Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE CdeG (11 May 1905 – 29 March 2004),[1] code names Odile and Marguerite, was a Mauritian agent in the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France during World War II.

The de Baissacs armed and organized French Resistance forces to hinder the German response to the invasion and to assist the allies.

Lise de Baissac had frequent encounters with German soldiers in the heavily militarized region in which she worked, but she eluded capture.

Female SOE agents were trained as couriers or wireless operators and worked for male "organisers," but de Baissac was identified as having the ability to head her own network.

The commandant at Beaulieu 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.

Her mission 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.

Her cover story was that she was a poor widow from Paris, Madame Irene Brisse, seeking refuge from the tension of life and avoiding the food shortages of the capital.

[13] De Baissac preferred the lonely life of working alone in Poitiers, making local contacts and recruiting resisters but avoiding the company of other SOE agents except when she chose to visit them on business in Paris or Bordeaux.

She played the role of an amateur archaeologist which gave her the pretext of bicycling around the country to search for ancient monuments while, in fact, identifying possible parachute drop-zones and landing areas for the RAF's 138 and 161 squadrons.

To communicate with London, as she had no wireless operator, she had to travel to Paris or Bordeaux where her brother Claude was organising sabotage missions and gathering information on ship and submarine movements.

On the night of 16/17 August 1943 Claude and Lise de Baissac, and SOE deputy head Nicholas Bodington, were flown back to England by Lysander.

By mutual consent, she left Pimiento to join her brother Claude, who had returned to France in February 1944, and the reborn Scientist network he headed which was now working in southern Normandy and adjacent areas.

(Unknown to de Baissac and the French Resistance, Normandy would be the landing site of allied forces in the D-Day invasion of France on 6 June 1944.)

[19] De Baissac was her brother's courier, bicycling 100 kilometres (62 miles) or more daily to deliver messages and attempting to restrain the now armed and impatient maquis (resistance fighters) from premature attacks on the Germans and the infrastructure which supported them.

The job of Scientist was to reconnoiter possible large open areas where invading airborne troops could land and hold and to receive air-drops of weapons and supplies for the resistance.

Immediately she bicycled back to her network, traveling more than 300 kilometres (190 miles) in three days, passing through large formations of the German army and sleeping in ditches.

At night they gathered canisters full of weapons for the resistance fighters and impeded the arrival of German reinforcements by setting land mines or tyre busters in the roads.

Dressed in long-unworn British military uniforms, they stood in front of the mayor's office in a provincial town and greeted the arriving American soldiers.

[23] In September 1944, the de Baissacs were back in France, now liberated from German occupation, as part of the Judex mission which aimed to locate lost and captured SOE agents and the French people who had worked with them.

[1][2][28] In an interview, de Baissac said that "the loneliness of a secret life" was her strongest emotion and that "cold-blooded efficiency for long weary months" was needed more than heroism.