Virginia Hall of Baltimore wanted to be a diplomat. In 1933, shooting snipe in Turkey, she stumbled climbing a fence, her shotgun discharged into her left foot, and gangrene took the leg below the knee. She was fitted with a wooden one, named it Cuthbert, and applied to the American Foreign Service anyway; the State Department rejected her on the grounds of the amputation. So she drove ambulances in France instead, and when France fell she walked into the British embassy in Madrid and was quietly passed to the Special Operations Executive.
In August 1941 she became the first SOE woman to live and work in France, running the Heckler network out of Lyon under cover as a New York Post correspondent. For fifteen months she found safe houses, moved money and weapons, got downed airmen out, arranged medical care for wounded agents and organised the escape of twelve of them from a prison camp at Mauzac. The Gestapo in Lyon — Klaus Barbie among them — circulated a sketch of a woman with a limp and the instruction that she was the most dangerous of all Allied spies.
In November 1942, with the Germans occupying the southern zone, she walked out over the Pyrenees in winter: two days on foot, over a two-thousand-metre pass, on a prosthetic leg that had not been designed for it. Her radio message from the road asked London to be patient because Cuthbert was giving her trouble; London, not understanding, replied that if Cuthbert was a problem she should have him eliminated.
She went back. In March 1944, now with the American OSS, she landed by boat and worked in the Haute-Loire disguised as an elderly peasant milkmaid — hair dyed grey, teeth filed down, a shuffling walk that hid the limp — transmitting, receiving drops and arming Maquis groups that cleared their department of German troops before the US Army arrived.
She was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the only civilian woman of the war to receive it, and refused a public ceremony. The CIA hired her afterwards and then left her at a desk for years, promoted far below her ability, in an agency that had not yet decided women could run operations. She died in Maryland in 1982. There is a training building named after her at Langley now, and a wing in the museum — belated, like most of it.
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