They Needed Female Couriers
At the time, the military was desperate for female couriers because they tended to generate much less suspicion than men. And if you add the appeal of native-born Britons who could speak French without an accent,” Odette was a golden ticket and deemed instrumental in the war effort.
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A little while after she sent in her letters, to which she thought headed to the right place, Odette heard from Captain Selwyn Jepson, who told her that he wanted to recruit her to the “F [France] Section of SOE — Special Operations Executive — a new sabotage outfit that Prime Minister Winston Churchill had tasked to ‘set Europe ablaze.’ ” As you can imagine, the mother of three and a wife to a husband in the service, she was not ready for this kind of offer.