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Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 6, 1906. Her father, Edwin Lee Hall, was a cinema owner in Baltimore.
Virginia was educated at Radcliffe College where she devolped a keen interest in modern languages. She was a talented linguist and spoke Fench, Italian, and German.
In 1931 Hall was appointed to the staff of the American Embassy in Poland. Over the next few years she worked in Estonia, Austria, and Turkey where a serious accident resulted in her losing her leg. The U.S. State Department had regulations about employing people with "any amputation of a portion of a limb", so she was forced to resign in May of 1939.
Virginia was living in France when WWII began. She joined the French Ambulance Service Unit. When the Germans invaded France in May of 1940, Hall left for England, where she found work at the U.S. Embassy.
Hall was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (OSE) in 1941 and agreed to become a British Special Agent. Given the code name "Marie", she returned to France, and while posing as a reporter for the New York Post she helped to set up resistance networks in Vichy.
Early in 1942, Virginia moved to Lyons and worked closely with the French Resistance. By the end of the year the German officials became suspicious of Hall and forced her to leave the country.
Virginia Hall was now representing the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and returned to France in March of 1944. After landing on the Brittany coast she joined the Resistance in the Haute-Loire region. The Gestapo was now aware of her actions and was known as the "lady with the limp." Despite all this she was able to inform the Allies that the German general staff had relocated its headquarters from Lyon to Le Puy.
In 1945, President Harry Truman award Virginia Hall the Distinguished Service Cross, shown above. In 1951 she joined the CIA where she became an intelligence analyst on French parlimentary affairs. Virginia Hall retired from the CIA in 1966. She died at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Washington DC in 1982.
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