ESPIONAGE: The Tactful Servant

• Share

Francesco Costantini was only an unschooled village boy from Viterbo when he went to Rome at the age of 14 and landed a job as office boy in the U.S. Embassy. His budding career in the world of diplomacy nearly ended three years later when he was fired for getting into a fight. But Francesco was a resilient boy. Soon afterward he landed another job in the British embassy and from there went on to change, in his modest way, the course of history. Last week, having long since retired as one of the most successful spies in history, 62-year-old Francesco Costantini told his story for the benefit of readers of Milan's weekly Candido.

Smoke in the Cellar. "Compared to the open, cordial, jovial Americans," he wrote of the momentous changeover in his early life, "the British were standoffish and haughty. I never learned to like them." He did learn to imitate their cool, diplomatic ways. As the years rolled by and Victor Emmanuel's monarchy gave way to Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, the village boy became a perfect embodiment of that superdiplomat—the diplomatic gentleman's gentleman. As a tactful and understanding embassy servant he was entrusted with all sorts of delicate missions by the well-born young Britons of His Majesty's Foreign Service. He got them theater tickets, arranged discreet assignations, and even took over some of their official functions.

One of these necessary jobs at the embassy was the ritual burning of each day's decoded dispatches. At first the attache in charge carefully supervised Francesco's performance of this daily chore, but after a time (and after Francesco had thoughtfully filled the furnace with damp paper to ensure the production of clouds of steamy smoke that stung diplomatic eyes) the attache let him go it alone. Francesco burned a few of the papers and took the rest (for a small fee) to the Italian military intelligence. "I was certainly not qualified," he writes modestly, "to select the material, all of which seemed to me absolutely incomprehensible." But by choosing a few dispatches at random each day, he proved a great help to Italian strategy. "It was," he declared, "child's play."

Encouraged by his success at the furnace and by the Italian authorities, Francesco tried even bolder schemes. He took wax impressions of embassy keys, pilfered papers from the ambassador's safe, had them photographed and securely back in place before anyone noticed. Once, on duty as night custodian of the building, he removed an entire 24-volume set of official British code books, took them over to his Italian contact, smoked and drank in nervous anxiety for seven hours while they were being photographed, and had them back safe in the morning. That, Costantini did admit, "was a bad moment," but it had a telling effect on Fascist policy. After that. Benito Mussolini's breakfasts were made pleasanter by the fact that he could read reports from Whitehall to Rome often before British Ambassador Sir Eric Drummond himself had seen them.