So she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older - but inexperienced - male officer. Even the notion of dispatching a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. This “gallant lady,” her SOE commanders concluded, was almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat. For a whole year, she was SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service decided to dispatch more women into the field. She also masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. She was one of the first SOE officers to be dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the war, “amazingly successful.”Įven then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. When Hall once again volunteered, her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich.
The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy,” “fanatical enthusiasm” and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of undercover warfare. SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically barred from sending them into enemy territory. He put her in touch with a “friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and sabotage.
#FEMALE AGENT BEST FREE#
On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer her services to the British war effort. Even President Franklin Roosevelt, although himself reliant on a wheelchair, rejected lobbying from powerful family friends to overturn a bar on amputees from joining the diplomatic service.
Despite her raft of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women - only six out of 1500 staffers in the Foreign Service at that time were female and one of her several attempts to join them was hampered when her exam papers were mysteriously mislaid - as well as the disabled. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.īorn to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. It has also now named a training building after her. It has only been comparatively recently that the agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA.
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