Doomed to Fail - Ep 182: Hitler's Least Favorite Spy - Virginia Hall

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Now, let's talk about a hero of WWII! Virginia Hall was an American woman who wanted to work in Europe, specifically France, to help the French Resistance stop the Nazis from taking over. Unfortunately, two things - she was a woman, and they only allowed women to type, and she shot her own leg off while hanging out with friends in Turkey. Well, if the US didn't want her, the Brits would take her - Virginia joined the SOE (spies!) and spent 15 months in France, messing with the Nazis, getting a huge group of supporters together -- and sharing everything with the UK! Until she had to walk over a mountain range in the winter with her fake leg! Don't worry, as soon as she could, she switched to the OSS and went BACK to France! Learn about our hero, the Limping Lady of Lyon, Virginia Hall - with us today!  SourceA Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War IIBy Sonia Purnellhttps://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-woman-of-no-importance-the-untold-story-of-the-american-spy-who-helped-win-world-war-ii_sonia-purnell/19683753/#edition=20899604&idiq=42316009 Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Rich banter is being captured. Taylor, hi, how are you? Good. How are you? Good. Are you wearing a hockey, like a Stars, Dallas Stars sweater? No. Could you imagine if I knew that the Dallas Stars were a hockey team? I just

No, it's got like a big tiger Okay A big pink tiger I like it It's very you Thank you Thank you How's your weekend been?

Good, Girl Scout season Is officially done We sold all of our cookies As a troop And I'm very excited Not to have to do that anymore You're relieved, aren't you? I am

It's good It's gonna be a supportive pair You know It's good The things end too You know Yeah exactly We had two softball games

So far We lost both of them But that's okay because we're trying really hard It's about The fat that you tried Exactly A secret

Yeah Sweet Cool well Hello Welcome to Jim DeVail We bring you history's most notorious disasters And epic failures

I am Taylor Join as always by Fars Yes I'm here as well That's the other voice that you hear Opposite Taylor Every day And how was your weekend first It was good

I was doing South by Southwest stuff And Oh is that now? other yeah it just ended i guess today's last day um so yeah austin's going to go back to normal briefly it very very briefly because my trip season is starting and so the routine's going to get thrown for the world again your trip season yeah i got to do much sure i got to can a couple of times i got to do dc trips stuff like that cool yeah it's great when you're 40 in your back hurts it's awesome yeah um planes are falling out of

the sky left and right it's awesome they haven't in a while do you think they haven't in a while or do you think big airline got to the news and was like stop reporting this i feel like we wouldn't know if it like i don't know i mean there's it is hard to capture all of the bad things that are happening in a new cycle so i guess it could be yeah hopefully that stops occurring right as i start flying a lot more

so yeah yeah for you um sweet well i think today's a you startus day it is sweet i am ready um it is because still women's history month will it be next week yes we'll be the big after that yeah okay maybe i'll do two more anyway today yeah well last time i talked about a piece of crap woman from world war two and so did you yeah weird right too bad he is too real we didn't coordinate that people that was like just total happenstance so we did that um and this week i'm going to talk about a really freaking amazing woman from world war two that you probably had not have not heard of um because a lot of first stuff is secret because she was the spy oh damn okay i thought it was like the

white roses or something but i guess not no i'll have talked about them eventually i know you said you did that too right you researched it a little bit i researched it a little i realized it was like a huge huge topic and it was like one was where you get to like plan like several weeks in advance for it so yeah i think one of us should do it that is cool yeah it's cool but no i'm talking about an american woman who did a lot of awesome stuff during world war two and again and again things were hard for her because she was a woman and people like didn't think she could do it and also she was disabled she only had one leg she had a fake leg a wonderful legs and so the fact that she did all she did is really remarkable and i'll tell you about that

but it's hard to get everything that she did because she was a spy so a lot of it will never know but it's really cool so i'm going to tell you about virginia hall that's her name fun so virginia hall was born on april 6 1906 in baltimore maryland so her mother had married her boss and like had a really nice life and was like this is the thing to do the thing to do is to like find an old rich man and marry him yeah and nicole smith figured that out yeah there's There's worst advice you can get from someone. Absolutely. So she, her mom wanted the same thing for for Virginia.

She was basically like, why don't you find someone nice to marry? And then, you know, you'll be able to have a lot of money and be settled. Virginia had an older brother. And that was like, you know, kind of went off and was a business person. But she really didn't want to do that. That was not something that Virginia would have like just easily done. She loved to travel. She loved to do things like boy things with her dad, like hunt and fish and spend time in the wilderness.

And so she really didn't want to do the things that her mom wanted her to do. She wanted to do a little bit, a little bit different. She went to Radcliffe, like Helen Keller, but like 20 years later, and then Barnard, and then she went to college in Europe to kind of finish her college years. So they were like, kind of like the middle class that you can be where you can send your kids to college in Europe. That's pretty upper. Yeah, that's what I mean.

Like upper, I think. So she went to Europe and she traveled. she learned five languages. She's super smart. She spoke Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, and English and German. No, did she speak German? Maybe she didn't speak German, which is weird. She spoke Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, and English. Whatever.

She learned a lot of languages. She probably spoke some German. And she loved... You ever see that one meme where it's like, what's one thing that if a poor person does it, it's trashy, but if a rich person does it, it's classy, knowing a lot of languages. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, continue.

Exactly. So she loved being in Europe, except, you know, she could see that. there was something rumbling, like fascism starting. And she was trying to figure out what to do with her life. She got engaged a few times, kind of like dated around, but she didn't, she didn't end up getting married while she was like in her 20s. In the stock market crash in the U.S., her dad lost all of his money and he ended up dying of a heart attack at age 59. So now her mom was even more like, girl, you got to come home and get married to someone rich. You know, we need, we need you as a family.

But she said no to that and she went back to Europe and she got a job with the U.S. State Department in Warsaw and she kind of had a lot of these jobs that she's going to get are like secretary jobs, which is like a totally fine job to have but not what she wanted and she wasn't able to get any other jobs. Like they wouldn't promote her. They wouldn't do other things because she was a woman. Also, fun fact that coming from someone who's like older at this point, take the shitty job. Take the shitty job and then prove yourself once you get in the building, then get the job

you want that's how you do it you don't just like sign up one day it's like i want to be the boss like it doesn't work totally totally so she when she was 27 she got re she got a new like moved jobs but stayed in the state department moved to turkey so it's 1933 and she likes it in turkey better than she likes it in a spot that has like a lot of like nature and she makes a bunch of friends and they're able to go and just kind of have a good time even though she still has a secretary her job that she doesn't really love. So with her friends, they go out hunting, and she has a gun that her dad had given her when she was little, and she took it with her to Europe, because you could just, like, take your gun

to Europe with you. But 9-11 things were different. So her and her friends are out shooting birds like you do, and they're, like, in this, like, swampy marshland area, and Virginia is running to catch a bird, and there's a fence, and she's climbing over the fence, and her gun gets kind of stuck in her coat. and she accidentally shoots herself in the leg. So before this, she had two legs. But now she's 27, and she's in Turkey, and she just shot herself in the leg.

The doctor that she goes to, they are like, we think we can save it, like we're going to try. And by the time that the American doctors got there to help her, her foot had gangrene and they had to cut it off below the knee. So that's how she became an amputee. She shot herself in the foot. which kind of makes her more qualified for a lot of things, I think, because, like, if he can go through that, they can go through a lot. Yeah, yeah. And so she was obviously devastated because, like, she,

and she went home and her mom was like, this is time to stay home now. Like, this is, you can't go back. But she really wanted to go back, and she got a fake leg put on, so she would always would walk with a little bit of a limp. But also, it's like a horror, it's not like a nice 2025 fake leg. It is a terrible 1930 fake leg that is like hollow metal. It's like attached to her, her like knee stub with like straps that attach to a corset or on her waist. So it's like super uncomfortable.

It hurts. It bleeds all the time. It's just like absolutely awful. It's like barely better than like a pirate's leg. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And she calls it Cuthbert.

She names a Cuthbert, her little little fake leg. So she tries to join the Foreign Services as a diplomat, which is hard for women to do anyway because they didn't really want women to do that. But she couldn't because she was an amputee. And the State Department, the Foreign Service Department doesn't allow people with disabilities to join, which is interesting because her plea to join. got all the way to FDR but FDR said no from his wheelchair that she could do it that is that is a little bit of harmony yeah so she's like fuck this I want to do something more than this like I don't want to just sit around like transcribing like memos all day long in as a secretary here I can do more I know I can do more despite my disability obviously like I can do more so she quits working for the United States and joins up with France as an ambulance driver because they she's she could drive she speaks french and they don't even ask her about her leg because who cares she can drive you know so it's those are left leg she lost actually don't know okay but either way i mean if she starts driving with her i mean right let i think you'd

figure it out pretty fast i guess so if you only have yeah okay fine fine you know she but either way she figured out also hold sorry i'm not i'm not going to try to belabor this but back then weren't cars manuals uh maybe but she can still move her legs she can still drive that's right she's still move it it's just like you know yeah she has her she has her fake leg and it's just it sucks and it hurts but she can move it so she can definitely drive oddly enough she was qualified for a lot of jobs more than this that they could have just given her but yes totally exactly but she gets this job and she likes it france is being occupied slowly by the germans and they needed her to be in there.

So this is where fate steps in for our dear Virginia. She's almost 30. She's a living in France as an ambulance driver, and she's going to Spain to visit some friends. She can travel pretty easily because she's American, and, like, America hasn't joined the war yet. People are still kind of pretending that things are okay, even though things are, like, not okay, and, like, getting worse.

And she's on her way to Spain, and she's on the train, and she meets a man named George Bellows, who happens to be a British intelligence officer. And he likes her right away. She's smart. She's funny. She's pretty. And she is an American, like I just says,

she can move back and forth really easily. And he's like, you know what? We can get you a better job than the job that you have. Like, we can absolutely use you in England. So he gives her a phone number and said, this is the friend. Call this number. And they'll help you get a job.

And so she had tried to, like, find other jobs. You couldn't really find one that she liked. so she decides to call the number and it goes to a man named Nicholas Boddington who is the man who started the Special Operations Executive which is called the SOE which is a brand new spy group coming out of England it's different than MI6 in like different ways but it's very very very very similar and she's like James Bond spy style now so this would have been like late 30s yeah early 40s okay late 30s yeah so she gets the job And also, you know, we didn't want to let her in because of, you know, she's a woman and all the things. But, like, this is a job that, like, a lot of people, like, didn't know how to do and they didn't know what was going to happen. So it could, it was so dangerous to even, like, think of being a spy for the British in World War II that a lot of people didn't do it. So, like, she was one of the few applicants. She was very qualified, you know, super smart, spoken languages, all the things.

She has to go through fun training, like, they interrogate her in German and, like, try to scare her, like, you have the Gashapo. and they do all these things. She learns how to do things like hide papers in various holes in her body. I wrote, training was intense and she learned how to put papers in her butthole. Because that's what she did. And so it was assumed that, like, she would go into France, maybe get a little bit of information from, you know,

what was going on on the ground in France, if there was any resistance, things like that. And it was assumed that she probably wasn't going to make it back by, like, her superiors. They didn't tell her that, but that was like the idea. They didn't think that she would be able to. I forgot which was it the Vietnam War where they're just like were printing purple

metals left and right? Because it's like we're assuming they're going to give away like a million of these things. Yeah. Yeah. So she has to get into Fregance and she's able to get in by pretending to be a reporter for the New York Post. And the New York Post did give her a job. So she had like a legit job that was like through SOE.

But if you followed the paper trail, she worked for the New York Post. And she is largely. on her own so they kind of were like go and see what you could find out and she would communicate back to england by like coded postcards and by her um her articles that were in the new york post they would have like things in there about birds that meant this was happening or people were moving and things like that um she spent fifth it's going to spend 15 months in france um creating like a huge resistance network and london called it the heckler circuit so she was really going in and like changing things. So I'm going to tell you what she did while she was there.

She goes to Leone, which is like a city in France. And when she gets there, she's like, they gave her money and are like good luck, you know. So she like walks around parts of France for a while, travels around, finally gets to Leone. She doesn't have any where to stay. She can't find a hotel room. She ends up going to finding a convent, like the top of a hill and being like, can you please help me? And they let her in. And those nuns become like, a real important part of her spy group just like the nuns and sound of music that's really fun i keep picturing this stuff i don't know why it's just always like that gets sort of everywhere and like everybody's having a great time but they're probably not because they're being tortured

and watching hell unfold in front of them yeah it's not great and so actually so other things that she does while she's there like i just wanted to mention that she learns how to change her appearance and like blend in like a spy movie which is also really really fun um but she's in leone and yeah to that point it's not things aren't going well well world war one just ended you know like barely and people aren't like prosperous in france it's not great in france either you know how we talked about how like europe is doing great they just had a war another about to have another one i know i just keep picturing like the countryside of leone france i'm sure it's like yeah yeah there's like mountains and all that stuff you really

need like a lot of like really rich things when you could just have great milk and great baguettes yeah but who are who's that who you're saying that too France yeah yeah well yeah they're going through a lot they're going through a lot I think that they're I think romanticizing this era for some reason I don't know why I think that like even I think that like being a peasant farmer in is like being a peasant farmer again you know like it's not good you know it's not it's not going to be people are kind of don't know what to do um and you

know that like things bad things are happening all over europe as well you can like you know hitler's in charge now so they know these things are happening um so she also meets some other people to be a part of her aspiring one cool character is a woman named jermaine geron and she was a madame at a brothel and she would always like do things like high jewish people in her house and like in her brothel so that you know obviously they couldn't get taken away and her the sex workers who worked for her would do like super awesome things like they had a doctor that was part of the group who would say like oh yeah none of these girls have STDs everything's fine when they definitely did and they would like give the Germans STDs oh I was like that's not good

healthcare for no no no no it was for it was to like infiltrate with the Nazis and like do stuff to to hurt them they would drug them like the Nazis that would come to the brothel they would drug them and then like take pictures of what was in their pockets after they had fallen asleep they would while if they fell asleep they would drip poison in their eyeballs so that their vision would be impaired they wouldn't be able to do pilots anymore isn't awesome i know um because like the gashapo's everywhere now charles de gall like the airport he is in the u.k and trying to start the resistance but like Nazis are taking over france like very very slowly um and france is like sure just don't hurt us so a lot of like the local governments are like we'll report you to the gestapo if if something happened because of they're like we just need to like not put them off yeah let's happen so she England is like okay this is working she has getting it at work things are happening so they decided to send more people from the SOE into France and they do things like they just drop people out of planes and hope for the best so they parachute like into a random field like with their radio like hoping that they

don't get caught but a lot of them do get caught when they just like land in a random field or like the middle of random town like you never know where they're going to be and the one who are radio operators, they're the ones who are really, really in demand because if you have a radio, you can like Morse code back to England and let them know what's happening. But they're trying. So a lot of these guys are trying to get to Virginia, but like don't know where exactly where she is when they get dropped off like in the middle of the night. She, um, at some point, there's like 17 or so other SOE agents in France. And they decide to meet up at a safe, a safe house because like they're also very lonely. Like that's part of it to the, I'll write a book called The Woman of No Importance that I'll share, but like, you know, it's a lonely job and it's weird because you always have to be looking over your shoulder and like you're making friends and like trying to like, you know, judge if people are safe to talk to and like you're always working. And so a bunch of agents decided to meet up at a house in Marseilles and they get found by the Gestapo like immediately. So one of the guys that had been captured right when he landed like in his parachute had a map to the safe house. house in his pocket, which was really stupid of the SOE to do that. And so these 17 other agents get arrested immediately. And Virginia was supposed to go, but she had a weird feeling and didn't

go, which was like the right thing to do to not attend to that party. And then let's put a pin in that. We'll talk about those guys in a little bit later. So just working for the SOE. She's living in Leone. And what does she do all day? She fights Nazis all day. That's what she does. she knows the Nazis are taking food to Germany while the French people are starving. That's it. That's a thing too as well. The Germans are stealing the food.

And she would do stuff like in packages of meat, put like one rotten piece of meat in it. So it would make it all rotten. And they would like put water in cereal. They would poke holes in tin cans, add salt to sugar, like things like that. Just like make the food that they were bringing over to Germany worthless as well. She would walk around.

She would walk around meeting people in cafes. But to get there, she'd have to take, like, 17 lefts and a right and, like, kind of moving and, like, just really, like, people that couldn't follow her. They couldn't really know who she was. So she did a lot of, like, secret spy stuff, which is super scary because, again, like, around every corner, there's, like, a German yelling, you can imagine, like, in these, in these towns. So there are a couple of men that are sent to be her boss, but there aren't as good as her.

Like, she's just better at it than they are. So she's sort of unofficially in charge of this area than ever actually make her the boss, but she's like better. There's a guy named Alon who is there as well. And he like literally lies and says he has thousands of people on his team and he doesn't. You know, so she's definitely like way better than anyone else at doing this. So a couple of fun stories from her 15 months in Leon. There was one person who, another SAOE agent who was in jail and she gave him tablets to make him sick.

And then he got sent to a hospital and had surgery, like unnecessary surgery on his stomach. didn't really have a stomach problem by a doctor who was in her in her group he did like the most minimal surgery that he could but he actually did it and then while he was in the hospital a nurse helped him escape out a window so like she was doing stuff like that um everybody had like cyanide pills in their mouths like at all times like pills that you could like swallow and then like you wouldn't die but if you bit it you would die so they had like all kinds of stuff like with them at all times people really needed soap that was a big thing as well that that people everybody was like super dirty

because if you get parachuted into the middle of France you don't have you know where you go you know so people were kind of just walking around at some point the Nazis started to figure out that there is someone in Leon who is running this like spy network but they don't have any idea that's a woman and they were like they just obviously just assumed that it was a man she finally got a radio operator,

but he had been parachuted 150 miles from where she was. So he was like dropped out in the wrong spot. And he walked around France for a month until he found her. And he couldn't like ask for her. He just had to like walk around and like figure it out. He ended up finding a radio that someone else had hidden and was able to then start sending messages back to England. And that was really, really helpful.

Even though they have a radio and they're doing like the, I mean, obviously it's sending the mail. takes forever, but a Morse code message, if you sent it to England, you would expect about like an hour and a half before they could write back to you. Because they had to like re, they'd like first they had to convert the Morse code into words and then it was obviously in code on top of that code. So it's like decode it and then they had to write something to you and then recode it and then Morse code it back to you. So it took a while. I still use Google Maps to go to my neighborhood or grocery store.

Yeah, no, I could not find you if they drop, if we were out. Okay, so basically these dudes are just like falling out of the sky, trying to find her in France so that she can help them, like, do other things. She had like a flower pot on her window cell that she would move around to be like, I'm available, I'm not available, things like that. It wasn't

always like, it was fun obviously to think about, but also obviously super dangerous. She would, her and most of the spies were also on a lot of drugs like uppers and downers, because sometimes she have to be awake for days at a time, like helping people, like, move things and do things. Sometimes she would, like, you know, have to sleep, things like that.

So remember her friends that were taken that all went, I mean, her friends, like the other SOE guys who were all taken out of that house. So now she wants to get them out of jail. And when I say jail, I mean, they're in, like, a constitution camp and sort of. And they are very, very malnourished. They have, you know, they can't really run out of jail, even if she, like, got the door open. in, you know, they need to be able to, like, get more, you know, get stronger. They ended up getting moved out of, like, the concentration, the, you know, collection

concentration camp that they were in and moved to a present, like, an actual prison where they're able to, like, kind of put on some weight and, like, start to, like, be human again. And then she starts to try to get them out. So she has people going in to visit them and doing things like, you know, putting a file in a book and hiding it. And, like, piece by piece, they're able to get the guys enough stuff so that they can start working on how to get out. They need to make a key.

So they take the key and they make a mold in bread and then like melt stuff down and make the key so that they can like get that. That's real. I thought that was like a Looney Tunes thing. I know. It's real. So they need to go out.

They got a guard to help them. So a lot of this, a lot of people are like, you know, secretly part of the resistance. So a guard is going to help them. They have to run in two stages from like their cell to a guard tower and then out through barbed wire fences to like actually get out.

and it had to be super fast when they got out. So they did things like they painted a door on a piece of cloth to hang over the door so that it looked like the door was closed. I guess our door wouldn't stay closed. So they wanted to make it so you couldn't easily tell that they were gone. The way that Virginia worked it out is that if like an old lady walked past the jail at night, then it was good. If it had been a man, it would have been a no.

So it was like little secret things like that. And they put a sleeping potion on one of the guards. or whatever somehow got the guard to pass out and then another guard that was supposed to help them he ended up um like chickening out so another guard there was a signal where he like lit a cigarette and that was a signal for the guys to run so they run and they're doing like they're making a lot of noise and while they're doing running and making a lot of noise another guard that they didn't know that like wasn't in cahoots with them stopped them and they're like oh my god and he goes is this the english stop making so much noise so like all the guards are trying to help them get out you know So it took them 12 minutes, but they got out. And then after they left, like someone else in the jail cleaned everything up, so you couldn't really tell how they had gotten out. And like one of the wives who had been bringing them stuff, like she was out of town, so she had an alibi, all the things.

They sent information over their way that was that the men were back in England. So that's where the Germans thought that they were. But they actually were just in a cabin in the woods in France. And they ended up getting better and getting out. So that was super fun. um she didn't say that it was her that did it but everyone knew that like she was the one who had done all the stuff for them a lot of her stuff was being like don't talk about it obviously because she's a spy i would so talk about it i would tell everyone i know but you know what i just did

yes she does not i know she doesn't tell anyone which is a bummer i wish i wish she would have written a book and she did not like that's kind of her her story um so okay so now the germans know that she's there they know she's a woman like somehow And they call her the limping lady of Leon, but they can't find her. And I kind of feel like I could find a limping person, but that's just me. Just walk around and kick everyone in the shins and the one that doesn't yelp. Yeah, exactly. I just trip a bunch of women until you find her.

But they don't. They know she's there, but they can't find her. She also did, you know, make friends with the people that she shouldn't have trusted. There is one man who, his name is Robert Alash, and he is a German spy. he came in as a priest and like he had a German accent but he said he was from like you know just from the border between France and Germany and a lot of people were suspicious of him but they let him in and they trusted him even though they thought he was weird and that was just like a huge mistake and a lot of people died because of the stuff that he had told the Nazis at the end of the war he will eventually be executed in Paris but it didn't come soon enough he did fuck some stuff up for her so now she has to leave France because it is there's no neutral zone. She's basically been in the unoccupied zone this entire time, not in, like, Paris, where the Germans have, like, actually taken over. So now France has totally fallen to the Nazis, and she has to leave. But she can't just leave because now they know the waiting, like, at the train stations, obviously, for this woman to leave. We're trying to figure out how to get her out. And she decides to go to Spain on foot. So she walks over the Pyrenees Mountains with a guide. And she in the winter so it's snowing with one leg with one leg it's a 7500 feet like elevation climb and then 50 miles they walk in just two days and like her leg is like bleeding and like a people she's with don't know that she has a fake leg she just like goes she sent before she left she sent a telegram or sent like a message to england and said that cuffbert is being tiresome because obviously like her leg hurts and is bleeding and it's awful and the person who got that message didn't

know that she called her fake leg cuthbert and she wrote back and said if cuff they wrote back if cuthbert is tired is troublesome eliminate him that is what like the head of a spy agency would say yes exactly exactly so she does escape she walks over the mountains and she goes to spain and she gets another desk job because like even through this they don't get one to give her a good job which is super annoying but they're also i think fairly like you've been compromised they know who you are they're looking for you you know so you cannot go back to france as part of the s oe there's just no way so she is like well fuck that i i need to go back to france like my whole thing is like liberating france from the nazis it's all i want to do let me go back they won't let her go back she's like

what i have a radio operator you need radio operators they're like no she's like fine so you push herself through radio operator school and learns how to be a radio operator. Now, she's like, I am so valuable right now. I know all these people. I speak French. I can do the radio now. Like, let me back in. And the SOE says no. And so she joins the OSS, which is the American version of it. So they finally let her in to the American side. And they're fine with it. They're like, you can go to France. Great. Go. She goes back to France to prep for D-Day. So what she does when she goes back is obviously that they're looking for her. They know there's this limping spy woman.

So she makes herself look old. She'll, like, draw on wrinkles every day. She dyes her hair gray. She learns to walk differently. So she doesn't have a limp anymore. She has, like, a shuffle. And she looks like an 80-year-old woman, even though she's, like, 35. And she dresses like a peasant, and she has her teeth file down so that she looks

like a peasant also. You retire. just like hang out and retire like I just really wanted to do this man and she so another thing that is fun is like the people who are spying like in inglorious bastards when that guy does the three the wrong way oh yeah I mean it was a spy you know like I knew immediately because I've been to Germany and I know that the hell you do a three like I was very like yes like so the stuff like that like the way that the way that your buttons are sewn on there's a French way and then there's a German way so you have like make sure you're doing it the right way you have to as a spy just like know so many of

these like little tiny things um which is like you wouldn't think of it some people get caught as spies because they do stupid shit like they you know do the number three or the wrong way and then you can tell that you're not french if you're not who you say you are so she does all this stuff she actually becomes a farmer she has a cow she sells produce at one point she sells cheese that she made to the Nazis hopefully she poised it i don't know if she did but hopefully she did but like but like so she's actually like doing that and her american counterpart at this time i wrote he was kind of a boob there's like a good handful of boobs around just like guys who just like don't help right um but she is she gets her radio to work

by getting a farm boy to ride a bike and like start a generator so like i'll do a generator then she can have her radio work and the radios aren't like iPhones the radio are like 40 pound boxes and you have to have this like the antenna you have to like strap it to the top of a house so it's not easy yeah it's also like something that if you knew what you're looking for you would know what they were doing in there exactly one cool way that they would find the radio operators is the germans would in bigger cities shut down the electricity block by block while listening to the radio transmission so when the radio transmission stopped they knew that was the block that had the radio oh that's pretty smart isn't that smart isn't that smart so then then they would raid that block and a lot of people would be like read it and then they were like you know they knew they heard it was coming and they'd be like oh I'm just a regular French guy leave me alone but they were like hiding the radio in their attic and like doing things like that just to make sure that they were doing it so a little bit in her second time in France people were a little bit like

okay is this lady legit she's like trying to get us to join her resistance like is she really from the OSS is she really from America like what it's happening and then finally she gets some planes to come and bring them supplies. And this is super cool. So they make a runway in like a field out of burning sticks like in Die Hard 2. I don't remember that. In Night Hard 2, he does that he like makes it out of the like a gas streak from a plane that had already crashed because of the, it's very complicated airport story, but it's

really good. You should watch it. I just watched it recently. But so they do that. And all of a sudden, planes are coming. They do 22 drops of supplies for everybody in this area. They drop cool things like tea and medicine and money and socks and shoes.

You know, at this point, in the war, people don't have anything. You know, like, they have nothing. They are wearing shoes on a cardboard. It's like not good, you know? And so she'd be able to get all this stuff. When they would drop the containers of stuff, they would dip their wings to say hi.

and then fly back to England, which is cute. Nice. You know, but she was able to do things like that. And with that stuff, and the people that she got to join her, they would do more fun stuff against the Nazis, like derailing trains and, and stopping food from going, things like that,

just like she was doing before, about like a big mass scale. Yeah. Remember, the Casapo's everywhere, and they're starting to get scared, too, because the war is, like, coming to an end, so they're getting more violent and weirder and people are going to die like a lot of her associates die a lot of these people end up in concentration camps there's just two like young men and she works with a lot and she really loves them she calls them her nephews she always being with them their brothers and they both die in daco so like this is you know people around her dying all the time but virginia is is doesn't happen to her um while she's in france she meets an osss agent named paul gio he is um five inches shorter than her and eight years younger than her and they fall in love um and so she's finally

able to like you know kind of have someone to like talk to you know even and at one point he like has his friends meet her but she is dressed like an old peasant lady her his friends are like what the hell's wrong what are you like why are you take this eight year old woman um so like and then like later after the war when the friends saw her they were like whoa like i didn't realize that you were not that you A agricultural woman. Yeah, it did such a good job. So they

France is now allied occupied but the war isn't over. They're still waiting for Germany to surrender. And so her and Paul go to Austria to start to do like anti-Nazi stuff there. But then the Germans surrender and she

ends up going back to Paris when Paris is liberated and kind of writing things down and just making like her last couple reports to the OSS and then she resigns in in 1945 so she doesn't stay in the OSS she leaves kind of like right away she wants to go back to well her mom wants her back in in the United States and by the way this whole time her mom is like my daughter's probably dead yeah of course like every once in a while she get like a telegram from the SOE that'll be like your daughter's doing great she's still alive but like they barely know that too either you know

so her mom wants her to go back she goes and paul wants to open a restaurant which he ends up doing even though it doesn't it doesn't turn off very well um so her mom doesn't approve of their of them because he's younger than her but you're like what and she's like 40 so like let her do whatever she wants to do she's killed men like so they like don't don't live together until 97 when they get married um they try to adopt a child that doesn't work out and they end up with a bunch of dogs. They like those like big brown poodles.

You know what I mean? Those are their favorite. They have a bunch of those. Another point for dog lovers. I know. Another plus. In 1947, she joins the CIA,

which is like the brand new as well. In her career, people are always going to be like, but you're a woman. You can't do stuff, even though she was like one of the most successful spies that they had in France during the war.

She would stay in the CIA until, she was 60 in um that was when you have to retire the city you can't work there you can't build them 60 to work there she while she was in the cSA she um worked on secret paramilitary operations in france to um like her model of creating resistance groups was used was studied by other groups who were working on um setting up resistance in european countries against a soviet attack and against communism so they were like she was they were following her her kind of as a role model of what she had done.

Later, the CIA released a report about her and said that her fellow office, she had like a very low-ranking officer title, and her fellow officers said, quote, they felt that she had been sidelined, shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues who felt threatened by her, and her experience and abilities were never properly used. utilized. So they didn't let her be a boss, didn't know she should have been for a bunch of

different shitty reasons. She did end up with a bunch of awards. She got the Distinguished Service Cross in September 1945 from the United States. This is the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II. She became an official member of the Order of the British Empire, which is a big award you get in Britain. And she was awarded the Crow de Gware, which is something cross by France, which is like their highest military, one of their highest military honors as well. And she didn't tell anybody about it about that one. And they found out later, like, in her papers that she had gotten it.

But like, she didn't tell anybody that she got that award. She really didn't, like, go after any of that recognition. In 2016, just a couple more awards about her, a CIA field agent training facility was named the Virginia Hall Expeditionary Center, which is fun. The CIA Museum, if you go there, there are five people who have individual, like, exhibits at the museum. Four of them are men who went on to head the CIA, and one of them is Virginia. So they talk about her there, yeah, which is super cool. Later in life, her health, you know, was failing after probably a lot because of all the drugs that she did during the war, like really fucked with her, kind of forever.

And she died on July 8, 1982, in Maryland, where she is buried, and Paul is buried. with her he died five years later um and then after after her death um a lot of like the research that the person who wrote a woman of no importance did and that people do about her is like going in and finding things and declassifying things and trying to find you know notes there's probably so much stuff that we did that she did that we don't even know about you know yeah what you were saying it reminded me of so she she sounds like a very modest and humble person um which also just does not bode well for career advancement yeah like like that's true one of like the I mean not but it's not a consistent argument like men are more apt to like talk about the shit they do and than women are

and like that's like a bi-product I mean she didn't write a book she didn't like yeah it's interesting yeah yeah exactly totally and yeah that's a good point because like she wasn't getting the promotions and things and there were men who were getting them and a lot of them some of the examples used in the like lying about what they were doing anyway you know like they didn't have the people they said they did and she did but she wasn't like advertising yeah isn't it like someone like if you're like the leader of an organization you're like dramatically higher you have a dramatically higher um percentage likelihood of being a psychopath or something than the regular population probably or like an narcissist or something i forgot what it was but yeah definitely something

definitely you know it takes a lot of other things besides doing a good job to get up to those positions. Right, exactly. You know? But yeah, that's, that's her story. And I think it's so fun that she, like, walked over the mountains, you know, and did all those, like, little sabotage things. Like, I can just picture her, like, limping around Leon in the middle of the night,

like, finding food and poking holes in it, you know? Yeah, even now, like, I looked like there's not that much, um, there's not like a movie about her. I know. Isn't that crazy? do you think there should be but it's like it sounds like they don't have any content to go off because she didn't say anything you could figure it out you could you could do a whole yeah give it a quentin terrino he'll figure it out yeah like she was in she was in leon for 15 months

and she there's a bunch of people that she met and you know moved in and out of her apartment and out of her world and like so you could you know you could show her meeting someone at a cafe and then climbing out a window because the Gestapo was there or you could see her you know show her people showing up in her apartment in the middle of the night stinky and poor and having to prove who they are to her you know um i do love a good spy movie so i would totally be in favor of that i think there's a new one coming out black bag looks pretty good um very fun very cool yeah thanks for sharing that thanks for sharing a woman that is not terrible you're welcome uh yes i'm gonna be doing the opposite i'm gonna be sharing one that is terrible

um cool uh anything uh any listener mail um I got another email for a sticker. So thank you, Kim. I sent you your sticker. I appreciate you. Very nice. Thank you. Please write in if you would like to get a sticker as well.

A Dundafelpond of GMO.com. False on socials on Dunefel pod. I think that's mostly it. Yeah, that's all I got. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for sharing. Well, thanks.

Okay, bye. All right. We'll go ahead and cut it off. You know,