The Italian Military Information Service was the military intelligence organization for the Royal Army of the Kingdom of Italy 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.

Brigadier General Bonner Frank Fellers was a United States Army officer who served during World War II as a military attaché and director of psychological warfare. He is notable as the military attaché in Egypt whose extensive transmissions of detailed British tactical information were unknowingly intercepted by Axis agents and passed to Nazi German Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel for over six months, which contributed to disastrous British defeats at Gazala and Tobruk in June 1942.