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Spice girl secret agents12/10/2023 ![]() ![]() The painting shows her making radio contact with London from an old barn in France to request supplies and personnel. This painting of Virginia Hall hangs in one of the main hallways near the entrance of CIA headquarters. "She came home when I was 16, and she was pale and had white hair and crappy clothes," Catling said. She recalls meeting her aunt after the war. Hall's niece, Lorna Catling, is now 89 and lives in Baltimore. They reclaimed villages well before Allied troops advanced deep into France.Īt its peak, Hall's network consisted of some 1,500 people, including a French-American soldier, Paul Goillot - who would later became her husband. She called in airdrops for the resistance fighters, who blew up bridges and sabotaged trains. Hall's second tour in France, in 19, was even more successful than the first. "She also got a fierce, a rather sort of scary London dentist to grind down her lovely, white American teeth so that she looked like a French milkmaid." "She got some makeup artist to teach her how to draw wrinkles on her face," she said. The Americans needed Hall, yet the Nazis were everywhere, making it even more difficult for her to operate, said Purnell. However, the Americans were ramping up their own intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which had virtually no presence in France. The only outsider attending was Hall's mother. President Harry Truman proposed a public ceremony at the White House, but Hall declined because she wanted to stay undercover. She was the only civilian woman so honored in World War II. ![]() William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, presents Virginia Hall with the Distinguished Service Cross in 1945. "She could be four different women in the space of an afternoon, with four different code names," said Purnell. "The Germans came to realize that they were after a limping lady," she said. Hall organized French resistance fighters, providing them with safe houses and intelligence. She befriended a female brothel owner and received information that French prostitutes gathered from German troops. She initially stayed at a convent and persuaded nuns to help her. Hall operated in the eastern French city of Lyon. None of the Germans early in the war necessarily thought that a woman was capable of being a spy." "She was able to play on the chauvinism of the Gestapo at the time. "Virginia Hall, to a certain extent, was invisible," said Gralley. Sonia Purnell, author of 'A Woman of No Importance'īut Hall was a natural spy, keeping one step ahead of the German secret police, the Gestapo. The Germans came to realize that they were after a limping lady. So why haven't more people heard about Hall? A quote from Hall on the agency display offers an explanation: "Many of my friends were killed for talking too much."īut now - more than 70 years after her wartime exploits in France, and almost 40 years after her death - Virginia Hall is having a moment. "She was the most highly decorated female civilian during World War II," said Janelle Neises, the museum's deputy director, who's providing a tour. Her story is on display at the CIA Museum inside the spy agency headquarters in Langley, Va. Virginia Hall is one of the most important American spies most people have never heard of. Her story was long hidden, but is now being told in full. Despite a hunting accident that cost her left leg, she became one of the most successful spies in World War II, first for the British and then for the Americans. She was raised to marry into her privileged class, but wanted a life of adventure. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.Virginia Hall was born into a wealthy Baltimore family in 1906. “But if we want anything to be kept a secret, we don’t tell her,” joked the singer. “There are things in the pipeline, and we’d love to do something together again – all of us,” she said.īunton said that she and the other Spice Girls love how “excited” Brown - who recently announced her engagement to her longtime partner Rory McPhee - gets about plans, but they know she’s loose-lipped. “We have been in talks about doing a doc, but nothing has been confirmed yet,” the 46-year-old singer, a k a Baby Spice, said. This one Spice Girl prefers to “holler” rather than keep a secret.Įmma Bunton revealed that none of the other Spice Girls will tell Melanie Brown, also known by the monikers Mel B and Scary Spice, anything that they want to keep secret.īunton, who was appearing on ITV’s “This Morning” Monday to promote her upcoming festive tour, was asked by the show’s host if there was an upcoming documentary about the Spice Girls - which Mel B seemed to reveal while being interviewed by “The Project.” Victoria Beckham shuns Spice Girls tour but will reunite for documentary Mel B ‘shocked’ by racism in the US while filming documentary: ‘It changed my outlook’ Why James Corden is the ‘biggest d–khead Mel B. Mel B’s daughter, Phoenix, recreates her Spice Girls looks in sexy photoshoot
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