Secret Pigeon Service - Gordon Corera

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realize he needed to sign them himself to prevent others taking credit. In spare moments, the priest’s humanity shone through – he would make small pencil drawings of an exhausted fellow soldier having a cigarette or devouring a chunk of bread. And so, without knowing it, the first stage of his preparation for the English pigeon scheme was complete. Raskin had learnt the fine art of military intelligence – which information was of value, and how to present it.

      When the war ended, Raskin became, as he had always intended, a missionary-priest. After celebrating his first mass, he boarded a white steamboat for the long journey to China. Pictures show the young man lounging on a bunk with fellow priests in second class and out on deck with a mixed group of priests and nuns, all smiling as they head out on their adventure. On the long voyage, Raskin would play the piano in the evening or draw pictures of fellow passengers. They made their way via Port Said and the Suez Canal, Singapore and Hong Kong before finally reaching China. A photograph shows Raskin in Shanghai, dressed in local clothes, learning how to write the local language. And here was the second phase of his preparation for the pigeon operation – the ability to write beautifully and precisely as he learnt how to trace Chinese characters. The quality of his handwriting would win him a prize in Shanghai and would later be useful in condensing information into a tiny space.

      His training complete, Raskin made his way to the heights of Mongolia. There he worked at a school training Chinese priests. He became the closest thing to a local doctor, dealing with ulcers in particular. ‘I have more consultations than confessions. That is not good,’ he would joke. The part of Mongolia he lived in was the Chinese equivalent of the Wild West. Local warlords would rampage from village to village, looting and killing. Raskin organized the villages so that a signal fire could be lit from a hilltop which could be seen by watchers in other villages to warn them of attack.

      After the best part of a decade in China, he was summoned back to Brussels by the chief of the Scheut mission house. His varied skills meant he was needed as what was called a ‘propagandist’ – a travelling preacher who would go from town to town spreading the word about the missions to raise funds and persuade people to support the organization or become missionaries themselves. In his diary in Mongolia, he wrote of his disappointment at the order to return. ‘My soul is sad as if it has died.’ But then, in Latin, he adds: ‘Your will be done.’ Back in Belgium, he would criss-cross the country giving talks about China. Here was another stage in his preparation – building up a wide-ranging network of friends, supporters and contacts.

      As the years passed, Raskin became rounder and seemingly smaller, the lines on his face deeper. But still he could attract people round him with his laugh and his story-telling.

      And then war came again. Another invasion of neutral Belgium. But this war was not like the one before. This time there were no trenches or static front lines. German tanks, accompanied by the terrifying air power of the Luftwaffe, ripped through Belgium in a matter of days. Raskin acted as a chaplain to soldiers in Torhout during the dark days of May 1940, visiting the nearby Debaillie family in Lichtervelde wearing the uniform of a captain. Within eighteen days, Belgium was occupied by the Nazis. Initially, the Germans promised that if there was compliance there would be no need for brutality. But for many Belgians that did not quell the desire to do something. Unlike France, it was a country that had been occupied and invaded many times before. There was almost an ingrained sense in many Belgians of how to find ways to live under occupation while also getting the better of the occupying power. For some that meant small acts of defiance, for others something more risky. Resistance would emerge faster and with greater strength in Belgium than in many other countries, including France. But it would still take time to recover from the shock of defeat and for resistance to become organized. For the first few months, the urge lay largely dormant and barely visible, like a flower bulb beneath the hard earth. By the summer of 1941, it was ready to push through into the open.

      This was how resistance often emerged in occupied Europe. Not as the result of activity from London on the part of British spies or exiles, but as groups of friends spontaneously coming together because they hated the German occupation and were desperate to do something about it. People would hang out in cafés, conspiring, starting to collect what they knew might be useful information about the enemy they could see around them, but often with no way of transmitting it to Britain. Now, suddenly, Columba presented some people with an opportunity. Could it act as a link to the nascent resistance?

      And so, after a year of occupation, Raskin received the phone call from Arseen Debaillie. The next day he was there in the corner shop, in front of him the pigeon and the two sheets of rice paper, along with a patriotic appeal from Britain for help. He never had any doubts about what to do. Raskin, Hector Joye and the Debaillies made their decision. They would answer the call. They agreed amongst themselves that they would split up over the coming days to maximize the amount of information they could collect.

      Arseen, the youngest of the brothers at the age of 27, nevertheless looked the oldest with his broad chubby face and glasses. He was the chief enthusiast and spy amongst the three brothers, although the family would work together as a team, its members supporting each other. Arseen spent the next few days driving along the coast and through the neighbourhoods around Bruges taking notes. Gabriel, thirty years old and the most anxious of the three brothers, would maintain the cover of working the family’s growing business – supplying animal feed at Roeselare. But he also went with his brother on a car trip to the coast, ostensibly for business but also to see what information they could gather.

      Michel, the gangly pigeon fancier, tended to stay at home. The pigeon had arrived just a fortnight before his thirty-second birthday. As a child he had suffered from rheumatic heart fever, a condition which had left his heart damaged and required him to see a doctor every few weeks. His comfort, like those in Britain who had supported Columba, were his pigeons. Sundays were the days he liked to spend with his birds, often racing them at Lille. He kept them in a large, sideboard-sized coop on the ground floor of the building.

      Hiding the British bird carried risks. Immediately after occupying Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Germans imposed controls on pigeon owners that were progressively tightened. In Belgium, the country’s Fédération des Colombophiles had to keep a register of every pigeon, and the Germans checked this regularly. Pigeon keeping would later be forbidden entirely in a number of districts in Belgium and northern France, matching closely the places where the Columba birds were dropped. Sometimes messages brought back by Columba pigeons revealed the pain this brought to those who loved their birds. One message reported a plea to British owners: ‘Rear a couple of young pigeons for me. I have to kill all mine.’ But Michel and the family were willing to take the risk. It was not too hard for him to hide one special bird that was different from the others.

      Marie and Margaret, the two sisters, had their role. They would maintain the appearance that everything was normal at the shop, chatting away with customers while looking out for any signs of trouble. Raskin would go back to Brussels and gather material from there. He would also ask friends whom he trusted for any information they had.

      Hector Joye had the time – and the cover – to travel. He had been a soldier in the First World War but while in the trenches he had been gassed by the Germans and was now invalided. During that war he had met Louise Legros, who worked for the Red Cross. Her well-to-do family had been opposed to their relationship, but one person who had encouraged them was Raskin. Theirs had been the first marriage he had conducted as a priest. Louise’s career had taken off and she had been appointed the director of a girls’ school in Bruges. The family lived in comfort in a house that was part of the grand, Gothic school complex. A family picture shows Raskin enjoying a lunch in comfortable surroundings with the Joye family all around – his visits were always the occasion for a party, events that the Joye children enjoyed.

      Handsome, with swept-back fine dark hair, round glasses and a trim moustache, Joye was another tinkerer with similar hobbies to Raskin. He had once been a carpenter, had designed a heating system for some nuns and had built incubators for the eggs of the pheasants he kept. His finest invention, his son would remember, was a special Christmas tree mobile containing a mechanism that enabled the angels to fly around. As a former military engineer, he was fascinated by maps and fortifications. Like the others,

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