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by Gordon Corera
| Hardback in Very Good condition in a Very Good Dust Jacket. The book in red cloth, has black lettering down spine. No damage. The Dust Jacket, unclipped, Light wear on edges, no nicks, tears or creases.
First published in GB by William Collins in 2018.
336 pages, illustrated with 2 blocks of 8 pages of black and white and colour photos.
15.9cm x 24cm x 3cm.
Cover price: £20.
Gordon Corera uses declassified documents and extensive original research to tell the story of M1 1 4(d) and the Secret Pigeon Service for the first time.
Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky homing pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of 'Columba' - a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. The messages flooded back written on tiny pieces of rice paper tucked into canisters and tied to the leg of the birds. Authentic voices from rural France, the Netherlands and Belgium - they were sometimes comic, often tragic and occasionally invaluable with details of German troop movements and fortifications, new Nazi weapons, radar systems of the development of the feared V-1 and V-2 rockets that terrorized London.
Who were the people who provided this rich seam of intelligence? Many were not trained agents nor, with a few exceptions, people with any experience of spying. At the centre of this book is the 'Leopold Vindictive' network - a small group of Belgian villagers prepared to take huge risks. They were led by an extraordinary priest, Joseph Raskin - a man connected to royalty and whose intelligence was so valuable it was shown to Churchill, leading M16 to parachute Agents in to assist him.
A powerful and tragic tale of wartime espionage, the book brings together the British and Belgian sides of Leopold Vindictive's story and reveals for the first time the wider history of a quirky, quarrelsome band of spy masters and their special wartime operations, as well as how bitter rivalries in London placed the lives of secret agents at risk. It is a book not so much about pigeons as the remarkable people living in occupied Europe who were faced with the choice of how to respond to a call for help, and took the decision to resist.
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Publisher: William Collins
ISBN: 9780008220303
Condition: VG / VG |
Issue No.: 1st
2018
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| Postage & Handling to UK mainland: £4.00 | Price: £6.50
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