MISSION “PATHFINDER”
On 8 February 1944, while the future teams were beginning their training, the very first missions, codenamed “Pathfinder” (scout), consisted of four officers parachuted into occupied France. Their real names were: Jeannette Guyot, Marcel Saubestre, Georges Lassale and Pierre Binet.
Their objective: to locate future drop zones and landing sites for subsequent missions, establish contacts, and set up caches for equipment, etc. Their methodical and relentless work was unquestionably a brilliant success: in the six months that followed, they found and organised twenty-two parachute drop sites that were used—some of them twice. They also identified nearly one hundred “safe houses” to shelter parachuted Sussex agents.
Arriving in Paris with Georges Lassale, the team’s radio operator, Jeannette decided to go to her cousin Madame Kiehl, in the Faubourg Montmartre district, at the “Café de l’Électricité”, where they were very warmly welcomed. After a few days, Jeannette was housed by an acquaintance whose husband was a prisoner of war, Madame Andrée Goubillon. She ran a café at 8 rue Tournefort in Paris. This café was later renamed at the Liberation as the “Café des Sussex”. Madame Goubillon, interviewed shortly before her death (October 1988), said of Jeannette:
I knew what kind of work she had come to do, and when she asked me whether I was ready to help her, I said yes without the slightest hesitation. Even though the café was next to a Gestapo office, I knew what I wanted to do; I wasn’t afraid.
(1) BBC interview conducted by Patricia CLEVELAND-PECK.
That is how the dangerous and difficult work of sheltering and hiding certain Sussex teams began. Madame Goubillon remembered that, to introduce themselves, agents entering her café for the first time had to say: “Hello Auntie, how is Uncle?” At the same time, they would show a photo of a baby known as Mic-Mic, in fact Colonel Rémy’s youngest son.