CIA Files: WWII Heroine Virginia Hall Remembered

The Gestapo put the name and face of Virginia Hall on a "Wanted" poster. The United States gave her the Distinguished Service Cross (DSS) "...for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against the enemy.” She was the only woman awarded the DSS during WWII.

Finally there is a new book of her life and a renewed interest in her Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) career, The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson. Most of my information comes from an excellent review by Hayden B. Peake in the "unclassified" case studies of the CIA.

This is the quintessential female hero and the kind of CIA agent — as she became after the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — that the Agency needs to show off in these years following 9/11 and the legacy of too many scandals through the last half of the century.

In the years after the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the archives of US and British intelligence services became more accessible, the history of this remarkable woman began to be more widely known and the facts (as well as the legends) began to be separated. Ms. Pearson's biography further clarifies and illuminates the facts. The facts are at least good enough to be fiction. Virginia Hall makes it, according to this biography and the records, as well fitted for a role model for girls, women, and not just a few men.

She was born in Baltimore and made it known rather early that she did not plan a life as a proper hausfrau. She went to Barnard and Radcliffe (we can assume she was not a dunce) and then continued at the Sorbonne and finally at the Konsularakademie in Vienna.

She was intent on being in the Foreign Service but did not do well in her first exam. She then decided to take a job as a clerk in an embassy overseas. She thought this would gain her experience and "the foot in the door." In 1933 in Turkey, while a clerk in the embassy, she lost her foot in a hunting accident. A prosthesis was made of wood and she returned to the Foreign Service in Venice. There she met not only with anti-feminist feelings but "...She was told that Department regulations prohibited hiring anyone without the necessary number of appendages."

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

Visit Howard Dratch's author page — Howard Dratch's Blog