2023-08-07 08:04:00
One morning in May 1942, the inhabitants of Lyon, in Nazi-occupied France, found the walls of the city “decorated” with the portrait – actually an elaborate identikit – of a woman.
The posters that reproduced her supposed face had been printed and pasted by order of the local Gestapo – in tune with the collaborationist Vichy government – as a desperate resource to catch a very unique spy. Beneath her portrait read: “This limping woman is one of the most dangerous agents of the Allies in France, and we must find her and destroy her.”
They called her “Germaine”, but her real name – known to no one in France and only two people in the British Special Operations Service (SOE) – was Virginia Hall.
By the time the Gestapo printed the posters with her identikit, she had already become a legend: she was the first female spy sent by the British to an occupied territory, she had set up a network of local agents that was a headache for the British. Nazis and set up a mobile radio team that sent information to London almost daily without detection.
In the following months and until the end of the war, “Germaine” would be the protagonist of other feats: she would break the siege in which they already believed her trapped, she would cross -with her wooden leg- the Pyrenees in the middle of winter to reach Spain and return to London only to return to France and help prepare the ground for D-Day.
She would also change aliases many times: “Marie Monin”, “Diane”, “Marie of Lyon”, “Camille” and even “Nicolas”.
Despite working for English espionage, Hall was not British but American and had become a spy almost by accident because her true vocation, that of being an American diplomat, had been frustrated for two reasons: her condition as a woman and the limp she suffered. it caused his prosthetic leg, which apparently was not well seen for the function.
a hunting accident
Born on April 6, 1906 in Baltimore, United States, Virginia Hall Goilott grew up knowing that by family mandate she was destined for great things and was groomed to achieve them. She studied at Radcliffe College, Harvard University’s women’s college; she at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University, and she did postgraduate studies at the American University in Washington DC, where she learned French, Italian and German. She traveled through Europe and studied at the School of Political Science in Paris, at the Konsularakademie in Vienna, and in Germany.
Upon completion of these graduate studies, she accepted a secretary position at the US Embassy in Warsaw and from there was transferred to Izmir, Turkey. It seemed the beginning of a promising diplomatic career, because Virginia Hall considered that secretary’s position as the first step towards the top of the foreign body of the United States.
However, in Turkey, an unfortunate event put an almost insurmountable obstacle ahead of him for his claims.
While on a hunting party in the Anatolian peninsula, he tripped and accidentally shot himself in the knee with his shotgun. Her wound was not serious in itself, but they took time to treat her, her leg became gangrenous and they had to amputate it to save her life.
Since then, he has used an orthopedic prosthesis –the best quality available at the time– that allowed him to walk but did not prevent him from doing so with a slight limp. Virginia called that leg of hers “Cuthbert” and spoke of it as if it were a person.
The curse of being a woman
That accident changed his life. If being a woman was already an obstacle to advancing in a diplomatic career, disability became a real impediment. The State Department rejected her admission to the diplomatic service. She might still be a trusted administrative employee, but not advance beyond that.
A recent investigation into Hall’s life made it clear, however, that the leg was an excuse used by the State Department to prevent him from pursuing a diplomatic career.
In A Woman of No Importance, a biography of Hall published in 2020, historian Sonia Purnell argues that “being a woman was an obstacle in her career, because she didn’t behave as women were supposed to back then, and her courage and their ambition made many men feel threatened.”
And he provides proof: “Apparently, she was rejected because one of her legs had been amputated, but I know of at least one other man who had lost both legs in the First World War and who, at exactly the same time, had no problem joining” to the US diplomatic service.
Go ahead with “Cuthbert”
International Spy Museum
Virginia Hall Document
After the rejection, Hall decided to leave her position as administrative secretary and seek more interesting destinations. For months she perfected her gait with “Cuthbert” until she managed to make her limp almost unnoticed – she might even run with some difficulty – and she, too, learned to ride a bicycle using her wooden leg.
By then, fascism and Nazism were advancing in Europe and Hall decided to do his part to stop them. She traveled to France and joined the ambulance service as a volunteer, but the advance of the German troops was already unstoppable. When France capitulated, she escaped by bicycle to the coast and was able to board one of the last ferries to go to Britain.
His arrival in London seemed at first a step backwards in his life. Without resources, she went to the United States Embassy and managed – given her background in Warsaw and Izmir – to be hired once more as a secretary.
However, that apparent setback opened a door that would change his life forever. In one of the many social events of the diplomatic corps, she met a woman as neglected as she was -in this case also because of her gender and because of her status as a foreigner in London-, but with enough power to open a new door for her: that of the espionage world.
Vera Atkins, spy trainer
The woman introduced herself as Vera Atkins, but her real name was Vera May Rosenberg, born in Romania in 1908, the daughter of the British citizen Hilda Atkins and the German citizen – of Jewish origin – Max Rosenberg.
Vera had studied French at the Sorbonne until the German invasion of France brought her to London as well. Due to family contacts, she was able to enter Section F, or French Section, of the Special Operations Directorate (SOE), a secret organization created by Winston Churchill, despite being a foreigner.
On paper, there Vera Atkins was the secretary of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who quickly discovered her skills as an organizer and -despite the fact that because of her foreign status she continued with the position of secretary- made her his personal assistant, personally trained her in the Intelligence job and gave him the task of recruiting women to fulfill missions behind enemy lines as messengers and radio operators.
When Vera Atkins met Virginia Hall, she knew she had discovered a real piece of gold for British intelligence. Hall spoke German, Italian and French very well, but, above all, his North American English -when the United States had not yet entered the war- allowed him to perfectly embody the coverage character he was looking for: that of a correspondent for a American newspaper in occupied France. Her limp, in addition to her, instead of playing once morest her, reinforced her cover by showing her as “harmless”.
Atkins and Colonel Buckmaster personally took care of training Virginia as a spy and radio operator, weapons handling, and explosives planting.
His last training was as a skydiver. By early 1941 she was ready for her first mission.
“Germaine” in France
With false identity papers and press credentials, Virgina Hall parachuted into occupied France, near Lyon, where a contact from the French Resistance was waiting for her.
Her main objective was to guarantee and organize the safe repatriation – through clandestine flights – of the British pilots whose planes had been shot down over French soil and to provide support to other SOE agents, who knew her only by her code name, “Germaine”. .
But her coverage as a journalist and her disability that showed her as harmless also allowed her to obtain information even from enemy sources, interviewing senior military commanders in Lyon.
With this coverage, he was also able to put together a network of local agents under the name “Heckler”, with which he obtained safe houses to operate and who he also trained for sabotage operations with explosives.
For more than a year she was able to work without being discovered, but in the middle of 1942 she had to leave her role as a foreign correspondent because that coverage no longer resisted. Rumors regarding the existence of a “lame spy” working with the Resistance had reached the ears of the Gestapo and their boss, Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”.
He continued working in complete secrecy.
Escape through the Pyrenees
By November 1942, it was practically cornered. To strengthen the local Gestapo, the Third Reich had sent an important figure, Klaus Barbie, who personally tortured prisoners and, shortly following arriving, earned the name “Butcher of Lyon”. Barbie had managed to infiltrate an agent into the Resistance and the agents of Hall’s network began to fall one following another. The agent was called Abbe Ackuin, he used the code name “Bishop” (“Bishop”, in English), and his main mission was to detect and capture the now legendary “lame lady”.
He was ordered by the British Special Operations Service to leave Lyon and try to return to London. She was also told that it was impossible to get her out of it on a clandestine flight, since the infiltration of the Resistance made it impossible, and that she must find a way out of it by her own means.
Virginia fled from Lyon on a bicycle and managed to cross the fence that had been set up to capture her. Thanks to her most trusted local contacts, she was able to organize her departure from France by a route that seemed impossible for a woman with her disability: crossing the Pyrenees with the help of a guide.
However, he succeeded, although reaching Spanish territory did not end his difficulties. She was stopped near the border by the Civil Guard for entering the country without a visa and imprisoned in Figueres for six weeks.
Her status as a US citizen saved her from being returned to France and handed over to the Nazis until, finally, pressure from the US Embassy on Francisco Franco led to her being released and able to travel to England.
His career as a spy in enemy territory seemed over.
Preparing for “D-Day”
In the second half of 1943, Vera Atkins and Colonel Buckmaster asked him to accept a new mission despite the risks. When she asked them what it was regarding, they only told her that she would find out step by step. They mightn’t tell him it was regarding supporting a landing mission. Virginia Hall accepted.
This time, she launched herself onto French territory together with other women from the SOE – Diana Rowden, Violette Szabo and Lilian Rolfe – who knew as much as she did regarding their mission.
In France, Virginia adopted a completely different coverage than before. She was no longer an American journalist but an elderly French woman named Marcelle Montagne, who worked in the small town of Crozant, barely a dot on the map in the center of the country, on the farm of a French peasant tending cows and making cheese.
From there he collected information on the movements of the German troops and coordinated sabotage actions with the Resistance to prevent their advance.
This coverage did not last long, the Nazis captured and tortured a dozen French peasants suspected of belonging to the Resistance and one of them revealed the existence of the English agent disguised as an old woman.
“The wolves are at the door,” Virginia transmitted for the last time from Crozant’s farm and fled to Cosne, where she reconnected and received a new mission; to organize operational groups of French resistance fighters that were in charge of blowing up railway lines, bridges, routes and installations of the German army to delay their advance towards Normandy and resist the Allied landing.
Their participation was considered “vital” by Allied intelligence in the steps that remained to be taken for the “D-Day” complex, whose axis required a high degree of secrecy because the exact place of the landing in Normandy might not reach the ears of the Wehrmatch, which the resistance had to harass to reduce the capacity of the forces engaged in facing the Anglo-American legion that would mean a hard blow to Hitler, who was already retreating on the eastern front.
The first woman in the CIA
With the liberation of France, Virginia Hall was sent to Paris to complete her last missions until her return to London, where she was greeted as a “war heroine” and received various decorations.
Shortly following, the United States government – the same one that had closed the doors of a diplomatic career to her – distinguished her with an offer that she might not and did not want to refuse: to be the first woman to join the brand new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). .
Her friend, recruiter and mentor Vera Atkins also got belated recognition for her wartime work: she was granted the British citizenship she had been denied for years and given the long-deserved rank of Intelligence officer.
Virginia Hall retired from the CIA and died on July 8, 1982, wrapped in the halo of a legend of the Intelligence services. So much so that, in 2019, the International Spy Museum, in Washington, set up a permanent exhibition on “the lame spy”, where many of her belongings can be seen, the false identification she used as an American correspondent in France and one of the suitcases with radio transmitter that he used in his missions.
His life was also told – with many fictional licences – that same year in the film A Call to Spy, starring Sarah Megan Thomas as Hall, Stana Katic as Atkins and Linus Roache as Colonel Buckmaster.
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