A female spy with a wooden leg dubbed ‘the most dangerous of all’ by the Gestapo, helped win World War II by getting prostitutes to infect Nazis with syphilis and gonorrhea.
Virginia Hall, worked for Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, a forerunner of MI6 and slipped back and forth between London and France, wreaking havoc behind enemy lines.
Hall, who had a wooden leg, was considered such a top level operative that Gestapo chief Hermann Göring put out Wanted posters offering a reward for the capture of the woman he viewed as the most dangerous spy in war-torn France.
She was based in Lyon, a key part of the French resistance, and became adept at recruiting potential allies, as revealed in a new book called A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell.
Virginia Hall worked for Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, a forerunner of MI6 and slipped back and forth between London and France, wreaking havoc behind enemy lines
One of the adept spy’s key lieutenants was Germaine Guerin, a brothel owner who ran an establishment popular with German officers and government officials.
The 37-year-old made parts of her brothel into flats available for safe houses, encouraged her girls to spike their clients drinks and got some clients addicted to heroin to make them incapable of fighting.
Germaine, then introduced Virginia to Dr Jean Rousset, a gynaecologist, who let her use the clinic to help injured agents.
In addition, Dr Rousset, would trick German soldiers into thinking a brothel girl was free from sexual diseases by giving out special white cards to those girls free of infection.
But the girls were not free from infection and would then spread possible syphilis or gonorrhea to the enemy, thereby incapacitating them.
The resourceful spy also managed to get a hairdresser to help disguise members of the resistance, used her extensive network of contacts to hide and feed British airmen who were shot down and recruited the owner of an underwear shop to sot
Virginia Hall receiving the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945
Miss Hall, was fluent in French, Italian and German when she went to work for the US foreign service before World War II but was invalided out of the service after a hunting accident in Turkey.
Her shotgun slipped from her grasp and as she grabbed it, it fired, blasting away her foot.
By the time she got to a hospital, gangrene had set in. To save her life, the surgeon had to amputate her left leg below the knee.
Always able to see the funny side of things, Miss Hall immediately named her wooden leg Cuthbert.
She was in Paris when war broke out in 1939 and joined the ambulance service.
When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, she fled to London, and with her language skills, was soon recruited by the SOE.
After training in the clandestine arts of killing, communications and security, she went to Vichy France to set up resistance networks under the cover of being a reporter for the New York Post.
After the November, 1942, North Africa invasion, German troops flooded into her area and things became too hot even for her.
She hiked on her artificial leg across the Pyrenees in the dead of winter to Spain.
During the journey she radioed London saying she was okay but Cuthbert was giving her trouble.
Forgetting this was her artificial leg, and knowing her value to the Allied cause, her commanders radioed back: ‘If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him.’
She later returned to London, but headed back to France in 1944 to set up a series of resistance fighters to target Nazi communications and blow up bridges.
After the war, Miss Hall married one of the men she’d fought with in France, French-born OSS agent, Paul Goilott, and continued to work for the CIA.
She later received the Distiguished Service Cross in 1945.
Woman Of No Importance by Sonia Purnell (Virago Press, £20), is released in April in hardback.