Rome confidential: deception and espionage in the British Embassy

Abstract

ABSTRACT From 1924 until 1940, two chancery servants at the British Embassy in Rome, passed confidential documents to Italian and Soviet intelligence, and gave Rome and Moscow the ability to read British coded material for a long time. Based on a critical analysis of unpublished archival sources, this article seeks to reconstruct their spying activities and understand their place in the history of intelligence, and to provide an assessment of the prevailing Foreign Office security arrangements. It concludes that poor employment practices and security arrangements at the British Embassy in Rome allowed them to pull off a major espionage coup.