The Italian authorities were seriously concerned about the danger represented by anarchists living abroad; they regarded the colonies established outside Italy by the Internationalists as dangerous centres of conspiracy. Since the Italian police could not intervene directly in foreign countries, the prosecution of anarchists fell to the discretion of foreign police forces, but collaboration was often problematic. Therefore, the Italian government attached great importance to its own system of surveillance carried out by an intelligence service largely based on informers and secret agents infiltrating the anarchist groups. Ambassadors and consuls were key elements in establishing the office known as the ‘International Police’. In 1888, the consul in Geneva, Giuseppe Basso, writing to the Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, declared himself one of the main founders of this system of international surveillance, a sort of pioneer.

Although the ultimate decision on recruitment belonged to the Ministry of the Interior, consuls and ambassadors enlisted their own informers in loco. Moreover, the Minister of the Interior occasionally recruited his own agents without the interference of the ambassadors, who were kept in the dark about their existence.

The Ministry of the Interior administered the espionage budget and decided upon the estimate of expenditure submitted by consuls and ambassadors. To avoid direct involvement by the Italian authorities, anonymous functionaries maintained contacts between the embassies and their informers. The person who for many years received and delivered the reports to the embassy using the alias Calvo was Cavalier Manetti, registrar at the embassy. The ambassadors valued the information received from spies and conveyed it to the Foreign Ministry through the Divisione Prima Affari Politici, the section in charge of the ‘International Police’. Subsequently, the Foreign Ministry passed all relevant information to the Ministry of the Interior or, if criminal acts were suspected, to the foreign governments involved.

Occasionally, more than one secret agent worked at the same time, each without knowledge of the other's existence. This allowed the Italian authorities to compare information acquired by their agents. At the 1881 International Revolutionary Socialist Congress an informer was sent from Marseilles to infiltrate the proceedings, along with the secret agent already present in London. The Ministry of the Interior considered it of the utmost importance to keep the two unaware of one another to cross-check their reports.