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She had many codenames - Diane, Camille, Marie, Philomene - but to the Gestapo she was simply the Limping Lady because of her wooden leg. Gestapo chief Hermann Göring put out Wanted posters offering a reward for the capture of the woman he viewed as the most dangerous spy in war-torn France. But Virginia Hall ignored the Nazi secret police, and, working for Winston Churchill's SOE, the Special Operations Executive, forerunner of MI6, she slipped back and forth between London and France, wreaking havoc behind enemy lines. When he set up the SOE, Churchill said he wanted it "to set...

The final item in the Sept. 30, 1944 "Activity Report of Virginia Hall," American intelligence agent, was No. XV: "Were you decorated in the Field?" "No," she had typed, "nor any reason to be." The answer was typical of her matter-of-fact sense of duty. But William J. Donovan, known to a generation of spies as "Wild Bill," begged to differ. On May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Donovan, director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, informed President Harry Truman that Hall was, for her extraordinary heroism, to receive the Distinguished Service Cross -- second only to the Medal of Honor....