There are men who receive an equal part of courage and intelligence. The general Cesare AméThe courage had shown him by serving in Libya and in the Great War, during which he had earned the degrees and three medals for military valor, in Caporetto and on the Piave. But it was above all his intelligence, and the marked ability to look at the complexity of the scenarios without being influenced by the ideological burden, who made him skip to the eyes of Colonel Attilio Vigevano, head of the new Italian secret service, the military information service, known more simply as a sim. Created in 1925.
It was he who entrusted him with the first “spy” mission, sending him to French North Africa to carefully observe the situation and draw up a relationship on the region; imagining that an officer like him, a Piedmontese who had come from the “apprenticeship“, It was brought for the secret service, more recommended that all too often ended up occupying the leaders and desks without providing the necessary contribution to the intelligence activity. A mission that Amé not only would have honored, but also exceeded, structuring the Italian espionage in a “modern” key when the command was assigned.
At the head of the secret service
When Amé assumes the direction of the SIM in September 1940, Italy had entered the conflict for only three months, and the information collected in France And Englandpaying particular attention to Mediterranean chessboard It is that of northern Africa, the result of the efforts shared by three services information, the secret information service of the Royal Marina, the aeronautical information service, and the SIM, had to be immensely exploited for strategic purposes and no longer as an analysis of future scenarios.
The lack of coordination between the different services was evident and had always compromised the effectiveness of the secret service, risking to jeopardize entire operations. It was necessary to find a solution to remedy the problem. Amé underlined how often the “agents of a service” were reported on the other as suspicions and as organs of one arrested agents of the other, interfering in important and delicate actions. The situation was further complicated by the presence ofOvrathe political police of Mussolini who, with the passage of time and the exacerbation of the war of spies that was fought in Italy, ended up being interested in military activities.
According to General Amé, who for the entire duration of the conflict maintained the name of the code of “Armando“, The first thing to do to avoid interference and contrasts in the Italian espionage and counterintellification system was to make the SIM the organ”central and board of the sector “, in order to maintain the”technical direction of all military information bodies in the operations area, in the territorial area and abroad“. The second was to strengthen the spy network abroad to fill any void, in the Balkans as in the Mediterranean, where the British controlled the Strait of Gibraltar and the Island Fortezza di Malta, taking advantage of each pawn from the Swiss Alps to Shanghai.
The “black code” and successes of the SIM
The agents of Amé, who moved in the shadows between the embassies and the alleys of Rome, passing the enemy lines in North Africa, with the same simplicity with which they moved in neutral Switzerland, were rewarded by foresight, as earned for the collection of and dissemination of false information in the Balkanslike the “false message” signed by General Dusan Simovis that sent by Forte Braschi; Sometimes from simple luck, as in the case of the Italian spy who after being able to infiltrate the British environments in Shanghai, managed to discover the details of operations that the Greeks wanted to launch against Italian forces (without being, erroneously, from military leaders, erroneously considered, editor’s note). Completing important operations such as the subtraction of the so -called “Black code“. A fundamental resource to know the enemy’s moves.
That scored by Section Por pre -hearing section, under the orders of Lieutenant Colonel Manfredi Talamoit is perhaps one of the most important companies of the SIM: the organization managed to infiltrate the American embassy of Rome and to take possession of the encryplants and decipnts of the US military employees. This allowed to decipher the messages that contained important information on the North Africa front, allowing the British 8th British 8th Army to the Feldmaresse Erwin Rommel with a series of overwhelming victories that allowed him to advance to El Alamein. The allies realized the problem only in July 1942.
That same summer, the agent Talamo discovered that the German cultural employee at the Embassy in Rome was actually a duplication. The discovery and efficiency of the SIM in spite of the German one does not like the Colonel Herbert Kapplerthe head of the SD and the Gestapo in Rome, which on March 24, 1944 personally inserted the name of Manfredi Talamo in the list of men who would have been shot at Had ardeatine.
A fate similar to what the third section, personally led by General Amé, reserved for Fortunato Picchi who had been recruited by the SOE, captured with an English commando who tried to sabotage the Apulian aqueduct in 1942, and ad Emilio Zappalione And Antonio Gallotwo other Italians trained by the SOE, which were captured near Catania after being released by a British submarine to study coastal fortifications.
“Suffering and rejoicing in silence”
As reported by the title of the book dedicated to the history of the Italian secret services from A.Vento, the agents of Amé “rejoiced and suffered” in silence. An example were the three agents who operated behind the enemy lines in Syria and who were captured and tortured without revealing any information before being shot.
After Mussolini’s fall, General Amé met the Admiral in Venice Wilhelm Canaristop of the ABWEHR, the German military secret service, and supported Italy’s firm intention not to want “treat a leaving the conflict with the Anglo-American separately“ Giuseppe Castellano.
The military information service was literally “cut off from the game“, And the confusion that followed was delivered to the history of the versions of several foreign secret agents who described the SIM of the after-armyist as an unreliable entity, split between the loyalty to the king and the Germans, where the duplication he is Tripogiocchisti.
In this intrigue made of secrets and sabotages, foreign embassies and deserts, clandestine radios and encrypted codes, our secret services were formed and learned to fight in the shadows. Confirming himself in the cold war as an effective security apparatus for the state.
Amé’s spies assisted powerlessly to the defeat of Italy and the struggle uniform between 1943 and 1945. Some were shot. Others were imprisoned. However, it was their own to lay the foundations ofModern Intelligencewhich still honors the tradition of Italian intelligence today.