Virginia Hall- World War II Spy. She received recognition as an American performing heroic acts for the Allied Armies, first for Britain then for the United States. She worked for British Special Operations starting in 1941 at Lyon, France. In 1942, the head of the Nazi Gestapo, Klaus Barbie, the "Lyon's Butcher," ordered wanted posters with her face in hope of capturing "the limping lady." She was considered the most dangerous of all Allied spies. She escaped to Spain, in a three-day journey in heavy snow over the Pyrenees Mountains. As a young lady, she accidentally gave herself a gunshot wound in the foot, which got infected, thus her leg was amputated below the knee. She did this 50-mile journey using a heavy wooden prosthetic leg. While in France, she had a network of 1,500 resistance fighters helping her to destroy bridges or railroads. Her second trip to France was working for the United States for the American Office of Strategic Services. In France from 1944 to 1945, this was even more successful than her first for Britain. She had developed numerous outfits to hide her identity. A make-up artist helped her to change into an elderly crippled lady with bad teeth. She had a dozen alias names. Receiving the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945, she was the most highly decorated female civilian during World War II. In 1943 she was made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire and given honors in France also. Her heroic actions were recognized again on the 100th anniversary of her birth date at the British and French Embassies in Washington, D.C. After the war, she worked for the CIA from a desk mainly in the Special Activities Division but helping those behind the Iron Curtain. In 1951, she married OSS agent Paul Goillot, who she had met during the war in France. The couple continued to work together at the CIA. She was at the CIA for 15 years taking mandatory retirement in 1966, but never spoke publicly of her deeds during the war. Even after her death, her story was confined to the intelligence community. She was the daughter of a well-to-do Baltimore family. After attending Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Barnard College in New York City, she pursued additional studies in Europe. She had a gift for languages and loved adventure. She became a clerk at the United States Embassy in Warsaw, Poland in hopes that someday she would be a diplomat. Her next assignment was in Ismir Turkey. It was here she had the hunting accident that caused the amputation of her left lower leg. This followed with an assignment in Venice, Italy, and while in Venice, she learned that her amputation caused her to be rejected from becoming a diplomat, which was her professional goal. At the start of World War II, she was in France and joined the ambulance corps. She traveled from France through Spain to reach England to join the British Special Operations, thus the beginning of her "spy days." Recently, the CIA training hall was named The Virginia Hall Expeditionary Center. A retired CIA officer, Craig Gralley, has written a book about her, "Hall of Mirrors." In 2005, "The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy" by Judith Pearson was released. "The Spy with the Wooden Leg: The Story of Virginia Hall" was a biography written by Nancy Polette in 2012. "Woman of No Importance" was written by Sonia Purnell in 2019 with a movie by the same name due to be released the same year. In 2019, she was posthumously inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. Served with both the SOE and OSS. Source: Find a Grave
From Maryland Woman Hall of Fame:
Virginia Hall, of Baltimore, became our country's first and arguably greatest spy of the Second World War. During the course of her astounding career, and despite a significant physical disability, she served as an intelligence officer for the British Special Operations Executive, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Born in Baltimore on April 6, 1906, Virginia spent her formative years on the family's "Boxhorn Farm" in Parkton, MD. She attended Roland Park School outside of Baltimore; studied languages, economics, and history at Radcliff and Barnard; and graduated from the Consular Academy in Vienna, Austria. Virginia started her career as a clerk for the U.S. State department in Warsaw, Poland, but had larger ambitions to join the Foreign Service. (Of the several thousand Foreign Service Officers at the time, only six were women; none were ambassadors.) She persevered and studied to take the Foreign Service exam. Then in Smyrna, Turkey disaster struck-she was injured in a hunting accident and lost a portion of her left leg, and her dreams vanished. The State Department had strict rules forbidding people with amputated limbs from joining the Foreign Service. Virginia quit the State Department and when World War II broke out, she took a job as an ambulance driver in France. When the Nazi's overran Paris, she escaped to London. The United States was not yet in the war but Virginia caught the eye of British Intelligence and was recruited to be its first spy-man or woman-to live behind enemy lines in Vichy France. There she stayed, recruiting agents, organizing resistance fighters, reporting on the German military, until she was betrayed. The Nazis called her "La Dame Qui Boite," the lady who limps. Hunted by Gestapo Chief, Klaus Barbie ("The Butcher of Lyon"), Virginia had to make a harrowing last-minute escape over the snow-capped Pyrenees, dragging her prosthetic limb, "Cuthbert" behind her. Despite the ordeal, Virginia Hall demanded to return to France but her British spymasters refused. It would be a suicide mission, they said. She was too well known. The Gestapo was still hunting her. But she did return, this time with the American Office of Strategic Services, where she led several thousand French resistance fighters on the eve of the D-Day invasion. After the war, Virginia joined the CIA and became one of the Agency's first Operations Officers. For her courage and bravery, Virginia was awarded the U. S. Military's Distinguished Service Cross (the only woman so honored in WWII); she was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE); and was nominated for the French Croix de Guerre. In retirement and for the last 16 years of her life, Virginia lived in Barnesville, Maryland. She died at Adventist Hospital in Rockville July 1982. "My neck is my own… and I'm willing to get a crick in it because there's a war (going on)…" Biography courtesy of the Maryland Commission for Women, 2019