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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

8. Getting to Work

Captain Adolphe Rabinovitch, SOE, the SPINDLE network’s radio operator. Wikimedia

Odette’s first main task was to arrange room and board for the radio operator, Rabinovitch, who had no ration card – a necessity at the time. She had a near puritanical attitudes towards the black market, and a general revulsion towards what she saw as an environment of frippery and fluff on the Cote d’Azur, which she thought was unseemly given the seriousness and hardships of wartime. Nonetheless, she made a go of it, and carried out her early assignments. Then things got immeasurably worse barely a week after her arrival, on November 11^th, 1942.

That day the Germans, reacting to the Allied landings in North Africa, invaded and occupied the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette and the SPINDLE network operated. The new conditions worsened the network’s internal strife. Odette was kept busy with her secret courier work between the SOE and various Resistance elements, while the SPINDLE network descended into chaos. That led to sloppy security work, which almost got Odette and Peter Churchill captured by the Germans, during a failed attempt to arrange a clandestine night time airplane landing.

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.