Virginia Hall, the American who felt the need to help occupied France

The extraordinary life story of American spy and resistance fighter Virginia Hall remained unknown for a long time. By virtue of her role as a spy, Virginia was accustomed to maintaining secrecy, and even after it was permissible to speak, she preferred to remain silent because she did not like to boast and did not seek honors and decorations. The right to fulfill her patriotic duty and restore her freedom to France, her second country, was a reward in itself for her.

“A Woman of No Importance”, What Does the Title Mean?

The title “A Woman of No Importance” is immediately implied to be ironic because the heroine of the biography, who was a heroine in the first meaning of the word, from the verb to be brave, was the most important spy who operated in France against the Nazis during World War II.

While reading the book, another aspect of the title's meaning becomes clear: there were those who saw in Virginia the potential that lay within her to live an extraordinary and important life, but there were many who saw her as an insignificant woman, who ignored her, did not recognize her abilities, and even belittled and dismissed her. Among the latter, who failed her at the beginning of her career in the US State Department and who limited her to a clerical position with which she was not prepared to be content, she had to fight to gain the life she wanted.

How does a heroine grow up? How did Virginia Hall, the daughter of Barbara and Ned Hall, stand out from the crowd? Sonia Parnell answers the questions and perplexities in a book presented in clear journalistic language.

Family background

Barbara Hall, an ambitious secretary who rose through the social ladder after marrying her boss, nicknamed Ned, a banker and movie theater owner from Baltimore, gave birth to Virginia on April 6, 1906.

The first to speak out against Virginia's personality was, according to Sonia Parnell, her mother Barbara. The mother directed her daughter to follow in her own footsteps, marry a rich man, and run a home and family, in the spirit of the times. But there was also a selfish side to Barbara's ambitions for her daughter's life.

Ned had failed to maintain the family fortune, and Barbara hoped to climb the ladder of material success and her glittering crowns again thanks to the mediation of her daughter who would find herself a suitable match. Virginia was tasked with entering a wealthy family to restore Atara to her former glory. The daughter had to solve her mother's problem. That was Barbara's goal.

But the charming girl had other goals. She wore men's trousers and plaid shirts, in defiance of her numerous suitors who dreamed of taming her, and declared her desire and right to enjoy freedom. Virginia, known as Dindy, broke conventions, went on hunting trips and rode bareback, much to the dismay of her mother Barbara. But Virginia found support in her father Ned, who encouraged her originality and allowed her to travel and study for the next seven years.

Dindy is twenty years old.

In 1926, the 20-year-old Dindy sailed to Paris, like hundreds of other young Americans, studied at the Institute of Political Science and enjoyed drinking, smoking and dancing in the cafes and clubs of the exciting city. A year of freedom and meetings with interesting people, racing drivers, politicians, intellectuals, artists.

Her time in Paris instilled in her a deep love for France, which became her second homeland. Two more exciting years of study and adventure in Vienna and she returned to the United States, steeped in European culture, the education she had acquired there, and fluent in five languages, especially French and German.

Virginia watched the rise of Hitler, who promised to put Germany first, the violent outbreaks of fascist groups in Vienna, and the rise of Mussolini in Italy.

In 1929 she returned to the US, to the economic depression, to the family's decline in assets and the loss of most of its money after Ned's death in 1931, at the age of 59 from a heart attack. Dindy was not accepted into the Foreign Service, as she had hoped. Not a diplomat, so at least a secretary at the American embassy in Warsaw. The main thing was to get out of Baltimore, away from the suffocating family.

At the embassy in Warsaw, she probably became acquainted with the world of intelligence by deciphering and encrypting telegrams. However, being a secretary did not match her ambitions and skills. And again, she failed the entrance exams to the Foreign Ministry, followed by a request to move to Smyrna, now Izmir. In 1933, Dindi arrived in Smyrna. Her professional life did not turn out to be any more exciting than hers in Warsaw, but the adventurous young woman organized group hunting trips in the salt marshes of the Gediz River delta.

A serious accident and a daring rehabilitation

On December 8, a bright and pleasant morning, during a hunting trip in the community, Virginia fell from a fence among the marsh grasses she was climbing, and the rifle slipped from her shoulder and ejected a bullet straight into her left foot. A hunting rifle that her beloved father had given her as a gift.

Sonia Parnell's book is an interesting attempt to understand why the accident happened through Dindy's character and competitive personality, a very detailed description of the injury, the efforts of friends and doctors to save her, the infection, the necrosis, the agony, the amputation, the prosthetic leg, the recovery, the return to life. And what a life!!!

Extraordinary fortitude. At the age of 27, Dindy's left leg was amputated below the knee, leaving her with no choice. While she was hallucinating due to the infection, her father Ned appeared to her in a significant vision and informed her that she must survive. This message would accompany her throughout her life. The accident and disability not only did not break Virginia, but on the contrary strengthened her and gave her wings to take off again.

In 1934, she received a transfer to Venice after returning to the United States. At the consulate, she immersed herself in work and in the city of stone and water – how to walk through the slippery alleys and climb steep bridges – she rode a gondola while a dedicated local named Angelo taught her the secrets of rowing.

In 1937, after serving in three diplomatic missions and all the knowledge and experience she had gained, Virginia returned to the United States with the goal of finally being accepted into the State Department. Thirty years old with an exceptional background and therefore exempt from the written entrance exam, it was decided that an interview would suffice.

But now she was not only a woman but also a cripple after that fateful moment in Smyrna. Virginia was again, to her astonishment, rejected on the basis of a rule prohibiting amputees from serving in the Foreign Office, even though she had proven that her disability had no bearing on her work performance, which impressed all her superiors.

Virginia's supporters reached out to President Roosevelt in an attempt to influence him to repeal the evil decree. The woman with the sharp mind would bring great honor to our country, predicted the future of the colonel who intervened in her favor. But Roosevelt decided to keep her in the clerical ranks despite the enthusiastic recommendations from Venice. A great injustice was done to the daring woman who led an active life and excelled in rowing, swimming and horseback riding. Of course, she kept up with the work and even replaced the vice consul when he was absent.

Virginia was ordered to move to the U.S. Legation in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where she continued to hunt grouse and pheasants in the virgin forests. But the clerical work in the nationalist country would not reward her, and in March 1939 she resigned from the State Department.

Seven years in the shadow of fascism and she is labeled as an unimportant woman. Virginia did not return to a safe life in the US and in February 1940 she enlisted in the XNUMXth Artillery Regiment of the France To drive the ambulances of the Medical Corps. The unit was unusually open, much to her delight, to volunteers and foreigners, and thus was able to play an active role in the campaign.

From ambulance driver in the French army to spy in British intelligence

The German invasion, the French surrender, the collaboration of Pétain and his friends, Virginia witnessed the historical events and was determined to fight tyranny even though her country refused, at this point, to intervene in the struggle in Europe. Writing articles about what was happening in Europe to make the Americans understand the approaching danger, Virginia thought fleetingly about a journalistic career, but no woman like her would be content with writing, action on the ground suited her better.

The eye of a British intelligence agent, whose path crossed hers in a Spanish border town, hunted down the young American woman who had returned from service in the French army and was seeking to come to London. When she reported passionately to him about the situation in France, the humiliation of surrender, the events she had witnessed, he realized he had found what he was looking for. Britain, which suffered from an almost complete lack of up-to-date information about what was happening in France, urgently needed spy agents.

In London, Virginia met with a second agent and thus returned to France as a secret liaison officer, whose job was to coordinate between local resistance leaders and agents of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the British intelligence service that operated during World War II.

And here comes a hair-raising description of the beginnings of the bold, revolutionary and innovative organization, initiated by Churchill, that made possible the defeat of Germany. Virginia, “a liaison and intelligence officer in Vichy France,” under the guise of an American newspaper reporter, was one of its first.

Again a fascinating description of her training, a long list, she was shown, for example, how to hide microfilm documents in tiny containers and insert them into the navel, the anus or the groove in the metal heel of a shoe. She was taught when she would have a license to kill, with potassium cyanide pills or just to stun some guard or some hospital nurse for a few hours with another type of morphine-based pill. In a dirty, ungentlemanly war, she would have to keep her hands to herself, but certain moral standards were set nonetheless.

On August 23, 1941, Agent 3844 boarded a ship in Lisbon that would take her to the unknown. In London, they did not believe that the fragmented clerk would survive for long, but they soon received a report from Vichy that Virginia was registered in its gendarmerie offices as the American correspondent for the “New York Post.”

Vichy, a sleepy resort town, apparently, but swarming with Gestapo agents in those dark and complicated days. Pétain, 85, hero of the previous war, now commits crimes. Charles de Gaulle is not resigned to surrender.

A month later, Virginia moved to Lyon which was more suited to her activities. A tradition of rebellion characterized the citizens of Lyon who began to rise up against the “new moral order” of the Vichy regime. Sonia Parnell follows Virginia’s movements in Lyon, how she found accommodation in a city flooded with refugees, where she ate and drank. The daily life of the beautiful young woman became routine.

Virginia replaced her red curls with a brown bun that revealed clean, noble features and calm, sparkling eyes. She shouldn't have stood out too much. And who would have suspected the friendly, slightly lame, fluent French-speaking foreign journalist with a heavy American accent?

Virginia changed names, identities and appearances with theatrical skill. She was not to be caught. Wireless operators were dropped or arrived by sea. The Gestapo lay in wait. The dramatic capture of almost all the SOE agents at the Villa des Bois in Marseille by the Vichy police and their execution was a turning point.

After the villa disaster in Marseille, Virginia was tasked with restarting the operation in France in a more intelligent and cautious manner. Virginia knew what was propaganda and what was truth, who to be wary of and who to trust. Thus she placed her faith in Germaine Guérin, the owner of a thriving brothel in Lyon, a hot 37-year-old brunette, a French patriot, who helped her develop the spy cell in its infancy with her extensive connections, her ability to influence, and her material means. The pages of the book about the activity of the brothel owner and her girls for the resistance against the German occupation are like excerpts from a novel, but this was reality, not fiction! Germaine Guérin was a brave resistance fighter who would later sacrifice herself to save her colleagues.

A breathtaking scene in Marseille where she was almost forced onto a truck with a group of unfortunates who were randomly caught in a cafe to fill a quota of workers to work in a factory in Germany. Miraculously, she escaped through a window.

The betrayal of French spy Mathilde Carré, “The Cat,” a double and triple agent who betrayed seventy fellow agents to death without batting an eyelid, is horrifying. There were quite a few like her.

Virginia's apartment in Lyon became the center of the entire Resistance movement in France. Determined, active, energetic, selfless, a good and caring mother, a foreigner who inspired French people to do for their country in her wake, the American conveyed important and even decisive reports to London, skillfully evaded traps, fed, bathed, escaped prisoners according to daring, improbable, impossible plans, and thus saved many agents from death. Virginia Hall held the SOE in France on her shoulders and thanks to her it did not fall apart in difficult times.

Internal conflicts and struggles, reckless behavior of colleagues that at such a time results in torture and executions, the Sisyphean work of the wireless operators, the breathtaking escape of a dozen SOE agents, including Jean-Pierre Bloch, from prison in Mosac. The rescue operation organized by Virginia and Bloch's wife, Gaby, surpasses all possible imagination. The daring and creative escape, you have to read the details to believe it.

Virginia Hall, unlike many other agents who turned to sex, gambling, and alcohol to cope with the pressure of the harsh living conditions and the constant need to pretend, was responsible and controlled, did not complain, and did not lose control most of the time.

She established, coordinated and coordinated intelligence cells and assisted in parachuting, training, exercises, sabotage operations, receiving supplies overseas, equipped the agents with false documents, money, wireless devices, weapons. Virginia, endowed with the ability to see the future, brilliantly organized the damage to the Germans' ability to prepare for the invasion.

Many breathtaking episodes, successful escapes and escapades like in the movies, but also captures, tortures and executions. Reverend Robert Alesch, rotten and corrupt to the core in every way, deceived many, including Virginia.

Is the handsome and charismatic priest who suddenly appears and presents himself as an anti-Nazi colleague an impostor? A German agent, in fact? Considerations here and there, Virginia was suspicious of his cold, metallic gaze but in the end, she trusted him... which would cause her severe pangs of conscience later when she learned of the magnitude of the disaster. The priest who worked for the Nazis caused enormous damage to the spy network and thinned its ranks. Dozens of agents were captured and executed. Because of him, Virginia, who had become the number one wanted, was forced to leave France.

Spy in the American intelligence service, key figure in the resistance activities

At the end of 1943, Virginia crossed the Pyrenees on foot, in a arduous journey, in terrible cold and in excruciating pain in her bleeding leg, and arrived in London and then in Madrid. The cocktail parties and boring work did not satisfy her as expected and despite the danger she wanted to return to her beloved France, groaning under the yoke of the occupier.

Groaning but holding her head high, how could Virginia not participate in organizing the resistance? On May 17, 1943, 38-year-old Virginia left London and landed near Madrid, from where, disguised as a grandmother, she arrived in France by sea to prepare the ground for the invasion.

The British intelligence agency was afraid to send the wanted spy, who was no longer anonymous, to the wolf's mouth. Virginia, who could not stand by, bypassed the obstacle and, after all, she is an American intelligence agent whose operators are the heads of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, the American version of the SOE, established by President Roosevelt in June 1942.

Disguised as an old peasant woman, Virginia Hall organized the Resistance movements in central France in preparation for D-Day. A wireless operator, saboteur, guerrilla fighter, and military commander, the American kept her cool. Determined, authoritative, and passionate, she fulfilled her mission.

In July 1944, she settled near Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire department, a Protestant settlement that would later become known as the “Village of the Righteous.” Virginia was responsible for radio communication with its operators to coordinate the airdrop of weapons and equipment to the Maquis fighters from planes arriving from England. Virginia also provided valuable information on German behavior.

After theNormandy landings In June 1944, Virginia organized guerrilla operations by members of the French underground behind the German army's rear. The resistance blew up bridges, damaged trains, and destroyed roads.

The members of the Resistance took very creative steps in their fight against the Germans. A local carpenter made signs that replaced the existing road signs and misled the enemy soldiers who were marching towards them. Normandy To stop the invaders. The fake signs directed them to the wrong destinations. Exploding horse manure blew vehicles into the air and the Germans stopped every time they saw horse manure to check if there was another trap.

after the war

Virginia Hall returned to the United States in September 1945, after six years in Europe, at almost forty years of age. The need to be needed drove her to seek a similar occupation again, and she became an agent for the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, a descendant of the OSS, in activities in various countries against the “Red Menace.”

At the age of 60, she retired and enjoyed happy years with her partner Paul Goillot on a farm they bought in Barnesville, Maryland. Virginia Hall died at the age of 76, and Paul five years later.

The American intelligence community now officially recognizes the legacy of the important woman, Virginia Hall, whose greatness is taught to new recruits in a building named after her. The recognition has also been received from Europe: in a ceremony held in December 2006 at the French ambassador's residence in Washington, Britain and France celebrated Virginia Hall's heroism.

At the same event, a painting by American artist Jeff Bass was unveiled, showing Virginia Hall in the summer of 1944, in the middle of a radio broadcast as a young underground fighter, Edmond Lebrat, helps her power up the radio. The original painting is now in the CIA Museum at Langley, and copies of it are scattered around the world.

The fame of Virginia Hall, the heroine of the French underground and a great spy, who dedicated her life to the fight for the ideal of freedom, today extends beyond the borders of France, the United States and Britain and beyond the circles concerned. The life story of this important woman, who always fled from fame and suffered quite a bit of alienation and discrimination, reaches the general public in books and films.

Previous biography of Virginia Hall by the Frenchman Vincent Nosy

The subtitle on the cover of Sonia Parnell's book in the American edition (which came out shortly after the English edition) implies that Virginia Hall's story has never been told before:

The book page even exaggerates and makes a statement that is not ambiguous:
A never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine.

It is important to note that the title "untold" for Virginia Hall's story is incorrect, so as not to say more bluntly about the marketing of Penguin Publishing in New York, according to which Hall's stories were supposedly never told.

Twelve years before Sonia Parnell, the French journalist and author Vincent Nosy published a detailed, meticulous and comprehensive biography of the spy (465 pages), the fruit of many years of research, which received, and rightly so, excellent reviews:

Vincent Nouzille, L'espionne: Virginia Hall, une américaine dans la guerre, Fayard, 2007

Sonia Parnell drew heavily on Vincent Nosy's book without giving him the credit he deserves. Two evasive sentences flash in the "acknowledgements" at the end of the book, at the beginning of a long paragraph that goes on to name other people, sentences that seem like an oversight:

“During my stay in Haute-Loire, I also had the privilege of meeting Vincent Nouzille, who more than a decade ago wrote L'Espionne in French. He was one of the first to glorify Virginia.” (p. 345).

Not a word about the great debt the author owes to Vincent Nozzi and his book. Not a word, either, in her interviews and promotional videos, as all the glory for “discovering” Virginia Hall goes only to her, to Sonia Parnell.

At the beginning and end of her book, Sonia Parnell writes about the archives she visited and the people she met in order to write the biography. A path that is remarkably similar to that taken by Vincent Nosy before her, full details in the introduction. Parnell encountered the same difficulties… writes about the same obstacles… Vincent Nosy shortened her path but not a word about that either. As if she was the first to research the important sources.

I contacted Vincent Nozzi and received confirmation of what I thought. I later read his book, which received excellent reviews and was very right. I highly recommend it to my readers. French About Nozi's book, which lays out in clear and lucid language the history of Hall's life and the history of the Resistance. Everything in it is based and documented, there is no mixture of fiction and fact, everything is historical reality revolving around the life of a unique, one-of-a-kind woman.

At the beginning of his book, Vincent Nozzi tells how Virginia Hall came into his life in May 2002, by chance, while researching a completely different subject, the Corsican mafia. While trying to verify an intuition about gangsters helping with the Normandy invasion, Nozzi arrived at the US National Archives in Washington and there, among thousands of gray boxes arranged on shelves, his eye was caught by a picture of Virginia Hall and a summary of her life in a small booklet about the beginnings of the OSS. Thus was born the book.

Years of research, with love and admiration for the heroine, do not blind the biographer's keen eye from seeing a dark side to Virginia Hall's personality. This is an interesting detail that Nozzi provides about Hall's participation, in 1961, towards the end of her career in the CIA, in compiling a manual for interrogation methods, bordering on legality, that were applied in Vietnam and Central America.

In the first chapter of his book, Nozzi tells of Virginia's voyage to Europe when she was three years old with her parents and seven-year-old brother. Thus were planted the seeds of her love for France, in whose history she played an important role, even at the risk of her own existence. The meaning of her life, in which she proved herself time and again, is slowly revealed through a fascinating biography, highly recommended.

Note

For another, second and different article on the subject, please visitMeirav Golan's blog.