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.
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