'Scullion I' was a British special forces attack by the Special Operations Executive on the shale oil refinery at Les Télots, which manufactured synthetic fuel, in German-occupied France (18/22 April 1943)

Led by Lieutenant Hugh Dormer, the team was picked for its toughness rather than flair, and otherwise comprised the Belgian Eugène Levene, the Mauritian Georges Larcher, Lieutenant George Demand, the SOE veteran Jack Hayes, and William Barry Knight. On the night of 18/19 April the party boarded a Handley Page Halifax bomber which departed the RAF base at Tempsford in Hertfordshire, and parachuted into a valley just to the west of the village of Barnay, 6.25 miles (10 km) to the north of the refinery. Almost immediately things began to go wrong for the party. Larcher and Levene were injured as they landed, and Dormer had no choice but to send them prematurely to Paris to join the escape line, while the rest of the men established a camp in the nearby woods. There followed a delay of several days as Dormer scouted the installation and planned the attack: the men had no shelter from the incessant rain, and their meagre rations amounted to a few cans of corned beef. On the evening of 22 April the party prepared its explosives and approached the target, round which the Germans had posted no guards, but was then dismayed to find that the police had secured the entire area.

The only conclusion was that the presence of the 'Scullion I' party had somehow been detected, and an attack on Les Télots was now impossible. Reluctantly Dormer called off the mission and began thinking of the long trip home. Reaching Paris, the men were passed down through France in pairs by the very capable 'Vic' escape line. Dormer.s trek across the Pyrenees mountains was arduous. It was common for Special Operations Executive agents arriving in Spain to be picked up by the civil police and imprisoned, but Dormer and his team were fortunate to reach the safety of the British consulate at Barcelona. From there he was passed on to Madrid and Lisbon, and eventually made it back to England. Demand, Larcher and Levene also returned. Hayes was careless and landed himself in a Seville prison.

Having ignored warnings not to enter restaurants and cafés, Knight had been arrested by the Gestapo in Lyon but later returned to England in July, claiming to have escaped his captors by jumping from a train bound for Paris. M.I.5 was immediately suspicious, undertook an investigation into Knight’s conduct, and arrived at the conclusion that Knight had given away the address of one of the 'Vic' line’s safe houses in Paris, but nothing more could be proved against him, though he was later dismissed from the SOE.