Bought at Bletchley Park, wonderful book about the pigeons "serving" in WWII. There are pigeon prisoners of war!
MI14(d) was running operation Colomba.
The [BBC] broadcasts encoured them to defy the invaders and parodied the propaganda spouted by the Germans. For that reason, the Nazis hated the BBC for its subversive influence. Almost every member of the population listened. A German officer given the accurate time by a little girl on the streets asked how it was possible she knew it was a quarter past seven when she had no watch. She replied, 'Don't you see? There is no one on the street. They are all listening to the English radio."
... a British intelligence officer would ring up the BBC and identify himself with a codename - rather bizarrely, for Belgium this was Napoleon Bonaparte and for the Netherlands Bing Crosby. He would then ask for a specific phrase to be broadcast, such as 'here is a message for Adolphe - the wine is warm' - which was meaningless to everyone else but acted as a coded signal for a particular group.
This special crack team was called the Falcon Destruction Unit, and could be sent to a particular area at the request of any government service. The 007 of the bird world, it had a license to kill. [...] MI5 sprang into action with its counter-pigeon team - section B3c - led by the dedicated Richard Melville Walker, the security service's counter-pigeon expert.
