Once the young maid fell in love with Manca, he asked her to provide the footprints of the safe keys retained by De La Fond.

[10] The Chief of Staff of the Regia Marina, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, could read De La Fond's daily reports before they arrived in Paris.

By reading some of the documents, the SIS discovered an operation aimed at stealing the schematics of the command tower of the new Littorio-class battleships (still under construction).

Ansaldo & C. The prompt intervention of the SIS led to the arrest of the traitor and his wife Clara Marchetto in Bordighera, a small town near the French border.

Under the pretext of raising the ship to sell it to a Spanish owner, a team of members of the Decima, disguised as Italian civilian workers, took control of the tanker.

Subsequent SLCs (siluri a lenta corsa, slow speed torpedoes) were shipped in multiple deliveries hidden among mechanical parts destined to the Olterra.

Only after the armistice of Cassibile, a member of the Italian embassy in Madrid revealed the Olterra's secret to Alan Hillgarth, and the ship was towed to Cádiz for a thorough inspection by embarrassed Spanish authorities.

In Leon Goldsworthy's words:In the spring of 1942 SIS ex-commander Alberto Lais planned and supervised Operation Pesca di beneficenza ("Lucky dip"), the recovery of British codebooks and other secret documents from the wreck of the destroyer HMS Mohawk, sunk in shallow water off the Kerkennah Islands during the battle of the Tarigo Convoy.

In 1936, the Italian Regia Marina made a further attempt, when both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini required cooperation between the military intelligence agencies of both nations, but B-Dienst was not part of this agreement until 1936.

According to the head of the SIS, Admiral Maugeri, its loss would have meant that Gibraltar and Alexandria would be cut off from each other, the lifeline sliced in two, the Strait and Suez blocked out completely.

[22] Maugeri was harshly opposed by the Italian Air Ministry, that, following Giulio Douhet's theories of total annihilation, insisted they could knock Malta out of the war with strategic bombing and at small cost in lives or matériel.

In February 1942 Italian losses in warships and merchant shipping in the Sicilian Passage (between Sicily and the coast of North Africa) reached alarming proportions.

At one of the daily meetings of Supermarina, Maugeri stated his ideas on the subject: unless Malta was invested Italians would have no chance in the Mediterranean, its convoys would be decimated, and the whole North African campaign compromised.

Like the Chief of Staff of Italian Comando Supremo, Field Marshal Ugo Cavallero, Admiral Maugeri maintained that Malta should have been a priority over the conquest of Egypt; his opinion was shared by Kesselring and Rintelen.

[24] Hitler, however, gradually grew sceptical of plans for a landing, and Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht supported him in this, because he had little faith in Italian military capabilities.

In a diary entry from August 17, 1941, Maugeri expressed his frustration for the lack of collaboration between Germans and Italians in the Mediterranean Theatre: To have elected the conquest of Egypt—not yet accomplished and God only knows if it will ever be—instead of the all-essential objective of capturing Malta.