Virginia Hall
Virginia Hall was an American who worked in France for British intelligence during World War II. The publisher of the New York Post arranged for her to become an accredited correspondent, which enabled her to interview people, gather information, and file stories with details useful to military planners. The chief censor of the foreign press in France not only avoided censoring Hall’s articles, but helped her build a network of contacts across the country. In “A Woman of No Importance,” Sonia Purnell writes that what Hall could tell her British contacts “was limited to her published articles. Some contained pre-agreed words as coded messages.” “The more sensitive articles on political news were not published but merely sent straight to” British intelligence. Hall spent 13 months in France in 1941-42, organizing spy networks, running safehouses, and delivering intelligence to the British government. Hall joined the CIA in 1947 where she was given a desk-bound job as an intelligence analyst. A CIA report would later admit that her fellow officers "felt 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 that "her experience and abilities were never properly utilized." She later received a number of awards for her efforts in France.