On June 20, 1941, Virginia Hall arrived in Vichy France, carrying credentials as a reporter for the New York Post. She was also working for the Special Operations Executive, Britain's covert sabotage and intelligence service.

Hall had a prosthetic leg — she had lost the original in a hunting accident before the war — which she called "Cuthbert." When she was warned that her leg might hamper her escape if she needed to flee France, she reported back: "Cuthbert is giving me no trouble." SOE replied: "If Cuthbert is giving you trouble, have him eliminated."

For the next year and a half, she organized resistance networks across unoccupied France, recruited and trained agents, and helped Allied airmen escape through Spain. The Gestapo identified her as the most dangerous Allied agent in France and distributed her description across occupied Europe.

When the Germans moved into unoccupied France in November 1942, she crossed the Pyrenees on foot in winter — on one leg and a prosthetic — and escaped to Spain.

She went back. In 1944, she returned to France in disguise, posing as an elderly peasant woman, and continued organizing resistance.

She received the Distinguished Service Cross after the war — the only civilian woman to receive it in World War II. The CIA, which absorbed the OSS, later named a building after her.