l4sfdrx

54 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
well with the limited reserves at their disposal'.22 By mid-1946
they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which
came from military cypher machines at division level codenamed
'Taper'. British liaison officers with the Italians were
working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification
of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew
that Taper traffic 'which had been taken with so much depth
and continuity for the past month' was Soviet in origin, but
many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance
about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer
was. 23
The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards
raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians
and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting
Britain's own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley
Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain's
allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a
number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra
had shown Britain's code-breakers that the Germans could read
many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets
and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious
human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively
an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo's codebreakers
were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain's secrets
safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose
communications were being read by friend and foe alike. 24
By the autumn of 1943 the security situation looked much
worse. The Italians had now capitulated, and captured Italian
code-breakers revealed their successes against British codes.
Captain Edmund Wilson, who helped to look after cypher security
at Bletchley Park, held prolonged 'conversations' with
Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau
in Rome, and his staff during late 1943. Wilson explained that
he could hardly call them 'interrogations', since Cianchi had
given all of Italy's secret information so happily and freely. Wilson
said that 'very valuable information' on the breaking of British