Spaniard claims to have cracked D-Day carrier pigeon code

A 22-year-old Spanish IT entrepreneur says he has cracked the D-Day code found on a dead carrier pigeon believed to have been sent from Nazi-occupied France and which was discovered in a chimney in Surrey three years ago.

Didac Sánchez claimed on Thursday that he had deciphered the Second World War message following a three-year effort at a cost of €1.5 million (£1.1m).

“I read about the D-Day message in the press and it became an obsession of mine. I wanted to understand the code; I thought this is not on the market today, it’s not in the operating system,” Mr Sánchez told The Telegraph.

The young entrepreneur said that he began to read extensively on the subject of wartime encryption in his free time before deciding that he would need to assemble a team of “top computer scientists” to beat the code by using advanced IT tools.

“I put out advertisements on the internet, asking for certain mathematical and IT skills to get the best people for the job. The selection process took four or five months as a lot of people turned up claiming to know a lot and then when it came down to it, they were useless. I thought about throwing in the towel at one point.”

So what does the message say?

Mr Sánchez says that it would not be appropriate for him to reveal the contents of the D-Day message.

He said he has made contact with the British government and hoped to work with UK authorities to corroborate his claim of having cracked the code “so that nobody thinks this is just a marketing exercise”.

“It’s their message; it belongs to them.”

He did say that the message had a clear meaning. “It is something which can be understood.”

“The moment when I realised we had cracked it, I felt huge joy. Three years’ work had all been worth it after all.”

A spokesperson for GCHQ said it had been contacted by Mr Sánchez to discuss his claim to have cracked the D-Day code, but would not comment further.

Until now, experts have been unable to break the military code found in a red capsule attached the homing pigeon’s leg, written in what to modern eyes is an unfamiliar system. The message, comprising groups of five letters with a few numbers at the end, is believed to have been dispatched by British forces during the D-Day invasion to relay secret messages across the Channel, after a radio blackout left them reliant on pigeons.

Historians believe the bird was almost certainly dispatched from Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944 - during the D-Day invasions.

After the discovery of the message, GCHQ appealed for help to unravel the cypher, even asking veterans from the wartime code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park to offer their ideas. Bletchley Park is assumed to be the pigeon’s intended destination before the bird apparently got stuck in a chimney some 80 miles distant in Bletchingley, Surrey, where it remained until homeowner David Martin had renovation work done on his house.

Mr Sánchez said during his quest he realised that a system no one understood anymore “offers wonderful commercial opportunities”.

He now plans to market new security software based on the code, a system he has christened 4YEO (For Your Eyes Only) and which will allow any text, document, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS or Skype conversation to be encrypted, as well as telephone calls.

Mr Sánchez’s corporate group, Legisdalia, reported turnover of €32 million last year and plans to market 4YEO in 2016. The Barcelona entrepreneur is so confident that his new encryption system is impossible to crack that he is offering €25,000 to anyone who figure out the code’s structure by the end of this year.