LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER TWO

       The Special Pigeon Service

      In the bowels of the War Office, two men waited anxiously for the first signs that Columba would work. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6, the domestic and foreign intelligence services that survive to this day. Some may even have heard of MI9 – the wartime department that helped Allied servicemen escape from behind enemy lines. But few will have heard of MI14 – let alone its subsection MI14(d) and its ‘Special Continental Pigeon Service’. Perhaps that subsection’s lack of fame is understandable, given that in 1941 it comprised a crack team of just two. But the little-known MI14 department to which those men belonged had arguably one of the most important tasks of the war. Its mission was the first priority of intelligence – to know your enemy.

      As war began in 1939, the entire staff devoted to evaluating information about the Nazi war effort and its day-to-day battle strategy amounted to a grand total of five officers across MI14. The initial estimates of German military strength were way off the mark – Britain thought the Germans had 1,400 medium tanks, for example, when there were only 300. That kind of knowledge had serious repercussions when it came to understanding the fight that lay ahead, and whether and how it might be won.

      Initially operational intelligence on the enemy sat within the department known as MI3, which was broken down into different departments. MI3b looked at Italy, while MI3c looked after the Soviet Union and was staffed by two Russian-speaking former brewers who despised the USSR more than they did the Germans, and who were consistently wrong on every issue. Intelligence on Germany became so important that it merited its own separate team, and so it was hived off to become MI14. Initially the small team consisted of a rich array of old-timers from the First World War who were not quite up to it, alongside a new batch of often eccentric but more talented younger men.

      MI14 was itself broken up into smaller units populated by an array of oddballs and professors who had come into the military from civilian, often academic, life. One section investigated German strategy and intentions. Another, led by a former England cricket captain, looked at German anti-aircraft positions. A professor who had studied the Roman army’s order of battle two thousand years ago now did the same for the Wehrmacht, the German army. As seems customary in British intelligence, MI14 even had its own Soviet mole in Leo Long. He had been recruited at Cambridge and was, unbeknownst to his colleagues, passing on their secrets to Moscow via Anthony Blunt. The teams worked all hours dealing with a constant stream of queries and requests from different parts of the armed services. Which were the best targets to attack in Germany by air? Where was this or that Panzer division? How was the Germany army reacting to British propaganda?

      The specific task of MI14(d) was to understand the German occupation of Western Europe, including the deployment of its forces and the work of its secret services. And it was in this team that Columba found its home.

      Brian Melland was the man in MI14(d) who oversaw Columba for much of its life. Melland was described by a colleague as a ‘theatrical character’. He was a convivial figure, a brilliant comic and mimic round the dinner table, but could quickly go from fooling around to focusing on the most serious matters with a fiery moral indignation. The theatrical description, moreover, was literally rather than just figuratively true. He had been born in 1904 in Paris, where his father had fallen in love with a French pianist. After studying French and German at Cambridge, he had begun a rather conventional career with Shell Oil. But after five years he realized he was bored and gave it up for his first love, acting. He spent eight years before the war treading the boards as a professional actor in repertory theatre in Manchester. He was married in 1938 and his son was born just as the war was beginning. Melland had hoped to join the Navy, but when that did not work out he walked across the road to the War Office; thanks to his language skills, they put him straight into Military Intelligence. With his dark hair parted on the side he was handsome but also smart and diligent. He would become the leading British expert on the German military and the go-to man on German documents. This meant he became involved in interrogating captured Germans. In the summer of 1941, just as Columba was starting up, a secretary came in to his office. In her strong cockney accent, she said there was a ‘Mr S’ who Melland needed to go and see urgently. It turned out she meant Rudolf Hess – the Deputy Führer, who had just landed in Britain.

      The second member of MI14(d)’s double act was L. H. F. ‘Sandy’ Sanderson. He had joined MI14 in January 1940 after being told he was too old to return to the Highland Division, with whom he had served in the First World War. However, the fact that he spoke excellent German would be put to good use. Lean and moustachioed, Sanderson had served as a business executive between the wars. ‘He looked like a friendly, alert terrier,’ recalled Noel Annan, who had been recruited into MI14 as a 24-year-old on New Year’s Day 1941. It can be surprising to realize the inexperience of the quickly expanding British intelligence world in the early years of war. But in some cases, it drew in people who brought

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