Profiles in Character #26 - Virginia Hall Defies Limits to Help Defeat Hitler
No memoir, no interviews and no public speaking tour heralded the remarkable achievements of Virginia Hall, who documented her life the way she lived it – by her deeds and mostly in secret. Born in Baltimore in 1906, she studied at Radcliffe and Barnard and gained fluency in French, German and Italian. She wanted to join the Foreign Service at a time when few women were accepted, so she had to work as a Consular Service clerk in Warsaw, Poland, starting in 1931. At 27, a hunting accident led to the loss of part of her leg. In 1937, her application to the Foreign Service was turned down because of her need for a wooden prosthesis, despite her appeal that if President Roosevelt could serve despite his disability, why couldn’t she? She left the State Department in 1939 and returned to the United States. Determined to serve, she went to Paris in 1940 after joining the French Army’s Ambulance Service.
When Germany invaded France, she made her way to England, where she volunteered for its espionage unit, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). For the remainder of the war Hall would play a critical role in European resistance movements. Sent to nominally independent Vichy France in August 1941, she worked undercover as a reporter for the New York Post. As the first female agent living in France, she created a network of agents and funneled money and agents into occupied territories. She orchestrated the escape of 12 imprisoned agents in July 1942 and was dubbed “the limping lady” by the Nazis. Wanted posters, part of the effort by Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie to capture her, did not dissuade Hall. Hearing just in time of a plan to attack her cell of agents, she fled to Spain in November 1942, walking to safety over a 50-mile, 7,500 foot pass across the Pyrenees in just two days. Informing her SOE handlers that “Cuthbert” might slow her escape, she was told to “eliminate him” if necessary. “Cuthbert,” they did not know, was the name she had given to her wooden leg.
From Spain she made her way to London and, after working with the SOE for another year, joined the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. She asked to be sent back to occupied France, where she returned in March 1944 using the code name “Diane” to map out safe zones for supply drops, recruit French men and women to operate safe houses, train Resistance fighters, supply weapons and help escaped prisoners of war. When needed, she worked in disguise, one time making her hair gray and filing down her teeth to look like an old milkmaid as she sold cheese to German soldiers.
Tasked with supporting the Maquis, the French Resistance who were planning sabotage to assist with the Normandy invasion, she bristled at their reluctance to take direction. She complained to OSS headquarters that “you send people out ostensibly to work with me and for me, but you do not give me the necessary authority.” When she promised the Maquis money and arms, but only if they took orders from her, they relented.
After she and her OSS agent Paul Golliot, whom she would marry in 1950, left France they organized anti-Nazi resistance in Austria until nearly the war’s end. Hall left the OSS in 1947 and joined the CIA, one of the first women hired by that new agency. Despite her accomplishments, she was passed over for work assignments, promotions and awards even when they were recommended by her immediate superiors. She resigned in 1948 but came back in 1950. Before leaving at the mandatory retirement age of 60, she returned again to France to head secret paramilitary planning in case of a Soviet attack. Hall was the first woman operations officer in the covert action arm of the CIA.
In a secret CIA report, the agency eventually acknowledged her colleagues “felt she had been sidelined - shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues, who felt threatened by her.” She did not go totally unrecognized, however. For her work with the SOE, she was made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1943 and she received the Croix de Guerre from France.
In 1945 President Harry Truman awarded her the Distinguished Service Cross. “Miss Hall,” he said “displayed rare courage, perseverance and ingenuity; her efforts contributed materially to the successful operations of the Resistance Forces in support of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the liberation of France.” Truman had wanted a public ceremony, but Hall demurred, saying that she was “still operational and most anxious to get busy.”
Part of that busy work involved a search for agents left behind when she fled France in 1942 and successfully petitioning France and the U.S. to recognize and compensate them. For that she sought no recognition either. It was for her, no doubt, a debt she owed to those who sacrificed so much.
Photo Credit: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
