The Third Reich is Listening by Christian Jennings

Author:Christian Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781472829511
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2018-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THE GOOD COLONEL

Three months before the United States joined the war, their embassy in Rome was still neutral territory, but in September 1941, the head of Italy’s military intelligence service decided to burgle it. General Cesare Ame was in charge of the SIM. Italy was fighting against the British in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and losing, and although it was allied with the Third Reich, they had a mutually distrustful relationship. Ferdinand Feichtner of the Luftwaffe was to say he would not trust the Italians and would prefer not to share intelligence with them. The cryptanalysts in Rome therefore needed an intelligence lead. So Ame approved a break-in of the United States embassy in Rome. His target? Their diplomatic and military codebooks. The actual operation to burgle the building turned out to be the most straightforward part of the operation: since Ame had keys to all the embassies in Rome, except for the Russian one, it was a simple matter to gain entry at night. He went to choose his team. There were four of them: two national Carabinieri police officers, and two Italians employed by the embassy. One of the latter, a messenger called Loris Gherardi, was chosen to open the safe in the military attaché’s office.

The four men waited until nightfall, and until all of the American diplomatic staff had long gone home, so it was after midnight when they approached the large, pillared building on the city’s Via Veneto. The orange trees and palms on the sloping boulevard outside the gates gave them some of the shadow they needed. They opened the main entrance gates – which Gherardi had left unlocked earlier – and walked quickly across the still-warm flagstones to the main entrance. Four minutes later, they were at the top of the main staircase, and turned towards the area where the military attaché had his office. Walking quickly across the floor, they gathered around the safe in the corner. The keys the embassy messenger held opened it easily. Inside were a variety of documents and items, one of them a black bound leather book. This was the American diplomatic codebook. Alongside it was another book, which contained its super-encipherment tables. The four men took the two books, did not touch anything else and left the way they had arrived. They took the books to the SIM headquarters, photographed each page of the contents and then replaced them in the embassy safe before dawn broke over central Rome.

The Italians later said that they gave only rough versions of decrypted messages, based on the codebooks, to the Germans. Another Italian version, from Cesare Ame himself, says that they simply handed the two collections of photographs to representatives of the SS, Gestapo and German foreign ministry at their Rome embassy two days later. OKW-Chi’s second-biggest intercept station by that stage of the war was at Lauf, the medieval town north of Nuremberg, where 150 of Wilhelm Fenner’s men were on duty at any one time. Listening

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