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Virginia Hall

  • Code: Cuthbert.
  • Organization: SOE (United Kingdom) / OSS / CIA (USA).
  • Service time: From 1940 to 1966.
  • Main achievements: He put bombs, studied troop movements, recruited agents, coordinated with the resistance and prepared D-Day in Normandy.
  • Decorations: Distinguished Service Cross / Order of the British Empire.

By definition, a spy is someone who goes unnoticed, mixes with the people, creates a character and hides behind him in a precarious existence and full of dangers to do an observation and information work that is usually boring. That is why it is so strange that one of the best and most decisive intelligence agents of the Second World War asked to be deployed in Nazi-occupied France with such a striking feature: it had a wooden leg.

Virginia Hall, a key character in the development of agencies such as the CIA , accidentally shot himself in a game of hunting in Turkey and lost his leg, so they had to put an orthopedic with which he limped visibly. That is why the Nazis, in the "wanted" posters they called it like this: The lame lady . But long before she was a spy she was diplomatic in the Europe of the 1930s, so she saw the rise of Nazism and the moral rot that extended with totalitarianism.

The amputation of the limb made him give up his career as an ambassador, since there was a rule in the US Department of State that prevented it from being people who were missing a member, but that did not stop him. Virginia Hall was a person who loves travel and adventure. He had traveled the seas in clippers under sail and knew Europe thanks to the development of the train . He spoke English, French and German perfectly and was a very valuable asset for the apocalypse that was to begin on September 1, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland.

Virginia Hall joined the ambulance service in France and there began its war. Obviously, and regardless of how useful it could be as a sanitary, destiny wanted it to have a much more prominent role. There are two key moments for this. The first, his flight by bicycle (pedaling with his wooden leg) to the French coast of the English Channel, where he embarked on one of the last ferries to Britain when France fell into the hands of the Nazis with refugees such as Manuel Chaves Nogales , in famous Sevillian journalist. The second, when it coincided with Vera Atkins, British spy and skillful recruiter of section F (for France) of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive responsible for sending agents to Europe to sabotage, spy, steal and, above all, kill Nazis, something like the Damned Bastard s of Tarantino.

The lame lady escaped from the Nazis on foot, arriving in Spain through the Pyrenees

Parachuted on France, he posed as a journalist and began his work: informing London about the movements of German troops and putting bombs in military installations . His fame was spreading among the French Resistance and among the Gestapo agents, who had posters printed with an alleged portrait of him and the following text: “This woman who limps is one of the most dangerous agents of the allies in France, and we must find her and destroy her ». It became the obsession of Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon , a guy who personally tortured French prisoners and hid with Josef Mengele in Brazil after the war. Barbie organized raids, monitored all transmissions in Morse sent to London to determine their position on the map, captured and tortured to death to other prisoners in search of information to find her ... All in vain. The lame lady managed to escape by crossing the Pyrenees towards Spain , on foot, with her only leg.

For six weeks they put her in a prison in Figueras until the US embassy pressured the Francoist authorities to get her out of there. Virginia Hall stopped working with the British SOE but went on to spy for the OSS , the United States Office of Strategic Services, mother of the current CIA.

Washington had plans for her and her bike: return to the French north coast, settle in Normandy and start documenting beach defenses, weapons, armies and most importantly, recruit agents and coordinate with the Resistance to cut communications from the Germans in the decisive hours of Day D. Thousands of Frenchmen flew railways, attacked convoys, changed traffic signs and cut telegraph wires at their command. But Virginia Hall was not alone. Diana Rowden, Violette Szabo and Lilian Rolfe cover other areas with the same task. Some were arrested by the Nazis and ended their days in the Ravensbrück death camp or in Dachau .

Moving near the front was the eyes of the guerrillas in France. The information collected traveled to London in Morse thanks to a transmitter powered by his bicycle.

At the end of World War II he managed to return to the British capital, where he was received as a true legend. The king of England wanted to decorate her , like the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, but she preferred that it was the founder of the OSS, William Joseph Donovan, who imposed the medal in a simple act in his office, without The presence of nobody else.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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