Virginia Hall: The One-Legged American Spy the Gestapo Called the Most Dangerous of All
Updated: Oct 29
In the winter of 1942, a woman with an artificial leg set off to walk across the Pyrenees. It was November, the high passes were deep in snow, and the route took her over peaks of more than 7,000 feet. Every step on her wooden leg rubbed the stump raw and bloody. Behind her, the Gestapo had put out wanted posters describing her. The head of the Gestapo in Lyon was said to be desperate to get his hands on her.
Part way across, she sent a radio message to London saying that Cuthbert, the name she'd given her artificial leg, was giving her trouble. Someone at headquarters, not realising who or what Cuthbert was, replied that if Cuthbert was causing difficulties, she should have him eliminated.
Her name was Virginia Hall. She was an American, a woman and an amputee, which meant that by the standards of the day she should never have been a spy at all. Instead, she became one of the most effective Allied agents of the Second World War, the woman the Germans called the most dangerous of all Allied spies.
Quick Answers
Who was Virginia Hall? An American spy from Baltimore who worked for Britain's Special Operations Executive and then America's OSS in occupied France during the Second World War, despite having lost her lower left leg in a hunting accident.
Why was she called the Limping Lady? Because of the artificial leg she walked on, which she nicknamed Cuthbert. The Gestapo knew her as the woman who limps and put out wanted posters describing her.
What did she achieve? She built one of the first resistance networks in Vichy France, helped dozens of Allied airmen and agents escape, organised a mass prison breakout, and in 1944 armed and trained resistance fighters who sabotaged German forces around D-Day.
What awards did she get? Britain made her an honorary MBE, and in 1945 she received the US Distinguished Service Cross, the only civilian woman to be given it in the Second World War.
What happened to her after the war? She joined the CIA, where she was badly underused because of her sex and disability. She retired in 1966 and died in Maryland in 1982.
A Baltimore Girl Who Wanted to Be a Diplomat
Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 6 April 1906, into a wealthy family. She was a tomboy who liked hunting and riding, and at school she was described as the most original girl in her class. She studied at Radcliffe and Barnard colleges, then went to Europe to continue her studies in Paris, at the Sorbonne, and in Vienna, picking up French, German and Italian along the way.
She wanted to be a diplomat. In 1931 she got a job as a clerk at the American embassy in Warsaw, hoping it would be a stepping stone into the Foreign Service. It wasn't. The service hardly took women at all.
Cuthbert
In December 1933 Hall was working at the American consulate in Smyrna, now Izmir, in Turkey. She went out snipe hunting with friends. As she climbed over a fence, she tripped, and her shotgun went off, blasting her in the left foot.
The wound turned gangrenous, and to save her life, surgeons amputated her left leg below the knee. She was fitted with a heavy wooden leg, which she called Cuthbert. She went back to work, but when she applied again to join the Foreign Service, she was turned down. One of the reasons given was her leg.
She stayed on as a clerk, in Venice and then Tallinn in Estonia, but she was bored and frustrated. In 1939 she resigned.
The War Begins
Hall was in Paris when Germany invaded France in May 1940. She volunteered to drive ambulances for the French army, ferrying wounded soldiers from the front line. When France surrendered in June, she made her way out through Spain.
At the Spanish border, she got talking to a man who turned out to be a British intelligence officer. He was impressed, and gave her a phone number to call in London. It belonged to someone connected with the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, the new secret organisation that Churchill had ordered to set Europe ablaze.
SOE took a chance on her. Women were rarely used as agents at the time, and nobody had sent one into France yet. But Hall spoke fluent French, knew the country well, and had something no British agent could have. As an American, she was still a neutral citizen, free to travel openly in Vichy France.
The First Woman In
In August 1941 Virginia Hall arrived in Lyon, in the unoccupied zone of southern France run by Marshal Pétain's collaborationist Vichy government. Her cover was that she was a correspondent for the New York Post, which gave her a reason to travel and ask questions. She was the first female SOE agent to be sent into France.
She started building a network from scratch, and she was very good at it. Her contacts included a gynaecologist, Dr Jean Rousset, who let her use his surgery as a meeting place, and a brothel owner named Germaine Guérin, whose girls picked up information from German officers and whose premises were used to hide agents and airmen. She recruited police officers, farmers, nuns and shopkeepers. She found safe houses, landing grounds for supply drops and escape routes.
She was careful in ways that kept her alive. She used a geranium on her windowsill as a signal: if it was in place, it was safe to approach. She moved between addresses, used several cover names, and kept her contacts apart, so that if one part of the network was caught it couldn't give away the rest. Her newspaper job wasn't entirely a front, either. She really did send reports to the New York Post about life under Vichy, describing food shortages, queues and the grim mood of a defeated country.
Hall became the hub for SOE in southern France. Agents arriving in the region came to her for money, contacts and help. Downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners were passed along her network and smuggled to Spain. She sent back intelligence to London, and passed messages for other agents whose radios had been lost or captured.
The Mauzac Breakout
In October 1941, a dozen SOE agents had been arrested and locked up in a Vichy prison camp at Mauzac, in the Dordogne. Several of them were key members of the organisation in France, and London wanted them out.
Hall made it happen. Working with one of the prisoners' wives, she arranged for tools and supplies to be smuggled into the camp, including, according to one account, a key made from a tin of sardines. In July 1942, the prisoners slipped out of their hut, past the guards, and disappeared. Hall's network hid them, then smuggled them across the border into Spain and back to Britain. Several of them went on to become important figures in the French resistance.
The Most Dangerous of All Allied Spies
The Germans were getting closer, though. They knew that a woman with a limp was at the centre of the resistance in Lyon, and they were determined to find her. The Gestapo circulated a description, with orders that described her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies, and said she must be found and destroyed.
One of the men hunting her was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief who would later be known as the Butcher of Lyon. He's said to have declared that he'd give anything to get his hands on that limping woman.
Her network was also infiltrated. A French priest, Abbé Robert Alesch, came to her claiming to have intelligence to pass to London. He was actually working for German military intelligence, the Abwehr. Hall was suspicious of him, but others in her network trusted him, and he betrayed many of them. After the war he was tried and executed.
In November 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa, and the Germans responded by occupying the whole of France. The United States was now an enemy of the Vichy regime, and Hall's cover was gone. She had hours to get out.
Over the Pyrenees
She left Lyon by train, heading for the Spanish border, and then, with a guide and a small group of other escapers, set off to walk over the mountains. It was a gruelling climb at the best of times, through snow and freezing wind, along paths used by smugglers. For a woman with an artificial leg, it was almost unimaginable. That's when she sent her famous message about Cuthbert.
She made it into Spain, but was arrested for entering the country illegally and locked up in the prison at Figueres. After about six weeks, a fellow prisoner who was being released smuggled out a letter to the American consul in Barcelona, and she was freed.
SOE sent her to Madrid, where she worked undercover as a newspaper correspondent, but she found it frustrating. She wanted to go back to France. SOE thought it was too dangerous. Her face was known, and she would be recognised. So she went looking for someone who'd say yes.
Back to France with the OSS
That someone was the Office of Strategic Services, the American wartime intelligence service and forerunner of the CIA. Hall joined it in 1944 and, at her own request, went straight back into occupied France. Because of her leg she couldn't parachute, so in March 1944 she was landed on the coast of Brittany from a British motor torpedo boat.
This time she disguised herself as an elderly peasant woman. She had her hair dyed grey, wore heavy, shapeless skirts and shuffled when she walked, which helped to hide her limp. She took the codename Diane. For a while she lived on farms, herding cows, milking them and making cheese, while secretly transmitting messages to London on her radio.
In the summer of 1944 she moved to the Haute-Loire, in central France. There, she found groups of young French resistance fighters, known as the maquis, who were brave but untrained and poorly armed. She organised parachute drops of weapons, money and supplies, and helped turn them into an effective fighting force.
Her base was close to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a remote Protestant village on a high plateau that had quietly spent the war hiding thousands of people, most of them Jewish children, from the Nazis. The villagers were used to keeping secrets, and the farms and forests around it made good country for receiving parachute drops at night. Hall organised the drop zones, arranged the signals with London, and was there in the dark fields as the containers of guns and explosives came floating down.
It wasn't easy. Some of the local resistance leaders didn't like taking orders from a foreign woman, and there were rows over money and command. Hall dealt with it by controlling the thing they wanted most: the weapons and cash she could summon from the sky.
After D-Day, her groups went on the attack. Following the kind of tactics laid out in the Allies' wartime sabotage manuals, they blew up bridges, derailed trains, cut railway lines and telephone cables, and ambushed German troops. According to an OSS report, her teams destroyed four bridges, killed around 150 German soldiers and captured around 500 more.
The Only Civilian Woman
Britain had already made her an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire. In 1945, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, one of America's highest awards for bravery in combat. She was the only civilian woman to receive it during the Second World War.
President Truman wanted to present it to her himself, in public. Hall said no. She was still a spy, she pointed out, and she didn't want her face in the papers. Instead, in September 1945, the head of the OSS, General William Donovan, pinned it on her in his office. The only other person there was her mother.
Sidelined at the CIA
After the war, Hall joined the new Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, one of the first women to do so. It should have been the start of a brilliant career. It wasn't.
She spent most of the next two decades in desk jobs well below her experience. Colleagues who knew what she'd done in France were embarrassed by how she was treated. A later CIA review of her career admitted that her experience and abilities had never been properly used, and that many of her colleagues believed she'd been sidelined because she outshone the men around her. Some of them simply didn't know what to do with a woman who'd fought a war.
There were exceptions. In the early 1950s she was involved in work to set up secret resistance networks in Europe that could fight back if the Soviet Union ever invaded, the kind of job she knew better than almost anyone alive. But the promotions and senior posts went to men, many of whom had never been near a war. One later assessment of her was written by a manager who seems to have had no idea what she'd done in France.
She later married Paul Goillot, a former OSS agent she'd met in France in 1944. She retired in 1966, when she reached the agency's mandatory retirement age of 60, and the couple settled on a farm in Maryland. She rarely talked about the war, and almost nobody outside the intelligence world knew who she was.
Virginia Hall died on 8 July 1982, aged 76.
Remembered at Last
For decades her story was barely known. That has changed. In 2016 the CIA named a training facility after her. Sonia Purnell's biography, A Woman of No Importance, became a bestseller in 2019, and the 2019 film A Call to Spy told the story of Hall and her fellow women agents.
She was one of a remarkable group of women who risked everything for the Allies in occupied Europe, alongside SOE agents like Noor Inayat Khan and Krystyna Skarbek, and resistance figures like Josephine Baker. Hall was turned down as a diplomat because of her leg. Then she spent the war proving how wrong they'd been.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the story of Virginia Hall? These are worth a look.
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of WWII's Most Dangerous Spy by Sonia Purnell. The definitive biography, and a cracking read.
The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson. An earlier biography that helped bring Hall's story to light.
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Sources
Purnell, Sonia. A Woman of No Importance. Virago, 2019.
Pearson, Judith L. The Wolves at the Door. Lyons Press, 2005.
