Virginia Hall: Secret Agent

Virginia Hall, one of the greatest secret agents of World War II was born 117 years ago this week on April 6, 1906.

Virginia Hall wanted to be a diplomat for the United States in the 1930s, but she was rebuffed by the State Department at least four times over the next decade, because she was a woman, an amputee and young. Desperate to play a role in fighting the rise of fascism in Europe and determined to make a difference, a chance encounter with a British agent led her into a career as one of the greatest spies for the Allies. By the end of World War II, “the limping lady,” had become one of the Nazis’ most hunted enemies.

Virginia Hall always had an independent streak as a child. She liked to hunt, ride horses bareback and be adventurous. In school, she was class president and editor in chief. Her classmates said she was the “most original” among them, but never would they have voted her “most likely to be a spy.”

Hall was born into a wealthy family in Baltimore and her mother, herself a socialite, had similar plans for her only daughter. By 19, Virginia was engaged and, on her way to following in her mother’s footsteps. But she broke off the engagement when she found out her fiancé was unfaithful, and she realized she wanted to meet “interesting” people by traveling the world as an ambassador.

Bored at college, after one year at Radcliffe and another at Barnard, she convinced her parents to send her to Europe to finish her education. In Paris and Vienna, she studied politics, French, journalism and economics. By the time she graduated in 1929, she was fluent in five languages and immersed in European culture and politics. She considered France her “second country,” and was troubled that the growing popularity of Adolf Hitler and fascism would threaten all the freedoms she had enjoyed there.

The fall after she returned home, the stock market crashed, wiping out her family’s fortunes. Hall had already been accepted to graduate school at George Washington University. As she pursued her dream of becoming a professional diplomat, she decided to take the entrance exam at the State Department. When she was turned down, she was not aware that of the 1,500 officers in the service, only six were women. The Foreign Service clearly was not a place where women were welcome, and it would be the first of several rejections by the agency.

In January 1931, Hall’s father died of a massive heart attack, creating the prospect of real poverty for her mother, brother and herself. Not content to continue her studies, Hall landed a clerical job at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, where she lasted almost two years before moving onto a similar post in Smyrna, Turkey.

While on a hunting trip there, her gun misfired as she was climbing over a fence, lodging a bullet in her left foot. The wound became infected with gangrene and her leg had to be amputated below the knee. Recovery was painful and long and Hall had to learn to walk with a wooden prosthetic, which she later named “Cuthbert.” It was a setback to her career ambitions she hadn’t anticipated. But as she rehabilitated at her family home in Maryland, Hall became more determined than ever to prove herself despite her disability.

By November 1934, she was back at work, assigned to the American consulate in Venice. For the next three years, she threw herself into her job, mostly dealing with visas, passports and customs but also standing in when needed, for her boss, the vice consul. By 1937, at age 30, with five years of stellar overseas experience, she was ready to pursue her dream of becoming an ambassador. But once again, Hall was denied. Decades before the Americans for Disability Act, an obscure rule within the agency barred amputees from serving in the diplomatic corps. Hall refused to take no for an answer and appealed the ruling, which went as high up as the Oval Office. Ironically, President Franklin Roosevelt, also disabled as a polio survivor, declined to intervene in her case.

Soon after, Hall was reassigned to Tallin, Estonia, an outpost that was far from the center of the action in Europe. She felt the job was probably a slap on the wrist for Hall’s appeal of the agency’s rejection. In March 1939, Hall quit her job, sensing that her career at the State Department was at a dead end. It was a perilous time to be in adrift in Europe. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 triggered Britain and France to declare war on Germany, throwing the continent into turmoil. But instead of returning to the safety of America, Hall moved to London and attempted to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army. She was turned down because she was not a British citizen.

She went back to Paris, where she volunteered with a French artillery unit. She was trained to drive an ambulance and rescue the wounded from the battlefields in the north. Hall worked as long as she could but when Paris fell to the Nazis in June 1940, she fled south to Spain and eventually back to London. For once, Hall’s timing was right. The British had just created the Special Operations Executive, a sabotage, guerilla warfare and spying unit. But the SOE had men in mind, not women. Hall had to overcome her gender and her nationality as an American before she was accepted into their rigorous training program. Surprisingly, her disability was not an issue. By September 1941, as Agent 3844, code name “Germaine,” Hall was in France. Her mission was huge: to coordinate the work of the ragtag group of French resistance units, recruit, train guerilla forces, spread propaganda and kill if necessary.

Over the next four years, until the war’s end, Hall led a double life. Posing as a special reporter for the New York Post, she was stationed in Lyon, a city that was the center of the French resistance. Working undercover, she became a master of disguises with multiple identities and names.

She befriended hundreds of ordinary citizens, recruiting them to become spies. Among them, was the owner of a brothel whose prostitutes gathered information about the Nazis’ plans from their clients. She also organized teams of Resistance fighters, providing them with safe homes and training them to sabotage key German supply routes. Hall also coordinated supply drops of food, arms and equipment and masterminded daring operations to free resistance fighters.

It was dangerous work and for the first time, being female and disabled was an advantage. Believing women and anyone who wasn’t able-bodied weren’t capable of being spies, the Germans never considered Hall as suspect. Eventually they realized “the limping lady,” was more than she seemed on the surface, and they offered a huge reward for information about her. Hunting her down became the obsession of Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, who plastered the city with posters calling her, “the enemy’s most dangerous spy: we must find and destroy her!”

After nearly fifteen months, in the winter of 1942, with the Gestapo hunting for her, Hall, with her wooden leg, hiked three painful days over the Pyrenees to escape to Spain. She survived, returning as a hero to Britain in time for Christmas.

Hall was far from quitting the spy life, but it was too dangerous to send her back to France. Instead, in May 1943, the SOE deployed her to Madrid, Spain. Officially she was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, but her undercover assignment to oversee safe houses was too tame for her liking.

By now, her success in the field had attracted the attention of the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American secret service. Now, overlooking past objections about her gender, disability and inexperience, they had no qualms about sending her back across German lines.

In March 1944, disguised as an old woman, “Diane” was back in France. By June 6th, D-Day, as Americans were landing in Normandy, Hall and her Resistance teams were inland, fighting and sabotaging German troops on the ground. By August, after weeks of brutal battle, the German southern command, comprised of 600 soldiers, surrendered to Hall and the Resistance in Le Chambon, liberating the region without any Allied military help. It was the beginning of the tide turning in the Allies’ favor and later, much of Hall’s intelligence gathering and operations were credited with laying the groundwork.

Le Chambon would turn out to be Hall’s last mission, the capstone to a wartime spy career that began as a gamble where the odds of a one-legged rookie surviving a mission were fifty – fifty at best. Virginia Hall’s remarkable heroism saved lives and contributed mightily to the Allies’ success. She was the only civilian woman to receive Distinguished Service Cross, the army’s second highest award. Britain made her an honorary member of the Order of the British Empire and France gave her the Croix de Guerre. For years the CIA kept her story classified and untold. Today the agency has a field agent training facility named for her and her story is in the CIA Museum.

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project