Virginia Hall the Limping Lady Who Tripped up the Germans
Virginia Hall was an American spy during the second world war who managed to be such a successful spy that she was code-named Artemis by the Germans and was placed on their most wanted list. She had a lust for adventure and a gift of languages which led her to join the foreign service. Her first assignment was in Turkey where she suffered a hunting accident. She was shot in the leg causing it to be amputated and replaced with a wooden leg that she named Cuthbert.
She was in France at the start of World War II and she made it out of France into England in order to join the British Special Operations Executive. There she received expert training in all aspects of espionage and counterintelligence. The SOE sent her back to France where she became the first female SOE operative in the country. There she developed agent networks, recruited French men and women for safe houses and hatched plans to free prisoners of war. She became known as “the limping lady” and the Gestapo were always desperate to capture her.
With the Gestapo closing in she managed to get to Spain, but she was imprisoned at the border for trying to enter without papers. She was able to secure her freedom through smuggling a letter to the American Embassy. Once free she decided to join the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the American CIA). They sent her back into occupied France where she worked undercover to coordinate parachute drops and report German troop movement. When the Americans landed in France she led resistance fighters to perform sabotage missions against the Germans as they retreated.
After the war she worked in Venice for a period collecting intelligence on the communist movement before starting a career with the CIA in 1951. She served with the CIA for 15 years with a wide range of agency tasks including supporting resistance groups in countries that were behind the Iron Curtain.