Women of the OSS and SOE
A digital humanities project
Virginia Hall
Code name:Â
Germaine Lecontre, Agent 3844, Brigitte Lecontre, Marie Monin, Isabelle, Philomene, Diane (OSS), Artemis (Gestapo), Marcelle Montagne/Madame Marcelle, Camille
Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest child of Edwin Lee Hall and Barbara Virginia Hammel. Virginia was ambitious and as she grew older, she was uninterested in settling down and more interested in forging her own path and following her own dreams of becoming a diplomat for the State Department.
Though that dream never came to fruition, Virginia Hall established herself as a pioneering spy during World War II and was fundamental to clandestine operations for both the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), new special intelligence organizations formed during World War II. Despite having a prosthetic leg (which she nicknamed 'Cuthbert'), Virginia organized escape routes, built resistance networks, arranged parachute drops, transmitted secret messages, found safe houses, trained resistance fighters, and saved dozens of airmen. Initially, Virginia was an ideal choice for an SOE agent because as an American, she was considered neutral at the start of the war.
Before the War
Virginia attended Radcliffe in Cambridge, MA before moving to New York City and attending Barnard. Unsatisfied with school, she began to travel, and in this time she enrolled at Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris and studied at the Konsular Akademie in Vienna. She then returned to the US and took classes at George Washington.
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She moved to Warsaw, Poland and took a job as a consular service clerk at the American Embassy. Denied once again from her dream, she later transferred jobs and moved to Smyrna, now Izmir, Turkey. It was in Turkey where she suffered a tragic accident. While hunting, she accidentally shot herself in the foot. After a near-fatal infection of gangrene, she had to have her leg amputated. She returned home briefly in the summer of '34 but by November, she requested a return to work and ended up in Venice.
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Virginia returned home in 1937 to try for a diplomat job, but once again being denied, she was transferred from Venice to Tallinn, Estonia where she worked until she resigned from the State Department in March 1939. She was still in Estonia when WWII began on September 1, 1939.
Map
Timeline
A timeline of important moments throughout Virginia's life.
After the war
She received the Distinguished Service Cross, the only female civilian to do so, just days before the OSS was disbanded on October 1, 1945.
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Virginia joined what would become the CIA in December of 1946. Tired of her desk work, she resigned in July 1948. She was later hired at a CIA front organization in March 1950 but wanted more. She eventually became one of the first women admitted to the CIA headquarters in December 1951. She continued to work on various desks despite dealing with sexist reviews and lack of promotions.
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She married Paul Goillot, an OSS lieutenant who worked for her and was a Diane Irregular, on April 15, 1957.
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She retired from the agency when she reached 60, the mandatory age of retirement. She and Paul moved to Barnesville, Maryland where she lived until her death on July 8, 1982.
