In 2012, Gordon Corera was assigned by the BBC to cover a story about a dead bird in a chimney. It wasn't, the security correspondent later admits, “the most obvious subject about which to write for someone interested in intelligence.” But this pigeon, uncovered during home renovations in a Surrey village about 20 miles south of London, had a red cannister attached to its leg. Inside the cannister was a coded message dating back to World War II.
As Mr. Corera recounts in “Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service,” the coded message stumped Britain's top government code breakers. “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.”
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