Born: 11 May 1905, Mauritius
Died: 29 March 2004
Country most active: France
Also known as: Odile and Marguerite (code names)
Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE was an agent of the United Kingdom’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) clandestine organization in France during World War II. The SOE carried out espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents worked with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from Britain. Because the presence of young, able-bodied men would raise suspicions, many SOE agents were women.
As soon as the SOE began recruiting women, de Baissac applied and was accepted for training in May 1942. Female agents were trained as couriers or wireless operators, working for male “organisers,” but de Baissac was identified as having the skills needed to head her own network. Her training took place at Beaulieu, Hampshire, where the commandant wrote that De Baissac was “quite imperturbable and would remain cool and collected in any situation… [s]he was very much ahead of her fellow students.”
On the night of 24 September 1942, de Baissac and Andrée Borrel were the first female SOE agents to parachute into France (Yvonne Rudellat had arrived by boat two months earlier). De Baissac worked a courier – bicycling 100 kilometres or more daily to deliver messages – and liaison officer for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, codenamed Scientist, communicating with networks in Paris and Tours. Her mission as a one-woman network was “to form a new circuit and to provide a centre where agents could go with complete security for material help and information on local details” and to organise the pick-up of arms drops from the UK to assist the French resistance. During her 11 months Poitiers, she received and briefed 13 newly arrived agents and organized departures of agents, resistance leaders, and others traveling to England. She collected air-dropped containers of weapons and supplies, transporting them to safe houses. She also built her own resistance network of recruits.
In September 1944, the de Baissac siblings returned to France, now liberated from German control, as part of the Judex mission to locate lost and captured SOE agents and the French people who had aided them.
Her obituary in The Guardian described her as a “grande dame of the old school: fiercely independent, courageous, elegant and modest.” One British officer stated, “The role she played in aiding the maquis and the resistance in France will never be over-praised and she did much to enable to maquis and resistance’s preparations before the American breakthrough in Mayenne.” Her SOE dossier reads “[S]he was the inspiring-force for the groups in the Orne, and through her initiatives she inflicted heavy losses on the Germans thanks to anti-tyre devices scattered on the roads near Saint-Aubin-du-Désert, Saint-Mars-du-Désert, and even as far as Laval, Le Mans and Rennes. She also took part in armed attacks on enemy columns.”