Anthony 'Tony' Romella is an officer in U.S. Naval Intelligence.
His rank when we first meet him in last week of November, 1941 is Lieutenant-Commander but as his adventures are described and he is put into more and more highly dangerous and very important operations in the European Theater of the Second World War, his rank will understandably increase.
Our introduction to him takes place in the offices of OP-20-G, the naval code for the Navy's COMINT organization on "the top floor of the Main Navy Building on Constitution Avenue" in D.C. He and his team are pouring over newly released intel predicting an attack by Japanese forces on "location AI". The consensus is the attack is imminent but the site of it remains a mystery. When the bombing of Pearl Harbor takes place shortly thereafter, he will receive orders to London.
Romella's skill at code breaking makes tremendous use of his expertise in Mathematics, a discipline in which he had some years before earned a Ph.D. He had chosen, to the surprise of his surviving mother and sister, to enter the American Navy rather than accept a position at a university but he felt a need to use his skills in something less academic.
Romella is 31 years old and single on our meeting, described as "subtly handsome" with a "relatively dark Italian complexion", wide-set brown eyes below his black hair cut in a regulation crew-cut; he enjoys a "smooth deep voice".
In the course of Romella's involvement in the War, he will find his normally sedentary work-life changing a considerable amount, change that he will be surprised himself enjoying; he will be put in charge of numerous small detachments of radio communications experts, both transmitting and intercepting, as those teams head to various areas of Europe to join in the fight.
His private life will also undergo a major change as he will meet soon after his transfer to London Petra Alice Graham Wilkinson, a Second Officer in the Women's Royal Navy Service. Wilkinson is a widow of a RAF fighter pilot killed in the early days of the War; she has a 9-year-old son named 9. She is intricately connected with the code-breaking work ongoing at Bletchley Park and will later become an operative with MI5.