The Other Agents — Virginia Hall — CIA Speech

image-Photograph 1 of Virginia Hall MBE, Distinguished Service Cross (US)

Codename(s): Diane / Camille / Marie / Philomene

I am most grateful to Molly Hale at the Office of Publications, Central Intelligence Agency in allowing me to reproduce the contents of this page. The CIA web site and the CIA Childrens web site.

image-Nora Slatkin Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency The following is an extract from a speech made by Nora Slatkin on 15th May 1996 when she was the Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The speech was to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations who were hosting a series of lectures on "Women in American Politics". She started the lecture by saying:

"I am pleased to participate in this lecture series on "Women in American Politics." Of course, the Central Intelligence Agency must, by charter, stay out of politics, so I have changed the subject of my talk to "Women in CIA."

"First I would like to give you a little of our history by going back to the CIA's forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was run by a visionary named General William Donovan. "Wild Bill" Donovan believed that the best way into the mind of the enemy was to harness the minds, talents and experiences of every kind of American, this meant women as well as ethnic minorities. While many people were gripped with a fear of subversion, while Japanese Americans were being put in internment camps, the OSS was hiring Japanese, and German, and Italian Americans. The OSS personnel office once boasted that its payroll listed every nationality and every occupation. And the OSS hired thousands of women to work in many types of jobs.

We may never know the true extent of the accomplishments of the women of OSS, because they were instructed to keep quiet about what they did and they took these directives seriously. A lot of OSS women won't speak of what they did, even years later. One former OSS officer, Betty MacDonald McIntosh, did write a memoir. She wrote of being warned very sternly by the OSS security officer never to divulge any aspect of her employment. "We are anonymous. If people ask you what you do here, tell 'em you are file clerks. People aren't interested in file clerks - not enough to ask questions." Betty evidently downplayed her own accomplishments. The tattered copy of her book in the Agency's Historical Intelligence Collection bears a faded, handwritten note that reads, "I have been told that this girl, modest and writing in a semi-humorous way, was one of the best operators in OSS."

Virginia Hall was a real clerk - with the State Department. She was a highly qualified clerk. She had studied at Radcliffe, Barnard and George Washington University. She also did advanced studies in political science and international affairs in Paris, Vienna, Strasbourg, Grenoble, and Toulouse. The State Department believed that Virginia had a very promising career ahead of her in the upper echelons of the clerical branch. Secretary of State Cordell Hull noted that Hall could "become a fine career girl in the Consular Service," but he rejected her appeal to become a career Foreign Service Officer. The official reason cited was that Hall had lost one leg below the knee in an accident, and walked with an artificial limb.

Hall left State at the outbreak of World War II, giving up the opportunity to file increasingly important documents. In March of 1941, she joined the British Special Operations Executive. There she got an advanced education of a different sort. She learned about weapons, communications, and security. She used these skills to set up an extensive agent network in unoccupied France, escaping to Spain just ahead of the German army and the Gestapo.

Hall then transferred to the OSS. Although well known to the Gestapo and under constant threat of capture, she organized, armed, and trained three battalions of French Resistance forces. She directed them in sabotage operations against the German army. At great personal risk, Hall also transmitted radio messages to Allied troops in the critical weeks after the invasion of Normandy. While German direction finders tried to pinpoint her location, she sent the first word that the German General Staff was moving its headquarters from Lyon to Le Puy - a critical turning point in the fighting. For her efforts, Virginia Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, this nation's second highest military award for bravery after the Medal of Honor. She was the only civilian American woman in World War II to receive this award.

Virginia Hall and the other women of the OSS worked in wartime. The CIA inherited many of the functions and the people of the OSS, including Betty McIntosh and Virginia Hall. But CIA was created as a peacetime intelligence service. In the CIA, as in the rest of the country, it became more difficult for women to move into responsible positions after the war. In peacetime, our society somehow felt it could afford the luxury of wasting the talents of women and leaving the Virginia Halls of this world deep in the file drawer."