Stichman, a Canadian of Yugoslav origin, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force before being recruited by SIS in Canada in 1943. He travelled to the Middle East in the summer of 1943 and was then assigned to Owen Reed's mission, to work as Reed's interpreter. He was duly dropped into Croatia with Reed and Paddy Ryan. His subsequent activities are something of a mystery. In January Reed reported that Stichman had been temporarily attached to a Partisan unit, but he later recalled that Stichman 'joined the Partisans, which he'd been determined to do from the outset'.
Bill Stuart’s full surname was Yull-Stuart: he was the son of Charles and Hedwig Yull-Stuart (née Baroness Henneberg). Although the circumstances of his recruitment into SIS are unclear, he had apparently spent much of his life in Yugoslavia and was one of the very few British SIS officers who spoke fluent Serbo-Croat. He became James Millar’s assistant in Zagreb in 1940, and escaped with him to surrender to the Italians in 1941, afterwards joining ISLD’s Yugoslavia section in Cairo. As all ISLD staff wore military uniform he was given a nominal commission in the Intelligence Corps. By the spring of 1942 he had become convinced that the communist Partisans were responsible for most resistance activity in Yugoslavia, and he was sent to North America later that year to help recruit émigré Yugoslav left-wingers for infiltration to the Partisans.
The mission dropped into the middle of Operation Schwarz, a German offensive against the Partisans, and disaster struck when Stuart was killed in an air raid on 9 June. Deakin later described how enemy planes caught their party at dawn in glades of birch trees just below the summit of Mt Ozren. ‘A sinister game was imposed upon those of us caught on the heights. The planes, in low dives, criss-crossed the wood in straight patterns, leaving in each run a neat path of bombs … On such a bombing run, a group of us was cornered. I had just time to shout to Stuart: “Take cover; they are using explosive bullets.” As the explosions darted through the trees, we scattered in the tight space around us: Bill Stuart and a group of officers in one direction; Tito, the commander of his Escort Battalion, and myself in another. The remaining members of the British mission and the Yugoslav Staff dispersed amid the trees. As the last bomb of one stick blew up a few feet from us, Tito, several of his men, and myself found ourselves heaped in a shallow depression in the ground … Stuart was out of sight. He had sought, standing upright, the protection of a stout beech tree, but had been killed by a bomb splinter or bullet in the head.’ The location of Stuart’s grave is not recorded, but he is commemorated on the Athens Memorial. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Debt of Honour Register states that Stuart served with the Intelligence Corps but does not mention SIS.