[1] The mission consisted of an Anglo-Yugoslav British army soldier Alexander Simić-Stevens and two Yugoslav Canadians, Petar Erdeljac and Paul Pavlić, who were recruited by the SOE and trained in clandestine operations at Camp X on the Lake Ontario, near the US border.
[4] During the Second World War, both the SOE and its military counterpart, the SIS, operated in Canada and the United States in order to recruit European immigrants as potential agents for deployment in their native countries.
[9] They were lucky, and shortly after landing they established radio contact with SOE Cairo HQ, confirming that they have reached the Partisan Command for Croatia at Brinje.
This was in response to a previous mission, Operation Hydra, which resulted in death of two British officers, Maj Terence Atherton and Sgt Patrick O'Donovan, most likely at the hand of a royalist Chetnik in April/May 1942.
The group consisted of Maj William Jones a 50-year-old Canadian, a Scots Fusilier Capt Anthony Hunter and Sgt Ronald Jephson, an RAF radio operator.
On 17 May 1943, Tito agreed to receive a British mission at Partisan Supreme Headquarters (SHQ) and requested the RAF bomb Axis airfields and garrisons surrounding his troops.
Around the same time, Jones went to Slovenia to focus on sabotaging the Ljubljana-Trieste railway, a strategic line of great importance for the Italian front which offered many good targets in shape of bridges and viaducts.