French, British honor reticent female WWII spy

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BALTIMORE -- In 1942, the Gestapo started circulating wanted posters throughout Vichy France, offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her."

The woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working for the British intelligence agency, and the limp was the result of a wooden left leg. The limb had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey.

The injury derailed Mrs. Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department wouldn't hire amputees. But it didn't prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.

On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors honored Mrs. Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony in Washington where a privately commissioned painting of Mrs. Hall in action will be put on display.

British Ambassador David Manning planned to present a certificate signed by King George VI to Mrs. Hall's niece, Lorna Catling. Mrs. Hall should have received the document in 1943, when she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

"I think it was ironic that the State Department turned her down because she was an amputee, and here she went on and did all this other stuff," said Mrs. Catling, who lives in Baltimore.

Mrs. Hall was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and she decamped for London, where she was recruited by the British paramilitary service known as the Special Operations Executive. Fluent in French, she became the SOE's first female field operative.

Mrs. Hall was "the heartbeat" of the French Resistance in Lyon, where she was based during her first undercover stint, said Judith L. Pearson, whose biography of Mrs. Hall, "Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's First Female Spy," was published last year.

"Any agent from London came through her flat. She coordinated them with Resistance members," Miss Pearson said. "Most agents only stayed about three months in the field. She stayed 15 months."

But those wanted posters made her situation untenable, and she was forced to flee, on foot, through the snowy Pyrenees into Spain. During the journey, she sent a lighthearted radio message to London, reporting that "Cuthbert" -- her nickname for her prosthetic leg -- was giving her trouble.