After fleeing Paris in 1940, Lise de Baissac found herself in London and applied to join SOE as soon as they accepted females.
Along with Andree on September 24, 1942, she was one of the first female agents to parachute into France.Lise, posing as a poor widow, was tasked with setting up a network in the city, as well as transporting arms from the UK to French resistance members.
She, of course, chose to be subtle, moving into an apartment near the Gestapo HQ and becoming acquainted with the chief, Herr Grabowski.
She also used the guise of an amateur archaeologist to gather geographical information for landings.
On her second mission, she returned to France on April 10, 1944 to work for another network. After D-Day, she played a role gathering information on troop movement, renting a room in a house occupied by the local commander of German forces.
Lise died at age 98 in 2004.
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First mission
On 24 September 1942, she and Andrée Borrel were among the first female SOE agents to be parachuted into France. (Yvonne Rudellat had arrived by boat two months earlier.) On the eve of her departure, she was taken for dinner by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster and seen off from RAF Tempsford in a Whitley bomber. Borrell was the first to drop, with de Baissac following in quick succession, landing in the village of Boisrenard near the town of Mer. Their mission was to establish a safe house in Poitiers where new agents could be settled into the secret life.
Lise's role was to be a courier and liaison officer on the SCIENTIST network, communicating with the Prosper - PHYSICIAN network under Francis Suttill and the BRICKLAYER network under France Antelme, with the mission "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.
She was effectively reproducing in Poitiers what Virginia Hall had created in Lyons. Lise used a number of code names (including "Odile", "Irene", "Marguerite" and "Adele"). Her cover story was that she was a poor widow from Paris, Madame Irene Brisse, seeking refuge from the tension of life in the capital and to avoid the food shortages of the capital. She moved into an apartment on a busy street near the Gestapo HQ, and became acquainted with the Gestapo chief, Herr Grabowski.
She also used the role of an amateur archaeologist looking for rock specimens in order to bicycle around the Loire countryside to reconnoitre possible parachute drop-zones and landing areas for RAF 138 and 161 squadrons. Having no radio to send and receive messages, she had to travel to Paris or Bordeaux; the latter location being where her brother Claude de Baissac was developing the SCIENTIST network, organising sabotage missions and gathering information on ship and submarine movements. In June 1943, the Prosper - PHYSICIAN network collapsed and ARTIST was also penetrated by the Gestapo, and so on the night of 16/17 August Lise, Claude and Major Nicholas Bodington, were flown back to England by Lysander. Lise was then sent to RAF Ringway where she was conducting officer to two new agents, Yvonne Baseden and Violette Szabo. While she was assisting them with their training, Lise de Baissac broke her leg.
Second mission
Once her leg healed, she returned to France (dropped by Lysander near Villers-les-Ormes on the night of 9/10 April 1944) to work for the PIMENTO network, headed by Anthony Brooks, under the new codename Marguerite. Shortly after Lise's arrival, two French schoolgirls of the PIMENTO network helped cripple eighty-two tank carriers of the Das Reich, Deutschland, and Der Führer divisions around Montauban.
She rejoined her brother Claude, who had been dropped in February 1944 and made his way to Normandy to reconnoitre possible large areas which airborne troops could hold for 48 hours while they got themselves established. After the D-Day, she gathered information on German dispositions and passed it to the Allies, even renting a room in a house occupied by the local commander of the German Forces. According to Lise, on one occasion, "the Germans arrived and threw me out of my room. I arrived to take my clothes and found they had opened up the parachute I had made into a sleeping bag and were sitting on it. Fortunately they had no idea what it was."
She continued her activities until the liberation, organising several groups and providing the Allied forces with information. When the US troops arrived to liberate the area, she was wearing her First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) uniform, which she had kept hidden in France.
