大象传媒

Journalist and author Gordon Corera chats to Simon about his new book the 'Secret Pigeon Service'.

Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6. Some may have even heard of MI9 which helped downed airmen escape in World War II. Few have heard of MI14(d) - home to Operation Columba.

Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of 'Columba' - a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. The messages flooded back via homing pigeons and written on tiny pieces of rice paper tucked into a canister and tied to the legs of the birds - authentic voices from rural France, Holland, Belgium - sometimes comic, often tragic and occasionally invaluable with details of German troop movements and fortifications, new Nazi weapons, radar systems or the deployment of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized London.

Who were the people providing this rich seam of intelligence? Many were not trained agents nor people with experience of spying. At the centre of this book is the 'Leopold Vindictive' network - a small group of Belgian villagers prepared to take huge risks. They were led by an extraordinary priest, Josef Raskin - a man connected to royalty and whose intelligence was so valuable it was shown to Churchill, leading MI6 to parachute agents to assist him.

A tale of espionage, this is a book not just about pigeons but about the ordinary people who were faced with the choice of how to respond to a call for help, and took the decision to resist.