Operation Columba—The Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera

It took him to the National Archives, where he found many files on the little-known Secret Pigeon Service. So, Corera began a quest to unravel the mysterious message himself. The message was a series of random letters - a code not even the country's best minds could crack.Īround 16,000 pigeons were sent out, and 1,000 came back with messages from occupied Europe ( Getty: Universal History Archive/UIG)

'The dead pigeon's leg had a message attached to it which appeared to come from World War II. He began his research a few years ago after coming across a news story about the discovery of a dead pigeon's leg in a chimney in Surrey, in South East England. 'I never thought I'd be writing about pigeons,' he laughs. Gordon Corera, an author and the BBC's security correspondent, has pieced together details of that group, known by the codename Leopold Vindictive. One group of villagers, led by a local priest, provided intelligence so valuable it was shown to Winston Churchill - but their brave defiance ultimately led them to a gruesome death. The plucky pigeons sparked hundreds of tiny acts of resistance: villagers sending back messages, tied to the legs of the birds. It may sound like the product of an over-imaginative mind, but Operation Columba, a clandestine British bid to gain intelligence from occupied areas, was very real.īetween 19, around 16,000 avian agents, hidden in canisters with little parachutes attached, fell to the ground in rural France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

During World War II, under the cover of darkness, thousands of homing pigeons were dropped from the sky - unlikely secret weapons in the fight against the Nazis.

Operation Columba—The Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera