Virginia Hall

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Virginia Hall receiving the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945

Virginia Hall MBE DSC (April 6, 1906 - July 14, 1982) was an American spy during World War II.

She was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended the best schools and colleges, but wanted to finish her studies in Europe. With help from her parents, she traveled the Continent and studied in France, Germany, and Austria, finally landing an appointment as a Consular Service clerk at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland in 1931. Hall hoped to join the Foreign Service, but suffered a terrible setback two years later when she lost her lower left leg in a hunting accident. The injury foreclosed whatever chance she might have had for a diplomatic career, and she resigned from the Department of State in 1939.

The coming of war that year found Hall in Paris. She joined the Ambulance Service before the fall of France and ended up in Vichy-controlled territory when the fighting stopped in the summer of 1940. Hall made her way to London and volunteered for Britain’s newly formed Special Operations Executive, which sent her back to Vichy in August 1941. She spent the next 15 months there, helping to coordinate the activities of the French Underground in Vichy and the occupied zone of France. When the Germans suddenly seized all of France in November 1942, Hall barely escaped to Spain.^[1]

Journeying back to London (after working for SOE for a time in Madrid), in July 1943 she was quietly made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. The British had wanted to recognize her contribution with a higher honor but were afraid it might compromise her identity as she was then still active as an operative.

Virginia Hall joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Special Operations Branch in March 1944 and asked to return to occupied France. She hardly needed training in clandestine work behind enemy lines, and OSS promptly granted her request and landed her from a British PT boat in Brittany (her artificial leg kept her from parachuting in). Code named "Diane," she eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France. She mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England, found safe houses, and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the Allied Forces landed at Normandy. Hall helped train three battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans and kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops overtook her small band in September.

For her efforts in France, General William Joseph Donovan in September 1945 personally awarded Virginia Hall a Distinguished Service Cross — the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II.

In 1950, she married OSS agent Paul Goillot. In 1951, she joined the Central Intelligence Agency working as an intelligence analyst on French parliamentary affairs. She retired in 1966 to a farm in Barnesville, Maryland.

Virginia Hall Goillot died at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, MD in 1982.

Her story was told in "The Wolves at the Door : The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy" by Judith L. Pearson (2005) The Lyons Press, ISBN 1-59228-762-X

[edit] Notes

^ Rather whimsically, her artificial foot had its own codename, "Cuthbert". Before making her escape, she signalled to SOE that she hoped Cuthbert would not give trouble on the way. SOE replied, "If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him".