Taranto intelligence and the Swordfish torpedo wire

Japanese and German estimates struggled to accept that a single British carrier had delivered the successful torpedo attack on Taranto. Analysts inferred that another carrier must have participated because their own assumptions made the reported number of hits seem impossible. They later suspected that Britain possessed a secret method for making aerial torpedoes travel more cleanly through the air. A simple tension wire used with the Fairey Swordfish instead stabilised the weapon as it dropped. The example shows how intelligence organisations can invent a complicated hidden capability when a modest engineering adaptation sits outside their expectations.