Local leaders were sympathetic to the resistance and the nearest Germans to the village were in the city of Agen, distant. Starr posed as a retired Belgian mining engineer who had made a fortune in the Congo. From Castelnau, Starr began to build up a local resistance movement, called by SOE the Wheelwright Network (or Circuit). Starr was very conscious of security, communicating with his contacts only through couriers or the spoken word, never putting words to paper, and building up his network one trusted associate at a time. In January 1943, the SOE in London parachuted weapons and explosives into Castelnau. They were hidden in a medieval dungeon beneath the church in the village. Starr's ability to call on the United Kingdom to provide weapons made him a power among the nascent rural resistance organisations called maquis (whose members were called maquisards). Also, in January 1943, Starr borrowed a wireless operator from another network to facilitate communication with SOE in London. These initial successes aside, in Spring 1943, seemingly forgotten by SOE headquarters in London, Starr was suffering from a skin disease probably caused by stress and contemplating failure and the abandonment of his mission. He sent Denise Bloch, an SOE agent on the run from another part of France, to Spain and hence to England with a written report (violating his own rule against written communication) requesting money and a wireless operator of his own. London's immediate answer was to send an aeroplane to hover over Castelnau to communicate with Starr by short-range S-Phone to determine that he was still alive. Starr affirmed his existence by greeting the pilot with a string of expletives and finally got attention from London. It was soon "raining containers" full of arms and equipment for the maquis. Starr's SOE team would expand to include explosives expert , wireless operator Yvonne Cormeau, and courier Anne-Marie Walters. All did not go smoothly, however, in the fractious world of the French Resistance. Starr had setbacks, rivals and enemies, some of whom he managed to marginalise. The Germans arrested several of his trusted associates. Starr was accused of being a "warlord," a law unto himself, independent of the French Resistance to the German occupation. M.R.D Foot said that the motto of every successful secret agent was ""dubito, ergo sum"" ("I doubt, therefore I survive.") and Starr is on his short list of agents who survived by paying careful attention to security.