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This Housewife Became World War II’s Highly Decorated Spy

Khalid Elhassan June 12, 2019 24 min

Odette Hallowes - World War II — Odette Sansom and her daughters. Code Name Lise

9. Operation CLOTHIER

Odette Sansom and Peter Churchill in 1947. Wall Street Journal

Given the code name “Lise”, Odette took a seaplane to Gibraltar, and from there boarded a boat for the French Riviera, to carry out her part in Operation CLOTHIER. She landed in the Riviera on November 2^nd, 1942, and was picked up by the French Resistance. She was then taken by them to her SOE cell, headed by British Army captain Peter Morland Churchill – no relation to the Prime Minister. Her mission called for her to then move on to Burgundy, where she was to set up a safe house for other agents. However, Peter Churchill, impressed by Odette – and perhaps feeling the first stirrings of a romance that would blossom down the road – contacted SOE headquarters in London, and convinced them to scrap her orders. Odette was reassigned as a courier to Churchill’s network, known as SPINDLE.

All was not well with SPINDLE when Odette arrived, and things were destined to get worse. The network was beset by internal strife between its French Resistance main contact, Andre Girard, his deputy, and the SOE radio operator assigned to the lot, Adolphe Rabinovitch. Things went from bad to worse when Girard’s negligence and inattention to operational security led to the loss of a list that contained the names of over 200 supporters. It was recovered by the Gestapo, who made a near clean sweep of the lot.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.