| Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM) | |
|---|---|
| Active | 1925–1949 |
| Countries |  Kingdom of Italy |
| Branch |  Royal Italian Army |
| Type | Military intelligence |
| Size | over 300 officers, 1,200 NCOs and specialists, and more than 9,000 secret agents (c. 1943) |
| Part of | Comando Supremo |
| Engagements | Second Italo-Ethiopian War Spanish Civil War World War II |
| Commanders | |
| Notable commanders | Mario Roatta Cesare Amè |
The Italian Military Information Service (Italian: Servizio Informazioni Militare, or SIM)[1] was the military intelligence organization for the Royal Army (Regio Esercito)[2] 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.”[3] According to Thaddeus Holt the SIM was the ablest Axis secret service on the technical level,[4] and it excelled by far any other secret service in Europe outside the USSR.[5]
- ^ Heiber & Glantz 2005, p. 838.
- ^ Wagner et al. 2007, p. 729
- ^ Holt 2004, p. 124.
- ^ Holt 2004, p. 118.
- ^ Holt 2004, p. 121.