[MUSIC PLAYING]
SARAH SAVITT: So I'm Sarah
Savitt, publisher at Virago.
And I'm really delighted to
be here today with Sonia.
I'm very proud to be her editor.
Sonia is a biographer
and journalist
who's written for "The
Guardian," "Daily Telegraph,"
and "The Sunday Times."
Her book, "First Lady--
The Life and Wars of
Clementine Churchill"
was Book of the Year in "The
Telegraph," "Independent,"
and "Lenny Letter"
and was shortlisted
for the Plutarch Award
for Best Biography.
Her first book, "Just Boris--
A Tale of Blond Ambition"--
my favorite subtitle ever, I
think--
was long-listed for
the Orwell Prize.
But Sonia is here to talk
about her new book, "A Woman
of No Importance-- the untold
story of World War II's most
dangerous spy, Virginia Hall."
And it came out
in March, and it's
been a huge hit on both
sides of the Atlantic.
So it's on the "New York Times"
bestseller list at the moment.
And it's just been stacking
up the most incredible set
of reviews.
So congratulations, Sonia.
And yeah, thank you so
much for having us here.
We're going to talk
for 30, 40 minutes
and then open up to
audience questions.
We've heard you ask
really great questions,
so please ask them at the end.
So Sonia, first, can you tell
us who was Virginia Hall?
And why did you want to
write a book about her?
SONIA PURNELL: Well,
I stumbled across her.
I was quite interested in
spying and spies, generally.
And I was reading a little
bit about intelligence
during the Second World War.
And there'd be a
whole lot of stuff
about all sorts of
different people.
And every now and again, there'd
be just a little mention of,
oh, there was this
American woman
who had a wooden leg
and spied for the Brits
and did amazing things.
And it'd be full
stop, new paragraph,
and nothing more would be said.
And I thought, well, she
sounds rather intriguing.
Why does no one ever
write about her?
And I started digging
into her life.
And I couldn't have imagined
how extraordinary her life was,
how she triumphed
over adversity,
her resilience, her
courage, her determination,
but also her secrecy.
I mean, she wanted to be a
secret agent all her life.
And so she wasn't going
to make it easy for me,
I can tell you, to find
out about her life.
But I got a few lucky
breaks, including
having the help of a couple of
retired intelligence officers
in getting some
documents declassified.
I spent a day at Langley, the
CIA headquarters in America.
I found an amazing
treasure trove
of letters and
reminiscences in France.
So gradually, I pieced
together this story
of this woman who, I feel,
is unbelievably modern.
There's so much in her
story that resonates today.
Of course, yeah,
she was fighting
in the war in the 1940s.
But the way that she
reacted, the way that she
kept going, the way that she
pushed down barriers really
spoke to me.
I found her really
inspirational.
And a lot of my
friends and I now
say, if we're in a tight spot
or having a difficult time,
what would Virginia do?
And in fact, even
Sarah and I were
talking earlier about something,
and what would Virginia say?
And she had a courage that
I simply can't quantify.
It really was incredible.
Of course she had fears.
Everyone does.
But she managed to conquer
them in these amazing ways.
So once I started
digging into her life,
it became almost an obsession.
I spent three years,
lots of late nights,
early mornings,
tracking her down,
piecing together the
story in different ways.
And I'm really glad I did.
I think she's amazing.
The Gestapo didn't
think she was amazing.
They just thought
she was dangerous.
They named her the most
dangerous of all allied spies--
quite a competitive field there.
But it is incredible,
actually, that we didn't really
know much about her until now.
But I aim to change that.
SARAH SAVITT: And
as you touched on,
she was quite an
unlikely spy as well as
a very successful
and dangerous one.
So you write in the
book that she grew up
in quite a well-to-do
American family.
But she ended up
spying for the British.
She had a prosthetic leg,
which must have made it more
difficult. But she really did--
her mom wanted her to
marry the right guy
and settle down, have a family.
Why did she ditch that life
that she was meant to have?
What drove her to have
this incredible life?
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah,
well, she grew up
in quite a well-to-do
family, as you say, just
outside Baltimore.
Her mother wanted her to
settle down and marry.
But she always had these
very different ideas.
She was a tomboy.
She loved to go out
bareback riding on horses
or go hunting with
her dad in the woods.
She went into school once with
this unusual bracelet made up
of live snakes.
She was a free spirit,
an adventurous soul.
And she wanted a career as an
ambassador to tour the world
and meet, what she called,
interesting people.
There was a problem
with that, though,
which was that, at the time--
we're talking 1920.
She was born in 1906.
Women did not
become ambassadors.
There were no women
ambassadors in America
and I don't think here either.
She applied to the
State Department,
but they turned her
down as a diplomat,
even, even though she spoke
five languages by this point.
And so she went and
worked as a desk clerk
at the State Department.
And that's when
she went to Turkey.
She was posted to Turkey.
And she gathered some
friends-- she was always
kind of a leader.
She was always a
leader at school--
gathered some friends, went out
on a hunting party one December
in Turkey, in the marshes there,
with the gun that her father
had given her, a hunting gun.
And she wanted to shoot snipe.
Now, I mean, hunting
is not my thing.
But apparently snipe have a
very erratic pattern of flight.
They're quite difficult to hit.
And she was always
very competitive.
And so maybe she wasn't
looking where she was going.
We don't know.
But she tripped over
a wire fence that
was going through the reeds.
And as she tripped,
she grabbed her gun,
she reached for her
gun, and she hadn't
applied the safety catch.
And so she literally
shot herself in the foot
at point-blank range.
Well, initially, they thought
she was going to be OK.
She was taken to hospital.
They thought she was fine.
But actually, within
a week or two,
she got gangrene
in her left leg.
Well, they didn't
have antibiotics then,
as I'm sure you know.
She was on the point of death.
There was no other way of saving
her apart from cutting off
her leg just below the knee.
Even then, I can tell you,
it was an absolute miracle
she pulled through.
So you had this adventurous
soul, this tomboy,
this free spirit, with
all these great ambitions,
wanting to travel
and meet people.
And suddenly she
was, she thought,
going to be reduced to a
sedentary life at best.
But do you know what?
And I know this almost
sounds perverse.
There was something about
that accident that made her
the great person
that she became,
gave her that self-reliance
and self-dependence.
And she had grit that made
her an absolutely brilliant
secret agent.
So although she might seem to
be an unlikely commando leader--
and in fact, only two
weeks ago, the US command,
[INAUDIBLE] mouthful--
placed her, for the first
time, on their Hall of Honor.
I mean, it took them 40
years since she died,
but they got there in the end.
She did become the most
amazing guerrilla leader.
But I think you can
draw-- and I certainly
became convinced of this
once I started investigating
her life-- you can draw a
line from that awful, awful
accident, which she
barely survived,
to this amazing leader
with charisma and resolve
and courage that is actually
almost difficult to imagine.
SARAH SAVITT: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And you, as you said, she
was a really successful spy.
And part of that is keeping
secrets and not keeping a diary
or writing long letters
home to her mom about what
she was doing.
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
SARAH SAVITT: So how did you--
you touched on
this a little bit.
But what were the challenges
in doing the research?
Like, how do you--
how do you write a
life of someone whose
whole aim is to keep secrets?
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah,
well, I feel like Virginia
and I did play a little
bit of cat and mouse
while I was writing this.
And that, yeah, obviously,
secret agents unfortunately
don't sit down at night
and write journals
about what they did that day.
Nor do they do selfies or any
of these other useful things.
But I was lucky in the
sense that she obviously
had to file situation reports,
sit reps, as they call them,
back to her controllers.
That gave me some idea.
A lot of other people wrote
about her after the war.
But no one had realized that
it was all the same person.
She had more than 20
different code names.
So when people
wrote about the time
that they met her or things
that they knew that she did,
they might call her Germaine or
Camille or Philomene or Marie
or even Nicola.
And it was a
question of realizing
that all those
different women who'd
done all those different
incredible things, they
were all the same person.
And no one had been mad enough
to sit down before and kind of,
with a organigram, bits
of string and Post-Its
and all the rest of it, realize
that, yes, she was there.
And she was doing
that kind of thing.
So yes, and not that many
spies had wooden legs either.
And that did obviously help.
That, eventually, I was able
to pull this all together.
And then, the other
thing happened
is that this guy who she fought
alongside in southern France
in the Haute-Louire was
quite obsessed with her
after the war.
I mean, he'd actually been
quite difficult at times.
But I think he
felt great remorse
because she helped to liberate
a whole swathe of France
without a single
professional soldier.
And I think he realized that
all the things that she'd done
had made that possible.
So he spent about
20 years of his life
after the war, when
people were still alive,
when a lot of the documents
that have now been destroyed,
by the way, were still around.
And he took copies.
And I managed to find this
little personal archive
that he'd put
together in France.
And so that was
very, very fortunate.
I was able to join
some of the dots.
And then her niece is still
alive and lives in Baltimore.
She's 89, wonderful
woman, sharp as a pin.
And some of the stuff she,
too, was able to help me with.
And ultimately, also, the CIA,
funny enough, were very helpful
and two former
intelligence officers,
who were able to help me
get some files declassified.
Because a lot of files
about the Second World War,
particularly intelligence
war, are still closed
and will be till
at least the 2030s.
I mean, we think
we know everything
we need to know about
the Second World War.
I can assure you, there's still
a whole lot more out there.
Some of it we'll never know
because an awful lot of things
seem to have been "mislaid."
We do know that something
like 85% of the documents
on the British Secret Service--
she worked for the SOE, Special
Operations Executive-- have
been destroyed or whatever.
They've just disappeared.
So it's always going
to be a bit difficult.
But with a bit of
elbow grease, you
can put these stories together.
SARAH SAVITT: Wow.
Yeah, I hadn't quite
realized that so many things
were missing now.
So I mean, the book
is so rich and tells
lots of great stories
about what Virginia did.
But what were-- just to
give a flavor to the people
in the audience, what
were some of her greatest
accomplishments, do you think,
as a spy and as a commando,
as a guerrilla leader?
SONIA PURNELL: Well, when
she went in in 1941--
so she went in as an American
spying for the Brits.
Remember that America wasn't
in the war at this point.
Pearl Harbor hadn't happened.
She didn't have to
do any of this stuff.
She volunteered.
She went into
enemy-controlled France
when Britain had no spies there.
They'd all disappeared
after Dunkirk.
They'd either died
or given up or left.
And so Britain expected
to be invaded at any point
and absolutely knew nothing
about what was going on
in its closest neighbor.
But funny enough, they couldn't
find that many people prepared
to go in without any backup.
But Virginia would.
And so she went in.
And at that time--
we all have heard
about the French
resistance-- it didn't exist.
It didn't just spring
up from nowhere,
because people were terrified.
If you think that a first
world power, like a country as
important as Britain
is today, say,
had become a subject
nation within six weeks.
And this had caused such a
shock to most French people
that they simply could not cope
with the idea of fighting back.
It took a long time for
this idea to be planted.
So Virginia went in.
Her job was to fan the
flames of French resistance,
to help make that first little
bit of French resistance
happen.
But anyone she spoke to
could be a collaborator.
We know there are lots and
lots of collaborators--
could be a Nazi stooge.
She could be killed
at any moment.
She had to go up to you,
you, and you and work out,
what side were you on?
Would you perhaps help?
What could you do?
Could you print
some false papers?
Could you provide a safe house?
Would you prepare to
hide guns or explosives?
What would you prepare to do?
And ironically, she had success
with some of the most unlikely
people, including nuns
in a convent who gave her
her first safe house,
and who did brilliantly,
and prostitutes in a
brothel, whose madam became
her chief lieutenant and one
of the bravest women you can
possibly imagine, basically
sacrificed herself,
her freedom to the
Gestapo to save agents.
She literally just
said, OK, take me,
to allow other
people to get away
and got all her prostitutes
spying on German clients
because they had
many German clients.
German officers were
encouraged to go to brothels.
It was thought to make
them better fighters.
And the prostitutes
spied on them,
rifled out their uniforms,
spiked their drinks,
they fell asleep, and then
deliberately infected them.
This was kind of like
a biological warfare,
if you like.
And Virginia got the
intelligence from them,
set them up into these networks,
recruited the local police
chief.
And as the secret
documents say, she saved--
this is a direct quote--
"allied intelligence in
France from extinction."
Not bad for a disabled woman
with virtually no training.
Because no one knew
how to do this stuff.
No one had done it before.
She pioneered it.
She pioneered techniques
that the CIA tell me
they still use today.
I mean, this is how
pioneering she was.
But no one knew about it.
Later, when she went back--
the Gestapo knew all
about her by this point.
They'd sent out this command
that we must find and destroy
her, that she was the most
dangerous satellite spy.
She went in disguised as a
milkmaid with wrinkles that
Hollywood makeup artists had
shown her how to put on her
face, so realistic and authentic
that German officers would come
up and think she was in her
60s-- she was in her 30s--
and eventually
formed little ragbag
armies of schoolboys and vets
and booksellers and teachers
and things, and
blowing up bridges,
ambushing German
convoys, and liberating
a whole part of France.
Now, this was apparently done--
another quote from the secret
documents-- "the good humor
of a Sunday school picnic."
So she was a pretty
amazing woman.
They had no-- it was a
very conservative time.
Vichy, France, women were
expected to stay at home
and have at least four kids.
And she was there,
a foreign woman,
somehow persuading hundreds
of men to take her orders.
They didn't know who she
was or where she came from.
She persuaded them to
do this, to trust her,
at a time when, really, you
couldn't trust anything.
So just to give you a little
clue as to why she was actually
a woman who was very
important, indeed-- that
just gives you a
little bit of a flavor.
SARAH SAVITT: Mm-hmm.
So you were saying she
innovated and pioneered
all these techniques.
Did she-- was there any training
available to her before,
or was she just
sort of plunged in?
What was she sent--
what tools were she sent with?
SONIA PURNELL: Well, very few.
She did get a little
bit of training.
One of the things she was taught
by-- they got in a burglar
to teach her how to pick locks.
She was taught how to
replace dust on a surface
when you remove something.
She was taught that urine is a
brilliant secret ink because it
comes out well under heat.
So you can see
things quite clearly.
And she was also shown how
to microfilm documents.
Obviously, you couldn't
send things in the way
that you guys can now.
But you could shrink documents
to a tiny little size,
like this, like a postage stamp.
And she was very fortunate.
She had a particularly
good hiding place for such
documents, which was a tiny
little slot in her metal--
sorry, left--
in her metal heel.
So she was able to put
secret documents in there.
She was also taught,
perhaps most importantly--
because she did have
a license to kill.
It was one of the few things she
had in common with James Bond.
She didn't drive around
in a flashy Aston Martin.
It's absurd.
She got the
[INAUDIBLE],, what else?
She did have a license to kill.
And she was shown how to do it.
And her preferred method
was with poison pills,
cynanide pills.
Now, these were in
unsoluble rubber balls.
If you swallowed them
whole, you'd be fine.
If you broke them and put the
contents in someone's food,
they wouldn't be fine.
They'd die within 45 seconds.
You could hold the pill in
your mouth at the back--
say, you were worried that
you were going to be tortured.
You might not be
able to hold out.
If that was the case, you
could then bite into the pill,
and you would die
within 45 seconds.
But this was pretty
much the only training
she had because they
didn't know how to set up
networks in a hostile country.
No one had ever done it before.
She had to work
it out on the job.
And so when she set
off, they gave her
a 50-50 chance of survival.
And that was actually
being quite optimistic.
So the fact that she did survive
longer than almost anyone
else in the field is kind
of a testament to the way
that she did become
a terrific spy.
And her spy craft, her
field craft, was great.
SARAH SAVITT: You talk in
the book about how, not only
are these cyanide
pills and poison pills,
but also there's quite a lot
of drugs around as well to--
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah.
SARAH SAVITT: --help
her keep going.
Can you say a bit about that?
SONIA PURNELL: OK.
So she had two
other sets of pills.
One set would give you
the symptoms of typhoid,
so that you would be
taken to hospital.
Supposing you were captured,
this is one potential way
that you might be
able to escape.
Hospitals were seen
as a softer touch.
The other pills, their
most popular pills of all--
and these were used in vast
quantities, let me tell you--
were Benzedrine.
They were amphetamines.
Because the thing was
that, in the field,
that sleep was a luxury.
And sometimes you might
have to be awake six nights
on the truck.
Well, there's no way
you can be dozing off
if you're on an operation.
So you would pop
these things, they
were blue little
tiny blue tablets,
like sweeties, almost
to keep you going.
Now, she took lots,
I can tell you.
And sometimes, when she
finally needed to sleep,
she had to take a
downer because they
kind of make you
so wired as you can
imagine after all that time.
And I can also tell
you that, having
taken all those pills
during the war--
and she wasn't the only one.
Once she started
organizing parachute drops,
whole bags of these
things would come down
with the guns and
the explosives.
And I'm glad to say,
chocolate, too--
they realized that chocolate
was very important, almost
as important as the Benzedrine.
But this did have an effect
on her heart after the war.
And a lot of those agents, their
health was clearly affected.
And also, there was nothing
to eat in France at that time.
The Germans were taking
pretty much all the food.
So she was half-starved as well,
lost a huge amount of weight.
And there were people going to
hospital in cities like Lyon
from the symptoms of famine.
I don't think people realize
just how tough life was.
There was also no soap.
So you couldn't get clean.
You couldn't wash your
clothes, and you couldn't
wash your sheets, or yourself.
So life was pretty grim.
So the very fact
that she volunteered
to do this for a few quid a
month when everyone thought
she'd have a 50/50
chance of survival
just shows you how
determined she was, really.
SARAH SAVITT: Absolutely.
And you touched upon earlier,
this incredible feat,
for the time it was,
anyway, for a woman,
but also in Vichy,
France, somewhere
that was very conservative,
that she, as a woman,
was able to lead
all of these men
and persuade them to do
all these new things.
And what were the disadvantages,
but also maybe the advantages
for her of being a
woman in this position?
SONIA PURNELL: Well,
I think, initially, it
was an advantage in the
sense that the Germans
in Vichy, France,
their reactionary views
persuaded them.
But women didn't get involved
in nasty, dirty things
like the Resistance or
parachute drops of guns
or blowing up things.
And so it was assumed that
they would be innocent.
But then they worked
that out quite
quickly that women were
actually hugely involved.
And the thing was
that they saved
some of their absolute worst
forms of torture for women.
We know that now, that some
of the most depraved things--
I won't go into details-- were
done to women to get secrets
out of them.
Because they realized
that, often, the women
knew an awful lot because
they were couriers.
They would be carrying
messages in their heads
from one town to another,
from one Resistance
leader to another.
And they often
knew an awful lot.
And so if you think that
they were treated any more
leniently than men, you'd be
wrong, absolutely the reverse.
And it wasn't long before
she became so successful
in rescuing other
agents from prison,
rescuing aircrew that
had been shot down,
people on the run from the
Gestapo, small-scale sabotage
at this point, that the
Germans and the French police
were after her.
And they knew now,
at this point,
that she had a false leg.
They called her
the Limping Lady.
And you may have heard of Klaus
Barbie-- the Butcher of Lyon,
this Gestapo monster,
killed thousands of people--
was particularly
obsessed with her
and said that he
would give anything
to get his hands on her.
So she had the whole of
the Reich after her as well
as the French police and at
one point had to escape--
there was no other way for it--
over the Pyrenees in the
worst winter for 200 years
with Cuthbert, her wooden leg.
And the amazing thing
is that she made it.
Her niece said that was
the worst moment for her,
personally, in the war.
But she managed to get away.
So she always eluded
them, amazingly.
But many women didn't.
Many women-- a lot of those
prostitutes I told you
about who deliberately infected
German officers so that they
couldn't fight, who got
all their information,
passed it on to Virginia, she
called them "my tart friends."
We won't even know
their names, ever.
But a lot of them were caught,
tortured, and shot, or worse.
So there are many,
many, many heroes
who we will never know about
and who we owe a great deal to.
SARAH SAVITT: You
mentioned earlier
that some of the things that she
pioneered, in terms of spying,
are still used by the CIA.
And I wondered if
you could talk,
if you're allowed to tell us,
what some of those techniques
are.
But also, the book is
really interesting about how
Britain and America
viewed spying
at the time and the differences
between the two countries.
And obviously, she
was an American spying
for the British.
And yeah, I guess just a bit
more background about spycraft
at that time, what
her innovations were,
and what her lasting impact was.
SONIA PURNELL: It
was interesting.
Obviously, America came into
the war much later than Britain,
but it also came into
this form of intelligence.
It was half intelligence,
half special forces.
Because most spies don't go
around blowing up bridges.
They tend to just
gather intelligence.
Well, she was doing both.
And that was quite unusual
and something that, yes, she
did pioneer, and something that
the CIA, when I spent the day
at Langley said, for instance--
I guess they wouldn't tell me
about anything more recent.
But there was something called
Operation Jawbreaker, which
was in Afghanistan before
and after 9/11 when they were
wanting to form local
networks to support
their own troops at some point.
And they said that they--
they looked at what Virginia
did and replicated it
in Afghanistan.
So it is pretty
amazing that what
she was getting up to the
1940s is still being used now.
And I guess that some of
the things that she did
was looking in
places for recruits
that other people
might not think of,
finding a way to give them
hope and a sense of loyalty,
but also this discipline
that you mustn't tell
other people what you're doing.
You can tell me because
I'm your commander.
I can tell one other
person, so-and-so.
And so that you have
these discrete cells
of people, maybe five or six.
You know only
those other people.
You don't know any other cell.
Because once you know
about-- you might never,
ever want to give them away.
But if you're caught, and
you're tortured, none of us
knows how long we
could hold out,
if we could hold
out for a minute.
We just don't know.
No one expected you to hold
out for more than 48 hours.
If someone was caught
who knew a lot,
everyone took that next 48
hours to get into hiding.
But it was that kind of
building up from nowhere,
and building up, building up,
giving people hope, giving
people structure, giving
them instructions too, that
was really important,
constantly being on the move,
only ever using code
names, never, ever using
your own name, never
giving away where you live,
but always having a place that
you can exchange messages.
So one of the places that
she exchanged messages was
in a laundry where the owner
of the laundry would put them--
it sounds a bit, hello,
hello, but this is all true--
would put stockings
in neat piles
close together if
she had messages.
And the neat piles would be
further apart if she didn't.
There was Jean-Michel Jarre--
I don't know whether
any of you've
heard of him, a musician--
his mother was involved in
Virginia's resistance, too.
She had an underwear shop.
And she used to hide guns under
piles of bras in the back room.
All these people who
you would never expect--
I think the thing is that
spies don't look like spies.
They don't look like James Bond.
They really don't.
They look like all
of us in this room.
I think Virginia was really
good at doing that and winning
people's trust to the
point that she needed it.
One of her recruits was
a local police chief.
Well, that was a
really smart move.
She managed to get
him to trust her
so that he tipped her off
when they were about to mount
a raid on a place.
Or he would also
try and let her know
when the Gestapo
were up to things.
So those techniques,
that kind of discipline--
never going straight
to a building.
If I want to go and see
someone in that cafe,
I have a meeting with them, I
don't just walk into the cafe.
I go around the block first.
I monitor it before I go in.
I might spend a quarter
of an hour doing that.
That person only
knows my code name.
I only know their code name.
We will never meet
at that cafe again.
Also, within the
space of a few hours,
she could make herself
look completely different.
She'd change her part and
put glasses on, a hat,
put little rubber
slivers in her cheeks,
put gloves on to
hide her hands, wear
different sorts of clothes.
So she could be Brigitte,
Marie, Philomene,
and Virginia in the space
of three or four hours--
always elusive, never
going the same way.
So all of these techniques
are ones that she kind of had
to make up on the hoof,
as it were, and are now
used by the CIA.
SARAH SAVITT: So we've
talked quite a lot about what
she did during the war.
But then she had this whole
second act to her life
at the CIA.
But before we get to that,
she did also, amazingly,
in the midst of all of this,
all these different identities,
the danger, find love
during World War II.
And that certainly is
not the cliche thrust
of your book at all.
But I felt so
attached to Virginia,
that I was so pleased.
Could you tell us a
little bit about that?
SONIA PURNELL: Well,
it's hard not to cheer,
actually, because after she lost
her leg, she had been lonely.
She had been very
much on her own.
She felt kind of separated from
other people, all qualities,
in a way, that make for a
good spy, but not necessarily
a happy life.
And then, towards the
end of the fighting
in the Second World War,
she'd been absolutely
shouting again and again.
She was in charge of
all these Frenchmen.
It was unruly.
She was a foreigner.
It was difficult. She always
wanted backup from base.
By this point, she's
working for the Americans.
It never came until the
fighting in her part of France
was pretty much over.
And then two American
officers were parachuted in
to help her, ironically,
right at the end.
Anyway, it was jolly good that
they did because one of them,
this chap called Paul,
who was, by the way,
6 inches shorter than her,
seven years younger than her,
and obviously more junior
than her, was one of those two
who was parachuted
in to help her.
And he was French-American.
He was French by background.
And he did everything she
wanted to, obeyed her orders,
watched her back for her,
but also made her laugh.
And I don't think there'd
been much laughing
for a wee while in her life.
And he certainly
lightened her life.
And they stayed together
for the rest of their life.
And there's a amazing
thing that I found out
from her niece is how they
commandeered the chateau at one
point.
They were looking
for more fighting.
They'd just liberated
one bit of France,
but that wasn't enough for her.
She wanted to get rid
of Germans elsewhere.
And they commandeered
this chateau.
And there was a
lake on the chateau.
And there was a
boat on the lake.
And things happened that
night, according to the niece.
And war often tested
relationships to destruction.
But amazingly, from that
night to the day she died,
they stayed together,
even though her mother,
if you remember, who wanted
her to marry "well," i.e.
money, refused to
acknowledge him.
He was a chef by background
and didn't have any money,
didn't have much of
an education either.
So amazingly, despite the fact
that Virginia wasn't scared
of the Gestapo or the Vichy
police or fighting Germans,
all the rest of it, she was a
teeny bit scared of her mom.
And she had to hide this
relationship for about 20 years
until she finally admitted,
yeah, we're still together
and, yeah, we're going
to get married next week.
But she left it until
quite late in life
to get married for that
reason, because she was
scared of her mom's reaction.
So it's such a human
side to Virginia.
There was sort of a
soft side to her too.
SARAH SAVITT: Yeah, I love her
relationship with her mother.
So she was then, after the war,
involved in the very early days
of the CIA.
Could you tell us a bit about
what her role was and some
of the challenges that
she had at the CIA,
despite this incredible
wealth of knowledge
she brought to them.
SONIA PURNELL: At
the end of the war,
she was the only civilian
woman of the whole war
to be decorated with the
Distinguished Service Cross,
which is a very, very
prestigious medal in America.
President Truman himself
wanted to give it to her.
But she said, no, thank
you, Mr. President.
I want to remain a
secret agent, so I can't
be doing with any publicity.
So she just had it in
this private ceremony.
But she was a recognized,
full-on, massive war hero
who had done all
this secret stuff
and turned around
the intelligence war.
And she couldn't get a job.
After the war, it
was very difficult.
And the CIA was set up.
And it took her a long
time even to join the CIA.
And even when she did, that's
when her real troubles began.
Because you see, she was
seen as this sacred presence
because of what she'd done.
But that just produced
a lot of resentment.
Because most of the men that
she was with at the CIA--
and there weren't many women,
let's face it, at this point--
had done nothing like what
she'd done in the war.
They'd been sitting behind a
desk, or they'd been too young,
or they hadn't blown up
bridges and things in the way
that she had.
And there was a
lot of resentment.
And I managed to
get, from the CIA,
her personnel files where, the
way that they talk about her
is absolutely horrifying.
They belittle her and
undermine her, say she's got
no ingenuity, no
resolve, no ideas.
They even question her
stability and courage.
When you think of what
she'd just been through,
it is utterly absurd.
But the story tells of
someone being basically frozen
out again and again and again.
And there's this guy
called E. Howard Hunt, who
was part of the Watergate
thing-- so basically a baddie--
he went to prison for that.
But he was actually
someone who saw
what was happening
to Virginia and wrote
about how appalling this
was, that she was basically
shut out of everything.
And when she said, I don't
think that's a very good idea,
she was just branded
as a conservative
with no new ideas of her own.
But when you think
what the CIA was
up to at that point, great
triumphs like the Bay of Pigs,
I don't think--
they could have done
with more people saying,
you need to plan this properly.
But her great sense
of being meticulous
was essential in
these operations,
kind of pushed to one side.
So really, that's
why the book is
called "A Woman
of No Importance,"
because that is how she
was very much treated
before the war when the State
Department excluded her,
after the war, when the CIA
pretty much behaved the same.
Society was becoming much more
reactionary and conservative
again.
But obviously,
during the war, she
was this figure of
exceptional importance,
but that's always been lost.
SARAH SAVITT: I'm going to open
up to the audience shortly.
But I just wanted
to mention to you
that, unsurprisingly, the
film rights were snapped up
very quickly.
And so if you could tell
us a little bit about that,
but also, how do
you think Virginia,
who kept all these
secrets, as you say,
didn't want to accept this
medal in front of anyone
so she could keep being a spy,
how do you think she would feel
about her life now hitting
the bestseller list
and maybe being
on the big screen?
Do you think-- would she mind?
SONIA PURNELL: I don't know.
I think, instinctively,
she would worry about it.
I have to admit, I've asked
myself this question a lot.
But I also think that she wanted
things to be more meritocratic.
And if she could push
down some barriers--
she was the only
woman out in France,
of the SOE for a whole year.
She was the guinea
pig, if you like.
But it was only because
she was so spectacularly
successful that they ever sent
more women into the field.
And they never did the same
sort of thing as she did.
But Gina Haspel,
who recently became
the first female
director of the CIA
last year, when she
accepted the job,
she said that she was standing
on the shoulders of heroines
who'd gone before her who
had pushed down barriers.
And I think it's pretty clear
that Virginia would have
been foremost amongst those.
She was talking about
women at the CIA
and its predecessor, OSS,
where Virginia worked.
So I think Virginia would
be pleased, ultimately,
that things are changing.
I think she would be pretty
dismayed it's taken so long
and that things are
still having to change.
So I'd like to
think that she'd be
pleased about that side of it.
And yeah, as to
the film, I guess
her life is so epic and, in
a way, so pictorial and full
of action--
it just never stopped,
her life, being
exciting and extraordinary.
And it's absolutely
fantastic news
that it's going to hopefully
be made into a huge film.
SARAH SAVITT: Yeah.
I know these things
are always under wraps.
But can you tell
us where the film
is in terms of [INAUDIBLE]?
SONIA PURNELL: Well, Paramount
Studios are the studios
and Bad Robot, who makes Star
Wars movies, are producing it.
Because the Star Wars thing
is basically winding up now.
So they were looking
for something new
to get their teeth into.
They're working on
the script right now.
I was in LA a
couple of weeks ago.
And we were talking
about, how on Earth
do we fit everything that
she did into a screenplay?
It's so difficult
to leave things out
because so much is exciting.
So I'm no expert
on films, but they
seem to be working very hard on
it right now, which is great.
SARAH SAVITT: Great.
Brilliant.
So let's open it
up to the audience.
AUDIENCE: So I can
start with a question.
So I was curious
about-- so you mentioned
that a big part of Virginia's
work, and her life in general,
was to be able to maintain
multiple identities
at the same time and to be able
to switch between identities.
So I was curious, if you
could elaborate a bit on,
how do you actually do that when
you have a very big detail that
gives away your true
identity as a wooden leg?
SONIA PURNELL: Oh.
Yes.
Well, the limp was
obviously an issue.
So she deliberately took huge
strides to try and disguise it.
At worst, when she was tired--
I guess these things always do--
that was a problem.
But the fact that she still
managed to do this despite that
is pretty indicative
of how good she was.
President Roosevelt, who was the
American president at the time,
and he was dependent
on a wheelchair,
you rarely were aware
of that at the time
because he found ways
of disguising it.
I suspect she did
things like met people
sitting down when she could
or tried not to walk along
with them so much.
But word did get round.
And there's one occasion,
which was written
about by this guy who is
walking along beside her thinks
that she has a wooden leg.
But she's walking so fast
and so briskly, he's saying,
is it true that you
have a wooden leg?
And later on that night,
they're having dinner,
and she takes it off, and--
[FAINT KNOCKING] --kind of
does this against the table
so that he can hear it's hollow.
Because it was so
rudimentary, by the way.
It's nothing like those
high-tech things you see now.
It was painted wood,
flesh-colored wood,
with a metal toe and a
metal heel and leather
straps around her waist.
That was it.
This was kind of Long
John Silver-type stuff.
And yet, somehow, she managed
to do this kind of thing.
The secret of that we'll never
probably hugely, totally get.
AUDIENCE: As an American
in Paris or, well,
as a foreigner in
France, how did she
manage to even get started
and not be given away,
for instance, by her accent?
SONIA PURNELL: Well,
she did have an accent.
Her French was pretty
good, but she did have
quite a heavy American accent.
She was very lucky.
And this is one of the
things that was lucky for her
to begin with.
While America was
not in the war,
and they didn't join the war,
obviously, until December '41,
she could go in undercover
as an American journalist,
which is what she did.
And initially, when she didn't
have a radio operator and any
other way of contacting London,
she contacted her controllers--
this is unbelievable--
with coded messages in her
articles in the "New York
Post."
So the people in
London would have
to get hold of a
copy of the newspaper
and then scan it, all the
different kind of code things,
to get her messages.
They had no way of contacting
her at all to begin with.
But also, being a journalist
meant that she could--
she had cover for going around
and being nosy and asking
people questions and
traveling around.
Obviously, after
America came into
the war, that became
more and more difficult.
She stopped sending articles
in to the "New York Post,"
or very few.
She no longer said
where she was in France.
She would say, if she
did write an article,
"somewhere in France," so she
wouldn't give her whereabouts.
But more and more and more,
she went completely undercover.
The accent was a problem.
And sometimes she
would get other people
to talk on her behalf
and say that she had
problems speaking or something.
There were all
kinds of techniques
that she used to
get around that.
But the initial thing was fine
because she was, to all intents
and purposes, an American.
AUDIENCE: As you said, she
helped raise the Resistance--
establish the
Resistance in France.
And one of the key things is
to not get any collaborators
or something inside.
So did she have a special sense
about sensing people who could
give the institution away?
SONIA PURNELL: That is
such a good question.
Having spoken to quite a few
intelligence officers now
about this, it
does sound like one
of the qualities you need as
a spy undercover is a highly
developed sixth sense
to some kind of feeling
as to what people's
motives or incentives are.
That said, of course,
anyone that she recruited
could be a collaborator.
And there were huge rewards.
If you shopped someone
to the Gestapo,
you could make a
serious amount of money.
There was a great
incentive to do that.
So obviously, her sixth sense
was very well-developed.
She was very good at
listening at the door.
She would never just
walk into a room.
She would always listen first if
she was going to meet someone,
just in case they
were doing something
that made them suspicious
or potentially betray
her in some way.
She was, ultimately,
betrayed by someone,
which is the final
catalyst for her having
to escape at the end of 1942.
A priest who was the
most unbelievably
wicked double agent who
managed to infiltrate himself
into her network and who
was responsible for dozens,
if not hundreds,
of deaths, a chap
by the name of Robert Alesch--
and it was brilliant
being a priest, of course.
Because so many people
instinctively thought
he must be a goodie.
There he is.
He's in a cassock.
And he was giving sermons
in his church denouncing
the Nazis and the Third Reich.
And then the young guys
in his congregation
would come up and
talk to him about what
they'd done for the Resistance.
And the next day,
they'd all be rounded up
because he would have sold them.
He took much more
care over how he
was bringing in the net
closer and closer and closer
to Virginia.
Her sixth sense did work.
By this point, she could
contact London through a radio.
She said, I can't believe he's
a phony, but, dot, dot, dot.
So, obviously, there was this
seed of doubt in her mind.
But A, he was a priest
that the others trusted.
And B, he kept turning up with
incredible intelligence that
seemed absolutely brilliant.
Unfortunately, it had all
been doctored by the Germans.
It looked great.
It was useless.
So on this occasion, she'd
just let her armor down.
Maybe she was so tired,
she couldn't quite
deal with it anymore.
But as a result of his work,
she got away over the Pyrenees.
But the brothel madame,
Germaine Guérin, for instance,
he caught her.
She was sent to Ravensbruck, the
appalling women's concentration
camp where they injected
you with gangrene where
so many died.
She survived only just.
She was never seen again.
And her other chief
lieutenant, who
was the VD doctor who
worked with the brothel
was sent to Buchenwald.
And he just survived.
Many, many others didn't though.
So that was the time
she got it wrong.
I think, after that,
she was even more
careful if that's possible.
AUDIENCE: All right, thank you.
It's fascinating.
Did you find the
French authorities were
helpful with any information?
Did they record much?
SONIA PURNELL: Not unhelpful.
But this is quite a tricky
subject in France, looking
at what happened in the war.
There were many, many
heroes, but there were also
many, many collaborators.
And who's not to say
that that wouldn't
have been the same here, before
we get superior about it?
I don't suppose it would
have been any different here
if we'd been occupied.
But it is still something that's
quite difficult to deal with.
So it isn't always easy to
get the files that you want.
They don't obstruct you,
but they don't make it easy.
On the other hand,
there was this archive
that I found in Lyon, where
there's a Resistance museum,
which is a amazing place.
And upstairs, there's a library
and this particular archive,
which was all about Virginia.
And they couldn't have been
more helpful, because no one
else had ever looked at it.
So when I walked up and said,
I'd like to spend a week here--
they're religious
about their lunch hours
in France, as I'm sure you know.
Normally, they would
close the office down
and everyone would
get chucked out.
But I only had a week.
And the guy said,
no, no, don't worry.
You can work through
your lunch hour.
Now, that was a
big, big concession.
And I'm very, very
grateful to this day.
So they were really pleased.
Because here was a Frenchman
who'd done the right thing,
and that was great.
So I realize that there
are sensitivities here.
But I'd also like to say that
some of those French people who
fought with her were just
incredible, incredible heroes.
And I tell their story too.
There was this young guy
called Marcel [INAUDIBLE]
in his 30s, who was
executed by the Germans,
but did so much with her.
She called him her nephew.
He was only a few
years younger than her.
He called her his auntie.
But there was an
international bond
that we can probably
never imagine.
And the guys that she
fought in the war,
liberated [INAUDIBLE]
with, all these letters
they wrote to each
other after the war,
they said it in different ways,
but the feeling was always
the same.
The sentiment was
always the same.
And it really touched
me, which was,
it had been worth being
born just for that moment
with Virginia Hall,
those two months when
they were all on the same side,
all different backgrounds,
different nationalities,
but all with the same cause,
which was getting rid of the
Nazis, freedom for France,
and peace again.
And I think that international
message is so strong,
that it was something that
came out so powerfully, that I
think, ultimately,
it's good for France,
and it's good for Britain,
and it's good for America.
And it's good for all of us.
AUDIENCE: I'm interested
in how you got
the information from the CIA?
How did you access people
there and the files?
Thank you.
SONIA PURNELL: Well, just
an amazing piece of luck.
I do think luck comes
into these things.
When I started
researching here, I
was at the National
Archives in queue.
And it was the second day.
And someone tapped
me on the shoulder.
I thought I must have
done something wrong.
He said he wanted to
speak to me outside.
And it turned out to be
a retired MI6 officer.
They speak in riddles.
But anyway, that's
basically what he was.
And he was really helpful
showing me documents, getting
stuff declassified over here.
And he had a friend
in American who was--
he knew someone in the
States who was recently
retired from the
CIA who also helped
me get some stuff declassified,
made some connections with me
at the CIA.
So I applied to go there for a
day, so I could speak to them,
to see these documents.
It took some time.
They eventually said yes.
Even when you get to the CIA,
there's yet more security.
And they told me that I'd gone
through nine levels of security
just to be allowed to go to
Langley, and one of which
there'd been a non-concur,
which is the phrase they use.
And I said, well, what's that?
And they said, well,
it's because you're
a foreign national.
So I said, well, how
come I'm here then?
And they said, oh, someone
high up said, don't worry,
she can come.
I said, well, who?
Oh, I can't tell you.
Why?
Don't know.
But anyway, so I've got
a friend at the CIA.
Who knew?
And so I was allowed to
go see these documents,
look at their own internal
documents about her
now, in which they accept "we
did not use her talents well."
You bet you didn't--
and also, all those annual
appraisals and the other
stuff about her.
So I think maybe the CIA finally
wanted her story to come out.
They are trying, I
think, to change things.
She is now a poster
girl, in a sense,
for inclusivity at the CIA.
They have named a new
training building after her.
Hurrah.
And maybe it was
just the right time
that people were prepared to
have this out in the open.
Because although it
seemed like I was never
going to be able
to open the door,
ultimately, it opened enough, so
I could get a pretty good view.
SARAH SAVITT: If you
google Virginia Hall,
one of the top results is
the CIA employing people
with disabilities page.
I hope there's more current
stuff on there, too.
But yeah, they do
definitely seemed--
as you say, she's a kind of
poster girl for them now.
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah,
she has become that now.
AUDIENCE: I also just wanted to
know if you found information
at the CIA from before
she was a spy with them,
like, from the time where she
was a spy for the British?
SONIA PURNELL: When she
went to what, sorry?
AUDIENCE: So did
you find information
at the CIA for the
time during the war,
or it was only for the
time she was working?
SONIA PURNELL: The CIA was
only formed after the war.
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
Sorry.
SONIA PURNELL:
During the war, there
was a forerunner to the
CIA called the OSS, which
she went to work for after.
See, when she escaped
over the Pyrenees,
the Gestapo knew all about her.
They had photographs of her.
They had sent this signal out
across the whole of France
saying, we must find
and destroy her.
So when she got back to
London, amazingly, right,
I want to go back now.
Well, the Brits
said, there's no way
we're going to send you back.
Every single Gestapo officer
in France has your photograph.
They all have this command
to find and destroy you.
We're not sending you back.
Are you joking?
So that's when she went and
worked for the Americans who
didn't know quite so much
what had been going on,
hadn't had quite
the same grounding
in the barbarity of
the war in France,
were prepared to send her
back, but as a milkmaid
with the wrinkles and things.
The OSS was disbanded
at the end of the war,
but then reemerged basically
as the CIA a few years later.
So that's how it happened.
And there were very, very,
very few women, if any others,
at the OSS, who did
what Virginia did.
They did other things, code
breaking and things, but not
so much behind enemy
lines as Virginia.
Yeah, so she changed stuff.
AUDIENCE: Sorry if you already
said, did you meet her niece?
SONIA PURNELL: Yes, I did.
Lorna Catling.
AUDIENCE: And if so--
SONIA PURNELL: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So the physicality
of meeting someone
who was a relation, did
a lot of this really come
to life for you?
Did it make a difference?
SONIA PURNELL: Oh,
yes, absolutely.
So we'd had several
conversations on the phone.
And then I went and spent some
time with her in Baltimore.
And yes because suddenly
it all makes sense.
When you're writing a
biography, initially, you see,
I can't quite get this person.
I can't quite get this person.
And I think it must be a
little bit like method acting,
that you need to have that
kind of understanding.
And I never
completed it, I felt,
until I met Lorna and
spent some time with her.
And she opened the
family photo album.
So some of the pictures
you'll see in the book
are from her photo album.
And they're great.
And she called her
Aunt [? Dindie. ?]
It was the family nickname.
So sort of talking
about [? Dindie, ?]
and what Paul was like,
and Paul made her laugh.
And just hearing
all of that, having
that firsthand
connection with her,
it's like this
light bulb comes on.
And it gives you
confidence as a writer.
Yeah, I know my subject now.
I've seen all those papers.
I've read all those accounts.
I've read the letters.
I've dug here, and
I've dug there.
But finally, I have
that personal account.
And that sort of, yeah,
makes it kind of whole.
And it was a great moment.
She's a fantastic
woman in her own right.
As I say, 89, she
drove to the station
to pick me up in
Baltimore, went back
to her house, insisted
on making me lunch.
We went for a walk
around the garden.
She's great, I mean,
absolutely great.
And she sent me the most
touching email the other day,
saying that, you've got her!
You've absolutely got her.
I'm so thrilled.
And I think that's the--
kind of getting all
emotional about it now.
That was the best moment
of any of this when
she did that, I have to say.
AUDIENCE: All right.
Thanks a lot.
SONIA PURNELL: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: It's been
really exciting.
[APPLAUSE]
