The Italian Military Information Service (, or SIM) was the military intelligence organization for the Royal Army (Regio Esercito) of the Kingdom of Italy (Regno d'Italia) from 1925 until 1946, and of the Italian Republic until 1949. The SIM was Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's equivalent to the German Abwehr. In the early years of the war, the SIM scored important intelligence successes. Rommel’s successful military operations in North Africa in 1942 were substantially facilitated by the SIM through the securing of the U.S. Black Code used by Colonel Bonner Fellers to communicate plans for British military operations to his Headquarters in Washington.
Italian SIM was highly efficient and even compared favourably with its German counterpart. According to Brigadier Edgar Williams, Montgomery's Chief Intelligence Officer, the Italians “made far more intelligent deductions from the information they received than did the Germans.” According to Thaddeus Holt the SIM was the ablest Axis secret service on the technical level, and it excelled 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 (Servizio Informazioni Aeronautiche, SIA) and the Navy Secret Information Service (Servizio Informazioni Segrete, SIS). 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 [Armed Forces Intelligence Service].
Just before the Italian surrender, Pietro Badoglio put his protégé Giacomo Carboni back in charge of SIM (September 1943). 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 (now the Casa Siviero museum). 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'.