LONDON — A World War II code found strapped to the leg of a dead pigeon stuck in a chimney for the last 70 years may never be broken, a British intelligence agency said on Friday. The bird was found by a man in Surrey, southern England while he was cleaning out a disused fireplace at his home earlier this month. The message, a series of 27 groups of five letters each, was inside a red canister attached to the pigeon's leg bone and has stumped code-breakers from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's main electronic intelligence-gathering agency. “Without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” a GCHQ spokesman said. The message is consistent with the use of code books to translate messages which were then encrypted, according to GCHQ, one of Britain's three intelligence agencies. — Reuters
