Crossword puzzle gives away D-Day invasion code words

This has to be one of the biggest long shots in history. A retired schoolteacher called Leonard Dawes had been compiling the daily crossword puzzle for London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper for over twenty years. In May 1944 he put together a series of puzzles that somehow managed to include the names of two of the landing beaches—Utah and Omaha—along with several other super secret code words like Overlord, Mulberry and Juno that nobody outside of General Eisenhower’s staff was supposed to know.

Assuming Dawes was a German agent, he was instantly interrogated, only to be released a short time later once they became convinced the words were entirely randomly chosen. While the chances of inadvertently using one of the code words is not remarkable, Dawes puzzles contained no fewer than five code words—all over the course of two weeks.