Secret Pigeon Service

Columba is an original piece of investigation, bringing a brand new meaning to 'air force'. Corera uses declassified files with original reporting from across Europe and pays homage to the families of those who risked their lives to send back messages, melding the human stories with the wider story of the war. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6. Some may even have heard of MI9 which helped downed airmen escape in World War II. But few will know of MI14(d) – the 'Special Pigeon Service'. From 1941 though 1944, sixteen thousand pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux in Southern France to Copenhagen in Denmark as part of 'Columba' – a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. In a war that began with Blitzkrieg and ended with the atom bomb, pigeons had a unique place in intelligence. Long before Twitter, social media and modern communications technology, the near-miraculous ability of trained pigeons to return to their home loft...