Secret wartime code mystery baffles pigeon detectives

p7 The remains of a WW2 carrier pigeon and it's red message cannister which David Martin discovered behind his fireplace. See SWNS story SWCOO: A top secret message sent by carrier pigeon by British soldiers in Nazi-occupied France will never be cracked, Government codebreakers said last night. In August, the Daily Express broke the story of Percy the pigeon, whose remains were found along with an encrypted message in the chimney of a house in Surrey. Percy is thought to have died of exhaustion on his way home from his Second World War mission. Experts at GCHQ have been trying to break the code, but say it was so skillfully written they cannot do so ìwithout access to the original cryptographic materialî.

SWNS, PA

Maxine Frith

23 November 2012

A Coded Second World War message found taped to the leg of a dead pigeon has stumped Britain’s top codebreakers.

David Martin began renovating his chimney in Bletchingley, Surrey and found the pigeon with a red canister attached to its leg. Inside was a thin piece of paper with the words “Pigeon Service” at the top and 27 handwritten blocks of code.

He passed it to experts at GCHQ but they have been unable to break the code because war messages were designed to be read only by the sender and recipient.

Intelligence officers believe the message may have been sent by a unit or agent from an operation in Europe that was unable to stop and set up an aerial for wireless communications.

Now the GCHQ team is appealing to members of the public who might have worked in wartime communication centres to help them solve the mystery.

More than 250.000 pigeons were used during the war. Each one was given an identity number which may enable experts to link the bird in Mr Martin’s chimney to a particular agent or unit.

MORE ABOUT

Espionage And Intelligence

Surrey