The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy (review)

Virginia Hall's achievements as a secret agent in the war against Hitler were far out of the ordinary, even among that galaxy of bright young women spies. Born to wealthy parents in Maryland in 1906, she often visited Europe when young, and was educated at the Sorbonne. She got minor jobs in United States consulates in Europe, but lost a leg in an accident with a sporting gun, and had to give up her ambition to join the U.S. foreign service. When the war against Hitler broke out, she worked in an ambulance unit in France, and got away to England when France collapsed. She volunteered for secret service with the British Special Operations Executive, and served as the lynch-pin for SOE's circuits in southeastern France in the dangerous early stages, under cover of being a New York Post correspondent in Lyons. She went in, prosaically enough, by railroad from Spain. This work was quite as dangerous as active sabotage, but much duller. The official history has it that "without her indispensable work about half of F section's early operations in France could never have been carried out at all." She got out in November 1942, walking over the Pyrenees in spite of her game leg, just ahead of the Gestapo; taught herself Morse; and went back, in disguise as an elderly woman, with a roving mission both for SOE and for OSS in the spring of 1944, arming several useful maquis. She later married Paul Goillot, who had joined her circuit by parachute in a "Jedburgh" team ; they retired to her Maryland home, where she died in 1982. After the world war, the British gave her an MBE and the Americans a Distinguished Service Cross.

Unhappily, her biographer has told her matchless story with a great many needless small errors: believing for example that stores were dropped into France by parachute from Lysanders and sending her to France from the wrong port for her second mission, when she landed from a small boat in Brittany. A second edition, in which these trivia were cleared up, would be a useful and important addition to the history of secret war.