Beverly Frazier reviewed the career of Virginia Hall,”the most dangerous of all Allied spies,” for Delphi Study Club members meeting in the home of Linda Brown.
Biographer and journalist Sonia Purnell uncovered the full secret life of the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines in her book A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.
Hall was a Baltimore socialite who had her first glimpse of intelligence work when she applied in 1931 for a secretarial position in the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. In 1939 she resigned from the State Department to volunteered for the British Auxiliary Territorial Service and drove an ambulance in France until the Germans overran Paris.
She contacted a member of the British Special Operations Executive and prepared for a secret mission to occupied France, posing as an American journalist. She reported on operations and conditions, recruited civilians for the French Resistance and eventually established a vast spy network throughout the country. In spite of her wooden leg, she hiked 50 miles in three days through winter snow over the Pyrenees from France into Spain after her cover was blown by a Nazi infiltrator.
She returned to France for the United States to lead a guerrilla campaign in 1944-1945, calling in air strikes to help liberate villages. After the war she worked for the CIA but never spoke publicly about her exploits. She was the only civilian woman in World War II to receive the Distinguished Service Cross, presented in a private ceremony at her request.
Attending the meeting were Frazier, Brown, Ann Cales, Vivian Pemberton and Marjilea Smithheisler.
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