The Dark Game by Paul B. Janeczko

Author:Paul B. Janeczko [Janeczko, Paul B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6209-7
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2010-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

A female spy who followed in the footsteps of her sisters who served before her, particularly in the Civil War, was Virginia Hall. Code-named Diane, Hall was one of the most successful woman spies in the history of espionage. By the time her service was complete, “the limping lady,” as she was called, was one of the spies most wanted by the Gestapo. As one Gestapo officer put it, “The woman who limps is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. We must find her and destroy her.”

Although Virginia Hall began college in the U.S., she traveled to Europe to further her language studies, mastering French, German, and Italian. She returned home in 1929 to study French in more depth. She then entered the diplomatic service, working for the U.S. State Department in Poland, Austria, and Turkey. While on a hunting trip in Turkey, she accidentally shot herself in the foot. When gangrene set in, there was nothing doctors could do but amputate her leg below the knee. She was fitted with a wooden leg, which she nicknamed Cuthbert.

Although her wooden leg kept her from working for the State Department as she had wanted — at the time they had a policy of not hiring amputees — Hall wasn’t one to let something like an artificial leg stop her from making a contribution. Alarmed at the growing threat of Nazi Germany throughout Europe, she returned to Europe as a volunteer with the French Ambulance Service Unit. However, when France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Hall was no longer safe in France. She moved to England and worked as a code clerk at the United States embassy. It didn’t take long for the British intelligence community to learn of her work, and she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive.

For her first assignment as a trained SOE agent, Virginia Hall was sent to France at the end of the summer of 1941 to organize resistance fighters and collect intelligence. Her “legend,” or fake background story, had been carefully crafted to take advantage of her position as a credentialed journalist for the New York Post. Hall would cable her stories to the U.S. with secret intelligence encoded and embedded in them.

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