RedHanded - Episode 365 - Virginia Hall: The WW2 Super Spy

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Nicknamed "Artemis" and "The Limping Lady" by Nazi Germany, Virginia Hall was, without a doubt, one of the most effective—and certainly the most feared—Allied spies during the Second World War. She helped countless POWs escape and funneled a constant stream of weapons into and information out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Her contribution is almost unfathomable, yet most people don't even know her name.This is her story.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed. I am so excited. I know. She's like, shut up for three weeks. I genuinely think I'm going to get a tattoo of this woman. I love her so much. And very problematically for me, a tattoo shop has just opened at the end of

my road. Danger. And my cousin and my cousin eve was like you need to go in there like stephen fry did when he got sober and he went into the groucho and he said whatever i say do not serve me she was like you need to go in there take a picture of yourself and be like do not under any circumstances tattoo me i was like i'm allowed allowed three. How many more? Three more. Three more. Okay. One of them will be Virginia Hall.

Yeah, one of them will be Virginia Hall because she's a fucking badass and I love her so much. And to tell you her story, which has affected me so much, we are going to take you to the tiny spa town. That's a lie. It's quite big. The spa town of Vichy in France, full of opulent buildings and healing mineral waters. Our story begins with an elderly milkmaid standing on a hillside, surrounded by goats. You never think of milkmaids as being elderly. No, you don't, do you?

Mm-mm. The old maid. Mm. She's the one that got left with the goats. Yeah, left with the goats. I mean, you always just think of them like shagging stable boys, don't you? Mm-hmm. All bosomy and Bavarian. Mm-hmm. An idyllic sight, perhaps. Until we mention that we are in 1945 this week,

which of course means that the once peaceful rolling hills and glistening lakes of Vici, whilst full of baths and opera houses, was also full of Nazis. Which harshed the chicken soup for the soul vibe just a little bit. And don't you worry, we're going to explain all about why the Nazis were all up in Vici's business later on. We weren't going to let you get away with it. But first, we need to zoom in on our little old lady milkmaid.

Day in, day out, she would amble around the hillside, earwigging conversations that German soldiers were having about their plans for France. They certainly do, and did in this story. Hitler had been sucking France absolutely dry to fund his own war effort. Our milkmaid's cheese was the best around, so the German soldiers were always happy to see our protagonist. They had no idea this wizened dairy peddler would radio everything she heard them say straight to the British Secret Service. They also didn't know that when she wasn't beaming vital intelligence across the channel, the milkmaid was in charge of distributing the canisters of cash that were being dropped by the

British into the French countryside to fund La Résistance. In fact, she delivered the money that fell from the sky to espionage networks that she had single-handedly built herself. Clearly, although her cheese was delicious, this woman was no elderly milkmaid at all. Underneath the paddled cloths, meticulously drawn wrinkles, and the herd of goats that hid her famous wooden leg called Cuthbert, the milkmaid was none other than Virginia Hall, Hannah's fever dream, and the Gestapo's most wanted spy.

The Germans knew her by a different name, though. They called her the Limping Lady. In the thick of the war, she, without the help of a single soldier, liberated a whole swathe of France and played a crucial role in the eventual Allied victory. And perhaps you've never heard her name before, but we certainly promise you after this episode, you'll never forget it. The exploits of spies are, obviously, by their very nature, secret, making retelling their stories pretty tricky. The reason that we've been able to put this episode together for you at all is a book called A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Pernau.

By some literary miracle, Sonia has pieced together the life and times of one of the most secretive women who ever walked the earth. Virginia had over 20 code names to identify and track, including Germaine, Diane, Camille, Marie Monin, La Madonna And even Nicholas La Madonna's not that subtle I'm gonna say that You wanna be a spy, you wanna be undercover

Oh, I'm La Madonna I don't think she introduced herself as La Madonna I think it was bestowed upon her by members of the resistance I see They also call her the woman with the sparkling eyes, which is much better in French. But as we have discussed at length, I don't speak French. So I'll let the funky music do the talking.

Over her years in France, Virginia, the spy, shapeshifted, disappeared and kept all of her personal information under wraps. But somehow, Sonia Panel managed to piece it all together. To make matters even more complicated, most of World War II remains classified, and will remain so until at least 2030. Even then, some truths will never be known, because as much as 85% of intelligence documents related to this period have been destroyed, or quote unquote, lost. Yeah, yeah. There is an enormous amount about

World War Two that we, the plebs, will never know about. Because that's how government works. My favourite instance of one of these types of stories, apart from Virginia Hall, obviously, is anyone who worked at Bletchley where they cracked Enigma was not allowed to tell anyone what they did during the war and then it was released that they could and there were like married couples who'd both been at Bletchley at the same time and they didn't know oh wow because they recruited people through the crossword love it I know I love it so much so what like just do a crossword and leave it on the train and they're like because I I wouldn't do very well at that books and books of crosswords were like half completed puzzles where i've just

furiously given up but um i do think as much as like we will never know about world war ii it is still the war it is still the war you know about it it's got a great brand we had a great baddie it's never gonna get a gooder baddie again as Hitler. My question is still, World War I, why? Will we ever know? I told you. Oh, God. Serbian nationalism.

I don't want to know. The sequel was so much better. Secret, secret, this might all be, but that didn't stop Sonia. She uncovered a completely inspirational woman who no one had ever heard of, who was rejected time after time, but continually ignored the haters

and changed the course of history. Obviously a story that had to be told. One that I cannot wait to pass on to all of you. So let's start at the beginning. On the 6th of April 1906, Virginia Hall was born to a middle-class family in Baltimore, Maryland. As the only girl in the family, she had one job, marry rich and keep her family living their best lives. But our Virginia refused to play the game. She knew from a young age that settling down was not an option for her.

She played by her own rules. She didn't want a stupid, boring husband and a white picket fence. Virginia Hall wanted to see the world. She loved hunting, riding horses bareback and playing the fool. Once she wore a bracelet made of snakes into school. Which I have so many questions about.

Firstly, it rhymes. Playing the fool, snakes to school. You're welcome. Were they dead? Were they alive? How did she keep them from wriggling around? Did they bite her on the vagina? I don't know. As soon as she could, Virginia waved Baltimore goodbye and headed for Europe.

She studied in France and in Austria and learned five whole languages. She also learned about politics. She watched the rise of nationalism firsthand. And as a result, she decided to have a crack at becoming an American ambassador. She, of course, because she's super smart, aced the exam. But back in the black and white times, fulfilling the criteria of an application was not nearly enough to get a woman a job. Only six of the 1,500 American diplomats were women. This was the first in a very long line of big fat no's that would be hurled at Virginia Hall.

So instead, she took a job as a clerk in Warsaw and decided that she would climb the diplomatic greasy pole from the inside. The American embassy moved her from Warsaw to Turkey, where an unlucky accident would change her life forever. Her childhood love of hunting had never left Virginia, and in 1933, the 27-year-old went along the Godiz River with some pals to hunt snipe. Snipe are particularly tricky birds to kill.

I didn't even know it was a bird. I had to look it up. Yeah, not a time. Their flight patterns are really hard to predict. So this hunting trip would have been difficult even for the most experienced marksman. Even Peep Show Sophie's dad would have had a hard time. You've only winged it.

You put it out of its misery. I may be a homophobe, Jeremy, but I'm no bat-a-bater. As Virginia was looking up at the birds flopping all over the place in the sky, she tripped over a wire fence. As she fell Virginia Hall, future bane of Hitler's life, shot herself in the left foot at point-blank range. She was rushed to hospital as fast as you could be rushed to hospital in Turkey in the 30s, where she swiftly contracted sepsis. Antibiotics hadn't made it to Asia Minor yet,

so Virginia was in real trouble. The only thing that the doctors could do to stop the infection from spreading was to chop off Virginia's leg from below the knee. For many, me absolutely included, I dropped a piano on my toe and I'm contemplating ending it all. This would be the moment to resign to a sedentary life, which is obviously what the doctors told her to do. But they didn't know who they were dealing with.

Virginia wasn't going to let the bastards grind her down. She did not give up. Quite the opposite. She saw her recovery from sepsis as a second chance at life, even though she had to lose a leg to get it. And, oh boy, did she grab that second chance by the balls. For the rest of her days, Virginia never forgot just how lucky she was to be alive.

And she didn't lose her sense of humour either, and named the wooden leg given to her Cuthbert. After St Cuthbert, the French patron saint of physical healing, and also Otters. That just reminds me of that. The only thing I ever think of when I think of Otters is what happened at my last job. We used to have these bonding sessions once a week with the production team. And the team kept getting bigger and bigger. And the time I was there, I think it grew by five or six times. So they were like, this is even more important than ever because like everybody doesn't know each other blah blah blah as they did this game one day where they like

passed around this box and you had to write a fact in it and put it in the box and one of the girls that I worked with her name is also great do I say it I'm not gonna say it but it's a great name let's call her Sue Sueville. Sue comes in, puts her fact inside. Oh, sorry if I missed anything. Sits down. I'm like, no, no, you're fine. You wrote your fact, right? She's like, yeah. Goes around and then you had to pick out a fact from the box, like a little scrap of paper. You had to read out what was in front of you. And then you basically had to guess who in the group had written that fact. And so people are pulling out scraps of paper that was like, oh, I was actually born in Iran or I can speak six languages or my favorite dish is, I want to say Pocahontas. That's not a dish. You know what I mean? I'm addicted to heroin. Yes, I'm addicted to heroin.

I murder pandas in my spare time. And then Sue leans over to me and she's like, I thought it was just any fact. And I was like, no, no, Sue, you missed the start. You had to write a fact about yourself that people could then guess who the fact was related to it she was like ah and i was like well i guess i'm gonna know when it gets to you and then somebody pulls out a scrap of paper and it's like otters have a favorite stone that they keep in their little fur pockets that they have to keep their favorite stones in and that person was just just like, well, is it you, Sue? The person who looks morbidly embarrassed at not having followed any of the instructions of this game.

It was just so perfect. The timing of it, the delivery, it was just too good. So there you go. Love it. Pay attention to the rules of the game. Otters also hold hands when they go to sleep so they don't fly away.

They do. Just lovely creatures. So once our girl was fully recovered, hold hands when they go to sleep so they don't float away. They do. Just lovely creatures. So, once our girl was fully recovered, she went back to clerk work, this time in Venice. And after a while, she applied for another diplomatic role.

It was another no, however. The embassy informed Virginia that they did not hire amputees. Except they definitely did. Just not ones with vaginas. But the winds of change were blowing across Europe. And soon Virginia Hall, her thirst for adventure and indestructible courage, would be very much in demand. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored,

and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near LA in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Laney Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now

by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him.

This is a story that I came across purely by chance but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Virginia was still plugging away as a clerk, by this time in Estonia. I can never, ever, ever, ever, ever talk about Germany invading Poland without thinking about an episode of Fawlty Towers. Oh, I thought you were going to talk about the time when we got horribly embarrassed because we didn't know that the SS Estonia was a ship.

Also that. Yeah. We were on tour and somebody was like, what did they say? Something like, oh, do the sinking of Estonia. And I was like, Estonia sunk? They're like, not the fucking country, you pleb. The ship, the SS Estonia. Whatever. Look, we're on tour to entertain you,

not be embarrassed by all the things we don't know, like why World War I started. Anyway, there's an episode of Fawlty Towers where there are Germans staying in the hotel. And there's like just cross wires, obviously, because it's Fawlty Towers. And Basil Fawlty goes to these German guests. Well, you started it. And they go, no, we didn't. He went, yes, you did.

You invaded Poland. started it and they go no we didn't he went yes you did you invaded poland anyway two days after the germans started it britain and france declared war and virginia sniffing an opportunity approached the british army which is another thing that i fucking love her for she's not even british she's just like i just want to be out there fucking helping france and obviously famously america don't show up until quite a long time later. Thank you for your wavering support. Anyway, she applies to the British and the British said, no. No foreigners allowed. So, with another rejection ringing in her ears, Virginia took herself off to France to volunteer for the ambulance corps. And the French were very happy to have her. So finally, Virginia Hall had a wee.

The French told Virginia that it would be an easy job. All she had to do was drive ambulances to and from a concrete barrier surrounding France called the Maguire Line. Although the top brass were sure that the wall was impenetrable, they stuck a bunch of artillery on top of it, just in case, to keep out the Germans and the Italians. And this may have been an easy job for most people, but changing gears in an old old bloody past oak car is quite difficult with a wooden leg called cuthbert. Soon that would be the least of Virginia's problems. On her third day on the job, Germany and Italy made it across the Magnoir Line

and kicked off their invasion of France. So now she had to negotiate an active battlefield in an ambulance, dodging machine gun fire and change gears with a wooden leg. But Virginia didn't care. She was exactly where she wanted to be, on the front line, grabbing life by the balls. This was her perfect opportunity to make the most out of her second chance. And after six weeks of bullet dodging,

France surrendered to the axis of evil. Germany made quick work of occupying France, and Virginia was forced to get the fuck out of Dodge. She headed over the Pyrenees to Portugal and got a boat to Blighty. On this doubtlessly long and boring boat journey, Virginia got chatting to an Englishman, and he gave her the number of one of his mates and strongly encouraged her to give him a ring when she landed in Dover. This guy wasn't a friendly stranger. He was a spy, who correctly identified the overflowing potential in our Virginia Hall.

Virginia being Virginia suspected as much, and very soon after she made it to Britain, she found herself at dinner with Nicholas Boddington, a senior official for the King's Special Operations Executive. Though he does sound like a character I'd like to be, no? Nicholas Boddington, a senior official for the King's Special Operations Executive. Though he does sound like a character out of, like, The Beano. Nicholas Boddington, yeah. Nicholas Boddington's mine. The SOE,

the Special Operations Executive, had just been started by Churchill to drum up a resistance to the Nazis in occupied France. The SOE had one instruction and one instruction only from Big Winnie, and that was to, quote, set Europe ablaze. The SOE had been trying to infiltrate the occupied France for six months,

but had had literally zero luck. Virginia told Boddington that she was the woman for the job, and he hired her on the spot. Virginia Hall, after years of rejection, was now officially a spy on His Majesty's service. Before we get into the good secret agent stuff, we have to give you a little bit of a red-handed rundown on the state of France at this particular time after the Nazi invasion. When Paris was invaded by Germany in 1940, the sitting president, Paul Reynard, refused to engage in peace talks with Hitler and was

forced to resign. He was replaced with a character called Philippe Pétain, which is astonishingly close to the French word for whore. Pétain. They use it like fuck. Pétain was much more amiable to the Aryan aggressions. So much so that on the 22nd of June 1940, he signed a peace treaty and let the Germans loose on France. The terms of this treaty made life in France a nightmare. Nobody learned anything from the Treaty of Versailles, clearly. Here are just a few of the terms. Number one, the French army was limited to just 100,000 men. The German army was six million

men strong, and only getting bigger by the day. Number two, the French were not allowed to fight from North Africa, and they weren't allowed a navy anymore. Three, all French prisoners of war would be held until Britain made peace with the Nazis. And four, France was split into two zones, the occupied north and the free zone in the south. The so-called free zone was gifted to the Italians as a thank you for all of their guns and people and stuff. On top of all of that, the French had to finance their own subjugation by paying occupation costs to the Germans that amounted to 400 million francs per day. Sounds a lot like what they did to Haiti.

Yeah, that's true. And also, as a cherry on top, Hitler decided to set the exchange rate at 20 Reich marks to one franc. Which meant the richest of French citizens became destitute overnight, and the average German soldier lived the life of Riley. And that is why people start a resistance. Patern and his new Nazi bum in government set up shop in Vichy, naming the new regime after the Spartan, where

we met Virginia at the top of the episode. Because it's essentially bang in the middle of the country. Yeah, it's like the Weimar Republic is just called that because it was decided in Weimar. And although Vichy was in the free zone, not much freedom was happening. The Germans ruled the French with brutal force. Their total carte blanche to stamp out anything they perceived to be hostile behaviour. They were brutal, and they were juvenile too. On the first day of the occupation, the Nazis brought the clocks forward by one hour to prolong darkness just for the shits of it.

Soon after that, a strict curfew was enforced. Every night between midnight and 6am. Just like the English did in Ireland, Nazis had first dibs on all of the food and they sent most of it to the front. French citizens were issued with ration cards that were strictly controlled, so much so that a lot of citizens

were hospitalised with famine symptoms. Many people deserted their homes, quite understandably, turning once-bustling cities into ghost towns at an extraordinary pace. Enter Virginia. Her mission was to infiltrate this disillusioned, brutalised land and recruit agents for the resistance. So how does a woman prepare to enter a country filled with bloodthirsty Gestapo officers and without one pre-existing connection?

With criminals, obviously. Virginia trained with a burglar who taught her how to pick a lock and also how to replace dust on a surface after you remove an item and that urine makes a brilliant secret ink when it's heated she also learned to shrink documents down to the size of a postage stamp so she could hide them in a secret slot in her shoe heel it is like some sort of batman montage getting getting this like secret spy training from this burglar of all people i just really wish the slot was in her wooden leg and not in her shoe. I'm not going to lie, when you said hidden in her secret slot,

my mind did go somewhere. I'm sure she fucking did, man. Needs must. Virginia, with her license to kill, steered clear of guns. Understandably, she'd shoot herself quite literally in the foot and opted for cyanide as her calling card.

Cyanide's also quite handy if you get captured, or, you know, lose the war à la Goebbels. Ingesting cyanide will finish you off in about 45 seconds. And that's all the British Secret Service had for Virginia. The rest of it she was going to have to figure out on the job. So off she went to France, posing as a correspondent for the New York Times. A clever cover, meaning that she could ask questions without raising any

eyebrows, and also because she wasn't French, she could travel around pretty easily. The articles that she wrote and published in the New York Times were riddled with secret codes of the things she had uncovered. It was her only method of communication with mission control in London, and they wouldn't be able to respond to her for years. But she built her own guerrilla network without them, even though the SEO gave Virginia a 50-50 chance of survival. And she started where we all would, with the nuns. The nuns were bang up for the resistance and helped Virginia straight away. And because, as above, so below, Virginia's next stop was a den of iniquity, where she made friends with a madam called Germaine Gurin, who was also happy to help.

She enlisted all of her working girls, and hysterically, her gynaecologist. Love. This was a genius move. Germaine's girls had unfettered access to Nazis at their most vulnerable. Quite a lot of the time, they would drug the soldiers and then photograph all of their stuff

and any documents that they had on them. They also gave the unsuspecting officers STDs. One woman incapacitated 28 soldiers with various STDs, taking them out of action. A fact that this woman was incredibly proud of. With the women on her side, Virginia turned her attention to the men and recruited the chief of police

and an owner of an underwear shop who received communications for her. And I love this. Virginia would know if something had come in for her if the stockings in the windows were tightly stacked together. Yeah, if there's gaps between the stockings, nothing for you, Virg. Eventually, Virginia started to hide guns in this shop under piles of bras. Very clever. Men wouldn't touch them. And as we alluded to at the top of the show, Virginia was a master of bras. Very clever, men wouldn't touch them. And as we alluded to at the top of the show, Virginia was a master of disguise, once even filing down her teeth to appear older than she was.

With her ever-changing appearance, Virginia continued to build the resistance network. Once she brought someone in, she would teach them the spy skills they needed, and a series of signals that only those on the right side of history would recognise. Being discovered to be a member of the resistance was a one-way ticket to the afterlife, and probably for your family too, North Korea style. The stakes for these people literally couldn't be any higher, but the resistance, thanks to Virginia Hall, just wouldn't stop growing. The people of occupied France were not going to go down without a fight. To keep herself safe, Virginia never told anyone, not even her own spying, anything about herself. That mistake had led to the demise of too many, so she ensured that she was untraceable. Admirable, but certainly a lonely way to live.

In 1941, two radio workers parachuted into France and organised to meet up at a safe house near where Virginia was living at the time. She must have been tempted to go, but something told her not to. And she was right. As Tommy Fury

always says, listen to your gut. That's why it's there. Great impression. Thank you. I've watched At Home with the Furies. It's actually quite good. I don't doubt it. Virginia later discovered that a fellow SOE agent

had been captured by the Gestapo and had revealed the safe house's location. Nazi police then stalked out the villa and captured 12 of the most valuable spies in the safe house's location. Nazi police then stalked out the villa and captured 12 of the most valuable spies in the SOE's arsenal, six British and six French. This gaggle of spies were given the codename Clan Cameron and the Nazis were not very nice to them. The cells they were held in were freezing.

They were so cold that the tap was constantly frozen. There were rats, They were so cold that the tap was constantly frozen. There were rats, there were lice, and Clan Cameron were only allowed out of their cells for ten minutes a day. Gabby Brosh, the wife of one of the imprisoned French spies, approached Virginia for help. Virginia was now too well known to be seen out in the open, and the only intelligence officer left in France, and she had her orders to return to Britain. But this is Virginia Hall we're talking about, and she knew that a good soldier never leaves a man behind. So Virginia ignored the SOE and made her way to the Vichy government to appeal for their release instead.

She told Pétain that Clan Cameron were invaluable symbols of hope for both the French and the British, but it fell on deaf ears. Pétain refused to violate the terms of the armistice, but he did eventually arrange that Clan Cameron be moved to an internment camp in Vichy, called Mozak. Our girl had absolutely no intention of letting Clan Cameron make it to Mozak. She was already planning to ambush the transfer and set them all free. What Virginia hadn't considered was that after six months in freezing cells and being fed just 250 grams of bread a day, Clan Cameron were just not up to the job.

So Virginia gave up. I'm kidding, of course she didn't. She came up with a better idea. A jailbreak. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media.

To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the

tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Naturally, these packages were searched by camp guards, but they weren't very good at their jobs. Those guards never found the jam jars containing tiny files. They never caught the hollowed-out books with tools in them that had been carefully selected for escape enablement. The only Allied spy in France naturally could not risk going to the camp herself,

so she trained Gabby up instead, sending her into local bars near the camp and telling her to spread the word about the inevitability of an Allied victory. It's so smart. Just go into a bar and say, I think we're going to win this, you know? And then if someone's like, yes, I think so too. And you're like, I think I have a job for you. And Gabby did just this, despite the fact that she was Jewish, putting her doubly at risk.

If she was caught, it would have been game over to the nth power. But Gabby exceeded even Virginia Hall's expectations. She even managed to recruit a bunch of the guards that worked at Mozak. One of these convinced his supervisors that the barracks that Clan Cameron were imprisoned in didn't need to be manned at night, because the ladder to the watchtower nearby was in bad nick, and so too dangerous to climb after dark. Under the cover of unwatched

darkness, Clan Cameron started to fashion a key for their prison door, using their bread rations as a mold. Meanwhile, on the outside, Virginia sorted a getaway driver safe house's train tickets and planned their escape route over the Pyrenees. To pull this off, Virginia went back to what she knew, the Catholic Church, and she drafted a French priest who'd lost his legs in World War I. He started to go and visit Clan Cameron under the guise of spiritual guidance. Confession and atonement were the last thing on anyone's mind. What actually happened is the priest

smuggled a radio into Clan Cameron's barracks, giving them direct contact with the SOE. The Gestapo did notice this radio signal, but didn't consider that it could be coming from inside the internment camp so they searched the surrounding civilian houses instead and found nothing. With a line of communication opened the chances of a successful escape improved drastically. They had another one too actually. Clanghammeran would also chuck aspirin tubes full of secret notes over the

prison fences or they would give them to an affable guard who would hand them over to Gabby. The escape had to take place between the 8th and the 15th of July, when there would be just enough light under the new moon for the spies to see, but not enough for them to be visible to night watchmen. After several bouts of trial and error, their bread moulded, hand-carved keys in working order, escape was finally on the horizon. Clan Cameron wanted to tell Virginia as much via the aspirin pipeline, but there was a hitch. A good guy guard accidentally slipped the aspirin tube, full of hope, into the wrong guard's jacket. So the message never made it to Virginia or even Gabby.

And the note was commandeered by the mess sergeant. He called Gabby in to see him a couple of days later and told her that he knew everything. But you can unclench those buttholes. The mess sergeant wanted in on the great escape for a price. Virginia swiftly provided him with the 50,000 francs he wanted, and it was go time. When the night of the 15th of July rolled around, everyone was ready, including the moon. So Clan Cameron waited for Virginia's signal. It had been agreed that if everything was just right, an elderly woman would pass the camp with three children in tow. When the old lady

and three kids hoved into view, Clan Cameron knew that it was now or never. They stuffed their beds with rags, for that, uh, we're still in bed, not out on the lam look. Meanwhile, a guard slipped into the watchtower with two litres of wine and challenged his superior to a drinking contest. Once the senior officer was sufficiently inebriated, another guard lit a pipe to signal to the interred espionage agents that the coast was clear. The time had come.

Clan Cameron unlocked the door to their barracks with their homemade key. To disguise the unlocked door in a Shawshank Redemption move, they pinned a painting of a closed door that they had made. Ha ha! And then... I mean, it's not

even like Shawshank... It's like... This is my second time referencing this today. It's like Roadrunner. Just paint a doorway onto this rock. Yes. So at a glance, at a very, very swift glance, it would have been. A swift, drunk, dark glance. Fucking hell. The door would look like it was locked.

And the camp guards would think that nothing was amiss. Then the men sprinted to their first dark spot in the shadow of a camp building. Then they dashed to a spot in the barbed wire fence that was out of sight from all of the watchtowers. They laid down a carpet to protect themselves and crawled through yards of jagged barbed wire. In just 12 minutes, all 12 members of Clan Cameron were on the other side of the fence, where their getaway driver was waiting. Virginia Hall had pulled it off. The perfect crime.

Why hasn't Quentin Tarantino made a film out of this? I don't know. He says he's only going to make one more film or some shit. It should be this. A woman of no importance. Such a great title. I know. Let's make it happen. Now Hitler quickly heard about the Klan Cameron clear out.

And he was incandescent with rage. He had known about Virginia Hall's existence for some time. And he'd never been happy about it. But now she was top of his Hitler-less. This also just reminds me. Did anyone ever play like, anyone, you're the only one in the room, Hannah. Did you ever play drawing with friends? That like, before words with friends and it was like pictionary. Yes, vaguely, yeah.

Me and my friend used to play it and you could only draw Hitler in whatever thing you were trying to describe. So if it was hula hooping, you had to draw Hitler as whatever thing you were trying to describe. So if it was hula hooping, you had to draw Hitler as the person who was hula hooping. There are so many pictures that existed at some point on my phone of Hitler in just various pictionary poses. It's such a good game. I would highly recommend, my friend. Not sponsored. So yeah, Hitler, not happy.

So he flooded Vici with Gestapo agents in a desperate attempt to smoke the limping lady out and put Klaus Barbie in charge of the operation. Klaus would later be dubbed the butcher of Leon. We don't have time, no, but look into it, bad guy. Uh-huh. He famously said, quote, I'd give anything to get my hands on that limping Canadian bitch. They know so little about her that they don't even know she's American. Like, it's so good. And the only reason, so she worked very hard on her accent, but you're never going to get rid of it entirely. Like, she spoke fluent French,

so she would have to come up with, like, reasons why she sounded funny, basically. And she'd just be like, oh, I'm from really far north. Barbie was obsessed with tracking Virginia Hall down and handing her over to the Fuhrer. So we littered France with posters of Virginia's face with the caption, the enemy's most dangerous spy. We must find her and destroy her. Not that catchy. No, maybe it rhymes in German.

Maybe. That's the name of a podcast. Maybe it rhymes in German. Patent pending. So yeah, the wars were closing in on Virginia. And after years, she would finally be betrayed. Ironically enough, by a Catholic priest. Boo.

I hate this guy a pantomime gone from a quentin tarantino film to a pantomime she's never behind you she's virginia hall this piece of shit priest was called father robert alice he was well known in vichy for condemning the nazis in his sermons if he ever got a whiff of a resistance sympathiser in confession, he would tell the Germans and have his parishioners arrested by the Gestapo, because the Gestapo were paying him a lot of money. I have a needle in my fucking arse.

That's like a, it's basically a proverb where someone's like, oh Jesus, can a rich man get into heaven? And he's like, there's as much chance as a rich man getting into heaven as a camel going through the eye of a needle. But when I was at Catholic school, they were like, well, funnily enough, there's a gate in Jerusalem that's called the eye of the needle that you can just about fit a camel through. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Why are we undermining a really nice story? The idea that Jesus was like, no, it's not about money. Why are we trying to find loopholes?

Because it's okay to be a capitalist, children. Go forth. Oh, I see. Shouldn't get you into heaven, though. Yeah. Could be a nice person. He was not a nice person and Virginia, unfortunately,

played directly into his Nazi-greased palms. Alice provided her with false intelligence and learned the whereabouts of Jemanga in The Brothel Madam, the gynecologist conspirator, and those of Virginia Hall herself. I hate him the most because after the war, he was like, no, no, no, I was a triple agent. And they're like, no, you weren't.

No, you were not, you absolute worm. Ugh. Ben. Anyway, Germaine was the first to be captured. She was sent to a nightmarish concentration camp where she was injected with dangreen. But by some miracle, Germaine survived. The gynecologist was apprehended and sent to Buchenwald, as in the bitch of, and also lived to see a Europe at peace. Our girl, even with the SS, the

Gestapo, and the most powerful Nazis in the world after her, managed to get the hell out of Dodge, by the only means possible. A 50-mile trek over the Pyrenees in the worst winter the terrain had seen in 200 years. As she walked and walked and walked, Cuthbert rubbed against her leg and soon a bloody open wound developed. She's not on her own on this hike. There are other people, other people escaping France.

And she is like, I can't stop. I can't let them down. So she just keeps going. Virginia radioed the SOE and told them that Cuthbert was giving her trouble. Clearly they had no idea what she was talking about as they replied

that she should have Cuthbert eliminated. It's so British, honestly. Well, you know, he's causing a fuss. She wasn't going to eliminate him, though. Virginia Hall ain't no quitter. Open wound, rubbing against her wooden leg be damned, she made it to Spain. Obviously, Spain is a fascist country at this time, and she was arrested by the Civil Guard and held for 20 days before the American embassy did her the first favour they'd ever done, and they secured her release. The second she was out of jail, Virginia demanded to be sent straight back to France. The Americans said no. So, Virginia joined the Operation of Strategic Services,

who we will learn later this year, are exclusively responsible for the introduction of LSD to the world at large, but that is a story for another day. The OSS did send Virginia straight back to France. Maybe they knew that she would be in her element.

Maybe they had no idea what they were actually sending her back into. There had been enormous changes on the other side of the Atlantic whilst Virginia had been in the States. In 1942, Hitler appointed a real stand-up guy called Fritz Sockel as General for Labour Deployment. A very impressive title that I'm sure Fritz was very proud of. But history remembers him by a different name. The Slaver of Europe. Politically, Fritz is incredibly interesting. The Nazis knew that France was a powder keg waiting to explode.

So, Patern and the rest of the Vichy government joined forces with Fritz Sockel and launched a program they called Relief Shift. Essentially, it was a hostage trading scheme in which the Germans swore to release one prisoner of war in exchange for every three French workers that were sent to Germany. Like, the French are obviously against their will, completely the cogs in the German war machine. A year after this agreement was reached, which are obviously against their will, completely the cogs in the German war machine.

A year after this agreement was reached, Sockel made it mandatory for healthy men between 18 and 50 and all single women between 18 and 35 to enter into unpaid servitude, wherever the Reich thought they were needed. After everything that France had endured, this was the last fucking straw. The resistance was now a rebellion. After everything that France had endured, this was the last fucking straw. The resistance was now a rebellion.

Virginia came back to a nation that were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. But as the resistance grew, so did the SS's appetite for brutality. Collective punishment became the norm. But the French being the French didn't quit. Virginia made her way back to the field by boat in 1944, deep in disguise as an elderly milkmaid. Like we said, her teeth were ground down and her clothes were padded to give her a stout silhouette. She drew convincing wrinkles on her face, making her appear, even to the Gestapo, much older than her 37 years. D-Day plans by this point were well underway. Virginia's job was to weaken the Axis as much as possible before Private Ryan

made contact. To do that, Virginia Hall had to build an army. And she did. She found schoolboys, booksellers and teachers all hungry for revolution. These ragtag recruits organised ambushes, blew up bridges and killed hundreds of Nazis. Imagine the inglorious bastards, but on a glorious, extremely French scale. And it was this gang, recruited, trained and instructed by Virginia Hall, that liberated an entire region of France from the axis of evil, without the influence of a single professional soldier. Virginia Hall was the only civilian woman ever to be awarded the service cross. Truman tried to give it to her personally, but she refused,

preferring to keep her life as quiet as she possibly could. After the war, Virginia was left out in the cold. but she refused, preferring to keep her life as quiet as she possibly could. After the war, Virginia was left out in the cold. Once the CIA was formed, this mistake was corrected and Virginia was invited back into the cloak and dagger world. But she didn't get very far. Despite her literally liberating half of France single-handedly, her file describes her as lacking ingenuity, resolve and ideas,

and also lacking in courage. It's like a woman, no matter how senior, is most likely to be asked to take notes in a meeting. It's like that. Yes, infuriating, but unsurprising. The entire mantra of the male establishment has always been bitches be crazy. However, we are making moves. In 2018, Gina Hapsall was appointed to be the director of the CIA,

which meant a woman was at the helm of the Secret Service for the first time in history. In Gina's acceptance speech, she paid tribute to all of the women who came before her, and Virginia Hall was on that list. A lot of undercover techniques that Virginia honed in France are still used by the Secret Service today. A woman is not just her work. After the war, Virginia Hall went back to the States with an Englishman who parachuted into her life one night in France. They got married in 1957 and lived out their lives together in Maryland until Virginia died in 1952. Her life after the war is quite sad.

She does do a lot of stuff for the CIA and she was really involved in the Cold War and Cuba was her beat and she would do a lot of reports about insurgents and blah, blah, blah. And someone who was around her at the time said the only time I ever heard her slip talking about her work was when the Bay of Pigs invasion was on TV. And she just says, God, I'm so glad that's not one of mine. And the other thing, you know, she was also in quite ill health because the whole time she was in France, just like Hitler, she was on fucking amphetamines the whole time. And because everybody was. And also, I think she drank quite a lot. Like there's a lovely quote of like something like the Secret Service rolled out of France on a wave of wine because they had a reputation for really going at it.

But like I fucking would, too, if I was living a terrifying life. So yeah, without our girl Virginia Hall, you'd probably be listening to this podcast. Which isn't called. It probably rhymes in German. In German. Yeah. Read the book. Like I can't encourage you to do that enough.

Like there are so many stories that I've left out. Sonia Connell's also an incredible writer. It's just so good. So go get the book. And that's our rundown of it. That's our Virginia Hall. It is. And we will see you next time for a different story.

And maybe I'll have her tattooed on my face by then. We don't know. Fingers crossed. Goodbye. Bye. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a

three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery+. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't.

I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.