It’s 11pm and I’m in a safe house sitting across from a woman I’ve been handling for a year now. I’m about to break the news to her that she will have to flee her country by following my escape plan in extreme detail to avoid getting caught. She’ll have to convince her husband and teenage children to leave everyone they know without a word and head to a secret meet-up location where a smuggler, paid by the CIA, will deliver them to safety. They can take only what they can carry on their backs; she must get her family to move swiftly under the cover of darkness. If she can’t accomplish this in 3 days, they’ll be arrested and most likely executed.
I knew in that moment: I carried the weight of their lives in my hands. Not just my source’s life, but her whole family’s.
I got into this line of work because of what happened on the morning of 9/11. I wanted to help prevent future attacks and the authoritarianism behind them.
In 1942, an American woman from Baltimore got into this line of work because of what was happening in France. She wanted to help prevent the total authoritarian rule of Nazi Germany. Had I read about her as a young girl, I might have been inspired years before the planes hit those buildings.
In France in 1942, the Gestapo circulated a description of a woman they were desperately searching for and couldn’t find.
Her name was Virginia Hall and she was one of the most formidable spymasters of WWII who worked first for the British, then for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and later for CIA. She operated behind enemy lines for years in France, running informants, conducting sabotage operations, and exfiltrating downed British pilots and French resistance fighters. She also helped protect Jewish children in hiding. An Allied postwar report concluded there was no doubt that progress in France would have been “impossible” without her. Most people have never heard of Virginia because she did her job well.
With German troops flooding Lyon, she found herself tracing the same exfiltration route she had taught her agents, starting first in Perpignan then up through the mountain pass at Mantet, where she climbed five thousand feet in the worst of winter (without gear), and finally made it into more friendly Spanish territory. On top of it all, she had only one leg and the other was a prosthetic she nicknamed “Cuthbert.”
As if that weren’t enough, she went back into France in March of 1944, disguised as an elderly peasant, recruiting resistance fighters and gathering intel from German patrols while she delivered milk on her daily rounds.
She came from a family that expected her to marry well and stay put. She spurned the role she was handed and fought hard for a job that put her in mortal danger instead, because she had spent time in France and valued the freedom, culture, and arts of the country, and wanted to fight against the tyranny thrust onto her French compatriots. OSS was struck that she never once asked what she would be paid.
In October this year, I and a group of fellow former CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service officers will retrace Virginia’s escape route, based on declassified archival debriefs, through an old mountain trail that crosses the Pyrenees.
We’re selecting two college-aged women interested in becoming CIA officers who will hike her escape route with us and I’d like your help paying their way. This will enable young women who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it to spend time learning about an American heroine and gain insights from former intelligence officers on what it takes to live a life undercover and fight for the freedoms we inherited.
Please donate. (More below about the hike details)
Virginia blazed the trail that I stood on at CIA. Yet nobody sat us down as trainees and told us what she did. I discovered the real story years later after I’d left the Agency. I handled a number of exfiltration or “exfil” cases with modern technology and extensive resources. Virginia did it behind enemy lines with a wooden leg. I wish I had known about her then.
My time at CIA has passed, as has Virginia’s, but we can still inspire who comes after us.
The decade to come
For every person who wants to bring down a World Trade Center and put an authoritarian way of living in its place, we need 10 Virginia Halls.
That’s why this year on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I’m choosing two women to retrace Virginia’s escape route with us.
The trek details
The group Girl Security graciously offered me access to their forum to post the opportunity and many women applied. I asked each of them to case a location near where they live where they could meet an agent without being noticed, then send me a map, photographs, and their reasoning. Most of them were born after September 11, 2001, but all of them have a desire to give back to our country.
I wish I could select them all, but we have to narrow it to two. The hike costs $1,500 per person before airfare and gear. Donations are tax deductible through Culper, a 501(c)(3) alumni organization for national security professionals, where I sit on the board.
I’ve never asked for any donations in previous posts. I’m asking now.
When we get back, I’ll post an account of how it went with photos from the route. If it works, I want to gather sponsors for it every year and take additional aspiring officers each time.
CIA’s Directorate of Operations has a motto: “Acta non verba.” Deeds not words. Please help me in deed to pay it forward to ensure and inspire the next generation of officers doing Virginia’s work.
Photo credit and more on Virginia Hall: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/virginia-hall-the-courage-and-daring-of-the-limping-lady/