Canadian Brigadier-General Jacques Dextraze was sent to the Congo in 1963, to serve as mission Chief of Staff, effectively deputy to the mission's military commander. The military component headquarters, coordinated by Dextraze, was in the process of planning the mission's withdrawal in early 1964 as the Simba rebellion loomed. Dextraze launched a small-scale operation during Pierre Mulele's Kwilu Province uprising of January 1964 in order to save at least some of the threatened aid workers and missionaries under attack from the "jeunesse".