Author(s): Gordon Corera

History

A riveting spy story set in World War Two. Using declassified documents and extensive original research, Secret Pigeon Service tells the dramatic untold story of MI 14(d) and its spy networks including the remarkable `Leopold Vindictive', a Belgian resistance cell who used the pigeon they found in 1941 to spy on the Nazis. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6. Some may even have heard of MI9 which helped downed airmen escape in World War II. But few will know of MI14(d) - the `Special Pigeon Service,' where Operation Columba was conceived. Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of `Columba' - a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. The messages flooded back attached to the pigeons - authentic voices from rural France, Holland, Belgium - sometimes comic, often tragic and some invaluable with details of German troop movements and fortifications. At the centre of this dramatic new book by BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera is the `Leopold Vindictive' ring - a small group of Belgian villagers prepared to take huge risks to resist and how they were led by a priest for whom it was as if every step of his extraordinary life up to July 1941 had prepared him for his role as leader of this unlikely spy network. A powerful and tragic tale of wartime espionage, the book brings together for the first time the British and Belgian sides of the Leopold Vindictive story and reveals the wider history of a quirky, quarellsome band of spymasters and their special wartime operations. It is a book not just about pigeons but about the ordinary people who were faced with the choice of how to respond to a call for help, and took the decision to resist.