The creator of Carte, André Girard, claimed to have "plans in hand for preparing first sabotage teams, then larger guerrilla groups, and finally a private army some 300,000 strong"[1] to liberate France.
Girard's army existed mainly on paper and in the minds of a community of artists, musicians, and students living on the French Riviera.
Girard persuaded the United Kingdom's clandestine organization, the Special Operations Executive, (SOE) that his plan merited British help.
In April 1941, he persuaded Henri Frager, an architect, to be his second in command and the pair set about recruiting intellectuals, soldiers, and others to become members of the network.
For SOE headquarters in London it seemed "that they had found what they were looking for; a ready-made secret army which only needed arms and orders before it was ready to co-operate in throwing the Germans out of France.
Based on the reports by Basin and Churchill, in July 1942 Nicolas Bodington, second in command of SOE's F section, landed in Vichy France.
In November 1942, an assistant of Girard named André Marsac was carrying the list by train from Marseille to Paris to give it to SOE agent Francis Suttill.
SOE agent Peter Churchill had earlier arrived in southern France to evaluate the usefulness of the Carte network.
Henri Frager had returned to France to assume leadership of the new SOE Donkeyman circuit built on the remnants of Carte.
The sisters were known to several members of Suttill's Prosper network who used them to pass on letters and held meetings in their Paris apartment.