The January 1944 invasion of the Italian mainland at Anzio, on the coast west of Rome, is seen now as a disaster. Seven thousand Allied soldiers died and 36,000 were wounded during months of bitter stalemate, in part because overly cautious generals failed to press their advantage after landing virtually unopposed. But historians say the campaign would have been a lot worse if not for Peter Tompkins and his network of Italian agents, who ferreted out the details of German counterattack plans and radioed them to American commanders.
There was nothing fanciful about what he did in the months leading up to Rome's June 4, 1944, liberation by U.S. troops. In an age before satellites could survey the battlefield, his dispatches allowed Allied bombers to smash German attacks against the American and British landing forces. Occasionally, tips from Radio Vittoria, as the Rome transmissions were called, were relayed to bomber pilots in mid-flight. In that sense he was a forerunner of the U.S. Special Forces soldiers who called in air strikes behind the lines in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he also played a James Bond role, sewing gold coins into his clothing, writing coded messages on tissue-thin paper (the better to eat them if discovered), and living as an Italian police officer.
The scion of a prominent Atlanta family that lost its fortune in the Depression, Harvard-educated Tompkins had grown up in Italy and spoke Italian like a native. So when, after a stint as a war correspondent for NEC Radio, he approached William "Wild Bill" Donovan about joining the fledgling OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, Donovan decided to send him to infiltrate his former home. "I was a pacifist," Tompkins said. "The last thing I wanted to do was go to war. First off, it was scary. But I had lived under Fascism. My decision was, we've got to win it. And the best way to win it is to tell these generals what's going on so that they can operate rationally."
After getting paramilitary and parachute training in North Africa, Tompkins landed in a boat on a beach 60 miles north of Rome, 36 hours before the Anzio invasion. The young spy was wearing a blue sharkskin suit, with fake identity papers and loose strands of Italian tobacco planted in his pockets. He made his way through the German checkpoints to the capital. By this point, Mussolini had been deposed by the Italian king and fled north, but the king installed a rightist successor government. While Rome was supposed to be an "open city," it was occupied by the German army, which was harassed by resistance fighters. Gestapo and SS men were deporting Jews to death camps and hunting for the resistance. Tompkins found a viper's nest of spies already on the Allied payroll, some of them ex-Fascists, others little more than gangsters.
He sidestepped them and recruited a network of Socialists and Communists that quickly began gathering valuable information. He had more than a dozen agents monitoring German troop movements on the main roads in and out of Rome. Eventually his sources tapped disgruntled officers in the German high command. Tompkins was constantly juggling identities and moving from apartment to apartment. He was nearly caught several times. On one occasion he found himself at a dinner party with Capt. Erich Priebke, the Gestapo's chief spy hunter. A woman asked why he didn't dance like an Italian, and he told her his mother was Hungarian. Priebke was none the wiser. A short time later, Tompkins' closest associate, an Italian police lieutenant named Maurizio Giglio, was caught. Priebke and others tortured him for a week, Tompkins said. Giglio could have doomed Tompkins and the entire network. But he never talked. "I owe my life to him, absolutely," Tompkins said.
Giglio was executed soon after at the Ardeatme Caves with 335 other Italians in a reprisal for a partisan bomb attack that killed 32 SS soldiers in central Rome. Tompkins later enjoyed some measure of justice when an elderly Priebke, located in Argentina by ABC News, was tried and convicted in 1999 for his role in that massacre. Priebke, now 89, is serving a life sentence, and Tompkins was among those who testified against him.
Cheering crowds greeted the U.S. entry into Rome; but, the Normandy D-Day landings 48 hours later, eclipsed the liberation, and Tompkins soon headed for another assignment in Berlin.
Peter Tompkins
Ken Dilanian
Philadelphia Inquirer