Inasmuch as an award of this kind has not been previously made during the present war, you may wish to make the presentation personally.
Signed, William J. Donovan, Director
General Donovan’s office contacted Virginia upon her return to Paris, to let her know that she had been awarded the DSC and that the president was most anxious to make the presentation himself. Virginia certainly didn’t want to insult the president, but she was not the least bit interested in fanfare. She had been sent to Europe to perform a job, which she had done. Bestowing an award on her simply for doing her work was as ludicrous as giving one to the horse that pulled a milk cart. And receiving it at a public ceremony in the White House was out of the question. She had witnessed the effectiveness of an intelligence organization and was sure it would be something the government would continue to support, even if it was in a different form. She had every intention of being a part of that nascent organization and any future in espionage would be ruined for her if her photo was splashed across newspapers from coast to coast.
The Paris OSS office cabled General Donovan that Miss Hall
feels very strongly that she should not receive any publicity or any announcement as to her award. Understand that at her request the British government made no publicity of an award [Member of the British Empire] she received from them. She states that she is still operational and most anxious to get busy. Any publicity would preclude her from going on any operation.
It was well known at OSS headquarters that it was far easier to agree with Virginia Hall than to argue with her. The presentation was delayed until Virginia’s return to Washington, DC, on September 23. It was made privately four days later, by General Donovan in his office, with only Mrs. Hall witnessing her daughter’s honor.
Although accolades had certainly not been the impetus for her work, Virginia discovered she had also been awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme. Like the Member of the British Empire, and the Distiguished Service Cross, the Croix de guerre had first been created during World War I for “those individuals who distinguish themselves by acts of heroism involving combat with enemy forces.” Virginia was gracious in receiving that award as well, although it was in absentia. But the awards were far less important to her than what she had seen as the result of coordinated intelligence work.
Virginia’s ceremony in General Donovan’s office was overshadowed by an executive order President Truman had issued the week before. The Office of Strategic Services had been offically disbanded. While Donovan’s idea of a peacetime intelligence agency had appealed to President Roosevelt, his successor had no intention of creating an “American Gestapo.” Furthermore, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had long been jealous of another intelligence agency treading on its turf. Hoover had exercised his considerable influence over the president to discourage any competition for valuable governmental resources.
Effective at the close of business on September 28, Virignia’s resignation from the OSS was officially filed. She was not about to close the door on her future, however, and she added her thoughts in the second paragraph of her resignation letter. “I am deeply interested in the future of intelligence work and would like to be considered in the event that an intelligence organization is established.”
Virginia’s next stop was Box Horn Farm, where she settled in with her mother for a little R & R. As she had held privileged information throughout the war, she was very close-mouthed about her experiences in Europe, even with her family. The OSS had recently issued documents giving former agents guidelines on acceptable disclosures. But Virginia was of the opinion that secret work should remain secret.
Shortly after her arrival home, Goillot visited her at Box Horn. He had left Paris after Virginia and resettled in New York City. Mrs. Hall was not impressed with the Frenchman when she met him. While she thought he was pleasant enough, she found it shocking that Virginia and Goillot made no secret of the fact that they had lived together while they were in Europe. Virginia was now thirty-nine, and Mrs. Hall thought it was high time she think about finding a husband. Her opinion of Goillot, however, was that he was well beneath the standards of the husband she had envisioned for her daughter.
With the future of intelligence up in the air, Virginia turned her thoughts once again to her prewar goal: a position within the Foreign Service. Certainly after all the skills she had aquired with the OSS, the State Department would recognize her value. She applied by letter on March 1, 1946.
Sirs:
You will find enclosed my application for appointment to the Foreign Service Auxiliary. It was suggested that I make this application as I was with the Foreign Service from 1931 to spring 1939, and during three years and a half in Venice worked at practically everything that is done in a consulate. … I would be grateful if you could inform me at your early convenience whether this application can be taken under consideration or not.
A response arrived just two weeks later.
My dear Miss Hall,
With reference to your application for an appointment in the Foreign Service Auxiliary, I am very sorry to inform you that a recent budgetary curtailment has forced the Department to suspend recruitment for the Auxiliary. In view of these circumstances, the Department regrets that it will not be possible to offer you an appointment.
Incredibly, after all of her experiences, it was yet another dead end in a long series from the State Department. But down the street in the nation’s capital, the intelligence pot was still being stirred. President Truman had reconsidered his hasty dissolution of the OSS, and in January of 1946, he created the Central Intelligence Group.
The CIG was the brainchild of Admiral Leahy, the American ambassador to Vichy, whom Virginia had numerous meetings with during her time in Lyon. The agency’s missions were to provide strategic warning and conduct clandestine activities. It functioned under the direction of a National Intelligence Authority, which was composed of a residential representative and the secretaries of state, war, and navy.
Virginia was elated when she heard the news. This was an organization that would suit not only her interests, but her skills as well. She applied for a position and given her many contacts from her OSS days, including Admiral Leahy, she was soon hired as a “field representative.” The downside was that the job would require her to travel, just as her relationship with Goillot was continuing to blossom. But the good-natured Goillot supported Virginia completely. He would remain in the United States and they could write one another and reunite as time and resources allowed.
Virginia spent all of 1947 in Europe, traveling between Italy, Switzerland, and France. As she had when she worked for SOE, she used journalism as her cover. But her real work was to collect economic, financial, and political intelligence on postwar Europe. She also reported on the Communist movements growing in Italy and Yugoslavia.
Virginia returned briefly to the United States in early 1948. The previous December, the CIG had been dissolved and the National Security Council was established. Under its auspices, a new organization was created, called the Central Intelligence Agency. Its job was to coordinate the nation’s intelligence activities, as well as correlate, evaluate, and disseminate intelligence that might affect national security. Virginia joined many of her fellow OSS veterans transferring to the new agency, making her one of the CIA’s first female agents. During the course of her work over the next two years, she continued to travel between New York and Europe, still using journalism as her cover and still in love with Paul Goillot.
The CIA brought Virginia back to the United States late in 1948 for a new assignment with one of its front organizations called the National Committee for a Free Europe. The organization was linked to Radio Free Europe. Goillot was still living in New York, so Virginia moved in with him. Her job was to interview incoming refugees and prepare radio propaganda to counteract the new threat facing Europe: Communism.
Changes were occurring in the world of int
elligence. The United States had been keeping an ever-watchful eye on Soviet chief Joseph Stalin, who, one observer noted, “made Hitler look like a Boy Scout.” A war with the Soviet Union was a frightening possibility, as Communism was spreading throughout Eastern Europe. It had already overtaken China and half of the Korean peninsula. The latter had been arbitrarily divided at the end of World War II, and the two halves were now at war with one another. And in Washington, Senator Joseph McCarthy, having ruined the careers of some and the morale of all at the State Department with his accusations of Communist affiliation, was now ready to rip into the CIA. It was a new day in espionage, and it was time to replace field-hardened World War II veterans like Virginia with younger agents equipped to handle the challenges.
The CIA assigned Virginia a corner desk back at headquarters in Washington. It wasn’t that her work for the agency wasn’t appreciated—it was. She prepared clandestine “hot and cold” war plans for the Southern European Division and a political action plan for South Asia. In 1956, she became the first woman on the CIA’s Career Staff, and later set up political and psychological projects in South America.
But what Virginia really wanted was to be an operative again, working in the field. She knew that was where her real strengths lay, and she was convinced that, as she had during World War II, she could make a difference in this new postwar world. She would have gladly undergone any training necessary to bring her up to speed, convinced as always that she could be as good as anyone.
The CIA saw it differently. Her skills were outdated, her aggressiveness offensive to the younger men who were her supervisors. And while new agents delighted in Virginia’s stories of the war years, her experience was dismissed as not pertinent to the new era in intelligence. As a young, enthusiastic woman, she had tried to follow her dream into Foreign Service, only to run into a roadblock. Now at the end of her career, a similar obstacle arose. Once again Virginia Hall didn’t fit in.
Epilogue
The casualty figures of the European theater of World War II were staggering. As Virginia Hall did more than her share to free France of the Nazi choke hold, 340,000 French soldiers and sailors died around her. The country’s civilian casualties, including the deaths of Resistance members, were 470,000. Seventy-five thousand French Jews died, while hundreds of thousands of Jews who had sought refuge in France were deported to camps, where many died as well.
But Hitler’s genocide stretched beyond the Jews, whose deaths totaled more than six million. Polish Catholics, Soviet prisoners of war, the handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also targets. The Nazi inhumanity to man resulted in 13,114,500 deaths.
The war involved twenty-one countries that suffered a total loss of 20,494,000 military personnel. In addition, 21,073,000 civilians perished, either as a result of the fighting or as a part of Hitler’s Final Solution. The final death toll for the war was 41,567,000, a figure that exceeds the combined populations of the states of New York and Texas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2003 Current Population Survey.
The Special Operations Executive sent a total of 480 agents into France to help organize the fight against the Nazis. Forty of those agents were women. Exactly 25 percent never came home; 15 of the 120 deaths were female.
The Office of Strategic Services didn’t keep such accurate statistics. Over the course of the war, about thirty thousand men and women were employed by the agency, including support people stateside as well as agents in the field. While there is no conclusive total number of agents that were sent to France, it is known that at least thirty-seven were there in the agency’s service. And Virginia was the only woman to operate her own réseau.
Justice was due the men who had engineered the bloodiest conflict the world had ever known. To that end, the European war criminals were tried in Nuremberg, Germany, a city that had suffered massive bombing in the closing days of the war. During Hitler’s glory years, the city had been the site of the annual Reichsparteitage, rallies celebrating the Nazi party. It was only fitting, then, that the party’s demise should take place there as well.
On November 20, 1945, twenty-four former Nazis were brought to trial before an international tribunal. Their charges were crimes against humanity. The presiding tribunal handed down verdicts almost a year later, on October 1, 1946. Twelve men were sentenced to death, two of whom committed suicide before their executions. Three men received life sentences. Three more were mentally unfit, and the rest received prison sentences varying from ten to twenty years.
The French dealt with their traitors themselves. De Gaulle’s new French government arrested Henri Pétain in April of 1945 and charged him with treason. He was sentenced to death, a sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment, given his advanced age. He died behind bars on July 23, 1951, at the age of ninety-five. Pierre Laval, Vichy’s premier, fled to Spain at the end of the war, only to be captured there in May 1945. After the French government got its hands on him on July 30, he was shot by a firing squad at Fresnes Prison outside Paris.
Tried as a collaborator in 1949, René Bousquet, Vichy’s chief of police and the architect of the massive Jewish roundup at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, received a suspended sentence as a reward for alleged acts of resistance. An investigation of his wartime activities was resumed and a second trial was to begin in the fall of 1993. The trial never took place, as Bousquet was murdered in June of that year. His murderer claimed he was “the good” sent to destroy “the evil.”
Joseph Darnand, leader of the deadly Milice, fled to Germany after the Allies landed in Normandy. Captured there at the end of the war and returned to France, he was tried and executed in 1945.
Postwar research attributes Klaus Barbie as being ultimately responsible for the arrest and torture of 14,311 Resistance members, the deportation of 7,500 people, and the murder of 4,342. At the war’s end, however, the American and British intelligence agencies protected and employed him. His police skills were of use in repressing the leftist resistance to the Allied occupation of Germany after the war.
No longer needed in 1955, he and his family escaped to Bolivia, where Nazi hunters found him in 1983 and had him extradited to France. Ironically, the same man who murdered Bousquet tried to kill Barbie before he could stand trial, but was unsuccessful. Barbie went to trial in Lyon for crimes against humanity and was found guilty in 1987. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the “Butcher of Lyon” died of leukemia in the prison hospital at Lyon on September 25, 1991.
In light of their acts of bravery during the war, it is often difficult to imagine the mortality of the unique, and often mysterious, individuals Virginia met during her career with the SOE and the OSS. And while some were easier to get along with than others, they all made sacrifices in the name of freedom.
Tall, handsome, Cardiff-born Jacques de Guélis was thirty-four when he and Virginia first met in London in 1941. After his initial trip to France in advance of Virginia’s arrival, de Guélis parachuted twice more into occupied Europe, landing in Corsica in 1942 and again in France after D-Day. He was still clearing Germany of Nazis on May 16, 1945, when he was involved in a motor accident. He died of his injuries three months later on August 7.
The de Vomecourt brothers willingly sacrificed a great deal for their homeland, as did many who Virginia came in contact with. While the youngest brother, Philippe, managed to escape capture, Pierre’s imprisonment following his capture in 1942 continued until the war’s end. He was liberated from Colditz in Germany in 1945 by the Americans. Their elder brother Jean was not as lucky. Also captured, he was sent via cattle car to a concentration camp in Germany. Like most prisoners, he was most probably kicked, beaten, starved, and tortured, all of which he survived. Even tuberculosis, which he contracted in camp, could not knock him down. Once recovered, he was made senior orderly at the camp hospital, a position he maintained until it became evident that the Russians’ arrival was imminent in their sweep through Germany. The N
azis chose to liquidate all who had witnessed their brutality and Jean was executed along with the other prisoners.
Peter Churchill was thirty-three when he first landed on the shores of occupied France in 1942, just weeks before his first meeting with Virginia. After his arrest by the Abwehr, and his imprisonment, along with that of his courier, Odette Sansom, in Fresnes Prison outside of Paris, he was sent to a German prison camp. He survived the ordeal, as did she, and they married in 1945, only to divorce in 1955. Churchill wrote four memoirs about his experiences during the war and died in 1972.
At the time of his death, Churchill was just one year older then Aramis was when he met Virginia in 1944. Aramis was sixty-two at the time, the oldest agent the OSS ever sent to the field. His real name was Henry Laussucq and he was a commercial artist from Pittsburgh. Laussucq’s official debriefing is rather huffy in several spots. Regarding Virginia’s move from Lopinat’s farm to the town of Cosne, he says she “then went to a farm a few miles from there but did not disclose her address to me.” Further in the report he states that she contacted him through their “cut out” (an intermediary) that she was moving again and that he would “surely hear from somebody somehow, which I never did.”
After the war ended, he gave an interview to a United Press writer, to whom he told that he “was accompanied into France by a young woman radio operator, still identified only as ‘Diane’ who later disappeared.” He described a variety of adventures that culminated in his holding off the Germans in the Paris Hotel de Ville, the city hall, along with three other Resistance members. They possessed stolen Vichy police files that ultimately helped in the liberation of Paris.
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