----- 3 stars ----- Operation Columba / London Review of Books Fascinating; if this were just slightly better written it probably would have gotten four stars: Pigeons move through a human world. They stay close to the land, often flying at street level, below the height of the rooftops. Recent studies have suggested that they navigate using human structures as well as natural ones: they follow roads and canals, and have been observed going round roundabouts before taking the appropriate exit. [...] Operation Columba was conceived and run by a raggle-taggle band of secret service officers, pigeon-fanciers, aristocratic animal lovers and soldiers, who didn’t always work well together. [...] In 1939 he suggested that pigeons could be used not only to receive intelligence from established agents but also as a means of recruiting new ones. MI6 thought the idea ridiculous and wanted nothing to do with it. But Military Intelligence, which was run by the army and based at the War Office rather than the Foreign Office, allowed Pearson to go ahead. [...] The messages they carried were by turns useful, unintelligible, petty, funny and moving. People wrote asking for supplies (sometimes guns and ammunition; often whisky and cigarettes), to taunt the enemy, to denounce traitors and ask for them to be condemned on the radio, or to tell the allies to be more careful when they dropped their bombs. Sometimes they just seemed intrigued by the birds. ‘I found this pigeon … early in the morning while I was cutting clover for the animals,’ one person wrote, ‘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.’ [...] When, in 1941, some friends discovered a Columba pigeon on their land, Raskin organised the assembly of an extraordinarily detailed message – five thousand words long and containing several maps – to send back to London. The group released the pigeon on 12 July and it arrived at its loft in Ipswich the same day. Their message was on a desk in Whitehall within 36 hours. Despite describing Columba as a ‘racket’, MI6 had to admit the report was useful.
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----- 3 stars ----- Operation Columba / London Review of Books Fascinating; if this were just slightly better written it probably would have gotten four stars: Pigeons move through a human world. They stay close to the land, often flying at street level, below the height of the rooftops. Recent studies have suggested that they navigate using human structures as well as natural ones: they follow roads and canals, and have been observed going round roundabouts before taking the appropriate exit. [...] Operation Columba was conceived and run by a raggle-taggle band of secret service officers, pigeon-fanciers, aristocratic animal lovers and soldiers, who didn’t always work well together. [...] In 1939 he suggested that pigeons could be used not only to receive intelligence from established agents but also as a means of recruiting new ones. MI6 thought the idea ridiculous and wanted nothing to do with it. But Military Intelligence, which was run by the army and based at the War Office rather than the Foreign Office, allowed Pearson to go ahead. [...] The messages they carried were by turns useful, unintelligible, petty, funny and moving. People wrote asking for supplies (sometimes guns and ammunition; often whisky and cigarettes), to taunt the enemy, to denounce traitors and ask for them to be condemned on the radio, or to tell the allies to be more careful when they dropped their bombs. Sometimes they just seemed intrigued by the birds. ‘I found this pigeon … early in the morning while I was cutting clover for the animals,’ one person wrote, ‘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.’ [...] When, in 1941, some friends discovered a Columba pigeon on their land, Raskin organised the assembly of an extraordinarily detailed message – five thousand words long and containing several maps – to send back to London. The group released the pigeon on 12 July and it arrived at its loft in Ipswich the same day. Their message was on a desk in Whitehall within 36 hours. Despite describing Columba as a ‘racket’, MI6 had to admit the report was useful.