Virginia Hall
Virginia Hall Goillot DSC, Croix de Guerre, , code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services in France during World War II.
The objective of SOE and OSS was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE and OSS agents in France allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. After World War II, Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hall was the first female SOE agent to take up residence in France, arriving in Vichy France in August 1941. She created the Heckler network in Lyon. Over the next 15 months, she "became an expert at support operations – organizing resistance movements; supplying agents with money, weapons, and supplies; helping downed airmen to escape; offering safe houses and medical assistance to wounded agents and pilots." She fled France in November 1942 to avoid capture by the Germans.
Hall returned to France in March 1944 as a wireless operator for the OSS in the Saint network. Working in territory still occupied by the German army and mostly without help from other OSS agents, she supplied arms, training, and direction to French resistance groups, called Maquisards, especially in Haute-Loire, where the Maquis cleared the department of German soldiers before the American army arrived in September 1944.
The Germans gave her the nickname Artemis, and the Gestapo reportedly considered her "the most dangerous of all Allied spies." Having lost part of her left leg after a hunting accident, Hall used a prosthesis she named "Cuthbert." She was also known as "The Limping Lady" by the Germans and as "Marie of Lyon" by many of the SOE agents she helped.
Early life
Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 6, 1906, to Edwin "Ned" Lee Hall and his wife, Barbara Virginia Hammel. Ned Hall's father, John W. Hall, had stowed away on his father's clipper ship at the age of nine, and later became a wealthy businessman. She had a brother, John, four years her senior. Virginia was close to her family members, who affectionately nicknamed her "Dindy".In 1912, Hall began attending Roland Park Country School, where during her high school years, she became editor-in-chief of her school's yearbook, Quid Nunc; and became class president in her senior year. After graduating, she attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and Barnard College of Columbia University, where she studied French, Italian, and German. She also attended George Washington University, where she studied French and Economics. She wanted to finish her studies in Europe, so she traveled the continent and studied in France, Germany, and Austria. In 1931, she landed an appointment as a Consular Service clerk at the Embassy of the United States, Warsaw, Poland.
A few months later she transferred to Smyrna, Turkey. In 1933, she tripped on a fence while hunting birds and accidentally shot herself in the left foot. After the wound turned gangrenous, her leg was amputated below the knee and replaced with a wooden appendage that she named "Cuthbert". She continued her work with the State Department as a consular clerk in Venice and in Tallinn, Estonia.
Hall made several attempts to become a diplomat with the United States Foreign Service, but women were rarely hired. In 1937, she was turned down because of an obscure State Department rule against hiring people with disabilities as diplomats. An appeal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unheeded. She resigned from the Department of State in March 1939, still a consular clerk.
World War II
Early in World War II in February 1940, Hall became an ambulance driver for the French army. After the defeat of France in June 1940, she made her way to Spain where, by chance, she met a British intelligence officer named George Bellows. Bellows was impressed with her and gave her the telephone number of a "friend" who might be able to help her find employment in England. That friend was Nicolas Bodington, who worked for the new Special Operations Executive.Special Operations Executive
Hall joined the SOE in April 1941 and after training arrived in Vichy France, unoccupied by Germany and nominally independent at that time, on August 23, 1941. She was the second female agent to be sent to France by SOE's F Section, and the first to remain there for a lengthy time. Hall's cover was as a reporter for the New York Post; this gave her license to interview people, gather information, and file stories filled with details useful to military planners. She based herself in Lyon. She turned away from her "chic Parisian wardrobe" to become inconspicuous and often quickly changed her appearance through make-up and disguise.Hall was a pioneer as a World War II secret agent and had to learn on her own the "exacting tasks of being available, arranging contacts, recommending who to bribe and where to hide, soothing the jagged nerves of agents on the run and supervising the distribution of wireless sets." The network of SOE agents she founded was named Heckler. Among her recruits were gynecologist Jean Rousset and Germaine Guérin, the owner of a prominent brothel in Lyon. Guérin made several safehouses available to Hall and passed along tidbits of information she and her female employees heard from German officers visiting the brothel.
The official historian of the SOE, M. R. D. Foot, said that the motto of every successful secret agent was "dubito, ergo sum". Hall's lengthy tenure in France without being captured illustrates her caution. In October 1941, she sensed danger and declined to attend a meeting of SOE agents in Marseille which the French police raided, capturing a dozen agents. That debacle left Hall among the few SOE agents still at large in France and the only one with a means of transmitting information to London. George Whittinghill, an American diplomat in Lyon, allowed her to smuggle reports and letters to London in the diplomatic pouch.
The winter of 1941–42 was miserable for Hall. In a letter, she said that if SOE would send her a piece of soap she would be "both very happy and much cleaner." In the absence of an SOE wireless operator, her access to the American diplomatic pouch was the only means the few agents in France had of communicating with London. She continued building contacts in southern France. She helped SOE agents Peter Churchill and Benjamin Cowburn in their brief missions and earned high compliments from both. When an SOE agent named Georges Duboudin was sent to Lyon, she judged him amateurish and lax in security, and therefore eschewed contact and refused to introduce him to her contacts. When SOE headquarters directed that Duboudin should supervise her, she told SOE to "lay off." She worked as little as possible with Philippe de Vomécourt, who, although an authentic French Resistance leader, was lax in security and grandiose in his ambitions.
In August 1942, SOE agent Richard Heslop met with her and described her as a "girl" who lived in a gloomy apartment. When a suspicious Heslop demanded to know who "Cuthbert" was, she showed him by banging her wooden foot against a table leg producing a hollow sound. He relied on her to facilitate communications with other agents.
Another task Hall took on was helping British airmen who'd been shot down or crashed over Europe to escape and return to England. Downed airmen who found their way to Lyon were told to go to the American Consulate and say they were a "friend of Olivier." "Olivier" was Hall and she, with the help of brothel-owner Guérin and other friends, hid, fed, and helped dozens of airmen escape France to neutral Spain and hence back to England.
The French nicknamed her "la dame qui boite" and the Germans put "the limping lady" on their most wanted list.
The jailbreak
Hall learned that the 12 agents arrested by the French police in October 1941 were incarcerated at Mauzac prison near Bergerac. Wireless operator Georges Bégué smuggled the prisoners' letters to Hall and she recruited Gaby Bloch, wife of the prisoner Jean-Pierre Bloch, to plan an escape. Bloch visited the prison frequently to bring food and other items to her husband, including tins of sardines. The sardine tins and the tools she smuggled in enabled Bégué to make a key to the door of the barracks where the prisoners were kept. Hall, too well known to visit the prison, assembled safe houses, vehicles and helpers. A priest smuggled a radio in to Bégué, and he began transmitting to London from within the prison.The prisoners escaped on July 15, 1942, and, after hiding in the woods during an intense manhunt, met up with Hall in Lyon by August 11. From there, they were smuggled to Spain and thence back to England. SOE historian Foot called the escape "one of the war's most useful operations of its kind." Several of the escapees returned later to France and became leaders of SOE networks.
Germany retaliates
The Germans were furious about the escape from Mauzac prison and the laxity of the French police in allowing the escape. The Gestapo flooded Vichy, France, with 500 agents, and the Abwehr also stepped up operations to infiltrate and destroy the fledgling French Resistance and the SOE networks. The Germans focused on Lyon, the center of the resistance. Hall had counted on contacts she had with the French police to protect her, but, under pressure from the Germans, her police contacts were no longer reliable.In May 1942, Hall had agreed to have messages from the Gloria Network, a French-run resistance movement based in Paris, transmitted to SOE in London. Gloria was infiltrated in August by Robert Alesch, a Roman Catholic priest and agent of the Abwehr, which captured its leaders. Alesch also made contact with Hall in August, claiming to be an agent of Gloria and offering intelligence of apparently high value. She had doubts about Alesch, especially when she learned that Gloria had been destroyed, but was persuaded of his bona fides, as was the London headquarters of SOE. Alesch penetrated Hall's network of contacts, leading to the capture of wireless operators and the sending of false messages to London in her name.