Photo By Lori Stewart | A rare photo of Carla Costa from a 1948 issue of The Saturday Evening Post in which...... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
23 OCTOBER 1944
On 23 October 1944, agents of the 305th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment apprehended Carla Costa, a 17-year-old Italian girl, trying to cross into enemy-held territory in northern Italy. Difficult to break, she eventually confessed, sharing her wealth of knowledge about her organization and fellow agents.
In the fall of 1944, as the Allies settled into an offensive defense in northern Italy to wait out poor weather before pushing into the Po Valley, German intelligence besieged the Allies with espionage agents. Unable to collect intelligence any other way, the Germans quickly recruited, trained and dispatched some three hundred spies and saboteurs into Allied occupied territory between October 1944 and April 1945.
The Fifth Army’s CIC detachment, the 305th commanded by Maj. Stephen J. Spingarn, had established its headquarters in Tavernelle south of Florence in October. The detachment had eight subsections throughout the Fifth Army’s area of operations and also oversaw operations at the Refugee Interrogation Post in Florence. Spingarn’s headquarters collated the other subsections’ reports, from which he noted that the Germans’ very methodical training meant their agents often wore the same types of clothing and shoes, carried the same types of identification papers, and gave very similar, sometimes verbatim, cover stories. Using these repeated characteristics and actions, he produced “Patterns Reports” that he distributed back to the field units. These reports contributed to the CIC’s apprehension of the vast majority of the German espionage agents caught that fall and winter by the Allies.
One of these captured agents was the young Carla Costa, a member of the Fascist Youth Action Group in Rome. In June 1944, Carla volunteered for the Abwehr. She was placed with the Abwehr Kommando 190 unit running agents in the Fifth Army’s area and, after training, was sent on two missions in early August. In both, she safely returned to German-held territory with military, political, and economic information. Her successful completion of two missions earned her a special audience with Mussolini, who promised her one of Italy’s highest military awards.
About 14 October, she and her partner Mario Martinelli crossed into Allied-held territory for another mission. Five days later, Allied forces captured Martinelli at a civilian movement control post in Florence. Lacking proper travel papers, he was turned over to the 305th CIC. Under interrogation, Martinelli quickly confessed and, in his sixty-three-page statement, implicated his partner. He indicated Carla was to meet him at the home of a countess for their return to German lines. Special agents rushed to the countess’ home, where they learned Carla had already departed. With a description of the girl’s clothing, down to her blue tennis shoes, Special Agent Gordon B. Mason quickly located and apprehended her near a checkpoint.
Carla proved to be a tough prisoner, and five days of interrogation by Major Spingarn and two other agents garnered little information from the taciturn teen. In the CIC report on the case, Spingarn stated, “Despite her youth and sex, [she] has proven herself the most stubborn and tenacious enemy agent or suspect whom CIC, 5th Army, has encountered in the course of its work in Italy.” Fortunately, Carla let slip that her parents lived in Rome. Within days, the Air Force CIC Detachment in Rome had tracked them down and sent a comprehensive report on Carla’s background back to Florence. With this new information, Major Spingarn and his agents were finally able to break Carla’s silence and learned enough about her organization and activities to capture additional enemy agents masquerading as refugees.
When Carla and Martinelli stood trial in mid-December, she was sentenced to twenty years in prison while her partner received the death penalty and was executed. Three years later, the Italian government commuted Carla’s sentence to time served despite CIC entreaties to keep her imprisoned until all Americans had vacated Italy.
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| Date Taken: | 10.20.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 10.20.2023 16:06 |
| Story ID: | 456243 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 259 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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