On a white-hot day at the end of August 1940, an undercover British agent named George Bellows was working the dusty Spanish border town of Irun, keeping watch on the frantic comings and goings at the station. Spain was ruled by another fascist dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and teeming with Nazi informants but was officially neutral. Every day hundreds or even thousands of refugees were streaming over the frontier from France, some of whom might have vital information on what was going on under the heel of the Third Reich. Since Hitler’s invasion and the evacuation at Dunkirk, British intelligence had lost virtually all contact with its closest continental neighbor. Its one-time extensive network of agents across France had either escaped, been killed, or been deemed unreliable. London was left dependent on the vagaries of aerial reconnaissance and sketchy reports from neutral diplomats and reporters to find out what Hitler and his allies were doing, even while a Nazi invasion across the English Channel appeared to be imminent. Britain was fighting for its very survival, but was doing so almost blind.
Bellows’s eyes were drawn by a glamorous American making inquiries in the ticket office under the sinister glare of outsize banner portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. Intrigued, he drew closer and struck up a conversation with the young woman, who had just arrived from France and wished to take a train to Portugal to continue on from there to Britain by ship. He introduced himself as a salesman experienced in the challenges of wartime travel and offered to help her secure her passage. As they got talking, Virginia recounted her extraordinary story to this reassuring companion (although as ever she was selective in what she revealed). Bellows heard about her ambulance driving under fire, and how she had journeyed alone across the length of a France reeling from the humiliation of capitulation to Nazi Germany. And how she had had to cross the heavily patrolled demarcation line that broadly followed the course of the river Loire and divided the country into two distinct zones. She relayed in matter-of-fact detail how conditions were rapidly deteriorating in the south (the so-called Free or Nonoccupied Zone), nominally run from Vichy by the unelected chief of state, Marshal Pétain. The Occupied Zone (composed of the north and west of France) was already under direct control of the Germans stationed in Paris, and she angrily described the curfews and food shortages, the widespread arrests, and the incident at a Renault factory when workers protesting working conditions had been lined up against the wall and shot.
As he listened to her sharp yet impassioned account, Bellows grew astonished by Virginia’s courage under fire, powers of observation, and most of all her unqualified desire to help the French fight back. Trusting his instincts, he made the most important decision of his life, one that was to help revive hopes of an eventual Allied victory in France. When he bade Virginia farewell, he slipped her the phone number of a “friend” in London who could help find her a worthwhile new role and urged her to call him on her arrival. Even if the State Department did not appreciate her qualities, Bellows knew he had just encountered an exceptional force.1
Bellows did not give anything away, and judging by her visa application Virginia seems to have assumed she would most likely be driving ambulances again once she reached England. In fact, the number belonged to Nicolas Bodington, a senior officer in the independent French or F Section of a new and controversial British secret service. The Special Operations Executive had been approved on July 19, 1940, the day that Hitler had made a triumphant speech at the Reichstag in Berlin, boasting of his victories. In response, Winston Churchill had personally ordered SOE to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of sabotage, subversion, and spying. He wanted SOE agents—in reality more Special Forces than spies—to find the way to light the flame of resistance, prove to the French and other subject nations that they were not alone, and prepare them to rise up against their Nazi occupiers. Through a new form of irregular warfare—as yet undefined and untested—they needed to prepare for the distant day when Britain could land its forces on the Continent again. If this new paramilitary version of fifth columnists violated the old Queensberry Rules of international conflict (involving codes of conduct, ranks, and uniforms), then the Nazis had given them no choice.
To serve in SOE, Churchill believed, would require a character able to pursue a noble cause with piratical daring. But SOE was, unsurprisingly, struggling to find men with the guile and guts it took to be secretly infiltrated into France without backup if things went wrong. No one had really thought of considering women for such potentially suicidal work. Yet Bellows believed the American he had found in Irun station could be exactly what SOE needed.
Virginia soon forgot about the phone number, though, because uncharacteristically she had a change of heart. Upon her arrival in London on September 1, she felt reluctant to put her mother through any more angst, perhaps also doubting that she really could make herself useful. She presented herself at the American embassy in London as a former State Department employee and asked for a temporary job while she waited to be repatriated back home. Virginia was not initially made welcome; after all, she had resigned before from the service. True, her up-to-date knowledge of France was invaluable, and she obligingly wrote a detailed report on matters such as the curfew, food shortages, and the way that in her view the “French were continuing to conduct themselves with dignity with the exception of prostitutes,” whom she believed were shamelessly consorting with the Germans.2 The State Department, however, took more notice of her linguistic and typing skills. The military attaché needed a secretary. Within a fortnight she was behind a typewriter again.
The weeks wore on, her nights largely sleepless as London braved the Blitz. Mrs. Hall urged her daughter to speed up her return, and shortly before Christmas Virginia agreed to book the passage home she thought was due to her as a former State Department staffer. No, she was informed, she was too late. She had allowed more than a year to elapse since her resignation and was no longer eligible for an official ticket, and in wartime others were all but impossible to come by. Unexpectedly stuck in London alone, she dug out the telephone number she had been given in Irun. Nicolas Bodington, an ex-Paris correspondent for Reuters, took the call and invited her to dinner early in the New Year with his American wife, Elizabeth, at their smart, white-stucco home at 20 Charles Street in Mayfair, not far from where Virginia was staying.
Although his round glasses lent him a scholarly air, Bodington could be a dilatory and even controversial character, known for his brutal lack of tact. Behind the blackout curtains that bitter winter’s evening, however, he was at his most entertaining and put Virginia at her ease by banking up the fire and laying on as fine a meal as wartime conditions allowed. She had no idea of her host’s real war job—or his exasperation at F Section’s continued failure to infiltrate a single agent after six months of trying—but soon she had him gripped by talk of her own plans. Now that she could not go home to America she wanted to return to France. Speaking about her trip as breezily as if she were embarking on a holiday, and seemingly unfazed by the dangers or obstacles, she recounted how she had it all worked out right down to how she would press her old contacts at the State Department to fast-track her application for a visa. She had also plotted her route via Barcelona in northern Spain, crossing the border by train to the French Riviera, ostensibly to help the Quakers’ refugee relief effort, but also taking the chance to report for newspapers back home. After all, as she pointed out to her exultant host as they finished their meal, as a supposedly neutral American she could travel into and around France quite openly.
Early the next morning, January 15, 1941, Bodington rushed to the top-secret SOE offices at 64 Baker Street (the road coincidentally made famous as the home of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes).3 He took the notoriously wobbly lift up to the fifth floor and in a state of considerable excitement dictated an urgent memo to the head of his section, known internally as F. “It strikes me that this lady, a native of Baltimore,” he informed F, “might well be used for a mission and that we might facilitate her voyage there and back, and stand her expenses on her trip in exchange for what service she could render us.”4 The more Bodington thought about Virginia, the more exceptional the opportunity she appeared to offer SOE, now under intense pressure to justify its existence through action. As she was American there was no need for the sort of challenging clandestine sea landing or parachute drop that had so far proved beyond them. Neither did her accented French count as a problem as she could operate under the cover of working as an American journalist, which would also explain her need to travel around and ask probing questions.
Such was his certainty of the value of the idea that Bodington had already instructed Captain Strong of MI5 (Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency) to conduct a positive vetting of her, a rigorous screening process then known as “putting her through the cards,” or PTC. The PTC involved searching for traces of German connections in the vast vaults of cross-referenced paper files kept on undesirables of every sort. It was a lengthy process, and F swiftly agreed that Virginia was such a catch they could not wait. Well before her “clean” verdict was finally returned on February 17, Virginia had been offered a job. This time it was not typing that anyone had in mind.
Luckily, money was hardly the motivation as the five hundred pounds a year on offer was barely more than she had been paid for sitting at a State Department desk. But how could Virginia, lover of adventure, otherwise stuck in a dead-end job in what she considered a dead-end life, resist entering France as a secret liaison officer (Class A)? She would be the first female F Section agent and the first liaison officer of either sex. Tasked with coordinating the work of local Resistance leaders and future SOE agents, her appointment was an outstanding act of faith in her abilities, which had for so long been belittled or ignored. She resigned again from the State Department, and on April 1, 1941, started work on preparing for her secret mission without anyone understanding quite what it would involve.
What did become clear was that SOE’s new, most “ungentlemanly” brand of warfare would draw in large part on the terror waged against the British by Irish republican paramilitaries. In the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–1921, the British had observed how regular troops could be defeated by a hostile population whose will had been stiffened by a few resolute gunmen. Now SOE agents would be expected to act as these Irish terrorist leaders had done—inspiring, controlling, and assisting the French to rise up against their oppressors when the time was right and to eliminate without mercy those who got in the way. There was, however, a lot of groundwork to do before SOE had any hope of sparking what was in effect another French Revolution.
Advertising for recruits for such subversive work was obviously out of the question—the government never mentioned Special Operations Executive in public and if asked would deny its very existence. Traditionally, British secret services had drawn from a shallow gene pool of posh boys raised on imperial adventure stories, but this regard for breeding over intellect was scarcely a match for the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. MI6 operatives were accustomed to lying low and patiently gathering intelligence while avoiding direct action themselves. SOE agents would be different. They would observe, yes, but also recruit and train guerrilla forces to agitate, spread propaganda, and ultimately kill and destroy. As one intelligence writer has put it: if MI6 officers spotted enemy troops crossing a bridge they would observe them from a distance and estimate their number, whereas SOE would simply demolish the bridge. The old-style spies were outraged by what they deemed to be a high strategy-low tactics approach—branding it by turns “amateur,” “dangerous,” or bogus”—and tried to thwart SOE’s very inception.
Unsurprisingly, Hugh Dalton, the pugnacious Labour minister whom Churchill had chosen to put in charge of SOE, found the search for a new type of rule-breaking recruit capable of “absolute secrecy” and “fanatical enthusiasm”5 tough going. Dyed-in-the-wool military types, with their concern for what they termed “ethics” had to be kept away, as indeed did most of His Majesty’s ministers. A Cabinet colleague excluded the devout Anglo-Catholic foreign secretary Lord Halifax from SOE meetings, for instance, because he did not have what it took to “make a gangster.”6
Yet such was Britain’s plight as she braced herself for invasion that the highest hopes were placed on SOE by Churchill himself. Others also saw it as an imaginative if desperate alternative to the “frontal slogging matches” of the First World War. Perhaps through cunning and courage it could help break Nazi power while Britain worked flat out to build up the military might needed for an eventual return to the Continent. And although no one could yet predict when that might be, any future attempted landing was always expected to be in France (the largest and nearest country in Western Europe), making it the pivotal military theater in the Western Hemisphere. Yet there was still no detailed plan or tested technique for stoking this rebellion. Virginia was joining what remained a Cinderella secret service, whose early days were marked by repeated failure. A boat carrying three agents to the coast of northern France had turned back when it had run into a German convoy. Another agent had boarded a plane to parachute in but became terror stricken at the last minute and refused to jump. Most recruits had not even got that far, pulling out horrified the minute they discovered what they were expected to do; others were ejected once found to be mad or bad. Even in London F Section numbered just eight people. The whole of SOE had just ten phone lines.
It was a huge gamble in so many ways. Even if Virginia could make it safely into France, did the desk clerk from Baltimore really have what it took to succeed? Was there any real hope of creating a free France anyway or was resistance just a fable? Early on, Dalton had promised that by the end of 1940 “the slave lands” overrun by Germany would rise up in rebellion, causing Nazi occupation to “dissolve like snow in the spring.”7 Certainly, that had not happened. One prominent French patriot, for instance, had not been able to recruit more than five volunteers to form a fledgling Resistance group after three desperate months of trying. So was there any support at all in France for Britain continuing the fight? Could the French people be transformed into effective paramilitaries to help the British wage the war against fascism or would they simply become hostile servants of the Third Reich? Could a British-controlled agent even survive long enough in France to report back? SOE had no answers to these questions.
The prospect of SOE service in the field was undoubtedly terrifying. So many backed out that SOE would later set up a “cooler,” a remote country house in the wilds of Scotland where quitters would be forcibly confined until what knowledge they had gleaned of SOE was of no use. As of July 1941, F Section had just ten people still in training—of whom Virginia was the only woman. And the only one with a disability.
Yet there is no mention of Virginia’s prosthetic in her files. SOE seems to have been unbothered. Her superiors already knew she could drive from her time with the French ambulances. When she was asked whether she could ride a horse, sail a boat, shoot, scale mountains, ski, or cycle she answered yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. True, she admitted she could not box, nor most important for a secret agent, run.8 But for Virginia, this was the first time since her accident that she was not defined by it. She was not going to give up.
Yet a frustrating series of events kept delaying her departure. It was as if the State Department (almost certainly unaware of the true reason for her trip to France) was deliberately holding her back even now, refusing to allow its London embassy to help push through her visas on the “grounds that no special assistance”9 should be given to Miss Hall. Unwilling to promote her within their own ranks, State Department officials seemed equally reluctant to allow her to plow her own furrow elsewhere. Perhaps her name was noted down somewhere in a file as having asked for special treatment before over her application to join the diplomatic service.
In the meantime, in May 1941 SOE had finally successfully parachuted two agents, both French, into France. The aristocratic Pierre de Vomécourt (or Lucas) was SOE’s first circuit organizer, and Georges Bégué its first wireless operator, and therefore its sole direct communications link with France. (Wireless operators were vital for sending intelligence and receiving orders.) Both were to become in different ways exceptional officers, but they could scarcely cover the entire country of 250,000 square miles by themselves. Virginia’s presence was more urgent than ever, but now there were problems with her journalistic cover. SOE had used a go-between to approach Ralph Ingersoll, owner of the American magazine PM, to take her on as a stringer. “We are not asking Miss Hall to do anything more than keep her eyes and ears open,”10 Ingersoll was told. He said no. SOE had more luck with an “extremely cordial” George Backer, publisher of the New York Post, who agreed to arrange for Virginia to become his accredited correspondent. Backer was “obviously aware” of the “ulterior motive,”11 although he knew to pretend otherwise, a delighted SOE operative reported back.
There were, as ever in Virginia’s life, further obstacles. Churchill’s Cabinet had forbidden women from front-line service of any sort. Government lawyers advised that women were particularly vulnerable if caught, as they were not recognized as combatants and therefore not protected by international laws on war. Within SOE itself, old-fashioned attitudes were also widespread. There was “considerable hostility”12 at every level to the idea of a woman in any other than supporting roles such as decoders, typists, and couriers. Also, as Virginia was American, could she be trusted? It was standard intelligence policy to recruit only British citizens. Her country, in those pre-Pearl Harbor days, was not at war with Germany and was suspiciously friendly with the Vichy regime, which was proving deeply hostile to Britain. “I have raised this question with CD [the SOE chief] and the Sections concerned and I do not consider that she can be qualified as an intelligence agent,”13 a senior security officer argued a few days after she joined the service. It now seemed as if her disability was the only thing not to count against her.
In the end, Virginia’s supporters won the day, persuading the doubters that the nationality of recruits was unimportant as long as they were loyal to the anti-Nazi cause and the British war effort. SOE would perforce need to be multinational; there could be no room for nationalism of any sort. And when the need to infiltrate agents into France was so urgent, the fact that one of the very few plausible candidates was a woman would simply have to be overlooked. Indeed, SOE decided in its desperation that it must and would be ready to work with “any man, woman or institution, whether Roman Catholic or masonic, trotskyist or liberal, syndicalist or capitalist, rationalist or chauvinist, radical or conservative, stalinist or anarchist, gentile or Jew, that would help it beat the Nazis.”14
So SOE’s urgency became Virgina’s breakthrough. In true SOE style, the rule book (such as there was) was discarded and her mission confirmed as “Liaison and Intelligence in Vichy France”—although almost uniquely in SOE she was not granted the recognition of an equivalent military rank, perhaps because her disability would have prevented her from passing a precommissioning medical test. It was an omission that would dog her for rest of the war, but for now plain Miss Hall was given orders to report generally on operating conditions and to help other agents who would follow her in. Now finally, what SOE termed her “special” training could begin.
Despite the wide-ranging scope of her mission, the induction was perfunctory and nothing like the extensive preparation given to later recruits. Over a few days locked away in a heavily guarded modern house hidden in the New Forest north of Bournemouth, she learned the basics of coding, and of clandestine warfare and security—how to disseminate pro-British propaganda; how to use only cover names or code names in the field—and “the importance of looking natural and ordinary” while doing “unnatural and extraordinary things.”15 During days that started at six and went long into the evening, she learned how to spot a follower (look in a window) and lose him (double back). She picked up when to change an address, how to make secret inks (urine comes up brilliantly when subjected to heat), and even how to conceal her personality (through altering a distinctive laugh, gesture, or demeanor). She was shown how to seal microfilm documents (equivalent to nine sheets of letter-size paper) in tiny containers and insert them in her navel or rectum—or, as she discovered, in a handy little slot in her metal heel. She learned how to rifle files and go through a desk leaving no trace, even replacing dust on a smooth surface, and how to approach a guarded house noiselessly. A retired burglar came in to demonstrate how to pick locks. Staff dressed in German uniforms probably put her through the standard drill of a simulated Gestapo interrogation or Verhör, waking her up in the middle of the night with rifle butts, blazing lights, and shouts of “Raus, du Schweinehund!”
She was obviously already familiar with handling a gun, but was now taken through her paces on how to use one in anger. She may have been allowed to practice in the James Bond–style firing range under Baker Street tube station, belonging to the London Transport Rifle Club. (Although in 1941, Britain was so short of ammunition it is possible that she was allowed only to load and unload the favored new Sten gun rather than fire it. Most trainees had to practice with the “dreadful old Tommy gun,” instead.16) She was trained to fire a range of weapons at SOE’s disposal, although most agents—probably Virginia included—were in the first instance issued with the handily compact Colt .32 revolver. But due to the almost total lack of up-to-date intelligence on conditions in France, none of this training could truly prepare agents for the dangers in the field. Virtually the sole source of maps, for instance, was an old Michelin holiday guide from a London travel agency.
SOE staffers were just guessing “at the sort of things they were instructing us on,” another agent, Francis Cammaerts, remarked. “They were trying to teach us something that they themselves didn’t know.” Indeed, there was very little to say about the core business of building up a Resistance network from scratch in a foreign land behind enemy lines—because no one had really done it. With their privileged former lives in journalism and business, and as citizens of an island nation that had not been invaded for nearly a millennium, SOE staff officers in London had little concept of how ruthless an occupier could be. “At the start, it must be confessed, we all thought of the whole business as a game,” recalled one early agent, who rapidly realized otherwise. “A serious, deadly one, but a game nevertheless. There was amusement, excitement and adventure.”17 But the Germans never saw it as a game and Virginia was to be a pioneer in a whole new type of warfare: an amateur and improviser pitted against the professional brutality of the Gestapo and Vichy police. No records remain—or were perhaps ever made—of how she performed in training. It was generally accepted that in the field she would either learn fast or die. In any case most of her colleagues thought all women incapable of such a demanding and dangerous job. It was up to her to survive and prove them wrong.
Virginia’s final briefing took place at the F Section flat at 6 Orchard Court, just behind Selfridges department store, in Portman Square. Arthur Park, a gold-toothed former doorman of the Paris branch of the National Westminster Bank, welcomed her into the thickly carpeted hallway by her field name of Germaine Lecontre. Although the flat was luxuriously furnished, agents often found their final memories of London were dominated by the bizarrely macabre bathroom, which had a black tub, black tiles, and a black basin with gleaming chrome taps.
An SOE conducting officer instructed Virginia to inform her mother that she was going “somewhere in Europe.” She was then briefed on when she could exercise her license to kill—and how. Her preferred method was to use one of the range of tablets supplied by SOE laboratories. What she called the pills were probably the L or Lethal tablets—tiny rubber balls containing potassium cyanide also intended for her own use if she were being tortured and could no longer bear it. Their coating was insoluble and if held in the mouth and swallowed whole, the pill could pass through the body without causing harm. But if chewed or the capsule broken and the contents added to food, death would come within forty-five seconds. Under SOE’s own brand of morality—and crucially where it departed from terrorism—she was instructed to kill only when her own or her comrades’ security was in immediate danger. Her first “elimination,” they said, would be the hardest.
Another sort of tablet produced a high fever and other symptoms of typhoid and would be useful if a hospital visit could facilitate an escape. The morphine-based K pills could also come in handy in such a situation as they could knock out someone, including a guard or even a nurse, for four hours. Most widely used, though, were the bitter-tasting, blue Benzedrine, or amphetamine, tablets. Sleep in the field would be a luxury, yet the mistakes made in tiredness were often fatal. Most took a couple of dozen with them and quickly asked for more. Now ready to go, on Saturday, August 23, 1941, Virginia left her old life behind her and headed for the ship to Lisbon and on into the unknown with barely a backward glance.
No one in London gave Agent 3844 more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving even the first few days. For all Virginia’s qualities, dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into wartime France was on paper an almost insane gamble. Her mission, code-named Operation Geologist 5, would expose her to grinding fear and the perpetual likelihood of a grisly death. There was no reception committee to welcome her or ready circuit for her to join, but she was permitted—even obliged—to commit a range of crimes from subversion to murder. To survive she must lead her double life to perfection and avoid capture at all costs. Her disability might help protect her—in that she made such an unlikely agent—but at the same time it rendered her more conspicuous.
It was two years to the day since the war started when she strode purposefully toward the modest Hôtel de la Paix in Vichy, capital of the Nonoccupied Zone. Thunderstorms growled ominously in the distance and the heat was suffocating after a long summer drought but dozens of pairs of eyes fixed on this statuesque, flame-haired newcomer with an aristocratic bearing as she climbed the steps into the lobby. Anyone out of the ordinary was ripe for denunciation to the Germans or their Vichy underlings. The financial rewards were generous.
The next day, September 4, 1941, Virginia registered her arrival at the gendarmerie as an American citizen under her real name, telling them she was a special envoy for the New York Post. As proof she pointed to the fact that she had already filed a story via Western Union cable, headlined EXCLUSIVE: BATHROOM OFFICES IN VICHY: REPORTER FINDS CAPITAL CROWDED. Its publication was an early measure of her calm efficiency—and cause for an outbreak of joy in Baker Street. Virginia had not only made it through her first hours but had already established contact. There was at last a connection with the political heart of France after silence for so long.
The article was ostensibly about how Pétain’s administration was commandeering every inch of space in its new hometown, including hotel bathrooms. But what enthralled London was her reportage on the lack of taxis and how her newly acquired ration book allowed her only ten ounces of meat a week, ten ounces of bread a day, but no rice, spaghetti, or chocolate. “I haven’t yet seen any butter and there is little milk . . . [and] women are no longer entitled to buy cigarettes”18 was noted down word for word. These tiny threads of information could make the difference between life and death, and initially London sought such intelligence above all else as it stepped up its efforts to infiltrate more agents into France.19 One operative walked into trouble, for instance, by not knowing that French cafés were forbidden to sell alcohol on alternate days. His ignorance immediately marked him out as an impostor, and he had had to run for his life while the proprietor called the police. As letters were censored and the Germans listened in to phone conversations, Virginia was limited to what she could safely tell her controllers in her published articles. Some contained preagreed words as coded messages—but mostly she was making her points en clair. She gave warning to Baker Street that even family postcards sent across the demarcation line were routinely checked, with the apparently innocent observation that “one is not inclined to write at length [on them] or air any grievances.”20 London had no direct way of contacting her.
Virginia’s status as a journalist was her sole protection against the “sadistic, depraved genius”21 of the Gestapo who were ever present, even in the so-called Free Zone, albeit usually in plain clothes. So establishing her cover was Virginia’s priority in her first few days. Combining a beatific smile with her genuine love of France, she cultivated senior Vichy bureaucrats and policemen and soon had them eating out of her hand by appealing to their patriotism and pride. In time, some would risk their own positions to save her life and help protect many others. As one historian has noted, “she seems to have totally bewitched everybody who knew her.”22
She also presented herself to the U.S. ambassador, Admiral William Leahy, but he proved more resistant to her magic. American isolationism remained a formidable force and Washington had recognized Pétain’s totalitarian regime despite its evident accommodation with the Nazis. But President Roosevelt had plucked one of his old friends out of retirement as his envoy to handle relations with Vichy—precisely because he was (privately) worried that France would in some way help the Axis powers defeat Britain. Despite the public policy of non-intervention, America had already sent food and aid to the French to try to wean them off German support and win their allegiance. Leahy, so punctual when arriving and leaving work that a local luggage shop set its clock by his movements, thus saw it as his overriding duty to maintain courteous relations with the marshal even as the Vichy government adopted some of the worst excesses of Nazi ideology under the banner of a new moral order for France. Pétain’s repression of Jews or “immigrants,” as he referred to them—whom he had already banned from universities and the leading professions—was at this point often more draconian than Hitler’s. Some of Leahy’s more liberal colleagues nevertheless worried that his “sympathy for the Vichy regime often seemed warmer than considerations of diplomatic and strategic expediency could account for.”23
Leahy made it clear he did not want his staff—or other Americans—to associate themselves with any espionage activities in case it messed up his careful diplomatic choreography. He had already noticed this “girl reporter” in an otherwise male press pack, with her independent attitude and thirst for knowledge, and soon harbored suspicions. It was clear that she was cleverly winning over key French officials and extracting far more information from them than her peers. Suzanne Bertillon, chief censor of the foreign press in Vichy’s Ministry of Information, was just one who went out of her way to help Virginia from the beginning. There was something about this particular foreigner that commanded Bertillon’s trust and the two became friends. The fiercely Gaullist Bertillon not only avoided censoring Virginia’s articles but set up a network of ninety contacts across France (such as mayors, farmers, and industrialists) to supply the American every week with information that proved vital for the British war effort. Virginia was thus able to collect intelligence on the location of ammunition and fuel depots, German troop movements, industrial production, and a Nazi submarine base under construction in Marseille that was later destroyed by Allied bombs.24 Indeed, Virginia became so knowledgeable on the state of wartime France that Leahy’s staff also surmised that she must be working for British intelligence. Soon she persuaded some of them to help her even if they risked their careers to do so, and they all had to be careful to cooperate out of the sight of the ambassador. Prominent among them was the American defense attaché Robert Schow, who was, unknown to his boss, in contact with early members of the Resistance. Later on, there is evidence that an African American official named Johnny Nicholas was also directly involved.25 It is more than likely they crossed paths but there are no records of meetings with Virginia, for good reason. It was a bold posting as no safe houses or false identify papers would have been available for him in case of trouble. The Nazis held a pathological hatred for black people, a comparative rarity in Europe at the time. When they took control of an area they habitually set about rounding them up.26
Despite her progress in making contacts, Virginia faced formidable obstacles in those early days. She soon found that Vichy, a faded spa town with an operetta atmosphere, was too small and claustrophic in which to lead a full double life as reporter-cum-spy. Despite Leahy’s friendliness to the French regime, his embassy was under constant surveillance;27 in fact, the town was crawling with undercover Gestapo, who were increasingly predatory. The Free Zone may have been spared mass Nazi occupation, but its freedom was a pretense. The truth was, as one historian has put it, that Vichy France was firmly “under German control once removed.”28 Pétain was eighty-five by this time and almost certainly senile. He was kept alert by morning injections of amphetamines, although when these wore off in the afternoon he was often difficult to rouse or simply incoherent. And yet he was still revered, despite shocking many supporters across France by his handshake with Hitler at Montoire, south of Paris, in October 1940, and by his espousal of collaboration with the Nazis. His actions had perversely had the effect of making many believe that to resist the Germans was to commit a crime. The marshal was seen by most French as the embodiment of whatever honor France had left; to go against a First World War military hero for most of a nation still stunned by the speed and ignominy of its capitulation was tantamount to treason. Also seen in the south as the final hedge against full-scale German occupation (and equally the feared Reds of Russia), he rationalized defeat into an opportunity for the power he had long craved. Pictures of him were plastered on classroom walls and shopwindows; his effigy was on coins and stamps.
In the face of such a powerful cult of personality—sustained by vicious muzzling of the independent press—Virginia discovered with dismay that there was precious little appetite to rejoin the fight. Pétain—subverting the legacy of French heroes such as Joan of Arc and Napoleon—had persuaded, or at least allowed, the French to believe that honor could be found in defeat. He would brook no opposition to his alliance with the Germans or his rejection of democracy; his diktats against internal enemies were enforced by arrest, internment, and when necessary, execution squads. Opposition had been and still was fragmented and weak. Not one major political party had stood united against the dissolution of Parliament or in favor of resistance to the Germans—and now they were dispensed with. One prefect of the Eure-et-Loir département, Jean Moulin, slit his throat in a bid to take his own life rather than agree to sign a pro-German declaration under torture, but although he survived he was an isolated figure. A junior French general and former undersecretary of defense named Charles de Gaulle had also had the courage to proclaim that he did not accept the surrender. The day before Churchill founded SOE, the Frenchman had invited those of his compatriots who agreed with him to join him in fighting on. “Whatever happens,” he had proclaimed in a shaky voice on June 18, 1940, over the BBC from exile in London, “the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.” Pétain had duly responded by having de Gaulle tried for treason and sentenced to death in absentia. His call had in any case gone largely unheard—and for the most part the French simply accepted the price of defeat. In the circumstances, what use was it for Virginia to preach the gospel of Resistance?
After a month in Vichy Virginia moved to what she believed to be more promising pastures in the city of Lyon, seventy miles to the southeast and out of sight of Ambassador Leahy. Lyon’s bourgeois façade belied a seditious past and what she heard could be the stirrings of a rebellious future. Its craft guilds rebelled against the clergy in the thirteenth century, and during the 1789 Revolution its citizens held out against the Jacobins in Paris. Since then, secret societies such as the Freemasons had thrived; it remained a difficult city for outsiders to crack.
Lyon’s proximity to the border with neutral Switzerland (just eighty miles to the east) could also open up a new channel of communications, as Virginia remained without a wireless operator. The city’s dramatic topography and confusing layout was another factor in making it a natural birthplace for an underground movement. Divided into discrete areas, the heart of town was a peninsula washed by two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, which were straddled by seventeen bridges and surrounded by wooded hills. Behind the place des Terreaux, with its seventeenth-century city hall, were the Croix-Rousse heights. Here, hundreds of steep stone steps led up to Vieux Lyon, with its impenetrable network of traboules, or interconnecting passages through buildings and between streets, “much like an above-ground sewer system, and almost as dirty and evil-smelling.”29 Only the locals knew their way around the labyrinth as the Gestapo had discovered. Further out of town were vast, flat floodplains, ideal for future parachute drops of agents and supplies.
Word had reached Virginia that a few uncommonly tough Lyonnais were gathering in smoke-filled bouchons—the city’s famously homely little bistros—to plan and to plot. Some were publishing the first tentative anti-Nazi tracts, using tiny primitive presses, such as Les Petites Ailes de France (the Little Wings of France) and Le Coq Enchaîné (the Chained Rooster). There were a handful who “preferred death to accepting German domination”30 and their spirit was just beginning to inspire a change of mood from craven acceptance. The fact that more than a million French husbands, sons, and brothers had still not come home from prisoner-of-war camps in Germany was prompting a quiet but seething anger; groups of Lyonnais also bridled at exhortations to improve themselves as Christians, soldiers, or obedient wives under Vichy’s “new moral order.” They scorned Pétain’s vows to rid France of the Third Republic, which had hosted an exceptional literary and artistic flowering, but which he denounced as “overrun by homosexuals and women.” They felt betrayed by the way in which he sought to destroy the ideas of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité of the French Revolution and replace them with the Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, Family, Country) slogan of the new État Français (French State). French Communists had been particularly fired up since the Reich had attacked the Soviet Union in June, breaking a nonaggression pact.
So for the first time since the armistice, and for a conflicting range of reasons, there was a faint muttering on the streets of Lyon among shopkeepers, doctors, factory workers, railwaymen, and industrialists. But no one, however they felt, had so far been able to join the “Resistance,” because until now no such organization had really come to exist. There was no blueprint imposed from above, and membership relied for the most part on haphazard encounters. The focus was still on talk rather than action; there were no guns or explosives or the skills to use them. Help from London remained unreachable; genuine information was equally elusive because Vichy propaganda on the progress of the war had long since drowned out real news. And with denunciation by neighbors, colleagues, or even family a constant threat, there was a fierce suspicion of outsiders.
When Virginia arrived at Lyon’s Gare de Perrache she had more immediate concerns. The place was heaving. Some 200,000 refugees escaping Nazi persecution to the north had descended on a city with a population of 570,000. Every hotel and guesthouse was fit to burst, there were no apartments to rent, and she had no friends to turn to. Sometime later, an exhausted Virginia dragged herself up the verdant hillside high above the river Saône to La Mulatière, where she knocked on the doors of the Sainte-Elisabeth convent. Fortunately, the cloistered sisters, unused as they were to receiving visitors, took pity and offered her a bed in a tiny room in a tower, where she had the “undivided attention of a strong north wind.”31 The one condition was that she return by six thirty in the evening when they locked the gates. She admitted it was all “certainly a change” from her prewar party existence in Paris. The nuns, who wore a “quaint headdress—a white dutch cap with wings,” fed her with produce from their own farm. Despite their otherworldliness, they became not only her first shelter in Lyon, but also her earliest recruits. Thanks to Virginia’s lateral thinking, F Section had just secured one of the best early safe houses in Vichy France.
As soon as a room became available, however, she booked into the Grand Nouvel Hôtel on rue Grolée to be in the center of town. It was ideal as her PC—or poste de commande: it had several entrances (vital for a quick getaway); easy access to the Number 3 tram (handy for getting about); and most important, it was close to the American consulate on place de la Bourse. Virginia registered as Brigitte Lecontre with her false papers supplied by SOE, printed up by a friendly forger on the Kingston bypass in southwest London (another of SOE’s underworld contacts) and then stamped on and chewed up until they looked appropriately tatty. Brigitte quickly settled into a routine, going out early in the morning and coming back at six in the evening, when she drank a glass of wine at the bar while reading messages left for her in reception.
Afterward she sometimes dined in a little restaurant near the hotel where the Greek patron, who stocked up on the black market, treated this good-looking woman like a loving daughter. He refused to take her food coupons but plied her with plates of macaroni, her favorite apéritif of gin and vermouth, and even much-prized English cigarettes despite the ban on women buying anything to smoke.32 He was another early recruit.
As Virginia, she took greatest care to inveigle herself with the American consulate, visiting almost every day as the correspondent from the New York Post. Gone were the red tresses of Vichy’s Miss Hall, however. She had learned to become less conspicuous than the striking figure who had caught the eye of George Bellows in Spain, dyeing her hair light brown and drawing it tightly into a bun to reveal the “features of a cavalier” and “beautifully calm eyes” that “twinkled in friendly circumstances.”33
She had also abandoned her chic Parisian wardrobe, avoiding the flamboyant look that Vichy propaganda termed “virago juive et bolchévique,”34 in favor of the quiet tweed suits of the petite bourgeoisie. Wearing her beloved trousers was now out of the question as Vichy blamed them for the female emancipation that had enthralled Virginia in prewar Paris but which Pétainists equated with a dangerous “moral turpitude.”35 Now those freedoms had been lost and in this new illiberal time women dressed demurely to avoid attention from the French police or their German masters. The upside was that in those early months such regressive views meant that most men struggled to believe that women could be involved in subversion.
Drawing on her love of drama and dressing up at school, she learned how to change her appearance within minutes depending on whom she was meeting. Altering her hairstyle, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, putting on glasses, changing her makeup, wearing different gloves to hide her hands, or even inserting slivers of rubber into her mouth to puff out her cheeks: it all worked surprisingly well. With a little improvisation she could be three or four different women—Brigitte, Virginia, Marie, or Germaine—within the space of an afternoon. Always moving, always changing, it made her difficult to pin down.
In place de la Bourse, the American vice consul George Whittinghill received her warmly as Virginia. Although he had to remain outwardly neutral, she quickly assessed Whittinghill’s sympathies correctly and recruited him as one of her most important helpers. It was not long before the pair had set up a reliable method of smuggling her messages out of France to the American embassy in Bern via the diplomatic pouch. From the Swiss capital, the military attaché, Colonel Barnwell Legge—who declared Virginia an “excellent type and a most reliable worker”36—would faithfully send the reports on to London. He forwarded replies and cash from Baker Street back to Lyon in sealed envelopes marked “Marie c/o Lion,” Lion being Whittinghill’s code name. Virginia now had an enviably reliable—if not speedy—channel of communication.
Yet what she really needed was a wireless operator. It was virtually impossible to organize parachute drops of new agents or supplies, for instance, without instant communication. SOE had so far managed to dispatch only two working operators into the whole of the Free Zone. The first, Georges Bégué, was overworked and monopolized by Lucas nearly two hundred miles away in Châteauroux. The only other Free Zone operator, Gilbert Turck, whose code name was Christophe, had been parachuted in, in August, but had immediately been imprisoned by the French police after being knocked unconscious on landing. His future had looked ominous until news came of his “amazing escape,” thanks to a mysterious intervention by the Vichy High Command, the first hint of the SOE wipeout that was to come.
September 1941 was a busy month for SOE, which was rapidly gearing up its operations in France. Virginia was standing by to make contact with the dozen or so new F Section agents coming in by parachute or by sea via the Mediterranean coast. Among the jumpers on the night of September 6 were George Langelaan, a former New York Times correspondent; Michael Trotobas, a charismatic young English chef; Victor Gerson, or Vic, a Jewish textiles businessman; and a supremely brave Lancashire engineer, Ben Cowburn. On September 19, several more F Section men arrived on board a converted freighter, including Georges Duboudin, or Alain, who headed to Lyon to join Virginia, and Francis Basin (Olive) who remained on the Riviera.
Just as Virginia was settling into the Grand Nouvel Hôtel, four more dropped during the moonlit night of Friday, October 10, near Bergerac in the Dordogne, along with the first SOE air delivery of money, explosives, and weapons. One arrival was particularly welcome, as Lieutenant Jean-Philippe Le Harivel had orders to travel to Lyon to act as Virginia’s wireless operator. He and two others were welcomed by a reception committee led by the former Socialist deputy Jean Pierre-Bloch and his wife, Gaby, who hurried to hide the materiel and sweep up the men into a safe house. But one newcomer could not be found. In the confusion, he had been dropped four miles off course—together with most of the supplies—and had blacked out after landing on a rock. When the Vichy police picked him up the following morning, they found in his pocket a piece of paper London had carelessly provided to all its outgoing agents. It was a map showing the location of an SOE safe house in Marseille—a gated residence behind a large verdant garden, called the Villa des Bois—where Christophe had been holed up since his release. It was just one of a number of leads now in police possession that all led to that address on the outskirts of the French port.
After recent outbreaks of violence against the occupying army in Paris and elsewhere, the Vichy authorities and their German masters were in the process of a brutal clampdown, with wholesale arrests and bloody reprisals. The assassination of a single German colonel in the city of Nantes on the Loire had, for instance, led to the shooting of forty-eight citizens in revenge. The French police were as eager as the Nazis to stamp out further trouble and “bully the dissidents into submission.”37 SOE may have been unaware of Vichy’s “efficiency and ruthlessness” against the Resistance, and failed in its duty to warn its agents.38 But soon they were to learn to fear them more than the Gestapo because of the skill of the Vichy security services in laying traps and infiltrating their ranks.39 The French authorities were doing a highly competent job on the Nazis’ behalf.
In some ways, the Nantes shootings played into Virginia’s hands as she began to establish herself in Lyon and plan for the future. They galvanized opinion against the Germans and their Vichy supporters and helped to spark the very first thoughts of a national Resistance movement. She reported back to London how the Nantes tragedy, while unconnected to SOE, was highlighting the need for strategy, training, and supplies to be properly coordinated across France. It was also clear that the Resistance could never pose a real threat to the occupiers until it had multiple and reliable radio links with the only free nation in Europe continuing the fight. Less obvious was how Virginia was to build up the local manpower necessary for a future fighting force. Although officially still only a liaison officer she now embarked on setting up her own circuit, code-named Heckler, but had started with virtually nothing, let alone guidance on how to recruit supporters on the ground. The going in those early days in Lyon was extremely tough. Even those rare souls she had found with the will to fight would have to be exceptionally patient. Their job at this point was merely to exist, to form the nucleus of a secret army that would one day rise up to attack the Germans from within when the Allies finally came back. In the meantime, however tempting, all assassinations or spectacular acts of sabotage that could be attributed to “deliberate interference” were strictly forbidden by Baker Street. Virginia would have to stop hotheads from taking a chance at glory until the right time; she must prevent her people from engaging in more unplanned and ultimately pointless exercises like the one in Nantes that ended in tragedy. “Fires might mysteriously light themselves,” engine bearings might suddently “run hot,” or perhaps a German car seize up from sugar in the tank. But things must not “go bang in the night,”40 was how one SOE report put it. “Premature explosion of French resistance was our worst danger,” explained a future F Section boss, “as there could at that time be no prospect of an early landing of Allied troops to sustain such a movement.”41 Virginia knew it was vital to have everything in place for when the time came for action, but until then her mission to recruit would have to tread a delicate path and avoid unnecessary sacrifice.
A list of nine names provided before her departure by Baker Street largely based on prearmistice information was neither safe (it was no longer certain where their true sympathies lay) nor sufficient. She in any case preferred to make her own contacts, ones she knew she could trust, as after years of unhelpful or hostile reaction to her disability she felt she had become a shrewd judge of character. She needed couriers to carry messages, money, and arms; more safe houses to hide incoming agents and outgoing escapees; and “letter boxes”—people who would take delivery of secret parcels and messages without asking questions. She needed false identity papers, driving permits, and ration cards. And she needed them fast. The fact was, though, that a newly arrived lone agent such as Virginia was in great danger of discovery or betrayal because in her ignorance or haste her very first inquiries might reach the Gestapo, who could arrest someone on the merest rumor from an informant. It would have been all too easy for an indiscreet word or a momentary lapse to lead to disaster. She urgently needed some safe introductions to get going.
That same sense of desperate urgency to get SOE started in France saw the self-effacing Bégué, who although French had studied engineering at Hull University in the north of England, frantically transmitting to London from a small hotel room in Châteauroux. Five fledgling SOE circuits relied on him, but none thought to offer him protection though it was evident he was in danger. Vichy and the Germans had started deploying radio-detection cars, which, through a system of triangulation, could track down over time the source of clandestine radio signals.42 The only active SOE radio operator in southern France, Bégué was staying on air far too long and the days were ticking down until he was inevitably caught.
“Feeling the breath of the police hot on his neck,”43 Bégué decided to get in contact with the only other Free Zone wireless operator known to be at liberty. Christophe responded by issuing an invitation to all agents in southern France to meet at the Villa in Marseille—a stark contravention of basic security rules. Why he did so was soon to become a subject of violent debate; the tragedy was that by then so many had responded. Some came for camaraderie, finding it even tougher in the field than they had expected; others, so short of money they were virtually starving, came to pick up cash from the recent parachute drop. Many of them had been stripped of their own money by reception committees composed of unscrupulous locals who somehow thought it their due.44 The problem was in large part that SOE agents and individual résistants were still operating alone with no clear direction or backup locally or in London. The need for an established figure in the field could not have been more urgent.
Virginia, waiting in Lyon for Le Harivel to show up as her longed-for radio operator, was also feeling isolated. After seven weeks alone, she too felt the lack of guidance or support. Yet some sixth sense seemingly stopped her from joining this mass gathering of the SOE clan. She had long ago discovered through necessity the benefits of self-dependency and was already far older than her years. By contrast, one Lieutenant Marc Jumeau, a tall bushy-haired technical adviser, one of the four parachutists near Bergerac on October 10, lacked her caution and was in search of friendly company in a frightening world. The first to arrive at the Villa des Bois, he ignored the fact that no one had answered when he had phoned the house several times earlier. He brushed aside the concerns of a female neighbor about Christophe’s suspicious behavior. He failed to notice anything untoward in the thickly planted gardens, blithely walking the twenty yards up the path to the door past a number of concealed policemen. But instead of being met by his fellow SOE agent, three inspectors of the French counterterrorism force, the fearsome Sûreté, opened the door from inside and arrested him.
A further dozen SOE agents—including Le Harivel and Langelaan—were picked up soon after. Five more of them were pulled in at the Villa, including Jean and Gaby Pierre-Bloch (who were carrying the 5 million francs sent from London wrapped in a towel), who were both Jewish. This led to further arrests in Châteauroux and Antibes. Finally, as darkness fell on October 24, SOE’s last working wireless operator in the Free Zone, its only direct link to the vast expanse of southern France, walked up the road to the Villa’s front gates to discover the house all closed up. At least Bégué had followed security protocol to the letter, having phoned half an hour beforehand to take soundings. A man with a voice exactly like Christophe had assured him that everything was “normal.”45 But when he rang the bell and waited to be admitted, six Sûreté officers nabbed Bégué too and took him to join the others in the cells, where interrogators were in the habit of spending the nights blowtorching the soles of prisoners’ feet. Bégué believed that Christophe, never a popular figure, had knowingly allowed himself to be trailed and the Villa to be used as a mousetrap. Others46 were convinced he had bought his freedom from prison by actively luring his colleagues into disaster. Christophe, the only one still at liberty, continued to plead innocence. But whether treachery or not, the fact was that in one swoop, French rather than German police had practically cleaned out SOE in the entire Free Zone. Virtually all its most promising agents, and both of its Free Zone wireless operators, were behind bars and facing the prospect of weeks of torture followed by a firing squad. Most had not even started their secret work.
A few days later, André Bloch, who had been transmitting from the Occupied Zone, also vanished after being denounced by a French neighbor for merely looking like a Jew. No one had properly considered the extra dangers this presented. He was tortured by the Gestapo, who gleefully discovered his radio, but, courageous to the last, Bloch faced the firing squad without giving anyone away. Now there was not a single working SOE radio operator at liberty in the whole of France.
F Section entered what was seen as a new “dark age”47 and was deafened by the silence from its agents. After fifteen months of intense activity involving the recruitment, training, and finally the infiltration of nearly two dozen agents, London was left “with little else in the field except Miss Virginia Hall.”48 Only she had means of contacting Baker Street. Only she had a growing circuit uncontaminated by the arrests. Only she was supplying vital information on Vichy and the Nazi occupiers. The future of Allied intelligence in France now rested on a solitary woman who had been written off for most of her adult life.