CHAPTER FIVE
After the pigeon was released, Margaret and Marie sat by the radio in Lichtervelde listening intently. Every night at the assigned time they clutched pencil and paper, determined not to miss a word as they tuned their radio to try to pick up the erratic crackle of a signal. The elder sister, Marie, may have been more cautious but both were now committed. Their father, who had passed away, had been ambitious for all his children, including his daughters, and had ensured they had private lessons in French in addition to their native Flemish. That meant they could scan broadcasts in different languages for some sign that distant London knew they were there.
That the two sisters pressed their ears to the radio to make out the words was itself an act of resistance. The BBC’s broadcasts provided a reassurance to those living in occupied Europe that they were not alone. The broadcasts encouraged 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 street 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.’
When the Nazis raided a house in Belgium, one of first things they would do was check what frequency the radio was tuned to. The penalties for being caught were severe, especially if the Germans wanted to make an example of someone. The headmistress of an Antwerp girls’ school was sentenced to five and a half years for permitting her pupils to listen to the BBC.
The Germans also did their best to jam the signal, which was why one of the items in the Columba questionnaire was about audibility. Responses saying which wavelength provided the best listening quality were hugely useful for the BBC’s technical staff. The broadcaster’s European Intelligence Director told MI14 that Columba was of ‘the utmost value’ thanks to the immediacy of its messages – often they provided feedback within a day or two of a programme’s broadcast, faster than a letter might arrive today. ‘Everything interests us but speak clearly and loud,’ wrote one person in a Columba message, echoing the kind of encouragement BBC broadcasters continue to receive.
There was audience feedback not just in terms of reception but also of editorial content. ‘My wife would like to kiss the well-known speakers, as they are so patriotic,’ one writer from Pas-de-Calais in France said enthusiastically. A pigeon message from Brittany said a wife was cheered up by hearing her husband speaking from London and they wanted him to know. Sometimes there was frustration married with the enthusiasm. The V for Victory campaign started by the BBC in its broadcasts to Belgium caught on like wildfire. It led to the daubing on walls of a flurry of signs in what seemed like every village, as well as on the chalkboard held up by the Debaillie family in their picture with the pigeon. Churchill himself joined the act with his trademark two-finger V for Victory sign. The campaign encouraged ordinary people to feel they could resist, even if only in a small way.
The downside was that it created an expectation amongst many that victory and a British return to Europe must be imminent. ‘You have announced your coming too long now. It would have been better to have done it and said nothing,’ one person wrote in frustration. But the BBC did not only support the war effort by broadcasting news and information. It had a direct operational role in the clandestine world of espionage.
The greatest prize for those brave enough to send a message via Columba was the possibility that for a brief few seconds they would become the stars of the BBC broadcast by receiving an acknowledgement on the messages personnels. When this was required, 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. The messages could be used to signal an upcoming drop by parachute, to establish the bona fides of an agent by proving they were in contact with London or to signal that a person – or information – had arrived in London. It was the last function that Columba used – offering the chance for an acknowledgement that a pigeon had arrived to be broadcast using a code provided by the writer.
For all those listening, the messages were a sign that somewhere out there were people taking risks who were in touch with Britain. For Columba message writers there would have been a real but clandestine thrill in knowing that a code-phrase they had scrawled on rice paper and attached to a pigeon was suddenly being read out from London.
Leopold Vindictive’s message had asked for a response on the Dutch and Belgian BBC radio news as soon as possible. They did not have to wait long. The stunning intelligence haul had left the Columba team in London knowing they had something special on their hands. On 15 July – only three days after Michel had set the bird free – Marie and Margaret heard the answer to their prayer.
‘Leopold Vindictive 200, the key fits the lock and the bird is in the lion’s cage.’ The acknowledgement was sent that day on the Dutch, Belgian and French BBC news services – all three to make sure. Now, in Lichtervelde, the band of friends knew that the crazy plan had worked. The pigeon tended by Michel had successfully crossed the Channel with their treasure.
The relief, joy and excitement were overwhelming. But the family may also have understood there was a cost. Their codename had just been broadcast across northern Europe. Thousands in Belgium would have heard it, and among the listeners would be the German secret police, hunting for resisters. The chase to identify a new band of spies had begun.
There was, though, another sign that their pigeon had got through. Towards the end of the message, they had mentioned a German radio station at Ichtegem, near Wijnendale, which consisted of a camouflaged wooden shed and two aerials. This was bombed by the British, creating what was described as a magnificent fireworks display. Not only had the intelligence got through but it was making a difference. From being powerless, it must have almost seemed as if the RAF were at the Belgians’ beck and call, and that the Belgians were forward air controllers calling in air strikes to the targets they selected.
The BBC acknowledgement raised hopes that a fresh consignment of pigeons might already be on their way. The first part of the BBC message had consisted not of intelligence but of details for the next drop. That was because the group of friends were convinced that this bird had just been the start. They had so much more to offer and all they needed was the means to communicate it back to London. The instructions to British intelligence were clear and precise. Leopold Vindictive needed more pigeons.
Raskin had written that he heard that up to ten other pigeons, in addition to the one they were setting free, had landed in the area on the same July morning. But all the rest had been handed in. Not because people disliked England, he explained, but because they feared Germany. So future birds would need to be dropped carefully. He was reluctant to put the exact location of the drop in the text in case the pigeon was captured and the Germans used it to trap him. So he told British intelligence to get a 1:40,000 military map of Belgium and find the point where Keyes would say he had met the bearded chaplain. They were then to place a ruler south-east from there along the axis of the main road. At the extreme east the ruler would meet the letter ‘e’ on the map, which was the last letter of the name of a village. The second letter of the name on the map lay over a field 300 yards by 300 yards square which was full of crops. That was where the new supply of pigeons were to be dropped. Planes were to avoid spending too much time in the air or else they would wake people, who would get out of bed to see what was happening. Nor should birds be dropped on Saturday night or Sunday morning, as people would be heading to church and it would be harder to hide them. The men had asked for a drop of three birds on 15, 16 or 17 July. ‘We will do our best but failure is not impossible,’ Raskin had written. ‘We suppose also that you know that such relations are rewarded by death.’
Raskin had stayed in the Debaillie house in Lichtervelde the night after the pigeon’s release and had taken the train the next morning. The pages of his small pocket diary from 7 to 13 July are all cut out as he tried to cover his tracks (he would also sometimes write in Chinese for the same reason). That left it to the Debaillie family to wait for the birds.
From sunrise on the first of the designated days, the Debaillies waited for the hoped-for delivery. Arseen had originally thought about using lamps to highlight the drop zone from the air. Gabriel and Michel talked him out of it. It was too risky. But when the brothers went for a walk in the early morning, doing their best to look natural, as if they were just ambling around, there was no sign of another container anywhere in the field. Their message had specified a three-day window and they waited nervously and walked the fields on each of the three days. But each time there was nothing. A disappointment. The first, but not the last.
The friends were moving too fast for Columba. Raskin had no idea about the logistics required in organizing a pigeon drop – why should he? The message had only arrived in Ipswich on 12 July. For MI14(d) to analyse it, verify it with Keyes and others and decide to respond by radio in two days was extraordinarily fast – a tribute to the importance of the message. But dropping fresh pigeons in a hurry required a level of coordination and cooperation that was a challenge for Columba. The delivery of pigeons was far less flexible than the Belgians imagined. They were dropped incidentally, as an adjunct to existing RAF Special Duties missions for the intelligence services, rather than on commission. Pigeons were low down the pecking order of intelligence requirements, way behind MI6. A flight needed to be carrying an agent over the right part of Belgium to allow for a drop of pigeons in Lichtervelde. That would be at best perhaps one in every half dozen flights of those that made it over the Channel. And the planes only flew during the full-moon period. In July, the last successful flight had been on the 12th, the day the message arrived in London. A flight on the 15th crashed, with eight of those on board ending up in hospital. After that the moon promised no light until August.
Here was Columba’s weakness. Columba excelled at gathering ad hoc intelligence from villagers in Europe. But it was harder to use as a reliable, regular tool of communication in the way Raskin imagined.
MI14(d) were nevertheless determined to contact their new prize asset. One item of evidence in Sanderson’s personal papers reveals the effort that went into following up the message. A photograph dated 21 July, and taken by an RAF plane, shows an aerial view of a patchwork of fields of different colours intersected by paths and roads. A scattering of fluffy clouds hang lazily above the fields. Sanderson’s notes indicate that the RAF aerial reconnaissance team had been tasked to photograph the exact location suggested by Leopold Vindictive for the second drop of pigeons. They had found the field. The message from Leopold Vindictive said that if weather made the first drop time impossible, then the next occasion should be 30 or 31 July, or 1 August.
Raskin and his friends were not going to wait passively for the next pigeon, whose arrival they were sure was imminent. And so they simply got on with the business of spying. Drafts and notes of their work survive in a box kept by the Debaillie family: handwritten notes, maps and coordinates, details of factories in Brussels, of movements on the Belgian railways. As well as the information the group collected themselves, Raskin’s many contacts in Brussels and elsewhere had been picking more up. All of it would be ready to go.
Raskin also needed to pass on an important item of news. He wanted to do away with Leopold Vindictive; not the group but the name. Raskin had gone to the royal court at Laken to speak to his friend and contact there, Comte de Grunne, the Queen’s chamberlain. De Grunne knew about the espionage network and perhaps may even have aided it quietly. The name Leopold had been a tribute to the King, but when Raskin told the count he was horrified. Having stayed in his own country, the King was in a precarious position – a virtual prisoner under house arrest – and the use of his name for the purposes of espionage by a person associated with the court risked the assumption that this was a spy network with – quite literally – a royal seal of approval. ‘It is as if the King himself is now a spy!’ exclaimed the count.
And so a chastened Raskin decided he should change the name of his group. He wanted to call it ‘John Victoire’. Raskin wrote out a message, stating that it was from Leopold Vindictive and requesting that in future, in a BBC acknowledgement at 19.00 in Dutch or 19.15 in French, Britain should respond to John Victoire, and that they were waiting for the next pigeons as stated in the original message. But how was he to get this urgent message back to London?
Raskin had always been a man in a hurry, and his impatience grew after the first window for a pigeon drop closed in mid-July. He needed to send the news about the name change to London. Pigeons were the best way of passing on maps and long, detailed intelligence reports, but radio was better for short, urgent messages. He was now desperate to find a working clandestine radio transmitter, both to announce the new name and also to try to hasten the arrival of the next pigeon. But radio sets were rare and dangerous. They got you killed. If the Nazis came through your door, you might be able to explain away a pigeon, but not a radio transmitter. The Germans were on the hunt for those using them. Especially in the early months of the war, a reliable, trusted radio transmitter was almost a mythical creature for those involved in espionage; to find such a rare prize would require a long tortuous path of whispered conversations and dangerous meetings, always with the risk of being betrayed by a double agent. But Raskin thought he knew someone. So he passed his message of the name change through his Brussels contacts to try to ensure it reached London.
Raskin’s circle of contacts in Brussels, largely female, had been involved in sheltering airmen and had also supplied intelligence to the priest. The central figure was a woman known to everyone as ‘Madame Roberts’. She had been born Anna de Bruycker, but had married a British man called Jesse Roberts from Blackpool. As soon as the occupation began, Madame Roberts had involved herself in helping Belgians who wanted to go to England. She helped hide two British servicemen for months, providing them with lodging, food, clothes and money. Raskin himself, it seems, was involved in helping hide people from the Nazis, these often being British servicemen who had not made it out at Dunkirk, or Belgian servicemen who wanted to leave for Britain. The details of Raskin’s work on escape and evasion are hazy, although one note in the Belgian Security Service Archives from a woman says she and Raskin took food and clothes to the Forêt de Soignes for evaders who were hiding there, and that four evaders were tended for three months by ‘Père Raskin and his group’ in the forest and in cellars.
Madame Roberts was a friend of Raskin through his Catholic missionary network (which would increasingly become a spy network). As the war started Raskin had confessed to her that he had an ardent desire to help his country but was not sure how to do so. To think of Roberts and her friends as a formal resistance network would be a mistake. They were less organized than that name implies. By the middle of 1941, resistance was just beginning to build and establish itself in Belgium. Britain had not yet been defeated as some had expected. There was still hope. Food shortages and the conscription of workers were taking their toll. There were occasional strikes and small acts of sabotage. People who wanted to do things were starting to work together, but they were not yet organized into coherent networks. Rather they consisted of overlapping groups of friends and contacts, who often lacked much understanding of the kind of security they needed to protect themselves.
As the second drop period approached at the end of July, Raskin, Joye and the Debaillie family waited anxiously, their prized notes ready to be transferred onto rice paper, the priest ready with his calligrapher’s pen and magnifying glass. But on the morning of 31 July, the field again failed to yield a pigeon. Marie and Margaret listened out anxiously for an update on the BBC.
The sisters heard what they were listening for on two consecutive nights – 31 July and 1 August. The message was relayed on the French, Dutch and Flemish news services again. That was the good news. The bad news was that it still began with the old call sign and not the new name – confirmation that the radio message Raskin had passed on had not gone through. ‘Leopold Vindictive 200 Allo Allo’ it began. It said there was much appreciation for the bravery and volume of their efforts. But there was news of a delay, given in a coded phrase, ‘The key is turning in the lock.’ But when it came to the 300 square metres – a reference to the field indicated by Raskin – they would have to wait some days. Regarding the information, it said that the details marked ‘A’ – in other words information from the original message relating to the invasion plans and the chateau – were of the greatest importance. It also asked what was happening 3 km south-south-east of location B2. But there was a strange ending: ‘Long live the courageous V of Lille and Nieuport.’ This was a riddle to Leopold Vindictive. They were not in Lille or Nieuport. Was there some kind of confusion as to who they were? Had another group somehow adopted their name or their pigeons? Or were the British trying to divert any listening Germans from the group’s identity?
In London, they were finally ready. ‘With the help of photographic recce, it is hoped to check the information still further; in the meantime it has been possible to locate the exact site recommended by source for a further release of birds and this operation is taking place tonight weather permitting,’ a note from Columba of 3 August reads.
At 3.35 a.m. the following day, 4 August, Ron Hockey took off with the RAF for Belgium on Operation Periwig. His flight plan took him on a path over the field mapped out by MI14(d). Searchlights lit up the plane and heavy flak headed his way as he reached the coast. The pigeons were released and he flew back above the clouds. But when they looked the next morning, the friends in Belgium could find no sign of a pigeon.