History detective: Did Churchill sacrifice a city to protect a secret?

The verdict: no

Winston Churchill
(Image credit: Central Press/Getty Images)

It remains the archetypal tale about how far governments will go to protect their intelligence secrets, even at great cost to civilians.

But even though people at the top of our intelligence establishment have told me this story, there is clear and convincing evidence that it's not true. Did Winston Churchill, nervous about the Germans discovering that U.K. cypher-crackers had broken their Enigma codes, fail to act on intelligence warning of a Luftwaffe raid against Coventry in November of 1940?

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.