled. At least for the time being.” And the following month Mussolini ordered Ciano to give von Mackensen yet another British intercept. This one reported a conversation between General Bernard Montgomery and the captured German commander in Africa, General Ritter Wilhelm von Thoma, in which “von Thoma said that the Germans are convinced that they have lost the war, and that the Army is anti-Nazi because it holds Hitler completely responsible.”
These were only the telegrams that Ciano thought outstanding enough to note. How many more must have fluttered onto Fascist desks without his mentioning them, and how much knowledge of Allied plans must Italy have obtained from the continuous flow!
Though Sezione 5 solved many cryptograms, many of its successes came, not from cryptanalysis, but from the S.I.M.’s theft of cryptologic documents. In 1941 alone, the S.I.M. obtained possession of about 50 such items, or about one a week. Some of these probably were only plaintext versions of coded telegrams. But many were the codes or ciphers themselves, and one of them, which led to probably the greatest Axis communications-intelligence results of the war, was a secret code of the United States of America.
The spy who stole it appears to have been Loris Gherardi, a messenger in the office of the American military attaché in Rome. An Italian national just turned 40, he had worked for the Americans since about 1920. His duties included the carrying of telegrams from the attaché’s office to the Italian telegraph bureau. In August of 1941 he apparently obtained for the S.I.M. the key or an impression of the key or the combination to an embassy safe. This enabled the Italians surreptitiously to open the safe, remove and photograph
the BLACK code and its attendant superencipherment tables, and then replace them. Neither his boss, the military attaché, Colonel Norman E. Fiske, nor the ambassador ever suspected a thing. Loris continued on the job.*
The BLACK code, so called for the color of its binding, was a relatively new and secret military attaché code, with its own superencipherment tables. Ambassadors may also have used it. Thus Ciano gloated in his diary on September 30, 1941, shortly after the theft: “The military intelligence service has come into possession of the American secret code; everything that [U.S. Ambassador William] Phillips telegraphs is read by our decoding offices….”
Soon after the S.I.M. acquired the code, it gave a copy to Germany’s Canaris. From that moment, the Axis powers—subject only to their ability to strip the superencipherments—were enabled to peer into the secret messages of the diplomats and the military attachés of a great power that their enemies were seeking desperately to win over. And the messages came from all over the world, not only from Axis capitals, but also from Allied capitals where the American attachés had access to some of the most intimate secrets of the Axis’ foes. “I handed Mackensen,” Ciano noted on February 12, 1942, “the text of a telegram from the American military attaché at Moscow, addressed to Washington. It complains about failure to deliver arms promised by the United States, and says that if the U.S.S.R. is not aided immediately and properly she will have to consider capitulating.”
But the most valuable material dealt with the battlefronts, where the issue of victory or defeat was being decided. In the fall of 1941, the Germans were driving eastward on two fronts, Russia and North Africa, intending to link them up in the Near East, make the Mediterranean an Axis lake, march on to India, and meet the Japanese in Asia, thereby ruling the world and fulfilling Hitler’s dream of out-conquering Alexander the Great.
The American military attaché in Cairo had much better opportunities to observe military action than his colleague in Moscow, owing to factors of distance, language, and politics, and he took full advantage of these opportunities to do his job. He was Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers, a West Pointer with a varied peacetime experience, including two years as assistant to General Douglas MacArthur. Fellers had been posted to Cairo in October, 1940. He industriously toured the battlefronts and studied the tactics and problems of desert warfare. He asked questions. He kept his eyes open. The British let him in on some of their secrets, hoping that this would improve American equipment lend-leased to Britain’s desert forces, but probably withheld some because of his anti-British predilections. Fellers soaked up this great quantity of information and poured it out to Washington in voluminous and detailed reports.
He discussed the British forces at the front, their duties, capabilities, and effectiveness; he told of reinforcements that were expected and supply ships that had arrived, explained morale problems, analyzed the various tactics that the British had under consideration, even reported on plans for local military operations. He carefully encoded his messages in the BLACK code and radioed them to Washington, usually addressed to MILID WASH (Military Intelligence Division, Washington). And as his transmissions flashed through the ether, listening Axis radio stations—usually at least two, so that nothing would be missed—took down every word. The intercepts were transmitted by direct wire to cryptanalysts, where they were reduced to plaintext, translated, reenciphered in a German system, and forwarded to General Erwin Rommel, commander of the Afrika Korps. He often had the messages only a few hours after Fellers had sent them.
And what messages they were! They provided Rommel with undoubtedly the broadest and clearest picture of enemy forces and intentions available to any Axis commander throughout the whole war. In the seesaw North African warfare, Rommel had been driven back across the desert by the British under General Claude Auchinleck at the end of 1941, but beginning on January 21, 1942, he rebounded with such vigor that in seventeen days he had thrown the British back 300 miles. During those days he was getting information like this from the Fellers intercepts:
January 23: 270 airplanes and a quantity of antiaircraft artillery being withdrawn from North Africa to reinforce British forces in the Far East.
January 25-26: Allied evaluation of the defects of Axis armor and aircraft.
January 29: Complete rundown of British armor, including number in working order, number damaged, number available, and their locations; location and efficiency ratings of armored and motorized units at the front.
February 1: Forthcoming commando operations; efficiency ratings of various British units; report that American M-3 tanks could not be used before mid-February.
February 6: Location and efficiency of the 4th Indian Division and the 1st Armored Division; iteration of British plans to dig in along the Acroma-Bir Hacheim line; recognition of the possibility that Axis forces might reach the Egyptian frontier once the armored divisions had been regrouped.
February 7: British units stabilized along the Ain el Gazala-Bir Hacheim line.
These only highlight the outstanding tesserae of the abundantly detailed mosaic which Rommel had available and which helped him win his epithet, “the Desert Fox.” And when in May of 1942 his Panzer divisions rolled forward in his supreme effort to conquer Egypt and punch through Palestine to join the Wehrmacht forces from Russia, the intercepted American messages again brought him information of the highest importance. They first told him that the British were planning to anchor their defense line on Mersa Matruh, a town on the Mediterranean coast about 200 miles west of Alexandria; then, when Auchinleck decided that this position was untenable, the intercepts kept Rommel up to date with the British changes of mind.
But even Rommel could not do much without gasoline for his tanks and troop-carriers, and of this he never had enough. The thorn in his side was Malta. This tough little island, a British bastion lying in the Mediterranean between Sicily and the Axis bases in North Africa, served as the base from which Allied ships, planes, and submarines wreaked havoc on Axis convoys carrying men and supplies to Rommel. Thus Germany and Italy sought to batter it into submission with air raids night and day, while England sought to strengthen and arm it by driving convoys through to her port of Valletta. When the Axis supply line was flowing freely, Rommel scored one victory after another; when the Allies choked off his supply line and his tanks thirsted for petrol, Rommel’s mobility in this highly fluid war of movement was seriously restricted, giving the Allies a considerable advantage.
Hence in June of 1942 the British determined to make a large-scale attempt to relieve Malta. They planned to pass convoys through from the east and from the west simultaneously, thus preventing the Axis from concentrating all its might on either movement. To paralyze Italian surface forces, Britain heavily bombed the Taranto naval base, and to minimize Axis air attacks on the convoys, the British planned to destroy Axis airplanes just before the convoys sailed. This they would accomplish by bombing, by swift strikes of motorized forces on airfields near the front, and by sabotage from commandos parachuted onto other airfields deeper within the German lines. Fellers, who was in close touch with the situation, knew of these plans, and on June 11—the day the eastern half of the convoy sailed from Alexandria—he drafted message No. 11119:
Nights of June 12th June 13th British sabotage units plan simultaneous sticker bomb attacks against aircraft on 9 Axis airdromes. Plans to reach objectives by parachutes and long range desert patrol.
This method of attack offers tremendous possibility for destruction, risk is slight compared with possible gains. If attacks succeed British should be prepared to make immediate use all R.A.F. [Royal Air Force] to support coordinating attacks by army.
Today British making heavy troop movement from Syria into Lybya.
Fellers
He encoded it and filed it with the Egyptian Telegraph Company in Cairo for radio transmission to MILID WASH. The O.K.W. intercept station at Lauf snatched it from the ether at about 8 a.m. June 12. By 9 a cryptanalyst was working on it t
o strip the superencipherment; by 10 it had been decrypted; by 11:30 Rommel had it in plenty of time to warn his airfields. On the night of the 13th, as expected, commandos dropped from the sky and strike forces roared in from the east.
The waiting German and Italian forces massacred them. The carefully planned operation failed almost completely. At the three North African airports of Martuba, El Fetejak, and Barce, not a plane was touched; at the K2 and K3 airfields, the British succeeded only in slightly damaging eight craft, all of them repairable in a few days. At three other airfields (Benina in North Africa and Heraklion and Castelli in Crete), where the warnings were either not received or ignored, the British destroyed a total of 18 planes and burned two hangars.
Next day, airplanes that had been saved from destruction by the timely warning delivered heavy attacks upon the convoy from Alexandria, sinking three destroyers and two merchant ships. A U-boat got a heavy cruiser, and when heavy Italian forces sortied from Taranto, the convoy turned back under this threat and the entire operation failed. “The approach to Malta from the eastward remained sealed, and no convoy again attempted this passage until November,” wrote Churchill. “Thus, in spite of our greatest efforts, only two supply ships out of seventeen got through, and the crisis in the island continued.” And Rommel’s pipeline remained open.
With his gasoline supplies assured, at least temporarily, the Desert Fox swept forward in the onslaught he had begun on the moonlit night of May 26-27. Complementing the strategic intelligence that the Fellers intercepts were providing was the tactical intelligence from his highly efficient Fernmeldeaufklärung Company under Captain Alfred Seeböhm. This mobile outfit tuned into every British 8th Army radio station, picked up every scrap of chat, ascertained troop and tank concentrations and movements by direction-finding, learned which units were where by analyzing call-signs, studied British cryptograms, and in general provided Rommel with much of the raw data by which he could sniff out the enemy’s intentions.
