Pigeon’s World War Two message stumps codebreakers

ELITE code-breakers from Britain’s most secret intelligence agency have admitted they are completely stumped by a secret World War Two message found attached to the leg of a dead pigeon.

The coded series of hand-written letters written on a cigarette paper-sized sheet of paper headed “Pigeon Service” was discovered in a small red canister attached to the bird’s skeleton up the chimney at a house in Bletchingley, Surrey.

David Martin, 74, a retired probation officer, was renovating his 17th century home, when he found the remains of the dead “secret agent” carrier pigeon which is believed to have got stuck in the chimney on its return from a top secret mission to Nazi Germany.

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Experts from UK intelligence agency GCHQ said the message, which has 27 five-letter code groups, is impossible to crack without its codebook. They have now appealed to retired spies and the public for help.

They were also left baffled by missing details, such as the date of the message and the identities of the sender, “Sjt W Stot”, and the recipient, “X02”.

However it is known that the bird was named 40TW194 from the aluminium ring found on its leg (the first two numerals indicating the pigeon’s year of birth).

Experts assume agent 40TW194 was destined for the top secret Bletchley Park, where codebreakers worked round the clock to crack the Nazi’s “unbreakable” Enigma code, and which is just 80 miles from Mr Martin’s home.

A GCHQ spokesman said: “During the war, the methods used to encode messages naturally needed to be as secure as possible and various methods were used.

“The senders would often have specialist code books in which each code group of four or five letters had a meaning relevant to a specific operation, allowing much information to be sent in a short message. For added security, the code groups could then themselves be encrypted.

“Although it is disappointing that we cannot yet read the message brought back by a brave carrier pigeon, it is a tribute to the skills of the wartime code-makers that, despite working under severe pressure, they devised a code that was indecipherable both then and now.”

Mr Martin said he had previously shown the message to the late British spy and intelligence officer Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, who is said to have been the real-life inspiration for Ian Fleming’s fictional spy James Bond.

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A specialist in counter-espionage, Biffy lived near Mr Martin’s house after the war.

“When I showed him the bird and code, the blood drained from his face and he advised us to back off,” Martin said.

“He said nothing would ever be published,” Mr Martin said.

Colin Hill, the curator of Bletchley Park’s “Pigeons at War” exhibition, said: “The message Mr Martin found must be highly top secret. We have more than 30 messages from WWII carrier pigeons in our exhibition, but not one is in code. We know it’s an Allied Forces pigeon because of the red capsule it was carrying -- but that’s all we know.”

One theory is that an Allied spy or army unit sent the message by carrier pigeon from Nazi-occupied France on 6 June 1944, during the D-Day Invasions.

It is thought the bird might have attempted to rest on an open chimney, due to exhaustion or become disorientated by bad weather before being overcome by fumes from a fire below and he died.

World War Two homing pigeons played a vital role in the war effort.

Because of wartime radio blackout imposed by Winston Churchill, homing pigeons were dropped behind enemy lines by RAF bomber planes. They were then picked up by resistance fighters who attached secret messages to them before releasing them homeward. The RAF trained 250,000 birds, forming the National Pigeon Service. Between 1943 and 1949, 32 were awarded the Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest possible decoration for valour given to animals.

Their adventures hit the big screen in 2005 with “Valiant” the Walt Disney movie about secret agent pigeons nearing the White Cliffs of Dover when they were attacked by General Von Talon, a German enemy falcon. Valiant (the voice of Ewan McGregor), eventually manages to lure Von Talon to his death.