Les Marguerites Fleuriront ce Soir

"Virginia Hall was a Baltimore native who joined the US State Department in the 1930s, serving as a clerk with postings in Warsaw, Poland, Venice, Italy, and Izmir, Turkey. A hunting accident resulted in the amputation of her left leg and precluded her from overseas assignments with the State Department, so she resigned. At the outbreak of WW II, she eagerly joined the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to fight fascism. Her fluency in French landed her a clandestine assignment in Lyons, where she went to work developing the area’s resistance operations. Over the next 15 months, every British agent arriving in France passed through her flat for instructions, counterfeit money, and contacts. In addition, she orchestrated supply drops and helped endangered agents escape to England. Betrayed in November 1942, she had to use her own escape route out of France, just steps ahead of her now infamous pursuer, Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyons.”
Hall then joined the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services in March 1944 and asked to return to occupied France. OSS promptly granted her request and reinfiltrated her aboard a British PT boat. Disguised as a farmwoman, she carried cheese to local villages to count German troops and identify drop zones for the Allied invasion to come."

OSS Director William Donovan awarded Virginia Hall the Distinguished Service Cross—the only one given to a civilian woman during that war. Hall later worked for the CIA, serving in many jobs as one of CIA’s first female operations officers. In 2006 this portrait of Hall was unveiled at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC forty years after she retired from CIA and almost 25 years after her death. She is pictured radioing London from an old barn near Le Chambon sur Ligon to request supplies and personnel.