A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, Purnell - B

   Virginia Hall was born to a wealthy Maryland family in 1906. She rejected the role of women of that era and sought a life of adventure. She attended five colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. She was in Paris at twenty, and then on to Vienna, where she received a degree. She spoke five languages, and landed a clerical job in the American embassy in Warsaw. She was twenty-seven and stationed in Turkey when a hunting accident cost her her left leg below the knee. She resigned from the State Dept. on the eve of war and briefly drove an ambulance for the French when the Germans invaded. She then went to London and landed a position with the F (French) section of the SOE, and became their first female agent. The disabled thirty-five year old slipped into Vichy France through the porous Spanish border in August, 1941 undercover as a reporter. She was spectacularly successful setting up a burgeoning operation with a series of safe houses able to pass on downed RAF pilots to Spain. Because Vichy was technically neutral, she was able to continue her cover as a reporter and to use the American consular office in Lyon as a method of passing information to London. Into 1942, she continued to excel at building her organization, notwithstanding London's refusal to put her in charge of all SOE agents in France or provide her with military rank. She organized an important jailbreak of a dozen SOE men held by the Germans. As the year wound down, the Gestapo was looking for her, and with the Allied invasion of N. Africa, the Germans occupied Vichy. Virginia fled south and somehow, with a prosthetic leg, climbed over an 8,000 foot snow-capped peak in the Pyrenees, only to be arrested in Spain. The American embassy was able to obtain her release, and she flew to London from Lisbon. SOE rewarded her with an MBE designation. By May, she was in Madrid tasked to work on building safe routes for those escaping France. Bored in Spain, she returned to London where she was recruited by Wild Bill Donovan for the OSS. She was back in France a  few months before the invasion. Once again, she organized resistance activities and now as a radio-telephone operator was able to obtain supplies and disburse them to the Resistance. She was instrumental in significant demolition and sabotage activities in southwest France. Eisenhower had said the Resistance tied down a number of German divisions and materially shortened the war. She was awarded a Croix de Guerre and Distinguished Service Cross. After the war, she worked for the CIA until mandatory retirement in 1966. Never again afforded an opportunity in the field  because she was a disabled woman, she survived as an analyst, but never really flourished. She died at 82. Her accomplishments are now honored in the CIA Museum. Virginia Hall was clearly an extraordinary talent and this is a great story. The challenge with books about clandestine operations after all the witnesses are dead is that there is little detail about what actually happened.