Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Gordon Corera 2018

Gordon Corera asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image: © Getty Images/FPG/Staff

Map © Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008220341

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008220327

Version: 2018-12-20

Dedication

In memory of Leopold Vindictive

and others who made their choice.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Prologue

Introduction

ONE: Birth

TWO: The Special Pigeon Service

THREE: Leopold Vindictive

FOUR: Arrival

FIVE: Listening

SIX: Battle of the Skies

SEVEN: Reaching Out

EIGHT: Resistance

NINE: Secret Agents

TEN: Undercover

ELEVEN: Battle of the Skies II

TWELVE: Capture

THIRTEEN: Interrogation and Infiltration

FOURTEEN: The Viscount

FIFTEEN: Trials and Tribulations

SIXTEEN: Deception

SEVENTEEN: The Americans are Coming

EIGHTEEN: Fates

Acknowledgements

References

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Map

Prologue

The Belgian farmer could see there was something odd in his field, something that did not belong there. It was early on a July morning in 1941, just over a year after Nazi tanks had swept through the country. As he stepped closer the farmer could make out that the unfamiliar object was a small container with a length of white material attached. Picking it up, he realized the material was a parachute – but one too small for a man. Inside the box he could see something moving and a pair of eyes that peeped out at him through a small opening. Next came the unmistakable sound of a pigeon cooing. Attached to the side of the container was a message – a request for help. The farmer decided this was something that he needed to consult his wife about.

It was a moment of peril – one that many a British pigeon did not survive. The message made clear that this was no innocent pigeon but a very dangerous bird. It was a spy pigeon that could get the farmer and his wife killed. At this crossroads in the war, many faced with the same discovery across north-western Europe would decide it was better that the pigeon died than they did. Often villagers would make the choice more palatable by roasting and eating the bird. Others went straight to the local police station or to their Nazi occupiers and took the reward on offer for surrendering one of these pigeons. That July morning, half a dozen other birds dropped in nearby Belgian fields would be handed over to the authorities out of fear or greed.

But this farmer and his wife were not like the others. And so the first in a series of small choices was made. The wife set off by bicycle, hiding the container in a sack of potatoes. She had an idea where to go. The small local town of Lichtervelde was, like Belgium as a whole, divided by Nazi occupation. The split was delineated by alcohol. Those who frequented a local pub called De Keizer were known as whites – they thought of themselves as ‘patriots’ – meaning they were against the occupation. Meanwhile those who frequented De Zwaan were blacks – nationalists who often wore black shirts and sympathized with the Nazis. Everyone knew who was who and what side they were on.

The farmer’s wife parked her cycle by a grocery shop on a corner a few streets from the centre of town. She carried in the sack of potatoes – nothing suspicious, since it was part of the regular drop-off of supplies for the shop’s owners. But she also handed over the spy pigeon to the family who ran the store. Why them? For two reasons. Everyone knew the Debaillie family were patriots – three brothers and two sisters, plus assorted relatives sent to them for safety during the war. But there was another reason. One of the brothers, Michel, was a pigeon fancier.

The brothers and sisters gathered round as Michel – gangly, with a mop of unruly curly hair – carefully took the bird out. Like any pigeon fancier, he knew how to hold it tenderly but firmly. With the bird were a small sack of feed, two sheets of fine rice paper, a pencil, a resistance newspaper and a questionnaire. The questionnaire, like the pigeon, was from England. It asked for help: specific and dangerous help.

It was time for another decision, one that would shape the course of the lives of this family and others. To help or not to help? To spy or not to spy? To resist or not to resist? Not all were sure. Michel’s younger brother wanted to act. The elder thought it was dangerous. But collectively, they made their choice. If they were patriots, they were patriots.

What did they know about spying? Nothing, really. But they had some friends who might be able to help. One was a former soldier from the First World War who had a fascination with military maps. The other, more surprisingly, was a priest. By the next day, these two had arrived in the corner shop and were inducted into the secret of the pigeon. An amateur spy network, consisting of a band of friends, had been born, driven by a desire to do something about the Nazi occupation that blighted their homeland. For the first friend, the former soldier, the bird was a thing of beauty that he marvelled at, reminding him of the pheasants he kept at home. For the priest, the rice paper was what lured him in. It was like the type of paper on which he had learnt to write characters in China a decade and a half earlier. Like the paper he had used to draw maps of German positions in the last war. And so, he knew, the paper and the pigeon were drawing him into the world of espionage – to make him once again priest, patriot and spy.

Introduction

Like the farmer in the field, I stumbled across the oddities of Operation Columba by chance one morning. I was covering a quirky news story about a dead pigeon’s leg found in a chimney in Surrey. Attached to the bony leg was a message which had stumped GCHQ’s top code-breakers. They had been unable to decipher what the seemingly random series of letters meant. No one was even sure who the pigeon had been sent by, and everyone seemed quite surprised to find that pigeons had been used in the Second World War.

Perhaps there was some clue in the National Archives in Kew which could unlock this pigeon’s secrets? I spent a morning pulling up any and every file that looked as if it might relate to pigeon messages in the Second World War. There were more than I thought, and it was a bewildering induction into a world I had never even known existed. But amidst the interminable accounts of which department should pay for pigeon feed, or what rank of personnel were required for a particular RAF loft, one file that landed on my desk immediately stood out.

Apart from the dates, the front cover bore only two words. One was ‘Secret’; the other, in elegant handwriting, was ‘Columba’. At the top was a photo of a pigeon someone had cut out. Just below the pigeon was a cartoon – also cut out, this time from a newspaper – of Hitler lying prostrate on the floor. This gave the impression that the pigeon had done on the Führer what pigeons do, leading him to fall over. At the bottom of the cover was another cartoon, this one of an RAF plane flown by Winston Churchill with a familiar cigar in his mouth and his fingers held up in his ‘V for Victory’ sign. The file clearly contained details of a secret operation. But it looked utterly unlike any I had seen before. What kind of people would, in the midst of war, encase the contents of their clandestine work in such colourful – even playful – packaging?

Loosening the ribbon that bound the file, I uncovered riches inside. The file had nothing to do with the secret message found in the chimney. But it was far more interesting. The riches came in the form of tiny pink slips of paper. These were messages from ordinary people living under Nazi rule in occupied Europe that had been brought back by pigeon. They were filled with the day-to-day realities of wartime and offered a remarkable insight into the small frustrations and dark tragedies of life under occupation. And then I came across message number thirty-seven. It was unlike everything else. All the other messages had been written up into formal notes, but in this case a copy of the original message had been included in the archive, clearly because it was something special. It looked more like a work of art than an official document. There was tiny, beautiful inky writing, too small to read with the naked eye and densely packed into an unimaginably small space. A swirling symbol as a signature. And maps, detailed colourful maps. Most of the other messages produced intelligence reports that were half a page or perhaps a page long. Message 37 – rolled up tightly into the size of a postage stamp so it could fit into a cylinder attached to a pigeon’s leg – produced an astonishing twelve pages of raw intelligence. And it had clearly had a profound impact on the team running Columba. The intelligence must have left an impression on everyone who saw it – and many did as it was passed around the highest levels of government, many referring to it in almost reverential terms.

But there was a mystery. Who had written it? And what had happened to them? The files had no answer. There was only a codename – Leopold Vindictive – on the message. Other documents contained confusing references to attempts to contact the writer after the message had been received. In none of them could I find a name. Nor was there any reference to the author in the history books I consulted. I knew I had to find out. The quest became something of an obsession. Who or what was Leopold Vindictive? And what was his – or her – fate?

Three years after first opening that file, I found my answer in Belgium. The answers lay partly with the families of those who had been members of Leopold Vindictive and who had preserved their story. In one house in a small town, a family opened up a metal keepsake box. Inside was a treasure trove of photos, maps and – most startlingly – the raw intelligence that had been collected to send back to Britain. Some of it had formed the basis for my message 37, but even more surprisingly, there was much more that had never made it over the Channel. Alongside those artefacts, I found a human story more dramatic and more powerful than I imagined. It is a story which has not been told before and which has had to be pieced together from personal accounts and archives in Britain and Belgium. It is the story that forms the centrepiece of this book, around which the wider story of the operation called Columba is told.

The pigeon is not the most obvious subject for someone interested in intelligence to write about. It is fair to say that the birds had not exactly stirred my interest before. Pigeons have a bad name. Quite literally, since if we preferred to call them by their proper name – doves, or to be more precise rock doves (or, most formally, Columba livia) – they might be seen in a less negative light. Our perception of the pigeon is coloured by the times as children we have chased them or as adults have evaded their droppings. But our experience of ‘feral’ pigeons has obscured from us the truth that some pigeons are a form of superhero. Imagine being blindfolded and then taken hundreds of miles from home – perhaps even to another country across the sea. And then suddenly having the blindfold removed and, despite not having the slightest idea where you are, racing home at top speed. Even if home is six hundred miles away. That is not normal. Just like the super-powers of comic-book heroes, the homing instinct of pigeons is something that scientists cannot explain. They have tried over the years, with theories about magnetic fields and the sun, but no one has satisfactorily managed it.

It is a strangely comfy super-power though. The pigeon is not on a mission to save the world. It just wants to go home. From the age of six weeks, pigeons can be taught to ‘home’ to the loft from which they make their first flight, because they understand that is where they will find food, water and company. Pigeons can be picky in their journey – they do not like to fly at night or to cross water, often flying along the coast to find the shortest point at which to cross a body like the English Channel. But they are ultimately single-minded in simply wanting to get back to where they belong. Amidst the horrors of wartime, this longing has a particular resonance.

Over the course of human history, this super-power has been recognized by people who have learnt to employ it for communication by releasing pigeons to send messages home. Noah released a dove from the Ark to bring back reports of whether the flood waters had receded. In Ancient Greece, the names of winners in the original Olympic Games were sent to distant towns by pigeon. Julius Caesar used birds during the conquest of Gaul (the Romans had, at various times, a fad for breeding pigeons, but that seems largely to have been in order to eat them). The Sultan of Baghdad used a pigeon post around 1150. In the nineteenth century, Julius Reuter began a news service using pigeons to send messages between Brussels and Germany. In Paris, pigeons were the only form of contact with the outside world during its siege in 1870. A manned hot-air balloon flew out of the city under fire carrying pigeons. Friends and family (including those in Britain) could post their letters to the city of Tours, where they would be photographed and then reduced to the point where one of the pigeons could be loaded with a film containing 2,500 messages before it flew home to Paris. A magic lantern would project the messages onto a screen so they could be copied out and sent to the recipients.

The modern sport of pigeon racing began at the start of the nineteenth century in Belgium. Clubs were formed as pigeons were carefully selected and bred to improve their abilities. The breeding extended their range from 40 miles to 200 miles and then upwards to 600 miles or more. The peak popularity of the sport came in the years before and after the Second World War; at least a quarter of a million Belgians were involved, and one in nine families had a pigeon. Lofts were present in almost every small town and village in northern France and the Low Countries, across much of Britain and in the United States.

Breeding pigeons to improve their ability (or their looks) was honed to a fine art by pigeon fanciers, or – to give them their proper name – the fancy. Pigeon keeping has come to be seen as a working-class preserve, the ‘poor man’s racehorse’, a sport offering the chance to train an animal, enjoy a social life around meetings and even perhaps win a bit of money on the side. Historically, it was also a sport for the well-off, which is why so many country houses had dovecotes and pigeon lofts. The Queen still has her own pigeon loft at her estate in Sandringham, the first pigeons a gift from the Belgian king. At the start of the Second World War, these pigeon owners – rich and poor alike – were called on to play their part in a remarkable and little-known volunteer effort. Total war demanded sacrifice, and pigeons and their owners played their part.

Pigeons did not win the war. People did. And this story is not so much about the birds as about the people who sent and received the pigeons of Columba. Yet, in a war that began with Blitzkrieg and ended with the atomic bomb, pigeons had a unique place when it came to intelligence gathering. Intelligence involves understanding your enemy – the disposition and composition of their forces, the lie of the land and the mood of the people. There are many ways of finding this out, the oldest being to use human spies who can see what is happening. But in this war there was a crucial challenge. How did your agents get the information back from behind enemy lines? Long before modern communications technology, the near-miraculous ability of trained pigeons to return to their home loft offered an unusual but highly effective way of receiving news and communicating.

Columba ran from April 1941 until September 1944. A total of 16,554 pigeons would be dropped in an arc from Copenhagen in Denmark to Bordeaux in the South of France. Casualties were heavy. Some were lost on planes shot down before they had a chance to be released. Some lay unfound in a field. Others fell into enemy hands. Some were eaten by hungry locals. Others were released but never made it back. The pigeons had to race through storms and battle against their nemesis – the hawk – to come home with their precious cargo. They returned with their messages to a quirky and quarrelsome band of British spymasters-cum-pigeon fanciers who did their best to prove the worth of their special operation against bureaucratic hindrances, institutional scepticism and bitter personal rivalries. The story of Columba – and particularly that of its most important message – does not always shine a particularly happy light on the inner workings of British intelligence, revealing divisions often overlooked in rose-tinted accounts of the war. The harsh reality is that brave men and women in the field were sometimes let down by London.

The messages Columba’s pigeons carried, though, would prove their worth. Messages like number 37 provided vital intelligence on Nazi plans to invade England during its darkest hour. Others would bring news of the latest German weapons and would pave the way for D-Day and victory in May 1945. Still other messages were more personal, like the letter from a crashed RAF airman to his mother.

Who were the people who provided this rich seam of intelligence? Some were trained agents. But most were simply local villagers who made a choice to undertake their own small act of resistance. As a result, their messages – sometimes tragic, sometimes comic – provide a unique and untapped insight into the realities of daily life under Nazi occupation, from the struggles over food to the attitude towards collaborators, and even the often terrible impact of Allied bombing on those living under occupation. They offer the authentic voice of the villagers of rural France, Belgium and the Netherlands and their calls to Britain for help.

The pigeon was simply doing what it did by its nature. It knew nothing of the war that raged around it. But for those involved in Columba, the values of sacrifice, duty and a love of home all came to be embodied in the humble pigeon’s flight. The living creatures offered a unique bond. For the British commando dropped with a pigeon behind enemy lines and in fear of his life, the sight of the bird flying off to a suburban garden with a message that he was safe offered a connection to home from a dangerous foreign field. And for a Frenchman or woman or a Belgian living under occupation, there was the knowledge that the pigeon that they released up into the sky was racing back to its home, bearing their message, to a land still free. This was the secret of Columba.

CHAPTER ONE

Birth

The pigeon that fell in the farmer’s field near Lichtervelde in July 1941 had begun its journey a day and a half earlier. Home was a loft in a large garden on Lattice Avenue, a quiet suburban street in Ipswich full of recently built houses. The bird had been plucked from its loft and handed over by its owner. Owners were told nothing of where a bird was going or what it would be doing. All they knew was that it was something secret for the war effort.

Soon the bird had company. Our pigeon and its fellow birds were driven in a van about forty miles to Newmarket racecourse. There each pigeon was placed in its own special box with a parachute attached. A tiny green Bakelite cylinder – about the size of a pen top – was placed around its leg.

Newmarket was home to a top secret RAF squadron whose job was to carry out ‘Special Duties’ for British intelligence. In the summer of 1940, MI6 had approached the Air Ministry to ask if it could help drop agents behind enemy lines. The first attempt to land an agent in Belgium using a small Lysander plane ended in disaster on 18 August 1940. The plane was unable to touch down and was lost on its return flight, killing both pilot and agent. But the RAF persisted and began to use a mix of Lysander landings and parachute drops to deliver agents. The crews were trained in the dangerous task of night-flying over enemy territory using moonlight. The hours before take-off would be spent memorizing the location of rivers, lakes, railway lines and forests. The moonlight allowed them to read their maps and guide themselves by the landmarks they could see below.

The drop of our pigeon on that July night was a minor add-on to the primary secret mission of parachuting two agents into Belgium. The pilots, Ron Hockey and Ashley Jackson, took off in their Whitley from the racecourse and headed over the Channel into Nazi-occupied Europe. Enemy searchlights lit up the plane as it reached Nieuport on the Belgian coast – not far from Dunkirk, where the previous year the little boats had played a vital part in rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from destruction. Anti-aircraft fire opened up from the ground but the pilots pressed on. They headed inland towards Charleroi, south of Brussels. As they did, they passed over a field in Ardoye, near Lichtervelde. This was our pigeon’s moment.

The flaps of the aircraft were lowered and one of the team grabbed the container. The best height from which to drop was between 600 and 1,000 feet, at a speed of about 180 miles an hour. The pigeon was rudely ejected. ‘We tried to be very humane and give them a good drop,’ an RAF pilot remembered of the process.

The plane went on to Namur and St Hubert but the crew realized they were lost and had to abandon the agent drop, returning home after a five-hour trip. The next night they tried again but the mission went disastrously wrong. The parachute of one of the agents caught in the plane as he leapt out over Belgium. He was left twirling out of the back like a puppet on a string. The crew were unable to reach him as his body repeatedly slammed against the side of the aircraft. By the time they returned to Britain, he was dead and his battered body was dropped into the sea the next night.

Crews, as well as agents, took enormous risks – their life expectancy was lower even than that of those who flew bombing missions over Germany – and with their gallows humour they enjoyed regaling each other with stories of derring-do. They found Columba a rather amusing and odd little sideshow. ‘Pigeons were dropped in a small parachute container, their heads just visible through the top of it,’ one pilot recalled. An agent might sometimes have second thoughts about parachuting into some dark, snowy wilderness but the pigeons were given no choice. ‘I doubt if any of them survived,’ the pilot reflected.

But the bird dropped near Lichtervelde did make it. The primary mission of that flight to drop agents might have failed, but the pilots would not have known that the train of events set in motion by the pigeon they had pushed out would end up with intelligence landing on Churchill’s desk. The parachute deployed and the pigeon fell gently into the dark field, ready to be discovered by a farmer the next morning.

This was Columba – the Secret Pigeon Service.

The driving force behind the use of pigeons in the Second World War were two men with experience of the previous war. One was a leading member of the ‘fancy’ – the community of pigeon fanciers in the country – whose ambition would drive deep fissures within the pigeon world. The other was a washed-up spy looking for one more chance to make a difference.

The name of Osman is to pigeon racing the equivalent of the Kennedys in American politics – a family dynasty stretching back for decades. The founder of that dynasty was Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Henry Osman. Stout, with a proud moustache, Osman had abandoned a career as a lawyer to found the publication the Racing Pigeon in 1898. In the First World War, he brought his personal passion to bear as the leading light in all matters pigeon. A hundred thousand pigeons were bred for use in the war. First deployed on trawlers commandeered to carry out minesweeping in the North Sea, one brought news of a Zeppelin heading towards Britain. Another was released by a skipper who lay mortally wounded on deck after a U-boat attack, allowing his crew to be rescued.

Pigeon use quickly expanded across all the services. The Army used them for communicating short distances from the front line, especially when cables had been cut or visual signalling was impossible owing to smoke, or when a runner carrying a message might be shot. ‘If it became necessary immediately to discard every line and method of communications used on the front, except one, and it were left to me to select that one method, I should unhesitatingly choose the pigeons,’ wrote Major General Fowler, Chief of Signals and Communications of the British Army, after the war. ‘When the battle rages and everything gives way to barrage and machine gun fire, to say nothing of gas attacks and bombings, it is to the pigeon that we go for succour.’

Belgium had the best pigeon service but had destroyed many of its birds at the start of the war to prevent them falling into German hands. The French released five thousand birds during the Battle of the Somme. The Americans took home and eventually stuffed one bird that had arrived badly wounded with a message that saved a battalion trapped behind enemy lines.

The British Army Pigeon Service was disbanded not long after the war. But as the 1930s turned darker and the threat of another war loomed, there were those from the fancy who saw themselves as voices in the wilderness, just like those calling for rearmament with tanks and aeroplanes. They urgently pressed the authorities to prepare to make use of pigeons once again. The leading advocate was Alfred Osman’s son, William. His poor eyesight meant he had been rejected from regular service in the First World War but he had worked with his father. On Alfred’s death in 1930, William inherited his father’s mantle as editor of the Racing Pigeon and leading proponent of the birds’ value in times of war. In 1937, he wrote to the Secretary of the Committee on Imperial Defence saying it was a mistake not to prepare pigeon plans. The Army said it saw little need, apart perhaps from their use for contact with isolated garrisons. The RAF thought they might need a hundred or so birds as an alternative means of communication – for instance if a plane crashed or a radio was jammed. But that could be organized when war began.

Osman kept pressing. At over six foot, he had the bearing of an old-fashioned military officer and the manner to go with it – abrupt in a way that could easily be interpreted as rude. He did not suffer fools gladly. The next year he attended a meeting of the Committee on Imperial Defence, explaining that it was a blunder not to have maintained a compulsory register of pigeon owners. His profound knowledge of pigeons was clear but there was also an element of self-interest – he proposed that an appeal for volunteers could be made through the Racing Pigeon, the newspaper he edited. It was agreed that a committee of four – including Osman – should start a National Pigeon Service, the NPS. It was to be riven by bitter infighting.

An immense voluntary effort was at the heart of Britain’s wartime pigeon operations. It is hard to appreciate just how popular a sport pigeon fancying was at the time. There were a quarter of a million people involved, with at least 70,000 lofts, mainly concentrated in working-class areas. At the outbreak of war, all pigeons had to be registered. In Plymouth, Bert Woodman went to the city police to collect his permit to keep his pigeons. A middle-aged local food factory manager, he was typical of the working men who would play their part. The regime was strict: all foreign birds and those without a ring which identified their owner were destroyed. ‘There was a terrible slaughter,’ Woodman remembered. Registration was about control, but it also offered a route for those like Bert Woodman to volunteer for the new NPS. Two thousand signed up at first, but the membership would grow to include 18,000 lofts. NPS members agreed to offer at least twenty birds a month for national service and membership was the only way a fancier could legally obtain food for his pigeons. Members were organized into local pigeon supply groups led by a pigeon supply officer – Bert Woodman would take on the role in Plymouth, where he also acted as adviser to the police. Membership offered a way to make a difference and was one of the many ways in which the Second World War became ‘the people’s war’ in which so many contributed. For one man, too old to fight but who had lost his brother in the last war, handing over his pigeons meant he could feel he was doing something for his brother’s memory. Meanwhile, a Nottinghamshire miner’s children remember always being late for school on a Tuesday, as this was the day their dad was down the pit early and they had to excitedly wait for someone to come and pick up his pigeons for some kind of secret work. Pigeon keeping had been a largely male pastime, but many women also took over a husband’s or son’s loft as their loved ones served far away.

The Air Ministry was given the overall co-ordinating role for all matters pigeon, including the supervision of the NPS. Its pigeon section was run by the influential but insecure William Dex Lea Rayner, who was manoeuvred into the job by Osman. Another veteran pigeoneer of the First World War, Rayner had gone on to run military pigeon operations in Ireland (soldiers battling against Irish Republicans would sometimes send news by pigeon that they were under attack). He then operated his own pigeon stud list in Norwich before becoming a somewhat hard-up dance band manager. Balding, with an oval face and sharp nose, he was bird-like in looks and was determined to maintain his position as pigeon supremo. He would be at the centre of ‘pigeon politics’ and some monumental feuds. This was especially the case once the Army – rather than Rayner’s own RAF – moved into the pigeon business when it saw the particular value of the birds in intelligence work. The Army, not the RAF, would be Columba’s master.

Osman had ensured that the humble pigeon had its place in the machinery of war. But he was not inside the spy world. And the pigeon’s specific role in Columba – as a tool to get intelligence back from ordinary people behind enemy lines – was established thanks to the vision of Rex Pearson, a veteran of military intelligence in the previous war. But as the Second World War began, Pearson was a spy without a mission or role.

In the inter-war years, Pearson had – to all appearances – left the intelligence game for a career in business. In Switzerland he had become the representative for the British firm Unilever. But that was not the full picture. In the mid-1930s, he had resumed his clandestine life. He was recruited into the ‘Z’ organization. ‘Z’ was the brainchild of Claude Dansey, a powerful figure within MI6. Some called him ‘Uncle Claude’ because, at first sight, Dansey looked like an elderly uncle, white-haired and with a general air of benevolence. That impression never lasted for those who got to know him. Dansey was an acerbic, sharp operator whose penchant for secrecy and intrigue made him as many enemies as admirers and left junior officers terrified of him. He had achieved his lofty position by trusting nobody. In the thirties, he had realized that the Germans had worked out MI6’s use of the Passport Control Office in British embassies to hide its undercover officers. That made MI6 officers easy to identify. So Dansey set about building his own network across the continent, using businessmen.

The Z organization was a parallel intelligence network and Pearson – a colleague of Dansey’s from military intelligence in the First World War – was Z’s man in Zurich. Dansey himself moved to Switzerland to run the network late in the decade. But in November 1939 he returned to London to supervise all MI6’s European operations, leaving Pearson in charge in Switzerland. The results were disastrous. Chaos ensued as Pearson proved not to be up to the job. At one point he managed to send two different officers to the same rendezvous with a contact. His catastrophic performance may also have stemmed from the fact that he had a drink problem. Heavy drinking was common at the time, but Pearson’s seems to have been bad enough to have an adverse impact on his work. In February 1940, another MI6 officer was sent out to Switzerland to replace him.

Pearson returned to London, his intelligence career in apparent ruins just as the war was beginning. But in November 1940, he approached Military Intelligence with an idea. In the last two years of the First World War, he had been involved in a clever intelligence operation that he wanted to reprise. It involved pigeons. He was met, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a degree of bewilderment bordering on annoyance from the higher-ups. Pigeons were an ‘outmoded’ weapon in Britain’s armoury, he was told. But Pearson persisted, and explained to his superiors what he had got up to in the last war.

The first lesson from that war was that you could use pigeons for the core business of intelligence gathering. The intelligence the military wanted included things like the disposition and movement of enemy forces. If train-loads of soldiers were seen heading to a particular station, for instance, that might mean the Germans were about to make a push on the front at that point. Networks of agents had emerged, especially in Belgium, to collect this information in the previous war but the biggest challenge had been getting their information back from the other side. MI6 had employed couriers and specialist passeurs (line crossers), whose hazardous work involved cutting and crawling through barbed wire, wearing rubber boots to avoid being electrocuted while carrying details of German forces.

Inventiveness was at a premium. A colleague of Pearson had developed a system in which messages were written in invisible ink on banknotes and dropped in offertory boxes in Catholic churches, which were allowed to be taken across the front lines. Another officer was convinced that by standing in front of an oven and moving back and forth he could send ‘infra-red rays’ to signal with Morse code. Animals were another possibility. The pigeon with its homing instinct seemed an attractive option, and it was soon employed to carry intelligence back from agents.

But Pearson explained that he had been involved in a further innovation. What about not only using pigeons to send back intelligence from existing agents, but to actually recruit people to gather intelligence in the first place? There were sympathetic people on the other side who wanted to help. The challenge was finding them and then getting their intelligence back. In the First World War small hydrogen balloons had been sent out downwind from the British side of the front lines to any district where it was thought German forces were concentrated. Normally seven balloons were released in a night, each holding four carrier pigeons in their own basket with a parachute. At first, the baskets were attached to a cross-shaped device with an alarm clock in the middle. When it reached the right hour and rang it would release the parachutes. Later, a slow-burning fuse was employed.

Attached to the pigeons was an envelope containing a patriotic appeal and a questionnaire asking whether the Germans were present, and in what numbers. This could be filled in by locals and then clipped back onto the pigeon’s leg. By breakfast time, a quarter of the pigeons released at night had normally returned, half with messages. It bothered the Germans enormously. The chief of the German Intelligence Service had griped about their use and fourteen days’ leave were promised to any German soldier who shot a pigeon down. At least eleven were shot and found to be carrying important military information.

Pearson had been in charge of all balloon operations in France by the end of the First World War. Now he wanted to do it again. And better.

What Pearson had in mind this time round was much more ambitious. In the previous war, the pigeons had typically flown only fifteen or twenty miles across the front lines. Balloons dependent on the wind might be fine for delivering pigeons over enemy lines that you were sometimes close enough to observe. But in this new war, the challenge was much greater. Pearson wanted to see if pigeons could make it all the way from occupied Europe, over the Channel or North Sea and back home to England. The challenge of getting the pigeons to the target zone in the first place could be solved by dropping them from planes rather than balloons. The chances of their return home would depend entirely on the skill of the birds.

Pearson pressed his case, against considerable resistance. His old service MI6 (officially designated the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS), which recruited agents to provide information abroad, was dismissive. It thought so little of the prospects that it said it wanted absolutely nothing to do with the idea and refused to co-operate. But Military Intelligence – based at the War Office and reporting to the Army, separate from MI6, which reported to the Foreign Office – eventually relented. It was a long shot but Columba, as the service was christened, offered the tantalizing chance to establish contact with untapped sources which Britain could reach by no other means. Pearson was appointed officer in charge of the Special Continental Section of the Army Pigeon Service, and soon a grandly titled ‘Special Section (Carrier Pigeon)’ team was set up in the Royal Corps of Signals. He would organize the logistics. Any messages that arrived back were to be sent on to a Military Intelligence team at the War Office. This meant Columba was rooted in the Army and not in the RAF – a source of abiding tension.

The first experimental pigeon drops took place at the end of 1940. Pigeon owners were told as little as possible about why their birds were needed. Early trials focused on how to transport the pigeons, and whether ‘head down’ or ‘tail down’ was better to avoid tail feathers being frayed. By January, a new container made their journey somewhat more comfortable as six birds were dropped from a Lysander plane at 130 feet. The parachute opened perfectly and the landing was gentle, but the container rolled over two or three times after reaching the ground. The pigeons did not appear ‘unduly frightened’, it was noted. They were given two minutes to recover before being liberated. Visibility was poor, so the birds circled for nine minutes or so trying to get their bearings before heading off to Aldershot. They covered ten miles in about fifteen minutes.

By April 1941, Columba was ready. Each container would be attached to a three-and-a-half-foot parachute. On the outside of the container was an envelope with a questionnaire, some rice paper for the return message and – thoughtfully – a pencil, as well as a bag containing ½ lb of pigeon food. Instructions explained that the parachute must be disposed of, and that the pigeon should be fed an eggcupful of corn a day and allowed to stretch its wings a little.

The questionnaire would be in French or Dutch, depending on the drop site. It included a run-down of the information Britain sought, compiled by the organizations that were customers of Columba’s information – Military Intelligence, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and the BBC. Top priority was anything on a planned invasion of England, followed by details of any troops in the area, enemy morale, significant addresses the Germans were using, the location of aerodromes, the effect of any recent bombs dropped by the Allies, and finally – in an example of early audience research – the extent to which people could hear BBC radio clearly and their views of the service it provided. It ended with the words: ‘Thank you. Take courage. We will not forget you.’

Instructions showed how to correctly clip the small green cylinder onto the pigeon’s leg again once the questionnaire had been filled in. Also enclosed was a copy of the latest edition of either a French, Belgian or Dutch resistance newspaper printed in London (or in some cases the Daily Mail). The idea was that this would provide assurance to the recipient that the bird had come from England and would return there when released.

No one was quite sure it would work. One official reckoned there were four options for a pigeon. It might not be found and simply die. It might be picked up by a local, as hoped, and a message sent back. Or it could be picked up by the Germans and dispatched back with a fake message. There was a final option – ‘they may be picked up by a hungry patriot and find themselves in a pigeon pie.’ The scepticism was shared by the RAF pilots who were asked to drop the birds. Perhaps reflecting their own sense of humour, they were convinced that any questionnaires that did come back would be filled with obscene messages from the Germans. But most, they thought, would not even get that far. ‘In our jaundiced opinion most of them ended up on the dining table!’ a pilot reckoned. That may have been true for many of the birds. But not all.

On the night of 8 April, an RAF Whitley took off from Newmarket making for Belgium on Columba’s first run. The plane was attacked by anti-aircraft fire near Zeebrugge but the Germans on the ground were wide of the mark. The rear gunner on the RAF flight even managed to take out one of the searchlights. The plane headed for the Franco-Belgian border and the dispatcher was told to ‘commence operations’. The pigeons in their containers were pushed out.

At Columba’s HQ in the War Office, they sat and waited.

CHAPTER TWO

The Special Pigeon Service

In the bowels of the War Office, two men waited anxiously for the first signs that Columba would work. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6, the domestic and foreign intelligence services that survive to this day. Some may even have heard of MI9 – the wartime department that helped Allied servicemen escape from behind enemy lines. But few will have heard of MI14 – let alone its subsection MI14(d) and its ‘Special Continental Pigeon Service’. Perhaps that subsection’s lack of fame is understandable, given that in 1941 it comprised a crack team of just two. But the little-known MI14 department to which those men belonged had arguably one of the most important tasks of the war. Its mission was the first priority of intelligence – to know your enemy.

As war began in 1939, the entire staff devoted to evaluating information about the Nazi war effort and its day-to-day battle strategy amounted to a grand total of five officers across MI14. The initial estimates of German military strength were way off the mark – Britain thought the Germans had 1,400 medium tanks, for example, when there were only 300. That kind of knowledge had serious repercussions when it came to understanding the fight that lay ahead, and whether and how it might be won.

Initially operational intelligence on the enemy sat within the department known as MI3, which was broken down into different departments. MI3b looked at Italy, while MI3c looked after the Soviet Union and was staffed by two Russian-speaking former brewers who despised the USSR more than they did the Germans, and who were consistently wrong on every issue. Intelligence on Germany became so important that it merited its own separate team, and so it was hived off to become MI14. Initially the small team consisted of a rich array of old-timers from the First World War who were not quite up to it, alongside a new batch of often eccentric but more talented younger men.

MI14 was itself broken up into smaller units populated by an array of oddballs and professors who had come into the military from civilian, often academic, life. One section investigated German strategy and intentions. Another, led by a former England cricket captain, looked at German anti-aircraft positions. A professor who had studied the Roman army’s order of battle two thousand years ago now did the same for the Wehrmacht, the German army. As seems customary in British intelligence, MI14 even had its own Soviet mole in Leo Long. He had been recruited at Cambridge and was, unbeknownst to his colleagues, passing on their secrets to Moscow via Anthony Blunt. The teams worked all hours dealing with a constant stream of queries and requests from different parts of the armed services. Which were the best targets to attack in Germany by air? Where was this or that Panzer division? How was the Germany army reacting to British propaganda?

The specific task of MI14(d) was to understand the German occupation of Western Europe, including the deployment of its forces and the work of its secret services. And it was in this team that Columba found its home.

Brian Melland was the man in MI14(d) who oversaw Columba for much of its life. Melland was described by a colleague as a ‘theatrical character’. He was a convivial figure, a brilliant comic and mimic round the dinner table, but could quickly go from fooling around to focusing on the most serious matters with a fiery moral indignation. The theatrical description, moreover, was literally rather than just figuratively true. He had been born in 1904 in Paris, where his father had fallen in love with a French pianist. After studying French and German at Cambridge, he had begun a rather conventional career with Shell Oil. But after five years he realized he was bored and gave it up for his first love, acting. He spent eight years before the war treading the boards as a professional actor in repertory theatre in Manchester. He was married in 1938 and his son was born just as the war was beginning. Melland had hoped to join the Navy, but when that did not work out he walked across the road to the War Office; thanks to his language skills, they put him straight into Military Intelligence. With his dark hair parted on the side he was handsome but also smart and diligent. He would become the leading British expert on the German military and the go-to man on German documents. This meant he became involved in interrogating captured Germans. In the summer of 1941, just as Columba was starting up, a secretary came in to his office. In her strong cockney accent, she said there was a ‘Mr S’ who Melland needed to go and see urgently. It turned out she meant Rudolf Hess – the Deputy Führer, who had just landed in Britain.

The second member of MI14(d)’s double act was L. H. F. ‘Sandy’ Sanderson. He had joined MI14 in January 1940 after being told he was too old to return to the Highland Division, with whom he had served in the First World War. However, the fact that he spoke excellent German would be put to good use. Lean and moustachioed, Sanderson had served as a business executive between the wars. ‘He looked like a friendly, alert terrier,’ recalled Noel Annan, who had been recruited into MI14 as a 24-year-old on New Year’s Day 1941. It can be surprising to realize the inexperience of the quickly expanding British intelligence world in the early years of war. But in some cases, it drew in people who brought their own skills and experience. That was true of Melland and Sanderson.

The MI14 team, whose initial five officers would grow to more than fifty, lived what Sanderson called a ‘troglodyte existence’ in the bowels of the War Office. This created something of a bunker mentality, especially as their job was to immerse themselves in their enemy’s thinking. They sometimes feared that their combination of dedication and humour might lead to confusion and even suspicion among those not part of the team. ‘We had in this large basement a great picture on the wall of Hitler with the inscription “Heil dem Führer”,’ Sanderson later recalled. ‘We often spoke German among ourselves for fun or practice and I wondered what a British passer-by in Whitehall would have thought, had he witnessed the scene.’

Amidst the humour and camaraderie, MI14’s work could not have been more serious. In six weeks of May and June 1940, France, Belgium and the Netherlands had all collapsed. There was now one crucial question to which everyone from Churchill down to the man on the street wanted the answer. Was Britain next? Were the Germans about to invade? This became the overriding mission for MI14 in its early days. Few tasks could have been more important. The fear was that the Germans would simply follow through and head over the Channel. At the end of May 1940, an urgent telegram went to coastal stations saying all defences had to be manned through the night since an invasion was considered imminent.

From June 1940, Sanderson was made responsible for all Army intelligence relating to the invasion of the UK. He was the only officer on the ‘Invasion Warning Committee’ who worked full time looking for ‘indicators’ – warning signs that meant the worst was about to begin. The committee met every day at noon at the Admiralty and at one o’clock would issue a single sheet of paper that summarized all the intelligence which had come in over the last twenty-four hours. It aimed to answer three simple questions: where, when and how would an invasion take place? That piece of paper would go up to the Chiefs of Staff and to the Prime Minister himself. The team would hold their breath for any outbursts from Churchill. Normally, by 3 p.m. they knew they could breathe out if nothing had been heard.

In June 1940, Churchill had prepared the public for the possibility that German troops might arrive over the Channel. ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,’ he had promised a nervous but resolute nation. The message is now remembered as one of defiance, but it was also designed to prepare the public for what many then thought inevitable. Posters were put up for public consumption entitled ‘If the Invader comes – what to do and how to do it’. The advice was simply to stay put.

The last invasion of the country had been in 1066, and Sanderson felt the public had no idea what total war would be like as ravaging armies moved across the British countryside. ‘Confusion and bewilderment might have led to disaster,’ he believed. ‘We felt that if we held out for a week we should do well.’ For all Churchill’s talk, the secret British assessment was that if the Germans did manage to gain a foothold in Britain, there would be no chance of driving them back into the sea. The country would be lost. The Army was short of equipment and the Home Guard was not far off their depiction in Dad’s Army, relying on pitchforks and golf clubs as weapons. Sanderson compiled a top secret handbook to help defending British forces know what to expect (although it did not remain so very secret, since someone managed to leave a copy in a public lavatory in Dublin and an Irishman handed it to the German embassy). The Army prepared an emergency pigeon service which would provide communications for defensive lines if all other links between HQ and forward units were cut.

There were also farcical attempts to undermine German morale. English phrase books were dropped by air upon German troops in France containing what seem comical phrases such as ‘We are sea-sick – where is the basin?’, ‘See how briskly our Captain burns!’ and ‘Why is the Führer not coming with us?’ But there was little hiding the fact that the situation was desperate. If the Germans seized the moment, it might all be over.

On 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ordering his armed forces to prepare plans for Operation Sealion – the invasion. The German navy had been considering the challenge for close to a year. They reckoned if they could get an initial ten divisions, or about 110,000, men over a bridgehead they could drive west of London to cut the capital off, forcing its surrender. German spies reported back to the High Command details of coastal defences between Dover and Brighton. The Germans also planned their own deception operation – as the British would later manage – in which they would feed false radio traffic and intelligence to make it look as if a landing was about to take place in the north-east of England to send defending forces the wrong way. The German D-Day was initially planned for September 1940.

The job of Sanderson and the MI14 team was to provide warning. They had said an attack on the Low Countries was probable. But they had never spotted any signs that it was actually beginning. Britain had been completely blind to the attack on Norway as well. The fear that there would be no warning when it was Britain’s turn haunted the team at the War Office. They were convinced Germany had completed all the necessary arrangements.

The British had no spy inside Berlin who could tell them when the order was given, so Sanderson’s job was to scour whatever scraps of intelligence he could get his hands on to find any so-called indicators. For instance, the Germans would need barges and other vessels to carry troops across the Channel, and so any sign of increased activity at ports in Belgium and France might be a giveaway (there were plans to bomb the ports if sufficient warning was received). Every moment mattered and might make the difference between the country’s survival and its capitulation.

The sources Sanderson and MI14 could turn to for insights into German plans were scant. The intelligence picture was parlous. The pickings were so slim that at one point MI14 were instructed to see if an astrologer and water diviner, ‘Smokey Joe’ from Yorkshire, might be able to help. The Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park would eventually transform understanding of Germany’s actions, but at the start of the war that effort was only just beginning and was yet to bear much fruit. In the dark early days there were only two real sources.

The first was age-old – human intelligence, courtesy of MI6. But their networks were an absolute mess at the start of the war. In November 1939, two MI6 officers had fallen into a Nazi trap and been captured at Venlo on the Dutch border. They were interrogated, with the result that much of the secret service’s work in Western Europe was compromised. The Nazi thrust through Belgium, the Netherlands and then France had compounded the disaster for MI6. No one had expected that those countries would collapse so quickly and so no one had prepared for the gathering of intelligence through underground networks under occupation. Almost all of MI6’s existing networks had been rolled up and it had to start virtually from scratch. Dansey and MI6 were all too aware of the pressure they were under to deliver – especially since they now had competition from the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was making a lot of noise carrying out orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

The reputation of MI6 – fuelled by thriller writers even then – might have been fearsome, but the reality did not always match up. Brain power was often lacking, as the emphasis was on a kind of schoolboy cunning. Hundreds of reports from MI6 regularly passed through Sanderson’s tray in a single week, but many were likely to be rubbish. Some of the reporting Sanderson saw from MI6 was ‘quite ludicrous’, he thought. One report in 1940 suggested German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes. There was absolutely no reliable source in France reporting anything to MI6 until late November 1940.

Belgium, with its busy ports, was always likely to be a key staging post for an invasion of Britain. But MI14 was unconvinced by the reports that came in during the early months of the war. ‘Unfortunately, neither the agent in Belgium nor the agent in France inspire full confidence,’ the team noted of MI6’s offerings. ‘The agent in Belgium may be described as enthusiastic, as well as painstaking; his frequent reports are alarmist in tone (some of his prophecies have already been disproved), and he has provided very few identifications.’ Along with the French agent, the two ‘can only be classed as among the least reliable of our whole body of sources’.

A second source of intelligence for MI14 was new. Aerial reconnaissance was just emerging. From photographs taken at a height of 30,000 feet, Sanderson recalled, an interpreter in one case was able not only to see a football stadium on the ground but also provide a useful match commentary, reporting that during the interval of nine seconds between three photos, the team at the end closest to a gasworks was being severely pressed by the other side as the opposition moved the ball a good twenty-five yards forward. MI14’s specialist would use photos to count the number of barges at Channel ports and look for changes. But there were limits to what could be seen from the skies. Interpretation by analysts was often tricky and filled with ambiguity. Bad weather sometimes meant there were many days when no flights could be made. The irregular timing of reconnaissance missions also made it hard sometimes to know from the pictures obtained what was changing and why. Movements on land were harder to spot than those of ships, since they often took place at night. There was also the risk of reconnaissance planes being shot down.

Air reconnaissance and ‘special methods’ – a code for intercepts – might provide indications, but agents were the best means of reporting German intentions and identifying what the signs meant. There were at least fourteen ports that the Germans might use. Since August 1940, MI14 had been pressing MI6 forcibly to try and have agents placed in these ports with some means of communication, but so far it had failed to deliver. There were people in occupied Europe willing to help, and Dansey and MI6 were trying to drop or land agents into Europe to contact them, but the going was slow.

The biggest problem with human intelligence sources (other than the reliability of the source itself) was the delay before the information arrived in London. Getting agents in and out at the start of the war was difficult and dangerous. Radios were in their infancy and so intelligence often had to be smuggled out by hand, passing from courier to courier. This meant it could take months, and by the time it arrived an item of intelligence which might have once been valuable could be out of date. One MI6 officer complained that although he was receiving lots of reports from Belgium, the information ‘has been so old that they have become valueless’. The average time it took in the middle of the war for an agent’s report to reach MI6 was nearly a third of a year. This was frustrating to analysts in London hungry for intelligence to help inform their decisions and improve their understanding of the enemy’s capabilities.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had begun its campaign to destroy Britain’s defences – first targeting the RAF itself and then, in what became known as the Blitz, the capital city and other targets. In Plymouth, Bert Woodman watched as incendiaries rained down on the city, anti-aircraft guns roared in response and tracers lit up the sky. As local pigeon supply officer and also an ARP warden, he found his pigeons in high demand, as police needed them in order to communicate when the telephone lines went down. The damage was fearful. ‘The bomber will always get through,’ pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had warned, and for a while it was feared he might be right. As war approached, desperate ideas had been thrown around to stop raids at night, when it was much harder to spot incoming bombers, one serious idea being to floodlight the whole of southern England. Technical intelligence on Germany’s weapons – especially in the air – was vital.

MI6 as a whole was sceptical about pigeons as a method of gathering intelligence, but one person who worked at its headquarters would become Columba’s greatest champion as he struggled to combat Germany’s aerial power. He was not a spy but a scientist. When war began, Reginald Jones – usually known as R. V. Jones – was one of those impatient new men who would rise fast because he understood how much warfare had changed. Jones, from a middle-class background in South London, had by the age of seventeen built a radio set that could pick up transmissions from Australia. He was ambitious and difficult to work with, but he knew what he was doing.

As fears of invasion gripped the country, Jones was sent from the Air Ministry to MI6 as a scientific adviser in its Air Branch. His mission was to detect as early as possible any new German weapon that might change the course of the war. Panic had gripped the intelligence community when Hitler made a speech claiming he had a secret weapon against which no defence could stand. Jones was ordered to find out what this mysterious weapon might be. MI6 files were crammed with wild rumours of ‘death rays’. One inventor had been paid by MI6 to see if he could live up to his promise of developing such a ray, but his invention proved only useful for preserving fruit. Eventually, Jones asked for a new translation of Hitler’s speech that had started all the fuss. He discovered that the context of the word for weapon (Waffe) had been mistranslated; what Hitler was referring to was his ‘Luftwaffe’ or air force, against which no one could prevail. His inquiries though had taught him two lessons. First, the spies barely understood science. And second, the Germans knew the war in the air would be pivotal and were far ahead in utilizing the latest technology.

Jones found the old hands at Bomber Command complacently arguing that the use of their standard flying instruments along with a quick glance at the sky was enough to find targets. Jones did not make himself popular when he asked why, if this was the case, so many British bombers flew into hills during practice flights. And when German bombers began their onslaught, they seemed uncannily accurate – at least compared to the British – in finding their targets. What followed became known as ‘the Battle of the Beams’. Through a series of clues and intelligence leads, Jones was able to work out that the Germans had discovered a successful way of guiding their bombers by means of radio beams, which the planes were able to follow. Aged just twenty-eight, Jones found himself briefing Churchill in the Cabinet Room, rebutting hostile questioning from those round the table who doubted his ideas (including his former tutor, who was the Prime Minister’s scientific adviser). But he won the argument, and Britain began developing counter-measures by broadcasting their own beams to confuse the Germans’ navigation. At the same time, the development of radar helped the RAF scramble to meet the German threat as the Luftwaffe began their campaign against Britain. It was the start of a scientific cat-and-mouse game that would last throughout the war.

Jones’s forte was solving intelligence puzzles. In his hand would be a jigsaw piece that looked curious – say, a report of some kind of unusual German activity. First he had to find other pieces that might fit alongside it. Jones described an intelligence analyst as like a human with various senses – eyes in the sky in the form of aerial reconnaissance, ears listening at Bletchley, hands that could reach out from the Secret Service. When the ears heard an unusual noise, then the eyes would turn towards the sound to find out more. Jones was hungry for every snippet of intelligence that might help him understand German technology but, as with MI14, the sources were scant. Pigeons would play their part.

The RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain meant the summer of 1940 passed without invasion. The Luftwaffe had proved a fearsome weapon but not, as Hitler had claimed, one against which it was impossible to prevail. The German navy had insisted that air superiority was a vital prerequisite for invasion. Nor had there been enough time to prepare the right type of craft to transport the Wehrmacht over the Channel. But the leadership of MI14 remained convinced that invasion was likely in 1941.

Their job of detecting preparations was complicated by a German decision to keep up the constant menace of the possibility of invasion, so as to maintain pressure on Britain. This meant Germany was ensuring that activity was visible and that fake intelligence was passed to Britain through military attachés and other channels. As the spring of 1941 began, the fear that German landing craft would soon be arriving on the British coast was still real. Sources reported details of preparations such as the training of parachutists, and even the intensive manufacture of gas. By May 1941, MI14 were still seeing reports of a possible invasion, with June to August appearing to be the most likely time. Reports from Belgium talked of the training of troops wearing British uniforms and the possible construction of barges.

The reality was that Germany had backed away – but no one in London knew that for sure, partly because the intelligence picture remained so poor. Details of the German military in Belgium and the Netherlands remained ‘very unsatisfactory’, the Director of Military Intelligence told MI6 in February. ‘We have no confirmed evidence of the number of divisions located at any time in these countries … With invasion more than likely at any time after a month from now this is a most serious situation.’

From the spring of 1941, there was a new source for the analysts in London – Columba. For Brian Melland and Sandy Sanderson at MI14, Columba was not a source whose reports were passed on to them like the human intelligence of MI6. It was their own source. Rex Pearson looked after the logistics, but Melland and Sanderson were given the job of overseeing the operation. They were the ones who decided what questions would be asked in the questionnaire; in what areas the pigeons would be dropped; and who evaluated the material when it came back. They were able to handle the resulting intelligence direct. And – most remarkably – it was intelligence so fresh you could almost smell it. It would be in their hands within hours or days of someone observing something.

Two days after the initial drop in April, the phone rang at the War Office. On 10 April the first bird had made its way home to Kent. Columba message number one was phoned back to Melland and Sanderson at the War Office at 10.30 a.m.

The message was from a small village called Le Briel in the commune of Herzeele in northern France, not far from the Belgian border. It might have been short but it contained real information. ‘Pigeon found Wednesday 9th at 8am’, it began. ‘The German troop movements are always at night. There are 50 Germans in every Commune. There is a large munitions dump at Herzeele 200 metres from the Railway station. Yesterday, a convoy of Horse Artillery passed towards Dunkirk via Bambesque and another to Hasebrouck. The Bosches do not mention an invasion of England. Their morale is not too good. The RAF have never bombed these parts. They should come to bomb the brick works as the proprietor is a …’ The next word is written up as ‘illegible’ by the translator, but one wonders if that was actually to avoid the blushes caused by a cruder word the Frenchman might have used about a collaborator.

And then the message ended with one of those phrases that spoke of something in the spirit during those dark days in France. ‘I await your return, I am and remain a Frenchman.’ It was signed ‘ABCD34’. This was precisely the type of intelligence the team had been after. It was a good start, a relief for the team who had backed Columba.

That same day at 3 p.m. came message number two, this time unsigned, from Flanders. ‘There are only a few troops here and no petrol dumps, but yesterday some artillery arrived and the men say they are going to Yugoslavia where other troops and wagons are also moving.’ Columba was working, although it took another nine days for the next message to arrive.

The next drop took place on 6 May and was less successful. One message simply brought greetings from West Flanders. Below was the slightly forlorn comment: ‘Through a mishap this bird lost the questionnaire en route as did a number of others which have returned empty.’ Another from the same batch mentioned some aerodromes but, as would often be the case, provided too little detail to locate them.

Resistance is often portrayed as a stark choice. A choice between a life of danger on the run or one of collaboration. But in reality, it was a much broader spectrum. People could and did resist in small ways and large. That was evident from those who chose to take the risk to send a message back via Columba. Some of those early messages were short – ‘No troops here’ was all one said, without even saying even roughly where ‘here’ was. Others wrote just a few lines with a plea for help, while making clear the individual understood the risks involved. ‘Although this may cost me my head if one of the damned Boches saw me take the bird to my house, I will release the pigeon again with information for you,’ they wrote.

Most pigeons were found early in the morning by farmers tending their land. The messages sometimes showed daily rural life continuing as if war had barely intruded. ‘I found this pigeon on the 6th early in the morning while I was cutting clover for the animals and I have looked after it well and given it food and drink and am now anxious to know if the little animal reaches its loft … Hoping that I have possibly rendered you some service.’ Often the finders were illiterate or unsure of what to do and would confide in a local priest, schoolmaster or someone else whom they trusted. That was often when the best intelligence came.

In some cases the pigeons found their way to people already trying to organize some kind of resistance. In July 1941, a writer said he was part of a group of eleven patriots in a position to give important information. A parachutist who had recently been dropped above Carpiquet in Caen was safe and sound but the person who had sheltered him had been denounced and was going to be shot. ‘From now onwards we will take direct action against such person in striking down anyone who betrays,’ they wrote. Columba was revealing that there were many in Europe who wanted to do something – some were willing to send a short message back, while others were already looking for ways to do more. There was potential there to be tapped.

Food was one recurring theme. The Germans took around 70 per cent of pre-war food production and the results were severe. Messages spoke of hunger and starvation. One writer in May said the pork butchers had all been closed because all the pigs had been sent to Germany and there was precious little other meat. ‘If it lasts much longer we must starve,’ one Belgian wrote, ‘try to free us as quickly as possible.’ In Brussels a writer said that the rations for the previous month had been 5 kilos of potatoes plus 225 grams of bread per day: ‘too much to starve but not enough to live.’ Potatoes were being requisitioned to be sent to Germany, they wrote, so people would dig them up and eat them before they were ripe. There were complaints of some French peasants profiteering and selling on butter and eggs to the Germans at high prices. Also evident were signs of small acts of resistance. One writer in Flanders recorded that a local farmer had hung a dead hen outside with a written note on it saying he would rather his hens were dead than lay eggs for the Germans. (The same author ended his message with the phrase ‘I do hope this is not a German pigeon’.)

A few weeks after Columba began, a message recorded that everyone had heard the ‘startling news about Hess’ – the Deputy Führer who had landed in England on some kind of bizarre mission in May and was now in custody. The Columba message noted it had made a ‘big impression on the Boches’. Another said that the German soldiers tried to listen to the English wireless to hear what had happened and did not believe the claims on German radio about the Deputy Führer’s mental illness. The morale of the Germans was not always good. One message that summer reported that sixteen pilots near Passchendaele being trained at an aerodrome were imprisoned for not flying, while one had actually taken off with his aeroplane and fled. Another writer talked of his conversations with the German soldiers. ‘When we talk to a soldier he dares to give his view they are all tired [of the situation] – but then he keeps looking round to see if another soldier is not approaching for they have no confidence in each other.’

One pigeon from Folkestone was found by a fellow pigeon lover in northern France. The English pigeon ‘could hardly have come into better hands’, he wrote in a detailed message tinged with sadness. He provided a long note full of details of life and of whatever movements he had seen, including the location of German telephone exchanges. He suggested that the Germans were convinced the British would not dare try a landing and could easily be defeated if the British did come. He did not want compensation for his efforts. He was just serving his country. But there was another reason. ‘This is a means for me to avenge myself for my son, whom they have killed.’ His son could not be replaced, but he did say that after the war he would like to replace all his own pigeons, which had also been killed.

Each pigeon was an act of resistance, however small – the risk of a life for the chance of contact with distant Britain. A bond was being created between the sender of a message in a small rural village and the official reading it in London’s War Office. But could Columba provide real, hard intelligence, more than just scraps and colour? The first sign that it might arrived in June.

Top of the list of questions to which Melland and Sanderson wanted answers was whether the finder of a pigeon knew anything of possible plans for the invasion of England. The seventh Columba message pointed to just that. ‘The attack on England will occur very soon, unforeseen and terrible,’ it warned in spring 1941, saying ships were being prepared in the Grand Canal in Belgium and four new aerodromes would be completed in the next few days. Docks which had been bombed were being repaired. Sanderson would find pigeons among the best sources for invasion intelligence, sometimes noting when they corroborated other sources or failed to back up reports from MI6 agents whom he was not sure about. ‘Valuable reports continue to arrive by pigeon,’ the official indicator’s document noted, adding that the troops did not hold out much enthusiasm for the possibility but that large-scale exercises still seemed to be taking place. In May and June 1941 sources were still suggesting that an invasion was possible, and that exercises were occurring and logistics like barges being put in place.

A pigeon from Cambridge fell in Huines near the Channel coast on 14 June 1941 and was liberated from Pontorson on the 17th. It had an unusual journey back. It was found in Penzance on 20 June. A military officer opened the message and ‘with great zeal’ translated it himself. It took a further three days for it to be transmitted by a wireless officer to the War Office, leading to an angry letter explaining that in future any pigeon container found with a coloured disc was to be sent immediately by dispatch rider.

The annoyance arose because that message from Pontorson – Columba message 19 – was one of the first to show what the operation might be capable of achieving, especially when it came to the challenge of warning of possible invasion. It contained rich detail of troop movements out of Brittany and the use of nine motor barges near Mont St Michel for embarkation practice. It pointed to an airfield at Caen where the planes were housed in specially camouflaged hangars. Details of anti-aircraft positions were given, and the writer offered specific suggestions of where to bomb. They also warned of fifth columns in England, having heard a drunken officer say that they were dropping parachutists in English uniform who spoke the language. There was even a special instruction centre in Brest to train them. He also wrote that a letter the previous day from a German officer to a female collaborator had indicated that an invasion was to come about next week. This was precisely the kind of information Sanderson was looking for.

The author was highly motivated. ‘The population here is 95% with you and hopes for deliverance. They vomit Darlan [the French admiral who collaborated in the Vichy regime] and his clique of traitors; we are ashamed to be represented in the eyes of the world by such a band of bastards. There are some “swine” here too, as everywhere but I’ve got them listed.’ The author went on to name the specific hotel keepers at Mont St Michel who ‘fight each other as to who shall make the most fuss of the Boches’. This scandal should be broadcast, he suggested, on the BBC, which he said he could hear very well. On Sunday, 15 June, he reported, there had been violent riots in Rennes when the people tried to commemorate those who died in the fall of France. The Germans and the police drove back the crowd to the Place du Palais where the Marseillaise was sung ‘with great fervour’ and accompanied by cries of ‘death to Ripert’ – the prefect nominated by the Vichy government to the area. Reprisals had come thick and fast afterwards, but the plan was to repeat the demonstrations on the night of the 17th – the very night the individual was writing the message. He ended with ‘Vive La France, Vive L’Angleterre and Vive de Gaulle’. The writer, who signed himself Arvor 114, asked for more pigeons and gave a specific location in a marsh near a railway line.

The Columba team analysed the message carefully. It was unusually detailed. How, when travel restrictions were in place, could someone living in Pontorson be in a position to report on events as distant as Caen in one direction and Beaumont-Hague in the other? Could it be a plant? They went through the details paragraph by paragraph. The troop movements, they judged, matched those of message number 18 and the train movements also seemed about right. The claim of poor morale in the area was supported by an MI6 source. Other information was considered fairly likely to be true or ‘sensible’. They carefully examined the request to name certain collaborators on air. Could this be an attempt to implicate genuine members of the resistance? ‘On the whole, we think not,’ was the verdict.

One or two points were considered unlikely to be true, but the writer’s wide-ranging knowledge could be explained by travel entailed in his job or by information being passed on from others. That would be similar to the way MI6 sources often reported, and ‘the information he has supplied us is certainly well up to their standard,’ the Columba team noted. The decision was made to consider the message valid and drop more pigeons in the marsh where they had been requested.

On 2 July 1941, the results from Columba’s initial foray were written up. Over three months, 221 birds had been released over Flanders, Normandy and Brittany. Forty-six returned, 19 with messages, 17 of which contained information. And this information had already shown its value. The six messages from Normandy and Brittany helped identify two German infantry regiments and also the movement of troops away from Cherbourg and Brittany. This was especially interesting since there had been few such indications from MI6 sources. What was particularly special about Columba was that intelligence would be in the hands of those hungry for information within hours of a message being written. This was unique among sources of intelligence, and the freshness of the information was something London would frequently marvel at. ‘I think this form of intelligence is most valuable and has great possibility and should be encouraged,’ the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence wrote. It was noted that it was an economical operation. The RAF planes were going across the Channel anyway and the main contribution was that of the pigeon owners themselves, who gave of their time and their birds freely. Columba was up and running. And within days of that first summary of its efforts, its most important message would arrive.

CHAPTER THREE

Leopold Vindictive

The Debaillie family gathered in the large building in Lichtervelde that doubled up as a grocery store and a family house. A local farmer had found the pigeon in the field that July morning in 1941 and his wife had brought it to them hidden in a sack of potatoes. It was just over a year since the Nazi war machine had swept through Belgium and the farmer had taken it to the Debaillies because he knew they were patriots. But now the family had to decide what being a patriot really meant.

Their task was initially to decide the pigeon’s fate – and perhaps with it, their own. The decision was far from easy. The three brothers, Gabriel, Arseen and Michel, and two sisters, Marie and Margaret, deliberated over what to do with the bird. Two of the brothers differed. Gabriel thought it best not to get involved. It was true the family were ‘patriots’ who hated the Germans, rather than ‘blacks’, but they had never engaged in any overt act of resistance. The risk was too great. They had too much to lose. But Arseen felt the need to act. He was the most ambitious of the brothers and the keenest to take risks. The pigeon had come to them with a call for help and they should not turn it away – it was their duty. Even though he was the youngest brother, he got his way. Margaret, the younger of the sisters, backed him, whilst her elder sister Marie was more cautious.

Once the decision had been made, there was no reluctance or dissent on the part of the other members of the family. They were and remained united. Their father, the founder of the business, had died a few years earlier and the siblings were a close-knit family who ran the concern together and knew they could trust each other. Spying would be a family affair. But what were they actually going to do? They knew that to make the most of the opportunity that the pigeon had brought their way, they needed help. And so they turned to two friends. One was Hector Joye from Bruges, who spoke English and loved military maps. The other was a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Raskin. The Debaillies knew Raskin through another brother of theirs who was a missionary in China. He had been taught by Raskin and had invited the older priest to stay with the family before the war. The priest had become a frequent overnight house-guest, with his own regular room. The two sisters, Marie, aged 48, and Margaret, nearly 40, were particularly devoted to Raskin. In turn, Raskin was a friend of Hector Joye, having presided over his wedding. So the circle of trust between the friends was complete. This was the way many early resistance groups were born – not as soldiers or spies but as groups of friends who felt such deep anger at the occupation of their homeland that they were willing to accept the risk of trying to do something about it. The bonds of friendship offered trust and some degree of protection but this often had to compensate for a lack of experience in the world of espionage against a formidable enemy.

Within a day of the pigeon’s arrival, the budding spy ring had gathered in Lichtervelde. Joseph Raskin would be the central figure. For all his outward trappings of a priest, it was as if everything in his life up to this point had prepared him for his career as a spy.

Raskin had been born in 1892 in a comfortable, detached house in Stevoort, a village of a few hundred families who all knew each other. His father had become a teacher and then principal of a local primary school. Joseph was the eldest of eleven siblings – the one they all looked up to and idolized. Culture and Catholicism were the defining characteristics of a family who would pray, sing, draw and read poetry together. From the time he was a small child and grabbed a rattle or moved to the piano, it was clear Joseph had a love of and gift for music. But the church came first. The headmaster of Joseph’s school had a brother who was a missionary and his letters from far-off lands would be read out to the pupils. That inspired Joseph to follow in his footsteps, and in 1909 he left home and joined a Belgian missionary organization called CICM – known as the missionaries of Scheut or Scheutists, after the neighbourhood of Anderlecht in Brussels where they were based. It was a strict regime – up at 5 a.m., asleep at 9 p.m., the hours between filled with prayer, study and communal living. Family visits were limited, but when Joseph returned for a few days’ holiday in 1912, his siblings found he had grown up. He was still not tall, and he continued to walk with a slight stoop that had been there from childhood, but now he proudly sported a short beard, much to their amusement. Joseph and his youngest brother would become missionaries and another brother a priest. Two of the sisters would become nuns.

When Germany declared war on Belgium on 4 August 1914, Raskin had just been ordained a sub-deacon, but he was not immune from the patriotic fervour sweeping Europe. God and country were intertwined for many at that time. But Raskin’s family were about to see up close what war really meant.

The family had moved to the town of Aarschot a few years earlier, when Raskin’s father became a school inspector. It was a small town but would become famous both in Belgium and Britain for the events of August 1914. As the Belgian army retreated, two Belgian regiments acted as a rearguard in the town and held up the German advance, much to the anger of German commanders. In their house, Raskin’s younger siblings hid in the basement and sat fearfully around a single lamp, occasionally going upstairs to peek at events from behind the curtains. When the town fell, twenty captured Belgian soldiers were shot and thrown into the river. That evening a German brigade commander was shot while standing on a balcony on the square – perhaps killed by the ricochet of a bullet fired by his own soldiers. But the Germans treated the death as an assassination and began heavy reprisals aimed at what they saw as resistance from the local population. Men were rounded up in the marketplace and then taken to a field where they were executed. In all, 156 civilians were killed over the following days. Women were said to have been victimized. The events in Aarschot were pivotal in what came to be known in Britain as ‘the rape of Belgium’, an episode ably exploited by British propagandists as their country responded to the attack on neutral Belgium by joining the war. The British spy and author William Le Queux wrote graphically of babies being bayoneted and women savaged by the German army in the town. British newspapers were filled with lurid, exaggerated accounts, which in turn helped galvanize support for war amongst the British public. And so Belgium’s war quickly became Britain’s.

The first time Joseph Raskin was arrested as a spy by the Germans he was entirely innocent. Priests and primary school teachers had been mobilized as stretcher-bearers and ambulance men for the Belgian army. Raskin was put to work at Beverlo ferrying wounded soldiers around. As word reached him of events in Aarschot, he became desperate for news of his family. At 6 a.m. one Sunday he put on civilian clothes and got on his bike. A German patrol stopped him. A young man cycling in civilian clothes was highly suspicious at a time when the Germans thought every Belgian was a spy. Worse, Raskin did not have his Red Cross papers. The case seemed open and shut. He must be a spy. The sentence was death.

Raskin was taken to a fort that was being used a prison. In a car on the way he noticed that the papers regarding his case were lying on the seat next to him. He slowly edged them underneath him and then to the other side. As the car hit a particularly violent bump, he pushed them out of the side without the Germans noticing. Upon his arrival at the fort, the authorities were lost without the paperwork. In the chaos of the early days of the war, there was nothing that could be done. He would just have to be kept there.

In December 1914, he made his escape from the fort. The family story was that he hid under the hay in a wagon on the return journey of a farmer who had come to deliver food. The reality may have been somewhat more prosaic. German papers indicate that they had been unsure what to do with him, and because he had made himself useful as a cook he was allowed to travel to Stevoort in early December. It was from there that he may then have made his escape, perhaps indeed in a hay cart. Whatever the real story, he was out. He then went to the front lines, again as a stretcher-bearer. This was dangerous work, sometimes involving making one’s way right to the front to load up the battered and broken bodies of soldiers and then suddenly having to drop into the mud as German bullets whistled overhead.

He enjoyed a ten-day break in London – not knowing that a quarter of a century later the course of his life would be shaped by his attempts to reach out to that city once again. During that brief visit, there were visits to churches and museums, but Raskin had one problem. With his lively blue-grey eyes, rippled dark hair and infectious laugh, he was handsome, and he wondered how to explain to the local girls who seemed interested in him that he was actually a chaste priest.

When he returned to the front, Raskin’s peculiar skills opened the way for him to become something else – an artist-spy. Since his youth, he had been good with his hands as well as his head. He would repair clocks and generally tinker with things. He was particularly talented as an artist. So now, he began to go to the front line, initially of his own volition, to draw what he saw in front of him. The result were beautiful drawings of the trenches and German positions.

When his superiors in the Army saw the drawings, they immediately recognized their military value and they were passed up the chain of command to the highest levels. Raskin was dismissed as a stretcher-bearer and turned into an observateur – a kind of intelligence gatherer. He worked across the Belgian front, just north of Ypres where the British were fighting. It was a bleak, apocalyptic landscape. The Germans had initially advanced over the River Yser but the Belgians flooded the land to halt their advance. The Germans then partially retreated back over to one bank. The land in between was laid waste by a mix of water and war. Sometimes the two sides were close – at a place called the ‘trenches of the dead’ they were little more than twenty metres apart. But in other places, no man’s land was far wider and less clear-cut. Shredded trees stood amongst pools of muddy water with the remnants of farm life surrounding them. The Germans had established advanced observation points and positioned snipers in farmhouses across the desolate flooded plain.

Raskin would travel out at night. He would give a password to a sentry and then sleep for a while in a shell hole. At first light, as the birdsong began, he would begin to observe and sketch. Two men would accompany him and provide covering fire if needed. At night, when he had seen enough, he would return. Back in his bureau he would take the rough drawings he had made and turn them into something approaching art. There are beautiful pencil drawings and watercolours of the view from the Belgian side facing the Germans, with each German position carefully marked out. The largest, most dramatic panoramas he made are two feet long, works of art crafted from the art of warfare.

It could be dangerous. In mid-May 1916, he spent three days and nights without food or water trapped in an abandoned flour mill, full of rats, surrounded by Germans. Another time, a bullet shattered the lens of the periscope he was using.

Sometimes in the picture is what appears to be an abandoned building. Look closely and you can just see the eyes of a German soldier hiding in a gap ready to shoot. A caption notes that this was a permanent German observation point. There were also bird’s-eye views of the same front lines, again marked out in precise detail with map coordinates and distances. One map has arrows indicating not just the direction in which the Germans shot from each trench but how regularly they fired; for instance, whether they only fired in response to Belgian fire or just at night. At one farmhouse, it is noted that every time the Belgian artillery began firing, a German periscope popped up. At another point it is remarked that the Germans at night sent out patrols so close they would throw grenades into Belgian trenches.

Senior officers were impressed. One went so far as to put his signature on one of Raskin’s pictures, which led the priest to realize he needed to sign them himself to prevent others taking credit. In spare moments, the priest’s humanity shone through – he would make small pencil drawings of an exhausted fellow soldier having a cigarette or devouring a chunk of bread. And so, without knowing it, the first stage of his preparation for the English pigeon scheme was complete. Raskin had learnt the fine art of military intelligence – which information was of value, and how to present it.

When the war ended, Raskin became, as he had always intended, a missionary-priest. After celebrating his first mass, he boarded a white steamboat for the long journey to China. Pictures show the young man lounging on a bunk with fellow priests in second class and out on deck with a mixed group of priests and nuns, all smiling as they head out on their adventure. On the long voyage, Raskin would play the piano in the evening or draw pictures of fellow passengers. They made their way via Port Said and the Suez Canal, Singapore and Hong Kong before finally reaching China. A photograph shows Raskin in Shanghai, dressed in local clothes, learning how to write the local language. And here was the second phase of his preparation for the pigeon operation – the ability to write beautifully and precisely as he learnt how to trace Chinese characters. The quality of his handwriting would win him a prize in Shanghai and would later be useful in condensing information into a tiny space.

His training complete, Raskin made his way to the heights of Mongolia. There he worked at a school training Chinese priests. He became the closest thing to a local doctor, dealing with ulcers in particular. ‘I have more consultations than confessions. That is not good,’ he would joke. The part of Mongolia he lived in was the Chinese equivalent of the Wild West. Local warlords would rampage from village to village, looting and killing. Raskin organized the villages so that a signal fire could be lit from a hilltop which could be seen by watchers in other villages to warn them of attack.

After the best part of a decade in China, he was summoned back to Brussels by the chief of the Scheut mission house. His varied skills meant he was needed as what was called a ‘propagandist’ – a travelling preacher who would go from town to town spreading the word about the missions to raise funds and persuade people to support the organization or become missionaries themselves. In his diary in Mongolia, he wrote of his disappointment at the order to return. ‘My soul is sad as if it has died.’ But then, in Latin, he adds: ‘Your will be done.’ Back in Belgium, he would criss-cross the country giving talks about China. Here was another stage in his preparation – building up a wide-ranging network of friends, supporters and contacts.

As the years passed, Raskin became rounder and seemingly smaller, the lines on his face deeper. But still he could attract people round him with his laugh and his story-telling.

And then war came again. Another invasion of neutral Belgium. But this war was not like the one before. This time there were no trenches or static front lines. German tanks, accompanied by the terrifying air power of the Luftwaffe, ripped through Belgium in a matter of days. Raskin acted as a chaplain to soldiers in Torhout during the dark days of May 1940, visiting the nearby Debaillie family in Lichtervelde wearing the uniform of a captain. Within eighteen days, Belgium was occupied by the Nazis. Initially, the Germans promised that if there was compliance there would be no need for brutality. But for many Belgians that did not quell the desire to do something. Unlike France, it was a country that had been occupied and invaded many times before. There was almost an ingrained sense in many Belgians of how to find ways to live under occupation while also getting the better of the occupying power. For some that meant small acts of defiance, for others something more risky. Resistance would emerge faster and with greater strength in Belgium than in many other countries, including France. But it would still take time to recover from the shock of defeat and for resistance to become organized. For the first few months, the urge lay largely dormant and barely visible, like a flower bulb beneath the hard earth. By the summer of 1941, it was ready to push through into the open.

This was how resistance often emerged in occupied Europe. Not as the result of activity from London on the part of British spies or exiles, but as groups of friends spontaneously coming together because they hated the German occupation and were desperate to do something about it. People would hang out in cafés, conspiring, starting to collect what they knew might be useful information about the enemy they could see around them, but often with no way of transmitting it to Britain. Now, suddenly, Columba presented some people with an opportunity. Could it act as a link to the nascent resistance?

And so, after a year of occupation, Raskin received the phone call from Arseen Debaillie. The next day he was there in the corner shop, in front of him the pigeon and the two sheets of rice paper, along with a patriotic appeal from Britain for help. He never had any doubts about what to do. Raskin, Hector Joye and the Debaillies made their decision. They would answer the call. They agreed amongst themselves that they would split up over the coming days to maximize the amount of information they could collect.

Arseen, the youngest of the brothers at the age of 27, nevertheless looked the oldest with his broad chubby face and glasses. He was the chief enthusiast and spy amongst the three brothers, although the family would work together as a team, its members supporting each other. Arseen spent the next few days driving along the coast and through the neighbourhoods around Bruges taking notes. Gabriel, thirty years old and the most anxious of the three brothers, would maintain the cover of working the family’s growing business – supplying animal feed at Roeselare. But he also went with his brother on a car trip to the coast, ostensibly for business but also to see what information they could gather.

Michel, the gangly pigeon fancier, tended to stay at home. The pigeon had arrived just a fortnight before his thirty-second birthday. As a child he had suffered from rheumatic heart fever, a condition which had left his heart damaged and required him to see a doctor every few weeks. His comfort, like those in Britain who had supported Columba, were his pigeons. Sundays were the days he liked to spend with his birds, often racing them at Lille. He kept them in a large, sideboard-sized coop on the ground floor of the building.

Hiding the British bird carried risks. Immediately after occupying Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Germans imposed controls on pigeon owners that were progressively tightened. In Belgium, the country’s Fédération des Colombophiles had to keep a register of every pigeon, and the Germans checked this regularly. Pigeon keeping would later be forbidden entirely in a number of districts in Belgium and northern France, matching closely the places where the Columba birds were dropped. Sometimes messages brought back by Columba pigeons revealed the pain this brought to those who loved their birds. One message reported a plea to British owners: ‘Rear a couple of young pigeons for me. I have to kill all mine.’ But Michel and the family were willing to take the risk. It was not too hard for him to hide one special bird that was different from the others.

Marie and Margaret, the two sisters, had their role. They would maintain the appearance that everything was normal at the shop, chatting away with customers while looking out for any signs of trouble. Raskin would go back to Brussels and gather material from there. He would also ask friends whom he trusted for any information they had.

Hector Joye had the time – and the cover – to travel. He had been a soldier in the First World War but while in the trenches he had been gassed by the Germans and was now invalided. During that war he had met Louise Legros, who worked for the Red Cross. Her well-to-do family had been opposed to their relationship, but one person who had encouraged them was Raskin. Theirs had been the first marriage he had conducted as a priest. Louise’s career had taken off and she had been appointed the director of a girls’ school in Bruges. The family lived in comfort in a house that was part of the grand, Gothic school complex. A family picture shows Raskin enjoying a lunch in comfortable surroundings with the Joye family all around – his visits were always the occasion for a party, events that the Joye children enjoyed.

Handsome, with swept-back fine dark hair, round glasses and a trim moustache, Joye was another tinkerer with similar hobbies to Raskin. He had once been a carpenter, had designed a heating system for some nuns and had built incubators for the eggs of the pheasants he kept. His finest invention, his son would remember, was a special Christmas tree mobile containing a mechanism that enabled the angels to fly around. As a former military engineer, he was fascinated by maps and fortifications. Like the others, he was a devout Catholic for whom serving God, king and country were as one. Because of his health, Joye had permission to travel up to the coast to get fresh air. With little to do (not least in comparison to his wife), Joye was enthusiastic at the opportunity to turn his hand to espionage.

The amateur spies needed to work fast. The pigeon could not be kept too long. But they were determined to make the most of their opportunity. The amount they collected was astonishing. They fanned out to discover what they could on their travels. Joye was the busiest. There was a particularly interesting chateau near Bruges occupied by German troops, he knew, and airports, and ammunition warehouses and factories producing material for the Wehrmacht. He would see what he could find. Arseen knew about the Bruges–Ghent railway line and a local aerodrome near their house, and could give details about the local population. Marie and Gabriel provided specific information about a nearby chateau. Raskin meanwhile seemed to have a stack of information ready to go. Some of this came from the network of contacts he had built up in Brussels, many of whom were women he knew through the church, and who were beginning, if haphazardly, to gather details of what they observed. Raskin tapped these friends for information. One letter to ‘my good Father’ from those days provides information about a German storage building in Brussels, and includes a drawing as well as details of munitions.

After days of frantic gathering, all the precious intelligence had to be squeezed into the two tiny sheets of rice paper the British had supplied with the pigeon. Raskin’s experience as a cartographer in the First World War and from China as a calligrapher meant he would be the one to write it all up. The Debaillies had just the place for him to work. Their corner shop was the public face of the business, where customers could come in and out. But the building was more of a mini-complex. There was an adjoining house where the family lived. And then, round the back of the shop, past a small, closed interior courtyard, was a structure used as a warehouse to store all the goods. At the beginning of the war, fearing German bombs, the family had built a windowless concrete room towards the back. Relatives would send their children out to Lichtervelde because it was thought less dangerous, and this room was their hiding place. The room had a bed in it where the children could sleep at times of danger, and a strong lock. It was what you might today call a safe room. It was perfect for spy-work.

A niece called Rosa, the daughter of another sister, was only eleven but was staying with the family. She was fond of Raskin. He wrote a rhyme, ‘Doosje van Roosje’ (little Rosa’s little box), on her sewing box and taught her to play the accordion the family had given him as a gift. She remembers Raskin was there more than normal during those days of July 1941. Something different was happening, she knew, but no one told her what it was. That would be too risky, in case she talked. She does remember one of her aunts – Marie, she thinks – heading into the safe room more often than she normally did.

At a table underneath a light in the safe room, Raskin pored over the drawings and details that came in, the spider at the centre of a web of espionage. The drafts of the maps and notes have miraculously survived, pages and pages of them, different types of notepaper and different handwriting reflecting the many hands that contributed to the work. Space was tight. Everything had to fit on two pages, and that meant decisions. Like a ruthless sub-editor at a newspaper, Raskin scribbled out lines with black pen where he thought the detail was superfluous. A line about the Germans taking too many potatoes from people is crossed out, as are general complaints about poverty and life being expensive. That was not hard intelligence, he knew. The next line of a draft, though, stayed in for the moment – how the Germans went from carriage to carriage on trains taking food from people, sometimes even slurping raw eggs. Also retained was a line about how people were taking the copper of phone cables between Bruges and Ghent. A line about how people longed for the English and would point out the blackshirts was scribbled out. Raskin was careful to stick to the exam question – answering the specific queries that the pigeon had carried to them and not inserting extraneous information.

The pigeon sat just round the corner at the ready. For Raskin, it may have represented something more than just a messenger. The pigeon – referred to by its proper name, the dove – has a powerful symbolic role in Christianity. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, ‘the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”’ This dove had come to Belgium from Britain; but perhaps, for Raskin, it had come spiritually as well as literally from above. Faith, duty and spying were all intertwined in the priest’s mind.

Material was still coming in as he wrote. The Germans were strengthening their positions on the coast, fearing an English attack. A new division had been installed and there was extensive activity from planes as well as lorries bringing in fuel. Advice was offered as well – if the British were planning to invade then they should avoid delay in moving through the country or the Germans would take all the able-bodied men to Germany. No one had any idea that it would take three long years for the British to arrive.

Finally, he was ready. Raskin took his pen and began the final draft, working through the night of 11 July. He sat at the desk with a magnifying glass to ensure he could cram in as much detail as possible on the tiny sheets of paper. The quill of his pen was precise. Every space would be put to use. A last-minute item of intelligence came in on the morning of 12 July at five minutes to eight. Joye had come through Bruges railway station and had seen a ground air defence post moved. That detail was added in the corner.

Raskin finished with a flourish and a special touch. ‘Our seal!’ he wrote in the bottom corner, adding a symbol which he intended to be a unique identifier of the group and its future messages. It was a circle with a curly L sitting in a V, one side of the V becoming either a cross or a sword, depending on how you interpreted it. Their name was Leopold Vindictive.

There was no more space. The message was ready to fly. The two pieces of rice paper were carefully folded up and placed inside the green cylinder that had come with the pigeon. The cylinder was slotted into the ring around the pigeon’s feet and twisted to secure it.

The group then did something extraordinary, an act contrary to every rule of spycraft. They picked up their family camera and took pictures of the pigeon, and of the message being pushed into the green cylinder. But then, even more extraordinarily, the three brothers and two sisters stood for a family portrait in the inner courtyard. Marie and Margaret are in their aprons, Michel and Gabriel in working shirts with braces. Arseen looks somewhat smarter. At first sight, it could be any other family picture, but look more closely and you can see that Marie, the elder sister, is holding a resistance newspaper, Margaret is holding what looks like a white sheet – the parachute. Arseen holds a pencil, Gabriel the British intelligence questionnaire, and Michel proudly clutches the pigeon. And in front of them, propped against a table with a white tablecloth, is a chalkboard – probably the board that they would normally use to display the latest fruit and vegetable prices for shoppers. But this time, on the board are written the dates of the bird’s arrival and departure, its ring number and the phrase ‘Via Engeland’ to mark its destination. And at the top are three capital V’s – the symbol of Victory, which earlier that year the BBC had called on people to daub on walls as a symbol of defiance.

Taking the photos was a mad, risky and amateurish thing to do, and yet it spoke of something that is impossible to criticize – a deep pride in their work of resistance. Raskin is not in the picture, most likely because he was on the other side of the camera taking it.

There was one final picture to be taken. Michel climbed up onto the roof, where there was an oat-attic. This was the place from which he normally released his pigeons, and so it may have looked less suspicious than it sounds to anyone watching him. Up there he opened his cupped hands and released the bird; a picture captures the precise moment. At 8.15 a.m. the bird rose high into the sky and circled for a few moments to get its bearings. Then it made for the Channel and for England. In seven hours’ time it would have escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and be home in suburban Ipswich.

CHAPTER FOUR

Arrival

It took thirty-six hours from Michel’s release of the pigeon on the roof in Lichtervelde for Raskin’s elegant message to reach the hands of British intelligence. The pigeon, which had left Britain on 5 July and was released from Belgium at 8.15 a.m. on 12 July, flew over the English Channel and was back at its loft in suburban Ipswich – about ten miles from the coast – by 3.30 that afternoon. All it knew was that it was home.

Loft owners had been ordered to keep a sharp eye out for the return of a bird, even though they were told nothing of its mission. As soon as a pigeon arrived, they were to take off the Bakelite cylinder, which was about the size of a pen top, attached to its legs. Well-to-do owners might have their own phone and be able to call the special number. But otherwise a child might be sent on a bike with the cylinder to the local pigeon supply officer, who would call in the delivery. Then they would wait. In some cases the roar of a motorcycle dispatch rider could be heard outside in just twenty minutes. The cylinder would be handed over and rushed to London. The orders were strict – cylinders were never to be opened by anyone until they arrived at the War Office. This was partly because the contents were secret, but more so because they were often written in pencil and folded up so tight that they had to be carefully extracted without being ripped or smudged. If that happened, someone would have risked his or her life for nothing.

On the morning of 13 July, the message arrived in London at Room 25 of the War Office. Sanderson and Melland were both on duty that day and early in the war they opened the messages themselves. ‘I well remember the fascination of opening these little tubes and unwinding the thin slips of paper which they contained,’ Melland later said. When the pigeon service first began, it was feared that the tiny cylinders might be booby-trapped. And so Melland and Sanderson would open them with a sheet of protective glass in front of their faces in order to guard against any ‘tricks’. Fortunately, they never had a cylinder explode in their face (although Bert Woodman in Plymouth said he heard that at least one cylinder had been found with explosives). Once a cylinder was open, they would translate the message into English, enter its details in a log book and then distribute the information round other departments.

Both men would always remember that day in July. There was nothing to suggest that message number 37 would be anything different from the other thirty-six they had opened in the previous three months. Melland pulled the first thin sheet of paper, nine inches square, out of the canister. The writing on it was tiny. But the closer he looked, the more astonished he was. Decades later, when Sanderson reflected on the intelligence that he had seen, he would remember this as the ‘most exciting and romantic’ of all the reports that passed through his hands.

Melland and Sanderson realized instantly that this was something different, something special. The writing spread across the two pages was small but perfectly formed, the accompanying maps expertly drawn. It felt as if every single millimetre of the two sheets had been used to cram in as many words as possible.

The author of the message had helpfully recommended placing the sheets against a dark paper and using a magnifying glass after cutting it up and reassembling it so that it was all in the right order. As the team set about typing out a report, they found that the transcription came to 5,000 words and took up twelve pages. And what was in those pages was gold dust.

‘This message is from Leopold Vindictive 200’, it began in English, although the bulk was in French. It was the specificity that was so remarkable, comprising precisely the type of intelligence the team had dreamed of when they started Columba. The text referred to maps and specific symbols employed to indicate hidden German emplacements and munitions depots. An old submarine base was now being used to repair boats and was carefully concealed by shrubs and buildings. Bombs would need to fall over an area of 200 by 300 metres to destroy it, Leopold Vindictive noted. The writers had explained when to attack to avoid civilian casualties. The Shell depot near Neder-over-Heembeek should be bombed ‘without delay’ – a map indicated exactly where the key parts of the oil facility lay. Another important fuel dump was protected by concrete and so would need larger bombs. ‘At any price spare the town of Bruges,’ they had written with a care for the architectural beauty of the city.

There were also precise battle damage assessments of recent British raids in Brussels. ‘Our congratulations to the airmen who carried out the bombardment in the Rue de Birmingham on Thursday 26th June and the Rue de l’Intendant on Thursday 10th July. They were marvellous hits which filled the whole city with admiration.’ The first bomb had wiped out a building where parachutes were made while hardly damaging neighbouring houses. Nine Germans were killed, while fifteen civilians had been only slightly wounded. The second had taken out a crucial German factory. More targets were suggested – a palace inhabited by hundreds of Germans, the location of an officers’ club, another building ‘swarming’ with Germans day and night, a garage which only worked on German vehicles, other barracks. The location of a wireless jammer opposite a hotel was also given. Brussels aerodrome should be targeted, but the writers warned that most of the structures around it were actually dummies. Nearly a dozen other factories in the region were also named as playing a role in the German war effort.

In the case of one telephone exchange, the team revealed it was guarded night and day with a machine-gun post in fear of a British attack by parachutists. The Germans were supposed to call the local Civil Guard for help in the event of an attack, but Leopold Vindictive revealed that the guards were in fact quite hostile, suggesting they might take their time to arrive. ‘I have this from a man on the spot,’ they wrote.

There were also assorted items of intelligence about daily life. Dropping propaganda leaflets was fine, but little packets of chocolate should be dropped with them to show there was no lack of food in England, they recommended. The impact of British bombers and the recent German attack on Russia had worried many of the local ‘black-shirt nationalists’ who supported the Nazis, and many had begun deserting. The blackshirts trained every Sunday morning between ten and twelve at one set of barracks. Bombing them, it was suggested, would discourage any more would-be recruits, and there was no anti-aircraft gun for several kilometres around the site. The Germans had been trying to recruit locals to fight the Russians, claiming it was a crusade of Christianity; leaflets should be dropped to say that those who joined would be held accountable.

Sanderson in particular found message 37 invaluable. The most significant section of the message answered the question that haunted his waking hours – what were the invasion plans? Belgium was seen as a launching point, with barges potentially heading out from Ostend, Antwerp and other ports. Britain had its own plan to carry out a sabotage mission (codenamed Claribel) to sink barges, damage rail lines and cut power and communications once the first signs of invasion were spotted, although the department tasked with carrying this out had to acknowledge in the spring of 1941 that it had no contact with or knowledge of any Belgian resistance organization and its attempts to send in a radio operator to make contact had failed.

Leopold Vindictive had real information. A map showed the chateau of Tillegem near Bruges and revealed that it was the central communications installation for German High Command in the whole sector. The picturesque medieval chateau, surrounded by a moat, had been undergoing work for four months and Leopold Vindictive were sure it was to be used by an admiral as a base for the invasion of England. It was nearly – but not quite – ready, they reported. One hundred and fifty special technical staff used the latest radio apparatus from Siemens. Nobody (the word was underlined by the writer) was admitted to the chateau except for the chiefs and the specialists. Anybody approaching would be shot without challenge.

The site’s true purpose and importance had been unknown to anyone in Britain. If an invasion appeared imminent, it could now be targeted by bombers or even by commandos; equally, it would need to be dealt with if Britain wanted to launch its own attack on the Belgian coast. With that in mind, Leopold Vindictive described how the crucial junction for the communication cables was outside the building in concrete shelters nine metres underground, protected with reinforced steel bars. An 11,000-volt current was provided by a cable lying along the road. Further specific details were supplied of the cables and of the antennae, which sat fifty metres back. In order to identify this from the air, the writer explained, a photograph could be taken between eight and ten in the morning from a particular direction he marked on the map. This would make the complex easier to spot. Usefully, it was pointed out which anti-aircraft positions had not yet had their guns installed. In all, fifty separate locations used by the Nazis were detailed; in some cases the paper gave more than a dozen items of note about an individual position.

The professionalism of whoever sent the message was obvious. It asked for a response that would indicate, by referring to letters ascribed to different sections, what in the enclosed information was unknown to the British, and in which areas more information was still wanted. The information, the author promised, was ‘thoroughly reliable’.

But who could have produced such treasures? And could they really be trusted? There was no name other than the codename, and nothing else was known except that the team consisted of a staff of three principals and several secondary agents. But to establish his bona fides, the author did offer an unusual means of verification. ‘Identify me as follows – I am the bearded military chaplain who shook hands with Admiral Keyes on the morning of May 27th 1940 at 7.30 a.m. Ask the Admiral please where he was exactly at that moment with my most respectful greetings.’

Admiral Roger Keyes was quickly approached by Military Intelligence. He would have remembered the meeting with the chaplain well. It was a day he would never forget. Keyes was close to King Leopold of Belgium, a friendship forged in the First World War when the sailor had led the Dover Patrol and the Belgian royal family frequently crossed the Channel. Leopold, then a boy, had attended Eton during term time, occasionally lunching with Britain’s royal family, but returning to serve on the front line during vacations. His father had stayed in Belgium as king during the war, a decision popular in the country.

Leopold had come to the throne in 1934 when his father died in a mountaineering accident. His reign would prove troubled and started darkly. A year after coming to the throne, Leopold was driving in Switzerland when he lost control of his car and it crashed, killing his wife Queen Astrid. By that time, his old friend Keyes had retired as an admiral and been elected to Parliament in Britain. A buccaneering character, although not necessarily of the highest intellect, Keyes had long been a close friend of Churchill, one of his allies who warned of the dangers of appeasing Nazi Germany.

On 7 May 1940, Keyes played a leading role in the unseating of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister when he stood up in the House of Commons, wearing his uniform with six rows of medals, and launched a passionate denunciation of the government’s ineptitude. Three days later, on 10 May, Belgium was attacked without warning at dawn. The country had desperately clung to its neutrality in the hope it might offer protection. But this proved a false hope. Its armies were poorly prepared for the onslaught of the formidable German war machine. That morning Keyes received a telephone message summoning him to see Churchill. At that moment Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty, but by the end of the day, with Neville Chamberlain ousted from Downing Street, he would be Prime Minister.

Churchill told Keyes to put on his uniform and fly to Belgium to act as his special representative to the King. Keyes had already made a number of visits in recent months on behalf of the government to take advantage of his friendship with Leopold (who was also commander in chief of the Belgian army). By 3.30 that afternoon Keyes was flying out of Hendon to Amiens, escorted by three RAF Hurricanes. That night he drove to a blacked-out Brussels, passing lorries and buses full of troops from the British Expeditionary Force, who were suddenly in a precarious position as the German military tore through the country at frightening speed.

Keyes saw the King the next morning at an old moated fort twenty miles outside the capital. Leopold was not yet forty, with a gentle face and curly hair. Nothing had prepared him for what his country was now going through and his ability to lead his nation would be sorely tested. The shell-shocked King told Keyes that as the invasion began a hundred German troops had landed atop a fort and placed bombs down ventilators, putting it out of action, whilst all but seven Belgian aircraft had been destroyed by German attacks on the country’s aerodromes. Much to Britain’s annoyance, the King had clung too long to the false hope of neutrality; now he pleaded for British air support to avoid what he called ‘an absolute debacle’. But Britain’s military leadership was also in chaos and coordination with the French and Belgian armies was abysmal.

Initially, the British Expeditionary Force advanced. The Times correspondent in Belgium travelling with the BEF (a certain Kim Philby) told a colleague ‘it went too damn well’. The reason was that Hitler was trying to draw the British army into a trap.

Over the next two weeks, Keyes’s telegrams back to Churchill, who was by now Prime Minister, carried increasingly dire news. The Germans were moving fast – so fast that the MI6 station in Brussels lurched from complacency to panic and had to burn its papers in a furnace and hurl its teleprinter out of the window to ensure nothing was captured, while MI6 officers took turns to guard the office with a long-barrelled Luger pistol. The Germans strafed military and civilians alike as they fled the cities by road and rail. Suddenly, the British force realized they risked being trapped and began to make a desperate retreat under pressure; London was initially less than honest with the Belgians after the decision was made for the BEF to abandon the country, using the Belgian army as cover while they headed towards the coast. They made their way, amidst scenes of chaos and confusion, for Dunkirk where hundreds of boats, including the ‘little ships’, a flotilla of fishing vessels, pleasure craft and lifeboats, waited to ferry them back over the Channel.

But where did the mysterious chaplain come in? Raskin’s royal connection dated back to the First World War. He had played music in a convent whose services were attended by Queen Elizabeth and had been introduced to her. After the Queen’s husband, King Albert, died in 1934, she became Queen Mother to King Leopold. She had arrived with the King at the castle of Wijnendale on 24 May. She asked her chamberlain, Comte de Grunne, to organize mass to be celebrated in the private chapel.

Raskin was acting as chaplain to soldiers in nearby Torhout and was asked to come to the royal court as personal chaplain to the royal family. For the next few days, he would be picked up by car and taken to see them. The journey for Raskin on Sunday, 26 May had been perilous as the Germans bombed the roads from the air, leaving craters and burning vehicles. Raskin took confession from the royal family and held a heavy, solemn mass at 10 a.m. by the Baroque altar under the domed vault of the chapel, which was located in the castle’s highest tower. His words and the singing of the congregation must have been spirited to overcome the sound of enemy aircraft flying overhead. Afterwards, Raskin spoke to the King at length, one to one. Leopold looked and sounded like a man not quite able to cope with the huge burden that lay upon his shoulders. He asked for the priest’s prayers as he agonized over the decision of whether to stay in a country that was collapsing or flee to Britain.

Raskin was a decade older than the monarch, and sought to stiffen the resolve of a man who seemed to struggle with the burden of kingship. He stressed to Leopold the tight bond between faith, the nation and the monarchy, in which the priest himself fervently believed. Raskin said he was sure the nation would support the King. The monarch should face the plans God had for him with patience and confidence. As he finished speaking, the King, trembling slightly, clasped Raskin’s two hands. ‘Chaplain, I understand. I understand,’ he said.

The day Admiral Keyes had met Raskin was the darkest. Everyone knew the end for Belgium was nigh. Churchill was desperate for the King to flee to Britain and not make any kind of deal with Hitler. The question for Leopold was whether he should lead an army in exile or stay with his people. He wanted to emulate his father, who had won support by remaining. But he did not understand this was a different war. His ministers either fled or wanted to leave, and were angry as he indicated he would stay. They were to arrive in London in dribs and drabs, but the bad blood from those days in May and the legacy of the choices each individual made would bedevil Belgium for years to come.

At 6 a.m. on 27 May, Keyes received a telegram from King George VI of England to pass on to his fellow monarch, asking him to reconsider his plans to stay. ‘I do not feel that Your Majesty is called upon to make the sacrifice which you contemplate,’ one king wrote to another. It went on to argue that the risk of being taken prisoner by the Germans and depriving his people of a leader was too great. Keyes gave the message to Leopold, who took it to his bedroom to read with Elizabeth. Leopold’s view was that he had no choice. ‘I feel my duty impels me to share the fate of my army and to remain with my people. To act otherwise would amount to desertion,’ he replied.

A photograph – taken by the Comte de Grunne – shows the scene on the morning of 27 May. Outside the castle among the trees stand four figures in military uniforms, talking in two pairs. On one side is Keyes, standing with the King’s aide-de-camp. On the other side King Leopold is talking to his chaplain, Joseph Raskin. The dark looks on all their faces make clear that they all know the end is at hand. This was the moment referred to by Raskin in the Leopold Vindictive message. He knew Keyes would remember it.

Keyes telephoned Churchill that day to give him the news of the King’s decision, adding that the Belgians would not last much longer. At five that afternoon, the King told Keyes his army had collapsed and he was surrendering. Churchill made clear that a new Belgian government would be formed in exile to disassociate itself from the King and his decision to make peace.

By 8 p.m. Keyes knew he had to move fast to avoid his own capture. As his convoy crossed the country, German parachutists landed around them and opened fire. Keyes made one last plea for the King to leave with him. His decision to stay would prove to be a fateful one for the monarch and for his country. Leopold would now never be a unifying figure. At 10 p.m., Keyes left on a road crowded with refugees. By 1 a.m., he was at the coast and found a fishing boat with two sleeping men on board. With some persuasion (which involved rifles and the promise of money on arrival) he was soon sailing back to England, where by the following morning he was at 10 Downing Street to report the King’s decision to an ‘indignant’ Churchill.

Churchill later claimed wrongly in Parliament that the surrender had exposed the British flank, when in fact the Belgian army’s resistance had protected the British Expeditionary Force as it was evacuated from Dunkirk. But the public needed a scapegoat for the disaster and the Belgian king served the purpose. The British press poured vitriol on the King for what they said was a surrender without warning. Keyes himself sued the Daily Mirror for saying he had been ‘bowing on Brussels carpets in a rat king’s palace’.

The day Keyes had met the chaplain was the day Belgium was lost. In their short time together, a bond may have been forged between the Belgian priest and the British admiral – perhaps over the fact both had spent time in China before war. Raskin the following day had taken a bike from Lichtervelde and ridden in turn to Torhout and then to Bruges. In Bruges he went to the school house of Hector Joye’s wife, which had become a field hospital, and met with the wounded. ‘German troops in the city, sad rainy day,’ he wrote.

The link to Keyes also explains the mystery of the codename taken by the spy network. Leopold was clearly a reference to King Leopold of Belgium. But Vindictive? It was a tribute to Keyes himself. In 1918, as commander of the Dover Patrol, Keyes had been given the mission of blocking the ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. Ostend proved a challenge until Keyes sent an ageing cruiser with orders for its crew to sink the ship in the harbour entrance. That ship was the Vindictive. Now Raskin had named his spy network in honour of his own king and a British admiral.

For MI14(d), the link to Keyes served to emphasize their new-found source’s credibility. ‘Confirmation of the value and accuracy of message No 37 has been obtained from the GOC [General Officer Commanding] Belgian Army in the UK and Admiral Keyes has assisted in assessing the sender’s bona fides,’ the team recorded.

There is one odd fact though. Nowhere is the name Joseph Raskin recorded. Had Keyes recalled meeting the chaplain but not remembered his name? Or did MI14 want to keep the name of their new agent secret? Either way, it was by the name Leopold Vindictive that the spy network would be known in London.

When Rex Pearson saw the original message 37, he marvelled at the way in which the author had crammed so much into such a small space. For a man who had fought to create Columba, it must have been a moment of validation against all those who had been sceptical of using pigeons. The intelligence from Leopold Vindictive rapidly made its way around Whitehall. In July, 174 pigeons had been released in five operations, but the information they gathered had revealed only limited details of troop movements and concentrations and confirmed one or two weapons dumps previously reported by human sources. Without Leopold Vindictive it would have been a pretty poor return. But its report was of a different class, as was clear even to the sceptics of Columba.

Naval Intelligence had been pretty dismissive of Columba until it saw Leopold Vindictive’s message. The Admiralty said it was a ‘particularly good report’ for its ‘wealth of detail’. Two MI6 reports had suggested the possibility that the Germans might have a naval headquarters, but there had been no confirmation until Leopold Vindictive drew attention to the chateau near Bruges and for the first time revealed its role in invasion plans. ‘Having seen such a detailed report as No. 37 it is clear that action should be taken’ in the event of an invasion, Naval Intelligence noted. Further photographic reconnaissance was ordered on the sites mentioned in the report.

There had been questions about Columba and its value. Was the bizarre scheme really going to work? Message 37 put those concerns to bed. Keep it going, but under regular review, was the order from the top of Military Intelligence. Columba offered speed and relevance. It is not hard to imagine that for Claude Dansey at MI6, whose service had been one of the sceptics, there was a touch of jealousy that this strange sideshow had suddenly delivered results that gained the appreciation of the rest of Whitehall whilst he still struggled to rebuild his European networks. One of the many secrets that Dansey was keeping was just how little real intelligence his own agents had so far delivered.

Something else happened to message 37. It was shown to Churchill himself. Why? Churchill loved intelligence and asked to see fresh Enigma decrypts from Bletchley every day to help him guide the war. Significant as the specific details of the intelligence in message 37 were, though, there was no reason he needed to know the exact location of a particular ammunition dump, or even a naval headquarters. The real reason was different. The message from Leopold Vindictive represented much more than just a collection of useful facts. It represented the spirit of resistance, confirming to Britain’s spies and leaders in that troubled hour, when they still feared invasion and when defeat seemed possible – perhaps even likely – that some of those living under the tyranny of Nazi occupation in Europe were willing to risk their lives to help. It was a sign of a spirit that Churchill hoped to inspire in the British people should the disaster of invasion ever befall them; a sign that out there in Europe were people who wanted to work with Britain and who stood ready should Britain be able to return to the continent to drive the Nazis back. All that was required now was for the two sides who needed each other so much to be able to communicate. A humble Ipswich pigeon had made that possible. Both sides were determined that this should be just the beginning. So now the question was, could they manage to get back in touch with the bearded chaplain?

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