Word Celebrity Blog

Virginia Hall - OSS Sketch.



 Virginia Hall - An American Spy


 On December 12, 2006, Virginia Hall was  honored at the home of the French ambassador in Washington, D.C., by the French and British governments.

British Ambassador Sir David Manning, Virginia Hall's niece Lorna Catling and French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte at the French Residence for a reception honoring the late Virginia Hall Goillot who had died in 1982.

During WWII,  Virginia Hall became a coordinator of the Resistance movement in France.  The German Gestapo declared that Virginia Hall was "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" and who had to be destroyed.   They offered a reward in their "Wanted Posters" for her demise.  Virginia was also known as "the woman with a limp",  since had one of her legs amputated following a hunting accident, years earlier.

























Virginia Hall's niece, Lorna Catling, accepted the posthumous honors that were presented by the British ambassador  at the home of the French ambassador.

Many attempts by the British government to track her down failed, because Virginia Hall didn't want to be found.

A British Embassy spokesman in Washington D.C. said: "We tried to find Miss Hall for years. We even placed advertisements in American newspapers asking her to come forward."

"But she was very good at what she did and didn't want to be found. We think she probably blocked her CIA chiefs from telling MI6 where she was".

"Finally we tracked down her niece, her only living relative, and that's why the ceremony is being held now."  

Mrs Catling said: "My aunt always seemed kind of glamorous and mysterious, but she made light of her war-time experiences.

"One time she told me she and Paul found a deserted chateau with a full wine cellar. She said they had a wonderful evening enjoying that."  


***

























After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United Stattes into the war,  President Franklin Roosevelt concluded that the United States needed an intelligence gathering operation along the British lines.  He appointed a New York lawyer and First World War veteran,  General William J. Donovan,  to create the agency.




























In June 1942, William Donovan, known as “Wild Bill”, set about creating a top-secret organization to gather military intelligence and wreak havoc on the enemy by any means.  He insisted on recruiting the brightest and the best,  so much so,  that the OSS was nicknamed “Oh So Social”  by many other government agencies.  They resented the exclusivity of the new network.





















The work of the OSS was to be highly effective:  intelligence gathering,  guerrilla warfare,  psychological tactics,  propaganda,  sabotage,  infiltration of enemy organizations,  supporting and training resistance movements,  code breaking,  and subversion.  The OSS was bankrolled by President Roosevelt’s emergency fund,  which meant that it could bypass the usual government accounting methods.















In the course of its wartime life, the OSS spent $135 million (more than $1 billion at today’s prices).

The 750,000 pages of the released documents reveal the extent of the OSS network, which swiftly evolved into a vital element in the United States war machine.

 The new organization took its cue directly from the British MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, the group which in Winston Churchill’s words, was detailed to “set Europe ablaze”.

Michael Warner, a CIA historian, writes: “The British had much to teach their American pupils... OSS needed information, training, and experience, all of which the British could provide.”





















Among others working in this shadowy world were Herbert Marcuse, the German philosopher,





















Ralph Bunche, the African-American diplomat,





















the actor, Sterling Hayden,


























Miles Copeland. photo by Aaron Stipkovich.


and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer in the band the Police.


The new American technicians excelled at the technological aspects of secret war, perfecting a range of miniature cameras,  limpet mines,  wiretaps,  electronic beacons, and a host of other gizmos.

Every agent was meticulously equipped.  In the OSS official history,  it states.:  “His eyeglasses, dental work, toothbrush, razor, brief case, traveling bag, shoes and every item of wearing apparel had to be microscopically accurate.” 





















The OSS’s greatest coup was the recruitment and deployment of the anti-Nazi German diplomat Fritz Kolbe. He was one of the most important spies of WWII.  As diplomatic courier, Fritz Kolbe, who was codenamed George Wood,  passed over 2,600 documents to his United States handlers,  including information on the German expectations for D-Day, the V1 and V2 rockets, and the activities of the German spy who was  code named Cicero, who was working as a butler in the British Embassy in Ankara.

He was liaised with MI6 and the OSS and proved particularly adept at recruiting spies to operate within Germany.  Some 200 agents,  mostly anti-Nazi prisoners of war,  were dropped into Germany equipped with meticulously prepared clothing and documents.

Other agents linked up with the Resistance fighters in France, and partisans in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Burma, Malaya and China.  Many of these agents were prepared for action behind the lines, at the OSS training camp in the Catoctin Mountain Park, which is now the location of Camp David, the presidential retreat.

The OSS psychological operations team churned out rafts of information and misinformation designed to mislead,  bewilder, and demoralise the enemy:   There were rumours about Hitler’s health and sanity,  as well as subversive leaflets and fake broadcasts.




















Young Julia Child.






















Julia Child's OSS bunk in China, 1944.


William Donovan’s assistant at OSS Headquarters in Washington was Julia Child,  whose main job was to type the details of thousands of agents, in order to enable the American spymasters to keep track of the spy network.  These are the files that have now been released.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the new intelligence organization is that no such orginization existed before the war.  Before 1942, America had gathered intelligence in an ad hoc way, without any overall direction.  Rival military branches declined to share their secrets with another branch. 














From such fastidious beginnings would emerge the CIA, an organisation not noted for gentlemanly methods. Not all of the OSS activities proved to be good long-term investments.  Among its other operations that it had, the OSS helped to train resistance movements such as Mao’s Red Army and the Viet Minh in French Indochina as tools to undermine Axis control in those areas.  We later had to fight the same people we had trained.

President Harry Truman was not an admirer of the fire-breathing General Donovan, or the OSS.   The OSS was terminated in September of 1945.  Most of its functions,  and at least part of its philosophy,  were later assumed by the CIA.
























William Donovan was never under any illusions about the huge and powerful weapon that he had created: “Espionage is not a nice thing, nor are the methods employed exemplary. Neither are demolition bombs nor poison gas."

“We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is that none but he will employ terror.  But we will turn terror against him.”




















Virginia Hall, a special agent for the British during World War II, was the only female civilian to receive the "Distinguished Service Cross" as well as "Member of the British Empire."

Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland,  on April 6, 1906,  in a "well to do" family.   She attended Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges from 1924 to 1926.  She was a talented linguist and could speak French, Italian, and German fluently.

I n 1931,  Virginia Hall assumed a clerk’s position with the United States Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.  During the 1930s,  she served at various posts in Tallin,  Estonia;  Vienna,  Austria; and Izmir, Turkey.

While she was in Izmir, her shotgun slipped from her grasp, and as she grabbed it,  it fired. The gunshot hit her foot.  By the time she went to a hospital,  gangrene had set in.  In order to save her life,  the surgeon had to amputate her left leg below the knee.

Miss Virginia Hall, who was always able to see the funny side of things, named her wooden leg "Cuthbert'.

Because of a United States State Department regulation regarding disabilities,  Virginia Hall was forced to resign her position in May of 1939.

Virginia Hall was living in France when World War II broke out.  While she was in Paris, Virginia joined the French Ambulance Service Unit as a private second class.  After the fall of France in June 1940,  she fled to England.

While working as a code clerk for the military attache in the United States Embassy, she was recruited by the British "Special Operations Executive" (SOE).  Her fluency in French enabled her to set up resistance networks in Vichy, France.  She began in August of 1941.  Using the code name Marie,  Virginia Hall posed as a reporter for the New York Post.


























In early 1942, Virginia Hall relocated to Lyons. In a short time, she was able to establish contact with the French underground. She began assisting escaped prisoners and downed aircrews to return to England.





















After the  North Africa invasion,  in November of 1942,  the number of German troops greatly increased in her area and she had to quickly move out of the area.  She hiked across the Pyrenees,  in the dead of winter, on her artificial leg,  to Spain.

During her journey over the mountains, during her radio report to London, she said that was okay, but happened to mention that "Cuthbert" was giving her trouble.

Forgetting this was what she called her artificial leg, and knowing how valuable that she was to the Allied cause, her commanders radioed back: "If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him."  


























When the United States entered the war,  she was listed as an enemy alien.  Virginia Hall was forced to conduct her business secretly from some of the numerous bistros and restaurants.  Virginia Hall was also known by many aliases: "Marie Monin", "Germaine", "Diane", "Marie of Lyon" and "Camille".  The Germans, not knowing her name, gave her the nickname "Artemis".

In July 1943, Virginia Hall was quietly made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). She was then transferred to the American Office of Strategic Services.

She joined the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Special Operations Branch, in March of  1944.  Virginia Hall asked to once again return to occupied France.


























Since she didn't need training in clandestine work behind enemy lines, the OSS promptly granted her request. They got her over in a British MTB to Brittany (her artificial leg having kept her from parachuting in). Operating under the code name "Diane", Virginia Hall eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France.  She worked setting up sabotage and guerrilla groups and supplying them with money, arms, and rations.  Several weeks prior to D-Day, she disguised herself as a peasant and with heavy clothing to hide her limp, while she reported on German troop movements. 















She mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England,  found safe houses,  and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the Allied Forces landed at Normandy.

On September 4th,  an OSS operative named Paul Goillot parachuted into France to aid Virginia Hall in her guerrilla war.  Paul Goillot had been born in France,  but emigrated to the United States in 1928,  and hadn't been back since.  Together they directed those French battalions,  and in 1950,  after returning to America,  the two OSS personnel got married. 

The Gestapo hierarchy regarded her as the most dangerous allied agent in France.  Despite her dangerous situation, she was able to inform the Allies that the German General Staff had relocated its headquarters to LePuy.



























Virginia Hall helped train three battalions of Resistance forces, to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans. She also kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops caught up with her small band in September.

In the final days of the German occupation of France,  Virginia Hall’s teams destroyed four bridges,  derailed several freight trains that were headed for Germany,  downed key telephone lines,  killed more than 150 enemy soldiers,  and captured more than 500 prisoners.












At the conclusion of the war,  she turned down an an attempt by President Truman to award her the United States Army's second highest award, the "Distinguished Service Cross" because she said the publicity would blow her cover.


























Instead she quietly accepted the award from her boss, the legendary OSS chief Bill Donovan, in his office. For her efforts in France, General William Joseph Donovan, in September 1945,  personally awarded Virginia Hall a "Distinguished Service Cross" (the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II).  Her mother was the only other person in attendance.

In 1950, Miss Virginia Hall married one of the men she'd fought with in France,  French-born OSS agent,  Paul Goillot,


























In 1951,  Virginia Hall began work for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C.  She became an intelligence analyst on French paramilitary affairs.  She was one of the first women operations officers in the new Office of the Deputy Director of Plans.

During her CIA career,  Virginia Hall accepted several overseas assignments.   She retired in 1966.

She is regarded as one of the True Heroines  of World War II.




















Virginia Hall Goillot was admitted to the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, Maryland,  where on July 12, 1982,  she died at the age of 76.  Her Husband Paul passed on in 1987,  five years later.






































Virginia Hall Goillot and her husband Paul Goillot were both buried in the Druid Ridge Cemetery.

Virginia Hall also rarely talked about her clandestine work, even to her family.  Virginia Hall's niece, Lorna Catling, remarked. "I do remember one letter [Hall] sent home during the war, She said that the Germans had caught some people and hung them up by a butcher's hook. It was a terrifying letter."

Lorna Catling, remarked. “She would say, 'It was just six years of my life.'"

"She always avoided publicity,"

"I think she was concerned about capitalizing on her experiences," says Judith L. Pearson,  author of Wolves at the Door,  a recent biography of Hall. "People she knew died. She felt obligated to them and wanted to be respectful of their deaths."


Women secretly served as couriers,  code breakers,  intelligence analysts and spies behind enemy lines for America's Office of Strategic Services.

According to the National Women’s History Museum, about 4,500 women worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.  Baltimore’s Virginia Hall, Minnesota’s Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, Slovakia’s Maria Gulovich  and television chef Julia Child were among the most active in the espionage work.

The OSS Society, which conducts a running history of the World War II intelligence agency, said women "served effectively in the shadowy world of espionage as couriers, guides, code breakers, intelligence analysts and as spies."

Though few Americans were even aware of their roles, the 4,500 women represented almost one fifth of the nearly 24,000 people who worked for the OSS during the war.



Virginia Hall's story was told in "The Wolves at the Door : The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy"  by Judith L. Pearson (2005)  The Lyons Press, ISBN 1-59228-762-X.

A biography exists in French: "L'Espionne. Virginia Hall, une Américaine dans la guerre", by Vincent Nouzille (2007)