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sff_corgi_ljPosthumous Honors for a Trailblazing Female Spy
BALTIMORE, Dec. 10 (AP) — In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of “the woman with a limp.”
Virginia Hall, left, an Allied spy in World War II, receiving a distinguished service medal in 1945.
“She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her,” the posters said.
The woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier, after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey.
The injury derailed Ms. Hall’s dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department would not hire amputees, but it did not prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.
On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors plan to honor Ms. Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony at the home of the French ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, in Washington.
Sir David Manning, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, plans to present a certificate signed by King George VI to Ms. Hall’s niece, Lorna Catling. Ms. Hall should have received the document in 1943, when she was made a member of the Order of the British Empire.
“I think it was ironic that the State Department turned her down because she was an amputee, and here she went on and did all this other stuff,” said Ms. Catling, who lives in Baltimore. She said she did not learn many of the details of her aunt’s espionage career until after her death.
Ms. Hall, who was fluent in French, was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and she decamped for London, where she was recruited by the secret British paramilitary service, the Special Operations Executive, becoming its first female field operative.
She was sent to Lyon, becoming “the heartbeat” of the local French Resistance, said Judith L. Pearson, whose biography of Ms. Hall, “Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s First Female Spy,” was published last year.
“Any agent from London came through her flat,” Ms. Pearson said. “She coordinated them with Resistance members. Most agents only stayed about three months in the field. She stayed 15 months.”
After the Gestapo’s wanted posters made her situation untenable, she fled through the Pyrenees into Spain.
During the journey, she sent a radio message to London, reporting that “Cuthbert,” her nickname for her prosthetic leg, was giving her trouble. Her commanders did not understand the reference, and their reply suggested the gravity of Ms. Hall’s circumstances and her value to the Allied cause: “If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him.”
Back in London, she joined the American Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and returned to France in 1944, disguised as an elderly peasant.
She located parachute drop zones where money and weapons could be passed to Resistance fighters and later coordinated guerrilla warfare. Her teams destroyed bridges, derailed freight trains and killed scores of German soldiers.
“I would certainly put her name in the pantheon of people who distinguished themselves in intelligence,” said Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, which has an exhibit devoted to Ms. Hall.
Ms. Hall maintained her cloak of secrecy after the war. The certificate that went with her Order of the British Empire honor sat in a vault for more than 50 years because the British government was unable to track her down.
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