Ambassadors to honor female WWII spy

AP via Yahoo! ^ | Sun Dec 10, 2006 - 2:45 PM ET | Ben Nuckols, AP Writer

[Ready4Freddy]

BALTIMORE - In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her."

The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey.

The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department wouldn't hire amputees, but it didn't prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.

On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors plan to honor Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony at the home of French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte in Washington.

British Ambassador Sir David Manning plans to present a certificate signed by King George VI to Hall's niece, Lorna Catling. Hall should have received the document in 1943, when she was made a member of the Order of the British Empire.

"I think it was ironic that the State Department turned her down because she was an amputee, and here she went on and did all this other stuff," said Catling, who lives in Baltimore. Catling said she didn't learn many of the details of her aunt's espionage career until after her death.

Hall, who was fluent in French, was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and she decamped for London, where she was recruited by the secret British paramilitary service, the Special Operations Executive, becoming its first female field operative.

[VOA]

Reminder to leave safety engaged.

And make that a rule for everyone in the hunting party.

E.g., as when I missed putting a .22LR round through my brother's foot
during a STUPID failure to put safety on...and absent-mindedly
let my index finger stray within the trigger guard while
letting the carbine dangle at my side.
(I learned from that close call)

[STARWISE]

Me, too. First I've heard of her .. would make a great movie.

[lndrvr1972]

Its a good movie.

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[USMCVet]

encroyable!

[leilani]

Really interesting. Odd that I haven't heard of her, since I went to one of those silly schools where the teachers would shamelessly scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with women involved, sometimes in the most absurdly tangential ways, with momentous historical events. (Evidently girls aren't capable of studying history unless we can "identify". Gag.)

So I just went to see about buying the book (only $16.75 at amazon!) and found the prologue to Judith Pearson's "Wolves at the Door" on the author's website.

Memo to Merrill Streep's production company: get off of your overpaid butts & get on this aready, slackers!

[Citizen Soldier]

Heather McCartney could play her

[OKSooner]

Bookmark.

[Ready4Freddy]

Thanks, LH!

Here's the thread that LH referred to - The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy [Book review]

There was a thread around here earlier this year (or last year) about the book. This woman was absolutely unbelievable.