“But the sad truth is that the only pigeons they [the MI5 British hawks] managed to kill were British ones because hawks don’t have a friend or foe identification system. An MI5 report at the end of the war noted that the hawks did not bring down a single enemy bird, probably because there never were any.”
The Telegraph (May 31 2018)
“There is scarcely a book of mine that didn’t have ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ at some time or another as its working title. Its origin is easily explained. I was in my mid-teens when my father decided to take me on one of his gambling sprees to Monte Carlo.
Close to the old casino stood the sporting club, and at its base lay a stretch of lawn and a shooting range looking out to sea. Under the lawn ran small, parallel tunnels that led in a row to the sea’s edge. Into them were inserted live pigeons that had been hatched and trapped on the casino roof.
Their job was to further their way along the pitch-dark tunnel until they emerged in the Mediterranean sky as targets for well-hunched sporting gentlemen who were standing or lying in wait with their shotguns. Pigeons who were missed or merely winged then did what pigeons do. They returned to the place of their birth on the casino roof, where the same traps awaited them.
Quite why this image has haunted me for so long is something the reader is perhaps better able to judge than I am.”
John Le Carré — The Pigeon Tunnel (January 2016)
This is the story of the ‘Battle of England’ you never heard of. During WWII, the Director-General of MI5 approved the creation of a falconry unit to ‘search and destroy’ Nazi pigeons. Once again, the operation was hardly a success.
The British hawks did not bring down a single enemy bird. Maybe, the spooks were watching for the wrong birds. Perhaps, they should have asked for the help of a professional bird-watcher: James Bond. Follow us on Twitter: @Intel_Today Continue reading →
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