A few months ago, I read an article signed by the historian Mihai Pelin on Historia.ro, entitled The Ploiesti bombing, from disinformation to the truth, in which he claims that the Romanian SSI (Special Intelligence Service) and the 2nd Section of the Romanian Air Force had intelligence regarding the imminence of the U.S. air raid (Operation Tidal Wave), prior to August 1st, 1943! The same historian wrote a whole book on the subject, entitled The air raid of the betrayed squadron, but I haven't got my hands on this book, yet. Let's look at what the article has to say:
The imminence of the U.S. air raid has been signaled to the upper echelons of the Romanian Army, in a credible form, only in the report from July 26, 1943, by the Special Intelligence Service in Bucharest. On July 28, in turn, lieutenant colonel Gheorghe Robescu and captain aviator Ceausu Titus, from the 2nd Section of the Air Force, have released a warning, lacking any doubt: "An informant in Turkey, with good connections in the Allied diplomatic circles there - as their report no. D 2241 shows - after a conversation he had had with an Englishman working in the British Consulate in Istanbul, announced that we should expect the bombing of our oil fields, soon. "And on July 30, 1943, SSI has issued a new report, entitled laconically , as usual: "Turkey. About the possibility of the bombing of our oil fields. Following the announcements in our report on July 26, 1943 - as this document mentions - from a source with good opportunities to investigate within the competent Anglo-American circles in Turkey, we received a piece of intelligence that the Americans intend to bomb the Prahova Valley, soon.
From the excerpt above, we have knowledge of three reports, from July 26th, 28th and 30th, 1943, written by the SSI and the 2nd Section of the Air Force... We even get a registration number of the military report: D 2241. Could this be true?
In the same article mentioned above, Mihai Pelin claims that the U.S. deliberately sabotaged Operation Tidal Wave, denying the British any participation in this air raid, despite Churchill's insistence, in order to prove to Churchill that a landing in the Balkans will hit an impregnable wall... This claim seems to me a little far-fetched (conspiracy theory?), especially since Pelin suggests, in the same article, that SSI probably knew about the imminence of Operation Tidal Wave from a British source... And there is no military connection between the air raid in Romania and the Allied landing that, most likely, would have been planned to take place in Greece... But who knows? Pelin also says that Elyesa Bazna (Cicero) began to collaborate with the German attaché, Ludwig Carl Moyzisch, only after October 26th, 1943, and he also says that the SSI and the 2nd Section of the Air Force had different sources.
On Wikipedia, the article, written in Romanian, dedicated to Eugen Cristescu - the SSI director between 1940 and 1944, says:
One of SSI's greatest achievements was finding the date of the American raid against Ploiesti - August 1st 1943 - one week before it actually took place.
Cool thing is that, in the (highly controversial, if not tendentious) English version of the same topic , on Wikipedia, dedicated to Cristescu, this piece of information, regarding SSI, is missing...
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