Women have always been deeply involved in the gathering and collection of intelligence for the United States. March is Women’s History Month. We will recognize a few of these women for their service with the help of the International Spy Museum in Washington.
Virginia Hall was a well-to-do young woman with dreams of serving in the diplomatic corps. Her parents could afford to send her to Radcliffe and Barnard, and then to allow her to study in Europe in the late 1920s. In 1931 she was able to secure a post at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.
Sadly, within a year, her dreams of becoming a diplomat were shattered. While hunting in Turkey, she seems to have accidentally shot herself in the leg. Treatment eventually included a partial amputation of the limb. The U.S. Foreign Service was firm. Diplomats must have all four limbs. And so her dream died.
After serving in clerical positions, she resigned from the State Department in 1939 and took up post-graduate studies at the American University in Washington. She found herself in Paris during the German invasion, and served with their Ambulance Corps until the fall of Paris. Making her way to London from Vichy France, she found herself in a social setting with an influential member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Shortly thereafter, completing training, she was sent back to Vichy by the British with a cover as a reporter for the New York Post.
For the next fifteen months, she actively managed the SOE’s work with the French Underground in Vichy and in occupied France. When the Germans moved in to Vichy, she escaped across the mountains to Spain. Working for the SOE in Spain did not suit her and she returned to London, and to a new service.
joining A Rag-Tag Band – the OSS
Bill Donovan was was running a rag-tag American outfit called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was engaged in efforts similar to the SOE. Virginia fit right in and after additional training, she was inserted into occupied France by a British motor torpedo boat. Her work in central France, gathering intelligence and training Resistance fighters, was integral to the success of the D-Day invasion and the allied attack on Germany.
Disguised as an elderly female farmhand, Hall organized sabotage operations, supported resistance groups as a radio operator and courier, mapped drop zones, and helped sabotage German military movements. She helped train three battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against German forces and kept up a stream of valuable reporting. Her work during this period is depicted in the painting, Les Marguerits Fleriront ce Soir, which hangs in the CIA’s Intelligence Art Gallery. – CIA
In 2007, a biography of Hall, titled “The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy” was reviewed in the unclassified portion of the CIA’s in-house publication, Studies in Intelligence. The review notes the obstacles that she had to overcome were far more than most. A wooden leg, after all, is hardly standard issue for intelligence officers. And, of course, the French were reluctant at first to listen to a woman.
A woman of privilege – she chose to serve
Virginia Hall spent her life in the clandestine service of the United States, retiring in 1966. Any recognition of her service was always muted at her request. Publicity would only threaten her intelligence work. Still, Bill Donovan was able to persuade Harry Truman to award this one-legged agent the military’s Distinguished Service Cross in a private ceremony in Sept. 1945. The British had awarded her the Order of the British Empire for her work with the SOE but she had refused the honor, fearing any publicity. In 2006, the award was finally made with Hall’s niece accepting it for her posthumously.
Virginia Hall was an educated, woman of privilege. Crippled in an accident, she could have sat out the war collecting tin and selling bonds. Instead, she chose country before self. She is just the type of American woman that we should tell our daughters and granddaughters about, and hold out as an example.
