The Film Archives's video: The Wolves at the Door: Captures an experience almost too terrifying for words 2005

Read or listen to the book: https://amzn.to/3ItcmLQ Virginia Hall Goillot DSC, Croix de Guerre, MBE (April 6, 1906 – July 8, 1982), code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II. The objective of SOE and OSS was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE and OSS agents in France allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. After World War II Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Hall was a pioneering agent for the SOE, arriving in Vichy France on 23 August 1941,[1] the first female agent to take up residence in France. She created the Heckler network in Lyon. Over the next 15 months, she "became an expert at support operations – organizing resistance movements; supplying agents with money, weapons, and supplies; helping downed airmen to escape; offering safe houses and medical assistance to wounded agents and pilots."[2] She fled France in November 1942 to avoid capture by the Germans. She returned to France as a wireless operator for the OSS in March 1944 as a member of the Saint network. Working in territory still occupied by the German army and mostly without the assistance of other OSS agents, she supplied arms, training, and direction to French resistance groups, called Maquisards, especially in Haute-Loire where the Maquis cleared the department of German soldiers prior to the arrival of the American army in September 1944. The Germans gave her the nickname Artemis, and the Gestapo reportedly considered her "the most dangerous of all Allied spies."[3] Having lost part of her leg in a hunting accident, Hall used a prosthesis she named "Cuthbert." She was also known as "The Limping Lady" by the Germans and as "Marie of Lyon" by many of the SOE agents she assisted. IFC Films released A Call to Spy in October 2020, the first feature film about Virginia Hall.[56] It had its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2019, commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.[57][58][59] Hall is portrayed by Sarah Megan Thomas, and the film is directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher. The film went on to win the Audience Choice Award in Canada.[60] A Call to Spy had its U.S. festival premiere at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where it was honored with the Anti-Defamation League's "Stand Up" Award.[61] The film A Woman of No Importance was announced in 2017, based on the book by Sonia Purnell[62] and starring Daisy Ridley as Hall.[63][64] After the war, Hall visited Lyon to learn the fate of the people who had worked for her there. Her closest associates, brothel-owner Germaine Guérin and gynecologist Jean Rousset, had both been captured by the Germans and sent to concentration camps, but they survived. She arranged 80,000 francs (400 British pounds) compensation from the United Kingdom for Guérin, but most of her other helpers received nothing. Many of the people she knew had not survived – including the three men she called "nephews" who had been executed at Buchenwald concentration camp.[40] The German agent and priest, Robert Alesch, who had betrayed her network in Lyon was captured after the war and executed in Paris.[25] Hall joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, one of the first women hired by the new agency. As a woman she was discriminated against, as the CIA later acknowledged. She was passed over for promotions, honors and work for which she was qualified despite the support and efforts from her superiors who knew her work directly. She was given a desk-bound job as an intelligence analyst to gather information about Soviet penetration of European countries. She resigned in 1948 and then was rehired in 1950 for another desk job. In the 1950s, she again headed ultra secret paramilitary operations in France as a model for setting up resistance groups in several European countries in case of a Soviet attack. She became a "sacred" presence and first woman operations officer in the entire covert action arm of the CIA and a valued member of the Special Activities Division supporting undercover activities to prevent the spread of communism in Europe. She received a poor performance reports from a superior who had never overseen her work. In 1966, she retired, at the mandatory retirement age of 60. In the secret CIA report of her career, the CIA admitted that her fellow officers "felt she had been sidelined-shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues, who felt threatened by her" and that "her experience and abilities were never properly utilized". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Hall