Journalists or spies

The Journal of Intelligence History 1 (Winter 2001)

The Regi Carabinieri:

Counterintelligence in the Great WarI would like to thank my friends Jack Greene and Thomas Nash-Marshall for his help.

Alessandro Massignani

By royal decree, a new branch of the Piedmontese Army of Savoy, the Royal Carabinieri, was established on 13 July 1814. It received the highest praise and was recognized before any other organization to be wise and well distinguished.The quote is from the royal act, known as the Regie Patenti. One hundred years later, the Carabinieri were mobilized as the Kingdom of Italy entered the Great War, mustering nine companies in three battalions, as well as two cavalry squadrons that had retained its formation since its establishment. The regiment was formed at Treviso between 22 and 28 May 1915, but was disbanded only a few months later, on 15 November, to be incorporated into the major units of the army were its members were to serve as military police.LEsercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, vol. 1: Le forze belligeranti (Rome, Ufficio storico Stato Maggiore esercito, thereafter Ussme, 1976), 197. The mobilization included 65 sections of Carabinieri, a number that was in time increased to 168, with 257 independent platoons. All in all, 500 officers and 19,816 men, out of 31,300, served at the front. They were worthy of the faith placed upon them, carrying out their orders with distinction.

The duties of the Carabinieri had been set forth in the Kings royal decree upon their establishment and was specified in the General Regulations of the corps of 16 October 1822, confirmed in December 1911. The Carabinieri were granted a freedom of choice of method to suit the needs of the particular objectives assigned them that resulted in the development of a spirit of personal initiative that distinguished it from the Italian military. The Carabinieri had and have two upper echelons in the chain of command, in the Interior Ministry and in the War Ministry. In time of war, their duties were counterintelligence and security, i.e. the maintenance of order among the troops, both on the front and on leave, as well as that of the defense of the nation. This included the maintenance of headquarters security, the control of communication lines to and from the front, protection of soldiers and their convoys in railway stations and, most importantly, the maintenance of order in battle. This daunting task, in addition to their functions in criminal policing, explains the need for a large numbers of men, particularly as the war drew out and changed in character.

In addition to the increased attention the Carabinieri had to direct at the military, civil order was considered vital to the successful pursuit of the nations war aims. This implied novel necessities of coordination, it called for the supply of the necessary means, and it called for visions. Counterintelligence required tools and the establishment of detention facilities for prisoners. Large parts of civil management had to be reassigned to new offices. In fact, the need for a tighter and more efficient organization clearly seemed overwhelming. The great difficulty, obviously, was not only in finding men capable of managing the new tasks at hand, but also to find men for the work at all. During times of peace, the army shouldered a large part of maintaining public order, chores that now were left in good part to the police officers.

It is of greatest importance to bear in mind that the Great War was an event that took place in a time of rapid and fundamental changes. The wisdom of their fathers was deeply entrenched in the minds of leaders of the day and, with the question of survival before them, was in urgent need of modification. The battle losses were unexpectedly high and increasing, posing a formidable demand to developed means to counter this trend. It was soon recognized that battle losses among the highly specialized Carabinieri were unsupportable. They were valiant fighters: two battalions of mobilized Carabinieri were deployed on the Gorizia front, for example, and carried out an unsuccessful attack on Point 240 of the Podgora Hill on 19 July 1915. As so often in that period, success had been nearly impossible from the very beginning. While the performance of the men was exemplary, a newly developed barbed wire defense presented an insurmountable barrier, and artillery support by light field pieces of low caliber turned out to be ineffective. As a result, combat units composed of Carabinieri were disbanded on 15 November 1915, and the men were reassigned to major combat units to serve at different stations and with different duties. This took place during a period when the soldiers conditions in the trenches were declining quickly and when sickness often claimed more victims then enemy fire: of the regiments 28 officers and 1,300 men, seven officers and 206 were killed or wounded, but trench gastro-enteritis sent 585 soldiers to a field hospital over a period of one week alone.

By that time, the moral spirit of the Carabinieri had brought them recognition from far and wide. Nine Silver, 33 Bronze, and 13 Crosses of Valor on the field of battle were awarded to Carabinieri by the Duke of Aosta,Entering the war, the Italian Army fielded four armies (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) and one special army corps. commander of the 3rd Army. Such honors, however, could not prevent the destruction of the so called lost generation of 1914 on the battlefields of Europe, and the Italian front was not exception.

The Carabinieri fought in very few battles, but the cavalry squadrons were the first to enter Gorizia in August 1916, the battalion attached to the supreme command was first to land in Trieste in 1918. But clearly, their expertise was needed in other areas than as infantryman. The Carabinieri shared this experience and fate with, for example, the Guardia di Finanza, whose mobilized battalions would be disbanded in 1916 and the men reassigned to their old duties of border and financial security. The platoons were attached to every infantry and cavalry division to carry out their complex tasks. As the war developed into a trench war, they became responsible for the surveillance of the front line, for secure accesses from and to the communication trenches, field hospitals, roads, paths, etc. They had to make sure that the military and the civilian population observed military decrees (e.g., the evacuation of the war zones during the offensive in the Trentino area in the Spring of 1916 and that of Caporetto), to control the occupied zones, and to prevent and repress espionage. These were obvious tasks for a military police, and it would be well, at this point, to bear in mind that the Royal Italian Army was no longer the small, compact Piedmontese army which would not waver even in severe tests, such as the two battles at Custoza.

The expansion of the armed forces (almost six million men were mobilized during the course of the war) brought with it new law enforcement problems.Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La Grande Guerra 1914-1918, (Florence, La Nuova Italia, 2000), 227. The number of military crimes committed was remarkably higher than that in the armies of Italys allies.The crime-rate within enemy armies is difficult to judge. Austria has not as yet published a comprehensive studies on this matter; the Germans had virtually no problems with crime in their armed forces. This may at least in part be due to the fact that the Italian military judges were granted a wide range of powers and discretion in the application of the criminal code. The Italian military code traces back to that of the first war of independence (1848) and was drawn up for a small army. The more frequent and and more casual occurrence of crimes in the Italian military is a problem that still needs scholarly attention. That mistaken evaluation and misunderstanding of the attitudes of the troops or to the vastness of the spirit of undiscipline and protestQuoted from the classic study of Alberto Monticone, Il regime penale nell esercito italiano, in Enzo Forcella and Alberto Monticone, Plotone di esecuzione. I processi della prima guerra mondiale, (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 436. may a play a role in this, points to the difficulty in such a study.

It is worth noting that out of a total of approximately 400,000 trials held before of the military courts (which also had jurisdiction in the common zone of war declared by the provinces and n the Adriatic coastal communes), 61,927 civilians were tried, leading to 37,839 convictions, a number that seems to be in conformity with the known characteristics of Italian military criminal code. These crimes were usually connected to disregard of the rules instated in the war zone, but over time, the consequences of the occupation of the border zones to the Austro-Hungarian Empire also became influential.

Behind the front, troop movement and prisoner transport made an observation of the zones of operations necessary. This burden was carried out by 69 railway officers, 206 non-commissioned officers and 2,676 Carabinieri. They had to watch the military plants and depots, fields of transit, and they had to take care of enemy prisoners as well liberated Italian prisoners. Theses turned out to be responsibilities that, as the workload increased, overtaxed the means of the Carabinieri. Thus, frequent demands for additional staff to be assigned especially to the internal services were made.

Civil Ppolice services in the civilian field also were severely taxed. Local police organizations often were reduced to two men by the end of December 1916, and some places were even left destitute. A report of the Prefect of Bologna to the Ministry of the Interior reads:

The Carabinieri are almost disorganized, many of their stations are closed, their numbers are reduced to a point of insufficiency: most are reduced to two men, rendering normal supervision as well as care for public services impossible in the little towns scattered in the country. The better NCOs have been sent to the front and replaced by military recalled from the reserve who are not capable of the work asked of them ..., the commissioned officers also called to arms are lacking in the experience necessary to their new station.Archivio ufficio Storico Stato maggiore esercito (Archive of the Italian Army, thereafter Aussme), fondo F3, bundle 98, Copia di rapporto della Prefettura di Bologna n. 228.7 in data 31 dicembre 1916 diretto al Ministero Interni Direz. Generale P.S. Italics are in the original documents. I am indebted to the Chief of the Office, Colonel Trippiccione, and to Major Filippo Cappellano for the kind support.

The General Command of the Carabinieri tried to solve these problems, drafting a memorandum issued at the end of 1915. It called for an increase of the Carabinieri forces by at least 2,500 new men to administer 250 newly created stations with no increase in the existing staff. It was also regarded as necessary to provide for officer corps needs, because the officers of the army branches engaged in operations were granted much more credits.Aussme, F3, 98: Memoria. provvedimenti per l'Arma dei CC.RR, dated 1 December 1915. The correspondence with the War Ministry reveals numerous demands for an increase in the number of the Carabinieri. The infantry brigades were granted a military police section, but economic concerns demanded a slow pace in the increase until the King gave his endorsement in October of 1916 and 2,500 men were added to the Carabinieri. Finally, two decrees dated 25 January and 2 December 1917 raised their numbers to meet the war situation. An undated memorandum (which probably was prepared between the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917) indicates a figure of 52,390 police officers, of which 31,005 were devoted to regular services at the home front.

An important step in the development of the Carabinieri as a branch of the armed forces in World WarI was the decree of the 5 October 1916 by which an NCO school was established, the new legion of Messina was formed and those at Catanzaro and Genua, who had been dissolved, were rebuilt.Scuola ufficiali Carabinieri, LArma dei Carabinieri dalla fondazione ai nostri giorni (1987): 110-11. The school, based in Florence, became operational only after the war. 14,300 Carabinieri served in the army, 200 in troop depots, 2,900 in the coastal and railroads defense, 8,690 took care of various other duties.Aussme, F3, 98: undated Promemoria of the Comando generale dell Arma dei Carabinieri. The enormous expansion of the army in the spring of 1917 (the 35 initial divisions of the Italian Army were doubled by 1917) made the increase of the Carabinieri by another 12,000 men necessary to take care of the growing number of military crimes. The increasingly bloody strain of the war also took its toll on the willingness of soldiers to fight, and by 1917, more than 100,000 deserters (a number that is more dramatic than in other countries) rambled about the country, adding to the chores the Carabinieri had to master.

The struggle against espionage and sabotage

A large part of the documents concerning the activities of the Carabinieri was destroyed during war, especially during the withdrawal from Caporetto. The available sources make clear, however, that the Carabinieris role in combating espionage and sabotage had become vitally important. As in every of the belligerent powers, Italy, as the war dragged on, faced a problematic transmission of power from military to civilian authorities. In Italy, this was particularly true in the fields of counterintelligence and intelligence. These activities were regarded with suspicion, considered fundamentally dishonorable, and thought to be the affairs of disjointed adventurers rather than a science and art that makes patient collection and accurate analysis pivotal. HistoriansAmbrogio Viviani, Servizi Segreti italiani 1815-1985 (Rome, Adnkronos, 1985), 168-69. and officers that took part in the events, such as Eugenio De RossiEugenio de Rossi, Vita di un ufficiale italiano sino alla guerra (Milan: Mondadori, 1927), and idem Ricordi di un agente segreto (Milano: Alpes, 1929). and Tullio Marchetti,Tullio Marchetti, Ventotto anni al servizio informazioni militari (Trento: Museo del Risorgimento, 1960), 18. Tullio Marchetti should not be confused with Odoardo Marchetti who was the Chief of the Army Intelligence Service from September 1917 to September 1919 and was regarded as incompetent by Tullio. Odoardo Marchetti wrote also the semi-official book Il Servizio informazioni dellEsercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, (Rome: Tipografia Regionale, 1937). have supplied important publications to make an adequate description of the developments possible.

The army intelligence service was established at the eve and during the first few weeks of the war by a group of Alpini officers, among them Tullio Marchetti, Ercole Smaniotto, the future commander of the 3rd army service later to become very active in the organization of missions behind enemy lines , and Attilio Vigevano, the future commander in chief of the service. In comparison with other leading European powers, who had established measures to combat espionage as early as the 1890s, Italy was at a disadvantage. It was not before the beginning of World War I, that the Italian penal code even addressed such issues. In comparison with their Italian counterparts, the Austro-Hungarian services had highly skilled and trained members who had been ruthless in the local wars in the Balkan countries where ethnic tensions had run high for centuries. They could easily pinpoint an advantage and were superbly skillful in exploiting it. At the beginning of the war, most of the Italian-speaking population close to the Austro-Hungarian border was interned and the few irredentisti at large, who would have been a natural pool of information and agents for Italian intelligence, were closely observed.Irredentisti were the Italian speaking citizens of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy who wanted to join the Italian kingdom. The Austrians were skilled in their use of sabotage, an accomplishment they used when forced to retreat before the advancing Italian army, and they established spy networks that, when overrun, efficiently worked behind enemy lines.

The Italians, in contrast, had to deal with acts of guerrilla warfare and sabotage conducted by the Slovenian liberated population and often by members of the clergy in areas seized during the first months of war. The Austrians knew the business of unconventional war while the Italian military, unprepared as they were for such situations, had hardly any guidelines for responses and countermeasures and easily lost their nerve and overreacted. Antonio Sema has written about the war on the Isonzo River a few years ago: Why it is surprising then that the Italians behaved as others had in the multiethnic areas of the Isonzo?Antonio Sema, La Grande Guerra sul fronte dellIsonzo, vol.1, (Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1995), 28. Nonetheless, the justified criticism about Italien behavior in those days still haunts the nation. During the onset of the war, Italian counterintelligence clearly was in its infancy and depended on the wisdom and good will of the few officers involved. According to the chief of the intelligence office of the Dual Monarchy (Evidenzbro), General Max Ronge, 250 people from Carinzia, 248 from Slovenia, and 75 from the coastal areas were involved in sabotages behind the lines of the Italian army.Quoted by Giorgio Boatti, Le spie imperfette. I servizi segreti italiani da Custoza a Beirut (Milan: Rizzoli, 1987), 189.

It was the Carabinieri who were charged with operating the counterintelligence section of the secret services, reporting espionage suspects, and performing operations the services needed. The gathering of intelligence was at that moment of lesser interests and was, in any case, more the result of amateurish activity of about thirty Alpine officers stationed near the border of Tirol than of a well-established organization. Among others, Lieutenant, later Captain, of the Carabinieri Giacinto Santucci, in service at Schio near Vicenza, commanded a spy network on the plateau of Folgaria and Lavarone where asomen Austrian alpine fortresses wereas built. Counterintelligence at the beginning of World War I was carried out by a single Carabinieri officer who could rely on the assistance of only two investigators. As late as May 1915, when Italy entered the war, this important service had failed to adapt to the necessities of war.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to have survived a copy of the 1912 regulations for the counterintelligence operations a document that is listed among the restricted documents of the timeTitled Provvedimenti per prevenire lo spionaggio militare in tempo di pace (istruzione di polizia militare). that would have shed some light on organizational structure and philosophy of the services. We can, however, gain some insights from the mobilization plans and from the 1918 regulations, when, after substantial changes, the service had been greatly improved: At the beginning of the war, every corps commander appointed a Carabinieri officer responsible for counterintelligence in his area. The Norme generali, issued in 1918, provided guidelines for inquiries, counterintelligence, and propaganda among the troops and civilians.Comando Supremo, Norme generali per i servizi dindagine, di propaganda e di controspionaggio fra le truppe operanti e le popolazioni e di propaganda sul nemico (Rome: Comando del Corpo di Stato maggiore, 1918). This is a more restricted part of the general regulations for the intelligence service of the Army. It assigned to the P officersP does mean among other things, propaganda. P officers were often famous writers such as Giuseppe Prezzolini. See Gian Luigi Gatti, Dopo Caporetto. Gli ufficiali P nella Grande Guerra: propaganda, assistenza, vigilanza (Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 2000). of the P sections whose main duty was to conduct propaganda among the troops officers the duties to gather directly, through agents, or by controlling the mail, intelligence about the ideas and feelings prevailing among the troops and the needs they mostly felt. This extended to the civilian population as well. The P officers could wear civilian clothes and make use of police agents in order to perform their duties. The pattern for intelligence webs was rather simple: creating a network of informers among members of the middle class that were known for undoubted patriotism. The P officers generally could operate inside their armys territory and had to report both to the supreme command P office and to the army headquarters.

During the war, it was the armys obligation to conduct intelligence operations while the Carabineri were assigned to carry out counterintelligence measures because they could operated in the civilian field.Viviani, I servizi segreti italiani 1815-1985, scheme at p. 139. Because of personnel shortage, however, this chore also fell upon the third line infantry which was employed in surveillance activities near the front. In some instances this proved to create problems and frictions with the civilian population, and the largely untrained men had to be put under the control of the Carabinieri. Targets of these activities were primarily clerks and individuals that lived near the Vicenza province border and still spoke old German dialects.Aussme, B1, volume 3e, War Diary of the V Army Corps, and volume 72d, War Diary of the Sbarramento Agno-Posina.

Although twelve intelligence services operated in Italy, the King relied mostly on the Carabinieri for information. He could thus circumvent the increasing tendency of the chief of the general staff Luigi Cadorna to keep politicians and the King in the blind on military operations and the state of the army, despite the fact that the King was, at least nominally, the commander in chief. That a certain confusion about the purposes of the individual services existed, was partially the result of the creation of the Uci (Ufficio centrale di investigazione Central Office of Investigation) in 1915. It was the intelligence apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior and served as a military police and counterintelligence agency within the country not in the areas of military operation. The intelligence office of the army, mobilized at Italy's intervention in the war, was transferred to the supreme command at Udine. Only the so-called Territorial office still had a duplicate operating in Rome. At the supreme command in Udine, the counterintelligence and military police section was numbered third, and it took advantage of the experience of two Carabinieri officers, among them Lieutenant (later promoted Captain) Giulio Blais, whose competence was praised by Marchetti: intelligent, clever like vixen, investigator of excellence. Their direct counterpart was the service that rather efficiently gathered intelligence for the Habsburg Monarchy. It had, from its creation in 1908 on, achieved important successes, such as the procurement of the Italian plans for mobilization.Sema, La Grande Guerra sul fronte dellIsonzo, 24. The author of this article paper received a copy of the Italian OB marked with stamps by the Austrian military headquarters at Innsbruck from Heinz von Lichem as a gift. Officially, the Italian intelligence services only operated against the central powers after 1914. Offices were detached to the headquarters of the several armies to gather operational intelligence at the tactical level. Their findings were essentially based on air photographs, interrogating of prisoners of war, wiretapping, and radio monitoring. One exception was the intelligence office of the 1st Army under the command of Major Tullio Marchetti, who was a native of the Italian speaking Tirolean region and had established his own spy network beyond the border, staffed by irredentisti.

The Italian secret war during Wor1d War I does not offer great moments of glory. A caveat, however, is in order here: substantial obstacles exist for research on the history of the military intelligence and particularly of counterintelligence services in Italy. Hardly any serious scholarly research has be conducted so far, partially because most documents relating to the operations of the Austro-Hungarian Evidenzbro in Italy were suppressed by its chief General Max Ronge. From a professional point of view, this was certainly the correct thing to do because it safeguarded many of the spies who had served Austria-Hungary or Imperial Germany from possible prosecution, and it left a valuable foundation for possible future intelligence operations in the region. However, not all agents and sources could be protected by the Austrians. Some intelligence documents were discovered at the office of the secret service of the Austro-Hungarian navy at Zurich in the safe of the Lieutenant Commander Rudolf MayerRudolf Mayer, sometimes also called the the man without face, was born on 8 December 1861 in Brnn, retired from active service on 1 May 1917 and died on 29 May 1927 a Brnn (Brno). He should be buried there at the Jewish cemetery. I am indebted to Dr. Peter Jung for his help at the KriegsarchivWien, where I had the opportunity to consult Mayers reports. and on that account it was possible to break up part of the Austro-Hungarian network in Italy. Some agents were taken to Innsbruck after the end of the war and were executed by a firing squad. The operation was conducted by the Italian navy, but the army tried to infiltrate the navys activities during and after the operation and a Carabiniere agent was present at the opening of the safe.About this operation see Marco Gemignani Zurigo 1916: un colpo risolutivo. Il Servizio Segreto della R. Marina in azione in Bollettino dArchivio dellUfficio Storico della Marina Militare 3 (September 1989): 153-70; Anton Peth, Agenten fr den Doppeladler: sterreich-Ungarns Geheimer Dienst im Weltkrieg (Graz: Stocker, 1998), 97 and ff. It is unlikely that the army could have gathered information in such operations by itself. The Carabinieri operated inside the naval bases for security reasons since, in 1879, the Navy begun to employ a small number of Carabinieri for counterintelligence duties in the arsenals. Carabinieri personnel was also be occasionally recruited for other operations, but they did not share the responsibility for sabotage conducted by the navy. Wherever possible, however, members of the army collected intelligence for their own service even when they were detached to other services. At least some kind of cooperation existed between different intelligence and security agencies in Italy in 1917, including allied services and particularly the French armed forces. The operation in Zurich, however, was a case of competitive intelligence arousing the attention of the Swiss authorities and leading to angry exchanges of letters between Army Chief of Staff Cadorna and the Navys Grand-Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel.

Italian intelligence operations in foreign countries were rather primitive and achieved limited success, with the exception of a mole that was planted in the army corps headquarters in Innsbruck. Only after Italy entered the war, intelligence structure was organized that went beyond the military attach level in order to acquire information, most notably the activities of Carabinieri Colonel (later General) Giovanni Maria Garruccio.

The most important task of the Carabinieri was in counterintelligence connected with the normal police work, control of railway stations, the often dangerous search for the large number of deserters, and the surveillance of aliens from neutral countries. They were the ones most probable to be engaged in possible networks of espionage in Italy. According to various sources, this counterintelligence activity seems to have achieved certain successes. In some of the ports, the Carabinieri established centers of surveillance composed of five to six men who looked for light signals at night, suspected to be a common form of communication use by spies. Important strategic points of passage were garrisoned, such as on the Island of Campione in the Lake of Lugano, where a small station of three police officers and a non-commissioned officer was installed by Tullio Marchetti.

Espionage and sabotage within Italy was successful because of the skilled work of Austro-Hungarian officers,Peter Schubert, Die Ttigkeit des k.u.k. Militrattachs in Bern whrend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Osnabruck: Biblio, 1980). particularly the section headed by the Captain of the Imperial-Royal Navy Rudolf Mayer and the Austro-Hungarian military attach to Bern, Colonel William von Einem, whose primary intelligence focus was on Milan. They explored opportunities for support of opponents of the war, such as Catholic groups and Socialists, in order to increase the tensions that were known to exist within the country. The twenty Socialists groups of Italians working in Switzerland and their newspaper Lavvenire del lavoratore were a primary target. Agents regularly carried propaganda leaflets to Italy, and the Austrian clandestine operations had expanded considerably by the winter of 1917/1918 and were so successfully concealed that von Einem claimed some officers of the Italian army had served, unaware of the propaganda content of the material, as couriers to Italy. The Socialists women section was also infiltrated by an agent code-named Engineer Rasim. This operation involved Angelica Balabanoff, who had strongly influenced the Italian Socialist Party and whose claim to fame was that she was the mistress of Benito Mussolini. Nevertheless, these activities turned out to have disadvantages. During the second half of 1917, news arrived in Vienna, that a revolution in Italy might be imminent. The many deserters from the Italian army after the bloody offensives at the Isonzo River had dramatically added to the number of those eager to overthrow the monarchy, and it was liklely that they might constitute the nucleus of a republican army that would have taken refuge in the mountains. Von Einem had just given 10,000 Swiss Francs to Balabanoff and another 25,000 Francs to two other agents in order to increase the propaganda against the war in Italy when orders arrived from the Austrian High Command prohibiting such activities.

At the same time, counterintelligence and repressive activity aimed particularly at the Socialists whose influence had been reduced after Caporetto was increasing in Italy.Archivio Ufficio Storico dellArma dei Carabinieri (Archive of the Carabinieri ArmRome, thereafter AUSAC), Ministero dellInterno, Direzione generale di PS, of 14 January 1918, Disertori rimpatriati dalla Svizzera: several defectors who were in Switzerland in relationship with the intelligence services of the Central Empires were sent to Italy supplied with money by those services. I would like to thank Lieutenant Colonel Musso and Marshall Sansoni of the Historical Office of the Carabinieri for allowing me to consult documents regarding the Carabinieri in World War I. Such measures were successful and lead to the detection of agents reporting high quality intelligence, such as Nero and Florenz, or Balabanoff. How valuable the information provided by these agents was is obvious when we look at the Italian attacks launched by Cadorna against the Austro-Hungarian positions at the Isonzo River: Out of the eleven offensives only one was not revealed, with exact date and time of the attacks, to the Austro-Hungarian high command, and only this, the sixths offensive, was successful and made the conquest of Gorizia possible. At another instance, the exact moment of the explosion of the mine in Mount Col di Lana was revealed to the Austrian headquarters of the southwest front, although they did not make good use of this information. The Austrian service boasted after the war that it had been responsible for important sabotage activities: the explosions at the gun-powder factory of Cengio; the destruction of a hangar at Ancona, where in April 1918 a landing of 60 Austrians took place unknown to the territorial defense; and the sinking of the battleships Benedetto Brin and Leonardo da Vinci.Walzel, Ufficio informazioni dellImpero austro-ungarico, (Milan: Marangoni, 1936), 141. To the public, these events were presented as accidents, and the preliminary conclusions of the investigating committees seemed to sustain this evaluation. But soon it became obvious that the Austrian services were responsible and that the counterintelligence of the Italian navy had failed.Commissione dinchiesta sul sinistro della Regia Nave Leonardo da Vinci. Relazione generale della presidenza, 218. Other daring plans were proposed but never materialized, such as the bomb that was to be placed in the lavatories of the Italian Parliament Concomitanza that was to explode during demonstrations calling for peace, a scheme the Italian counterintelligence did detect.Aussme, B1, 265c, SI reparto R, notiziario n. 123 (serie A) del 21 febbraio 1917.

While the establishment of a revolutionary republican army fighting in the Alps was perceived as threat, the failure of the revolution in Italy greatly disappointed the Austrians. Thus, in January 1918, they resumed to finance the Socialists activities supporting the revolution in Italy as a last resort to safe the Dual Monarchy and to win the war. According to a Carabinieri report written in the first days of 1918, 2,000 Swiss Francs monthly went to members of the Italian socialist party to foster the revolution. The Socialist Party of Italy held two positions, an official one of neither joining, nor sabotaging the war effort, and an unofficial one by inner groups that proposed active propaganda against the war through the establishment of red legions. The Austrians also financed a Milan-based group of anarchists with the consent of the Socialist Partys leaders.

Influence on the morale surely had an impact on the operational Italian army and explains why Cadorna urged the Prime Minister to provide more provisions against propaganda activities. Propaganda alone, however, could not have achieved wide-ranging dissatisfaction of Italien soldiers, but it fed on the inability of the Italian supreme command to convince the soldiers that the war was just and that they would get everything they would need to succeed.

Both sides employed saboteurs and informers behind enemy lines, the Austro-Hungarians, however, were first. The Adriatic coastal communities were declared war-zones and placed under surveillance by the Carabinieri in addition to the navy and the border police. Secret landings were not uncommon and were aided by support on land. The Carabineri were able to discover some of these attempts, for example a large group of saboteurs near the Ancona naval base. The saboteurs had already passed a Finance Guard post, but a second sentry fired his gun before being knifed. When soldiers arrive on the scene, the Austro-Hungarians tried to flee in a motor torpedo craft (MAS) they had wanted to seize when its engine failed.Aussme, E2, 110, Legione territoriale dei Carabinieri di Ancona, n. 335/9: Processo verbale di interrogatorio fatto ai 53 marinai della Marina da guerra dellimpero austro-ungarico descritti nellaccluso elenco, catturati nella notte dal 5 al 6 aprile 1918 in Ancona. The Zugsfhrer (platoon leader) Giovanni Trampusch declared under interrogation that we found ourselves before Carabinieri who should have come running there after the shot fired by the Guardia di Finanza. We did not offer resistance to the Carabinieri but threw our weapons, ammunitions, and other equipment into the sea and surrendered. After the Zurich affair the season of the saboteurs seemed to have ended; counterintelligence became more effective, and, as a direct outgrowth of the information gathered in Zurich the head of the Ministry of the Colonies, Ferdinando Martini, could note in his diary that on 7 April 1917, 40 individuals were arrested in Rome and other cities.Ferdinando Martini, Diario 1914-1918, edited by Gabriele De Rosa, (Milan: Mondadori, 1966)..

Checking the route of Caporetto.

In September 1917, one month before the Caporetto breakthrough, Carabinieri General Garruccio, who was relieved from his post at the head of the Military Intelligence, was appointed by the Italian prime minister to establish an intelligence office which was to serve him directly. The prime minister had been alerted by rumors of a possible coup dtat by Cadorna and others. Garruccio used all means at hand, and on 5 October 1917, the Service of the Carabinieri was reorganized. The effectiveness of the newly organized Carabinieri can be demonstrated by its organization of a line to stop the tide of retreating soldiers after the battle of Caporetto. Many units of the 2nd Army on 24 October 1917 broke ranks and retreated calmly towards the countryside, often without their weapons, harboring the naive belief that now the war would be over. Italian efforts to explain to their soldiers the causes and aims of the war had been ineffective, while the memory of the slaughter at the Isonzo front lingered and had undermined the morale of a large part of the troops. At the same time the 3rd Army withdrew in good order, partly because it was not pursued by the troops of General Boroevic as the 2nd Army was, but mostly because the military police, the Carabinieri, were at hand, a role that has been depicted in a number of books,As an example, see Gianni Oliva, Storia dei Carabinieri. Immagine e autorappresentazione dellArma (1815-1992) (Milan: Leonardo, 1992), 164-70. such as A Farewell to the Arms by Ernest Hemingway, which contains a vivid description of the military police work.Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to the Arms was published in 1929 but was not translated into Italian before 1946 because of Fascists opposition because of the negative representation of Caporetto. See also the comments of Brian Sullivan in Caporetto: Causes, Recovery and Consequences, in George J. Andreopulos and Harold E. Salesky, eds., The Aftermath of the Defeat (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 59-78, here p. 59. The work of the police officers has been associated with firing squads, but actually these were composed of regular soldiers. The repressive action against the soldiers who deserted in combat was often carried out by their own officers in accordance with war regulations. The Carabinieri generally acted professionally within their assigned duties; discipline was rigorously upheld by the army and its supreme command, i.e., Generals Luigi Cadorna until the end of the retreat after, Caporetto, and Armando Vittorio Diaz from 9 November 1917.This came up also at the International Meeting on the Great War, 28 September to 1 October 1995 at Trieste, and in discussions organized by the Centro Studi e documentazione della Grande Guerra of Asiago (Vicenza), 6 to 7 June 1997, on the Italian soldiers in the Great War. The Carabinieri understood that the situation called for conservation of human resources rather than for indiscriminate application of military justice. The police officers chores thus were to gather and channel stragglers in camps rather than to provide for punishment. Naturally, many men escaped to remote regions of Italy, but most of them were recovered.

The independent Carabinieri Legion, the two squadrons, and the Carabinieri battalion serving under the supreme command, reinforced by men from the Udinese division of the Legion of Verona (the Carabinieri of the occupied zones depended from that legion), very quickly formed three lines of control at the rivers Tagliamento, Livenza, and Piave. They accompanied, regulated, and at times blocked the tide of regular soldiers, and when necessary they fought forward Austro-German patrols who had become overconfident in their success. This largely neglected episode demonstrates the essential service the Carabinieri provided at Caporetto amidst the epochal disaster of withdrawal ordered by Cadorna.

The command of the army knew that is was in serious trouble and during the battle for the Piave Line, Colonel Angelo Gatti, the historian of the supreme command, noted that Diaz had great hopes in his soldiers but did not develop his own command. It was the military police that had a more accurate image of the armys morale and could chart its development to recovery of confidence and a willingness to end the war in victory. The Carabinieri reports on the troop are a precious source for understanding the morale of the troops at various points in time. They obviously were obtained from agents that had infiltrated the troops. One example may suffice to support this evaluation: it is a dearly held myth in Italy that on the Piave the nation's moral spirit held against an onslaught of advancing enemies, however, this paints a picture that is much too simple. On the Piave-Mount Grappa line the 2nd Army, which was defeated at Caporetto, but this only was of minor significance because a good part of the men had been taken prisoner or were concentrated in camps behind the lines. Defending that line were, the 3rd Army that withdrawn in order without enemy pressure, and the 4th Army, having survived intense operational phases, came from the Cadore high mountain area were operations were curtailed by the severe climate of high altitude. Both these armies had a good morale level. From the reports of the Carabinieri it is clear that after the victorious battle on the Piave River during the second half of June 1918, when finally the end of an endless war appeared likely, feelings of renewed confidence were spreading among the troops; with it came a desire for victory.AUSAC, Legione territoriale dei Carabinieri reali di Torino, n. 18/119 of 30 July 1918: Raccolta di notizie sullo stato morale e sullo spirito delle truppe al fronte.

These reports often were compiled by the P sections of the Carabinieri (as noted above, P stood for Propaganda), because after Caporetto the supreme command finally realized that it was necessary to support the morale of the soldier by means of propaganda. The eight Carabinieri soldiers of the P section of the 1st Army under the command of Lieutenant Aldo Soncelli may serve as a good example of these activities. They dressed either in civilian clothing or in uniform and reported what they saw, they felt, and they reported on the morale of the soldiers. They also combated Austrian formations which took advantage of the fatigue of the Italian soldiers and were looking for opportunities at the front to exploit their war-weariness trying to talk them into a separate peace, i.e., individual and collective surrender.Marchetti, Ventotto anni, 301. The normal pattern usually involved one lookout-post (in fact an officer or trained NCO) beginning to talk with his Italian counterpart trying to establish a friendly climate of conversation and trust. Soncelli and his eight Carabinieri pretended to bite and visited the enemy trench. When the Austrians returned the visit they were captured. On one occasion, for example, interrogation of the prisoners revealed that in the little Tirolean town of Brixen a Austrian school similar to the Carabinieri school existed.Ibid., 303. Similar episodes are recounted in memoirs written after the war, for example by Arditi Captain Ettore Viola, who noted that on Mount Grappa he encountered very clever and trained [Austrian] officers who, disguised as simple sentries, started conversations with our soldiers, leaving gifts and propaganda leaflets.Ettore Viola, Vita di guerra (Milan: Istituto editoriale nazionale, 1928). That these activities were regarded as very dangerous to the morale of the Italian army became obvious when General Pietro Badoglio, after he became deputy chief of staff under Diaz, ordered the execution of three Austro-Hungarians captured while they were trying to persuade Italian soldiers to defect.

Conclusion

The total losses among the Carabinieri during World War I amounts to 1,400 killed and 5,000 wounded. Of these, 22 died and 159 were wounded during shoot-outs with the deserters.AUSAC, 149.27, Comando generale dellArma dei Carabinieri, Ufficio storico, Studio sintetico sul contributo dato dallArma alla guerra 1915-1918, dated 1968. Operating in combination with forces of the Ministry of the Interior, the military police arrested some 7,000 deserters and 2,000 other armed criminals.Annibale Paloscia, I segreti del Viminale (Rome: Newton Compton, 1994), 47-48. This experience is not unique to Italy: in Austria-Hungary, in 1917-1918, armed groups of deserters, called Grne Kader, even had artillery pieces, and a group of bandits composed of Austrian deserters and Italian former prisoners of war thrived on the heights of Gemona, in Friuli.

Even before the war, the Carabinieri were regarded as the most reliable intelligence service. Faced in 1915 with the possibility that Italy might have to take part in the war, it was necessary to evaluate the food resources of the country, a critical factor in any kind of war. In February 1915, Premier Minister Salandra ordered the prefects to conduct a discreet inquiry into the quantity of wheat stores in Italy. This was to be done by the Carabinieri to ensure that information provided was accurate.Maria Concetta Dentoni, Annona e consenso in Italia 1914-1919 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1995), 18.

The awards bestowed upon Carabinieri during the war provides an ample indication of their contribution to the war effort: a Medal of Gold to the Flag, four Medals of Gold, 304 Silver, 831 Bronze, 801 War Crosses, and 8,182 crosses to the Merit of War. Their careful selection and training a tradition since the Regie Patenti but above all their integration in the army, made the Carabinieri an effective and reliable force that, in contrast with the other police forces, was trusted by the population. Even when compared with similar agencies of the Ministry of the Interior, the Comando Supremo, and the War Ministry, the Carabinieri can be regarded as most serious and effective.Viviani, Servizi segreti italiani 1815-1985, 151. In the implementation of their duties in the Great War, the Carabinieri appear to have been inspired by the old motto Used to silently obey and to silently die. Cooperating with other agencies, particularly the Army Servizio Informazioni, the counterintelligence operations throughout the country, with personnel detached to active espionage duty in the armies military intelligence offices at the front, and serving abroad, the Carabinieri were a limited but effective intelligence service.