VIRGINIA HALL, AMERICA'S GREATEST FEMALE SPY...#2

Hall joined the SOE in April 1941 and after training arrived in Vichy France, unoccupied by Germany and nominally independent at that time, on August 23, 1941. She was the second female agent to be sent to France by SOE's F (France) Section, and the first to remain there for a lengthy period of time. (SOE F section would send 41 female agents to France during World War II, of whom 26 would survive the war.) Hall's cover was as a reporter for the New York Post which gave her license to interview people, gather information and file stories filled with details useful to military planners. She based herself in Lyon. She turned away from her "chic Parisian wardrobe" to become inconspicuous and often quickly changed her appearance through make-up and disguise.

Hall was a pioneer as a World War II secret agent and had to learn on her own the "exacting tasks of being available, arranging contacts, recommending who to bribe and where to hide, soothing the jagged nerves of agents on the run and supervising the distribution of wireless sets." The network (or circuit) of SOE agents she founded was named Heckler. Among her recruits was gynecologist Jean Rousset and Germaine Guérin, the owner of a prominent brothel in Lyon. Guérin made several safehouses available to Hall and passed along tidbits of information she and her female employees heard from German officers visiting the brothel.

The official historian of the SOE, M. R. D. Foot, said that the motto of every successful secret agent was "dubito, ergo sum" ("I doubt, therefore I survive."). Hall's lengthy tenure in France without being captured illustrates her caution. In October 1941, she sensed danger and declined to attend a meeting of SOE agents in Marseille which the French police raided, capturing a dozen agents. After that debacle, Hall was one of the few SOE agents still at large in France and the only one with a means of transmitting information to London. George Whittinghill, an American diplomat in Lyon, allowed her to smuggle reports and letters to London in the diplomatic pouch.

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