Virginia Hall and Christopher Lee

Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash and author Ben Thompson cover the stories of a couple real-life inspirations for James Bond -- the multi-talented actor (and WWII Special Operations Executive soldier) Christopher Lee, and American super-spy Virginia Hall, the notorious "Limping Lady", who made life hard for the Nazis in occupied France.

My original article on Virginia Hall can be found here, and Christopher Lee can be found here..

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Episode Transcript:

It's November 8, 1942, and American spy Virginia Hall is on the run from the Nazis. Her plan is to escape to Spain. But between Virginia and salvation lies a 30 mile trek through the Pyrenees mountains on foot in the snow and with a suitcase full of secret radio equipment. She radios her handlers that she hopes Cuthbert won't cause any problems for her. They respond with just five words": If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him.

Ben [00:00:58] Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche. Pat. How are you doing?

Pat [00:01:06] Doing okay. Doing okay. Bopping along. How are you? I'm doing.

Ben [00:01:09] Good. I'm doing good. We've been we've been doing the show for a while now, and we are on episode seven and the way we internally a number of these, it's episode 007. So we thought maybe this would be a good time to talk about some spy stuff. Pat, have you seen any of the James Bond movies? Have you heard of this guy, James Bond?

Pat [00:01:28] The Bond. James Bond. Yeah, I think I've heard of him.

Ben [00:01:33] Are you a fan of the movies at all?

Pat [00:01:34] They're fun. They're fun.

Ben [00:01:36] Yeah, they certainly can be. Some of them are very not fun, but some of them are pretty fun.

Pat [00:01:40] Yeah, some of them are better than others. Oh, that's true. You know.

Ben [00:01:43] I'm having a little bit of deja vu because starting about two years ago, I was on a show called Podcasters Assemble, where we watched every single James Bond movie in order and recorded like our takes on them. And so I saw them. Within the last two years, I've watched every James Bond movie.

Pat [00:02:01] Yeah, the writing got a lot more sophisticated. Yes.

Ben [00:02:05] Absolutely. Absolutely. Bond's also fun to watch because they have this thing of like whatever the most popular movie was a year or two ago. Bond does the next thing. So Moonraker was like two years after Star Wars, you know, And then Casino Royale was a couple of years after Jason Bourne, and it was like, okay, whatever action movies are doing, which is going to kind of do that and put James Bond in it and people will come see it. So I do have an appreciation for how much this character and these movies have changed so dramatically and so drastically in the I mean, what, 40 years they've been doing it now? 50 years.

Pat [00:02:37] Mm hmm. Yeah.

Ben [00:02:38] So James Bond was created by Ian Fleming. People probably already know, and he had served in the Special Operations Executive during World War Two. So he was like a real life spy during World War Two, working against the Nazis. And we're going to talk about a couple of people today that probably helped influence his his stories. Yeah.

Pat [00:03:00] And given that Fleming was working on the front lines with, you know, the story, you know, one of the world's first modern intelligence services, I bet he saw all sorts of things and he heard about even more. And he probably got a lot of material that way, not just for plots and stories, but also characters like like the psychology, the personality. What is it like to be someone actually doing these things? There's an entire Wikipedia entry on people Fleming met who were it's just like a list of people who probably influenced the fictional James Bond character in some way.

Ben [00:03:37] Yeah, absolutely. When everybody he's just writing about his job, I guess, right? Like becomes James Bond.

Pat [00:03:43] Like you do. Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:03:44] And there are some big names on there. People like Fitzroy McClean and Forrest Thomas that I I've read about on the website or that we will talk about in the future on the show. But you know, we were talking about movies and we were talking about influences for James Bond. So I'm going to talk about a guy who might have been an influence for James Bond and also played a villain in a James Bond movie. I'm going to talk about Christopher Lee.

Pat [00:04:06] What Christopher Lee? You mean the actor who played well besides the Bond villain who has it in Lord of the Rings, Saruman? The bad guy, one of the bad guys and Count Dooku.

Ben [00:04:18] It's the same guy. He was he was a World War Two British soldier fighting on the front lines against the Germans. And there's a great one of my favorite stories with him is there's this great piece on the behind the scenes for Return of the King Solomon Get stabbed in the back by Grimm, a warm tongue, and Christopher Lee makes this noise. And Peter Jackson is like, No, no, no. He's talking about is like, I cut. And then I went up to Christopher Lee and I was like, No, don't. When you get stabbed, don't, don't do that. Just be like, go like, wow. And Christopher Lee looks at him and he says, That's not the sound a man makes when he's stabbed in the back. And Peter Jackson was like, And I could feel I really felt like he knew that that was true and I didn't correct him again. So I just kept the original audio in there. It's funny. It's probably authentic, and I leave it at that.

Pat [00:05:05] Okay. So how does Christopher Lee get to the point where he can say that with such authority? And clearly he either he knew what he was talking about or she's such a good actor that he convinced us that he knew what he was talking about. So. Yeah. So, yeah. Tell us about Christopher Lee. Let's do it.

Ben [00:05:29] Probably best known for playing Darth Duran in Salem on the White Dracula and basically everybody from like Fu Manchu to Gregory what Rasputin to like. Weirdly, he was in like the biopic on the guy who founded Pakistan. He's six foot five. He's a world champion fencer. He speaks six languages. He does all of his own stunts. And he, according to Guinness, has been in more onscreen sword fights than any other actor in history. He also served for five years defending democracy against the Nazis. No big deal like you do. He was a British commando. And then in 2013, at the age of 91, he wrote, performed down and released his second progressive symphonic Power metal EP about the life of Charlemagne, put it up for free on his MySpace page because why not?

Pat [00:06:14] So in addition to being a badass actor and fencer and World War Two guy, he's also a history buff.

Ben [00:06:25] He's a classicist that he has a degree in classics just like you.

Pat [00:06:29] Oh.

Ben [00:06:31] So the classics professors can be bad ass.

Pat [00:06:34] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:06:36] Okay. He's quite possibly the most prolific actor in motion picture history. He was born in 1922. His mother was an Italian countess who is actually descended from Charlemagne. And she was so important that they let her wear the royal seal of Frederic Barbarossa. He also has an ancestor on that side through Italy. He was the secretary of state for the Pope, who refused to attend the coronation of Napoleon. And that guy is buried in a tomb next to Raphael. Not the Ninja Turtle, but the painter. Lee's father is a distant relative of Robert E Lee and was a decorated war hero who was a colonel fighting in the Royal Rifle Corps during World War One and the Boer War. So like I said, he went and he got his classics degree. He was on the fencing team. He also played ice hockey and rugby. He's a big duty six five, right? He's big and strong and that's why, you know, he's so physically imposing in his film roles. He got this job working as an office clerk that paid him £1 a week, which seems like it's probably not very much money.

Pat [00:07:36] Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was it like an internship plan or just just didn't pay? Well, it's.

Ben [00:07:41] Just a desk job. That's what these jobs paid in 1938, I guess. Okay. So in 1939, the Winter War begins where Russia invades Finland and Christopher Lee and his friends there are only about 18 years old at this point. But they try to sign up and enlist into the Finnish army. And he may have actually gone over there. He was never deployed into combat, but he did attempt to join the Finnish army in order to help them fight the Russians in 1939, which is pretty cool. Whatever his plans were for fighting, the Russians never really came to be because in 1940, before he was able to see any action in Finland, Germany and England went to war and he had a much more pressing duty that he had to fulfill to King and country. So Christopher Lee joins the Royal Air Force in 1940. He goes British home Guard first during the Battle of Britain, and then he joins the RAF. He originally wanted to be a pilot, but he had some kind of problems with his optic nerve. So he basically, like was relocated to the intelligence service of the Royal Air Force. So Christopher Lee is a is an officer in the Royal Air Force doing mostly intelligence work. So he's forwardly deployed into airfields. I think first is in South Africa and then he's going through North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and probably the Balkans as well. And a lot of what he's doing is helping coordinate the RAAF, working with ground units, especially like ground units behind enemy lines. And Christopher Lee, like famously never really liked to talk too much about his military service, didn't talk about it, didn't really say much about it, has definitely said that he worked a little bit with some of the British special Forces as well. And so special operations executive, which was behind enemy lines like counter intelligence, espionage, sabotage, you know, so he was part of the group that sent Eastern European partizans and rebels into Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to the western and eastern fronts. It was called the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And they did things like destroy that German heavy water plant in Norway when they were getting close to making a nuclear weapon. And they did things like help the Yugoslavian partizans fight against the Germans. They helped the Poles and the French and they helped throw off the plans for D-Day. Just deceived the Germans into thinking that the landing was going to be either in Italy or in Calais instead of at Normandy. He's also said that he worked with the long range desert patrol, which is really bad stuff. So these guys, they are the pre version of the SAS. Their unit eventually became the Special Air Service, which is like the special forces of the British military. But what these guys would do is they would attack German airfields in northern Africa behind enemy lines. So they would get like a jeep and they would. Mount machineguns on cheap and they would drive it around. It's like five British guys on a jeep that has airplane machine guns mounted on the front of it. And they're driving around the German airfields machine getting all the German aircraft on the ground. They set off bombs and then they drive away and there's just explosions and wreckage in their wake. And it's it's so cool. And it's so what they did was so amazing. Christopher Lee is working with these these units. He never really talked about in what capacity he was working with these units. I don't know. He didn't talk about it in the in the year or so after he died, a few news articles came out saying that, oh, you know, we don't have any record of him being in the SAS or the. So we like maybe he maybe he embellished some of these stories as an as an RAF liaison officer. He would have coordinated the Royal Air Force working with these guys. That is almost certainly a possibility. But these special operations things, you know, I don't know, Pat, this is one of these history things that some of this stuff gets a little fuzzy, right?

Pat [00:11:36] Yeah, It's hard to pin down. It's hard to It's hard to document.

Ben [00:11:41] Right? Right. Was he on a Jeep machine getting German airplanes? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he was in a forward air base coordinating the British planes that were going to fly and give cover to whatever German airplanes took off from that airfield. Maybe he was doing something completely different. We don't know. Nobody really knows. He knew, but he didn't want to talk about it. So what we're talking about with this is influences for James Bond. And it's worth mentioning that Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, the creator of the character, was Step Cousins with Christopher Lee. So presumably some of this probably rubbed off on Ian Fleming a little bit. Ian Fleming was in the so we even if Christopher Lee was completely 100% lying about his entire involvement in World War Two whatsoever, which we know is not true because we have service records for him that he was part of it. But even if everything was bullshit, he could have still told Ian Fleming some of these stories and some of it could have made its way into the Bond stuff. So I am very comfortable listing him as a potential influence for the character of James Bond. Pat, you have any problems with that? I'll fight anybody.

Pat [00:12:46] I know I have zero problems with that. I have your problems with that because, you know, James Bond is fiction and it's all about the stories, right?

Ben [00:12:52] Christopher Lee is a real life badass, and I don't hear anybody say anything else about it. So he gets into acting in 1948. He's doing like really hard roles, like real Work me kind of stuff for almost ten years, just little bit parts here and there, wherever he can get it. And he finally gets his big break. In 1957, he got paid $300 to play Frankenstein's monster for Hammer films. And I don't know if you're familiar with Hammer films, but they're just like they did all of like the schlocky, like Wolfman Dracula mummy movies and like, you know, the fifties, sixties and seventies and.

Pat [00:13:25] Yeah, stuff that shows up on that used to show up on Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon on whatever TV station that was when I was growing up.

Ben [00:13:33] Right, exactly. Yeah. Like their Elvira movies. And that's exactly what he was in. And and he played Frankenstein's monster, which he got the role because he was 65 and nobody in Hollywood is even close to as tall as him. So he looked really good on camera next to some of these shorter actor guys. So the year after Frankenstein, he gets Dracula, and then for the next decade, he plays Dracula in seven or eight of the horror of Dracula movies. And everything kind of blows up for him from there. So our Bond connection here is in 1974, Christopher Lee played Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. It was the ninth Bond movie, and it was based off of the 12th Bond novel, which was published after Ian Fleming's death. Sully was basically an inspiration for James Bond. Then he went on to play a Bond villain in a movie, which I think is awesome. The Man with the Golden Gun is not a great Bond movie, but Christopher Lee lives on an island surrounded by hot bikini babes and tattooed from Fantasy Island, and he drives a car that turns into an airplane. He wants to take over the world using renewable solar energy, the details of which are not very well explained over the course of the story. But that's what he wants to do. And he carries the gun that is the the best gun in the Goldeneye Nintendo 64 game. I feel like if Fleming had been around, Fleming died ten years before this movie came out, but if he had been around, he'd probably have approved of all of this.

Pat [00:14:55] It sounds like Ian Fleming would have been totally into that.

Ben [00:14:58] He's been in Academy Award winning movies and he's been in Elvira movies. Right. And the stuff you see on Channel 800 at 4:00 in the morning, he's almost always the villain. And he's been in something like 300 pieces of media, movies, TV shows and things. So he's probably died on camera more than anybody in history. And I mean, the roles that he's had are awesome, right? He was the he was the count the of four and several Three Musketeers movies. He was Dracula. He was The Mummy. He was Willy Wonka's dad. He was an emperor of China. The Grim Reaper, Lucifer Ramsay's. Vlad the Impaler. He was in A Tale of Two Cities and played in Hamlet alongside Laurence Olivier. But he was also in a softcore porn based on the works of the Marquis de Sade. And he was in a movie called Howling to Werewolf Bitch with the dude from Space Mutiny. He's all over the place.

Pat [00:15:44] I just. Can I just interrupt and say I have a lot of questions? I'm not going to ask them, but I have a lot of questions.

Ben [00:15:51] Howling two werewolf bitch is not streaming on Netflix, if that's what you're wondering. I tried.

Pat [00:15:55] Then you're performing a public service, you know, watching or trying to chase down movies for the rest of us. Don't have to.

Ben [00:16:02] Write it off as a business expense on my taxes. IMDB lists him as the the center of the Hollywood universe. Because because he's been in so many movies, you can basically six degrees of Kevin Bacon him in like three steps instead of six. Pretty much anybody in the world. I haven't done it for myself yet, but I should. You should? Yes. It belongs to three stuntman unions because he does all of his own stunts. He got his face busted once by being thrown through an actual plate glass window that wasn't a breakaway one by accident. There was like a props problem. And he went right through it. He he was he died and fell into an open grave in one of the Dracula movies and hurt himself. And then he had an off camera drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn, and he got his hand slashed, which is just there's that's a whole story that I would love to hear sometime.

Pat [00:16:45] I would to. Yeah.

Ben [00:16:47] Christopher Lee has appeared in more on screen sword duels than any other actor ever. According to the Guinness Book, he was a very good fencer. He fenced in college and he was apparently really very successful at, like competitive fencing. And he's been in everything from like pirate duels to like Musketeer fights to taking on a couple of guys half his age with light sabers on whatever they called the star destroyers in the prequel movies. He's also a classically trained singer, and later in life in his eighties, he decided he wanted to start recording symphonic metal albums. And so in a when he was 88 and then again when he was 91, he released hardcore symphonic power metal concept albums about the life of Charlemagne. He's played live shows with Rhapsody and Man, or on his 90th birthday, he released a single called Let Legend Mark Me as the King with music written by the guys from Judas Priest. And he's got he got like a golden hammer from, like the, you know, the metal people who, like, give out awards for for heavy metal albums. It's not bad. I've listened to it and I can recommend it.

Pat [00:17:55] Oh, cool, cool. And didn't you sing earlier? Wasn't he descended from Charlemagne on through some ancestor or something?

Ben [00:18:03] Yeah, on his mom's side. So he was for real. I mean, one of the funny things about genealogy is that if you trace anybody back far enough, they're descended by Charlemagne or William the Conqueror or something like that.

Pat [00:18:13] Oh, yeah, Yeah. Or Genghis Khan or something. Yeah, something like that. Okay.

Ben [00:18:17] Okay. He's also an expert golfer. He was the only actor to be accepted into the honorable company of Edinburg golfers, which is the most prestigious golf country club in the world. And he married a Danish supermodel and stayed married to her for over 40 years. He was knighted. He was a commander of the Order of Saint John's of Jerusalem. KNIGHT Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire, once got a medal from Mikhail Gorbachev. And and then he died in 2015 at the age of 93. And just just a crazy life.

Pat [00:18:45] And the truth of the matter is, you know, okay, maybe these stories, some of these stories were embellished, but even if we set aside the stories that some people are questioning, the stuff that's solid is still so badass.

Ben [00:18:57] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Like, oh, he he talked to the Surui on the radio and he didn't actually, like, walk into the office, like, get out of here, man. Get out of here with this.

Pat [00:19:07] And also there's also something about being so there's also about being a badass kind of person where you have this sort of aura where people are prone to believe stories about you, even if you know, Yeah, who knows.

Ben [00:19:18] That's true, right? And there is definitely an argument to be made here that let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to that Peter Jackson story of like, that's not the sound a man makes when he stabbed in the back. Right. I would make a solid argument that if Chris really had never stabbed a person in the back, had never seen a person be stabbed in the back, we know that this is probably not true because we do have accounts of him that are like verified of him being in combat on the front lines, Airfields he was working at were bombed. Friends of his were being blown up. Like, I don't want to I mean, we know that that is true, right? We just don't know the full details of every little thing that he did during the course of the war. But like we know, he was in combat. We know he was he was friends with people who were killed in action, like people at his airfield, like he was wounded a couple of times in battle. But let's take let's say hypothetically, this guy's never killed anybody, never been around a real dead body his entire life. And he says that to Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson's like, oh, shit. Like, that was scary. I'm I'm not going to talk to this guy anymore. I'm going to believe this forever. That's also badass.

Pat [00:20:16] Yes. Agreed, Agreed. Agreed. You know, and I'm also wondering. Maybe some of the some of his records are just still classified. You know, who knows? I mean.

Ben [00:20:27] That's what he always said, right? Yeah, Well, that's what he has always said is like, I'm not really supposed to talk about it. And I mean, like, look, there's a lot of guys who served in the military that don't want to talk about it, right?

Pat [00:20:37] Exactly. Yeah.

Ben [00:20:38] You can't make them in. And whatever the truth is, it died with him, and I'm okay leaving it that way. So what? What? I want to leave all of this with, like, I know I've been kind of rambling on about this. I just discovered these articles, like, earlier this week when I was, like, brushing up on the Christopher Lee research, and I'm still kind of hot under the collar about him. I'll leave it at this. When Christopher Lee was doing interviews for like various, like press things or whatever interviewers would had a, you know, sometimes ask him about his military service, They'd say like, oh, you know, what happened in the war or didn't you fight in World War Two and you fight the Nazis and you were in Italy and you were he was at Monte Cassino. We know that for sure. And they're like, Oh, well, what happened? What was your service like? And he would go, Well, can you keep a secret? And the reporter would lean in really close, like they were going to get a good scoop and be like, I can keep a secret. And Christopher Lee would say, So can I.

Pat [00:21:41] Welcome back from the break. We've been spending a lot of time talking about James Bond and influences on James Bond. And, you know, if you look at that Wikipedia entry of influences on James Bond, they're all men. I mean, they're all badasses, to be sure, but they're all men. What about women in the James Bond universe? Because you've got Bond girls, right? And Bond girls. Okay. So they're potentially badass, but the way they're presented is, like, they're never the main story.

Ben [00:22:12] Sometimes it's not great. Yeah, there's some pretty solid ones. I mean, my favorite if you were going to go with women in the Bond franchise is probably Dame Judi Dench as M. She's awesome consistently throughout everyone. She's like, maybe my favorite character in the whole series.

Pat [00:22:27] Agreed. Agreed.

Ben [00:22:28] So there are some good ones and there's some pretty rough ones also.

Pat [00:22:32] Yeah. Yeah. So we've got fictional special agents and fictional sidekicks and whatever, and we've got Judi Dench, you know, at the same time that Ian Fleming was working in the set, we you also have plenty of historical real life women working in the. So some of them are desk jobs, some of them are out in the field doing incredibly badass things. You know, Winston Churchill, what did he call it, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And then, I mean, you could totally imagine someone like Virginia Hall coming along and saying, I am no gentleman.

Ben [00:23:06] There's really good He's the Lord of the Rings referenced in there, tying all together. It's so good.

Pat [00:23:10] So who is this Virginia Hall? Well, she is. She is. She's American, but she ends up working for the sweep. She was incredibly well-educated in languages, economics. She went to all sorts of fancy institutions of higher learning. You know, Radcliffe Barnard, just the women's equivalent of Harvard and Columbia, especially in those days, George Washington University. She continued her education in France, Germany, Austria. She was really interested in Foreign service international relations. And in 1931, she got a job as a consular service clerk in Poland. And that's you know, she's a clerk, so she has a desk job, paperwork. She wanted to be a for real diplomat, like an actual diplomat. And was that a realistic option for an American woman in the 1930s, even one as qualified as Virginia Hall? Well, you know, it wasn't impossible. But realistically, very few women got hired into got selected to be the actual diplomats. But she persisted. She kept working in the consular service. She kept living her best life. At one point she was stationed in Izmir, Turkey, and she went hunting, but there was a hunting accident and she wound up taking a shotgun shell to her leg and it didn't go well. She got gangrene, so she needed to have it amputated and she got a prosthetic leg. And what would you do, Ben, if you had a prosthetic leg?

Ben [00:24:45] Well, shock shoulder of the leg is like hopefully not a thing I'm going to ever have to deal with. That's like a little outside my realm of bad attitude.

Pat [00:24:52] I admit that was an unfair question, Ben.

Ben [00:24:54] What does she do with it?

Pat [00:24:55] She names it like you do. She named it Cuthbert. So this.

Ben [00:24:58] Is Cuthbert. Cuthbert must be eliminated. Yes. Being ordered to literally shoot herself in the foot. So she's taking the Pyrenees in the snow. In the rain and the the, you know, the freezing cold with the Nazis hunting her. And she's got a wooden leg.

Pat [00:25:11] Yes. Yes, indeed. Because why? Why should anything be easy?

Ben [00:25:17] Women are just held to a higher standard sometimes.

Pat [00:25:19] Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So how does she get from a hunting accident in Turkey to the Pyrenees? There are a few years. So let me. Let me walk you through those. The intervening years. She keeps working as a counselor clerk. She's posted to Venice, in Italy. She's posted to Tallinn in Estonia. So she gets to see a lot of Europe. And she, you know, every time she gets a chance, she applies for an actual diplomatic job. But in 1937, she's turned down like officially turned down because apparently there is this rule on the books and it's, you know, by our standards, it's incredibly discriminatory. There's a rule on the books against hiring people with disabilities for diplomatic positions. And I mean, honestly, I don't blame her. She's just got fed up with being a clerk. And she resigned in 1939. But this is Virginia Hall. She doesn't she doesn't stay still for very long. You know, this is 1940s rolling around and she became an ambulance driver for the French army. So France was defeated. And so we're now in Vichy, France. And you know what? What are you going to do? You know, you're a former ambulance driver. Virginia Hall manages to get connected with the British Essawi, and she's actually the second woman agent sent by the SLA to France. And she's the first. So we woman agent to be there long term. She's got a great cover story. She's she is or claims to be or poses as a reporter for the New York Post. And it's a great cover story because she can go around asking people questions.

Ben [00:26:52] She's American and the America is still neutral. America is still not part of the war yet. So that's a great cover because, you know, you can't really go attacking an American journalist when you're Germany and you don't want America to get involved with the war.

Pat [00:27:05] So she goes around as a newspaper reporter and she's really good at changing her costume, changing her clothing, change makeup, how she presents herself. And so sometimes she's a newspaper reporter in like chic Parisian couture, and sometimes she morphs herself into a nondescript person who wouldn't give a second glance to if you passed on the street. And she, in addition to collecting information, she also has to do all sorts of things. She has to figure out the job that she has to do. So she's setting up contacts, you know, putting the right people in contact with the right other people. She has to figure out who to bribe, how much to bribe them, how to bribe them, where and how to hide. She's also, you know, she's interacting with or she's in touch with agents who are on the run. So she's providing support. Yes. Sometimes material, sometimes moral support. She oversees the distribution of wireless sets. So the communication equipment, the radio equipment that these agents use to report back to London. And, you know, these are not little dinky little cell phones that you can hold that you lose in the bottom of your purse. This is you know, these are radio quite bulky radio equipment.

Ben [00:28:12] Right. 1940s, 1939 radio equipment. Right. She's got a 1939 wooden leg and a 1939 radio equipment. It's like, you know, there's no computers. This is like this is a big thing, right? It's it's you said it was a briefcase or a suitcase or something that it all Yeah.

Pat [00:28:28] Luggage? Yeah. And recruits French operatives. I'm sure she's using her language skills to great effect here. Funny side note, one of the operatives she recruits is a woman named Jasmine Grande, who is a madame of a brothel in Paris. And Madame Grande set up safe houses and passed along info that her employees, which is to say the sex workers picked up from their German clients.

Ben [00:28:53] That it's a good intelligence contact to have.

Pat [00:28:56] Simply managing all of these tasks and all of these logistics, just simply the logistical side of it, is pretty badass. But then also remember, this is you know, this is 1940, 1941. France and Virginia Hall knew that in addition to all the logistical stuff, there's the threat of being captured by the Gestapo, being tortured by the Gestapo, being killed by the Gestapo, and also not blowing her cover. So this is you know, there's this there's this threat. There's this real threat to her and the mission.

Ben [00:29:27] Yeah, it's I mean, it's the Gestapo, right? It's what? What everybody, like, accuses other agencies of being right. It's the worst one. Yeah. And. And she knows what they do, right? She's probably got, like, contacts or colleagues or other people that are, like, going through, you know, torture, slash death, slash, who knows what else by these agents. So it's it's not like she doesn't isn't imminently aware of the danger at all times and knows exactly what is going to happen if she gets caught.

Pat [00:29:55] Exactly. Exactly. And she just keeps going. At some point, they move her to the ground region, which is more in the southern part of France. A big part of her job is to make radio broadcasts back to the Essawi in London. But these transmissions could be traced by the Gestapo. And so you have to imagine, this is Virginia Hall. She's lugging around her briefcase or whatever with this clunky radio equipment. And she also she has to mix it up. So, you know, maybe one time she's broadcasting from like some attic somewhere, but then she wants to, you know, she has to pack up and move someplace else. Maybe she's broadcasting from a safe house some other time. Maybe sometimes she's broadcasting from like, you know, some old abandoned barn.

Ben [00:30:46] This isn't like this is radio transmission. This isn't being beamed to a satellite over a secure network. Right. This is like somebody standing there with a piece of handheld equipment, can pick up your radio broadcast and trace it to the barn that you're at. And so you make the radio broadcasts and you move. And these broadcasts are like drop weapons here, you know, drop paratroopers here, drop secret agents here to move on to the next thing. The rendezvous point is this the codename? Is this the whatever is this? And then she's got to get out of there because as soon as she starts that transmission, German agents are trying to triangulate her position and. And come find.

Pat [00:31:26] Her. Yes. It's like the clock is ticking. As soon as she hits the on switch. And, you know, if you want a visual for this, there is a painting from 2006 by the artist Jeffrey Bass. And I love this painting. Because, you know, it's it's it's an artistic representation. But the scene is, you know, we're imagining Virginia Hall, this kind of honestly prim looking, you know, 1940s, white American woman. And she's got this equipment, this kind of clunky equipment set up in a barn. It's in the room of a barn. There's straw on the floor. And this is like, this is so not a cell phone. How do you power this equipment? Well, someone else in the. So we had devised this way to use an old bicycle to crank the power to do the radio equipment. And in this painting, she's actually got a guy helping her. So there's this guy in the background managing the bike crank like as a generator or something. And then she's sitting there looking really intently doing her broadcast and making sure she gets the message. Absolutely right. And probably part of her brain is also thinking, okay, okay, do to how fast can I do this? And, you know, where's my next safe house or attic or barn to go to? It's clearly a barn, you know, like wooden walls. It's kind of dark straw on the floor. There is some sunlight coming through a window and sitting on the windowsill without a care in the world is a cat.

Ben [00:32:55] I mean, honestly, like, this set up kind of sounds like exactly what I do when I record my half of the podcast. It's just sitting there with somebody hand cranking like a wheel and some cat that doesn't care about anything and a suitcase full of equipment.

Pat [00:33:08] So anyway, cat or no cat? Virginia Hall Agent Hall We're now in 1942 and she's in the city of Lyon. Okay. There are so many, like, side stories we could go into here. Long story short, she's feeling way too much pressure from the Gestapo. Like they're really stepping up things. They're kind of onto her. The kind of kind of starting to infiltrate her network of contacts in ways that she's very not okay with. And there is this guy who was a priest but claimed to be part of the Gloria network, which is like this resistance network. He claimed to have lots of good intel. Virginia Hall had her doubts, but she went ahead with like interacting with this guy. Anyway, this guy, his name was Robert, and he was even able to send fake messages back to London. Very not good. So this is all of the danger that Virginia Hall has been in. It's now doubled, tripled. She need to get the hell out of Leon.

Ben [00:34:05] So this guy was an enemy agent?

Pat [00:34:07] Uh huh, yep, yep, yep, yep. He is an enemy agent. Danger. Danger. So this is November of 1942, and I mention this because we know it's 1942. This is where we're at in the World War. And also it's November, so it's not like mild spring weather. What she decides to do is something that some other secret agents also do is go to the Pyrenees. This is you know, this is the Pyrenees. These are the this is a 3000 foot high mountain range that separates France from Spain. And Spain, relatively speaking, is safer than France for her at this moment.

Ben [00:34:45] Right. They're neutral in the war, but they're friendly to Germany because they have a fascist dictator.

Pat [00:34:49] Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. So she wants to go to Spain, get a breather, and she wants to go across the Pyrenees. So there's a guide. Who is a guide who has helped other agents. Okay. Like there's kind of a system in place, but it's a system that's kind of flawed. This particular guide doesn't really like the idea of guiding a woman spy through the Pyrenees. He's got this little bit of a hand up about that, but okay, sure, fine. So Virginia has to put up with the prejudice from this guy, and it's November in the mountains. So it's going to be cold, it's going to be icy, it's going to be rainy. There might be snow. And, you know, there are paths through the mountain, but you don't know how safe they're going to be. And remember, she's doing this with a wooden leg. Now, mind you, she's had several years of excellent practice with the wooden leg, but still with a wooden leg and lugging her radio equipment with her. So she's got weapons through the mountains and on the other side of Spain. And well, basically, once she gets to the other side of the mountains, she gets thrown in a Spanish prison. Because like you said, Ben, it's run by a bunch of fascists. She festers in the prison for a while and she manages to get out. She had the option of staying in Spain and doing kind of relatively safe work once she got out of that Spanish prison.

Ben [00:36:26] And I think it's worth saying that she got out of the prison. And my understanding of this is that they didn't know who they had.

Pat [00:36:33] Yeah, she could keep secrets. She could keep secrets. Yeah. And the Germans Intel wasn't. Pletely 100% accurate. Anyway, they thought she was Canadian. And this is so this is Virginia. How is she going to cool her heels doing something relatively safe in Spain? No. Nope. She goes right back to France and she's she goes back to the same general region, her alias or her persona. This time around, she was supposed to pose as a much older, heavier. Country woman. I go to a farmer's wife or farmer's widow type person. She dyed her hair white and she, you know, probably changed her posture and everything. So basically her like her cover story was, yeah, she's taking care of cows in the French countryside. And she was able to, you know, again, just do her thing. She coordinated parachute drops And, you know, among the people, among the agents she was helping come in and parachute drop was Lieutenant Paul Goyal, who is French American. And we'll hear about him just a little bit later.

Ben [00:37:45] And she's trying to throw off the Germans for D-Day. The stuff that I was talking about with Christopher Lee and the story was that, like so much of D-Day, depended on misdirection of where the landings were going to be and when they were coming. When they happened, the French needed to be ready to fight. Right? The French have to know when and where the allies are coming and the Germans can't know. And so you have that double agent priest, right? You have people trying to mess with you. And like, this is kind of a very high tension moment here of like this. The work she's doing is it is incredibly vital to the survival of all of those people landing on Omaha Beach, right?

Pat [00:38:25] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The stakes are very, very high. And it works. It works. D-Day was successful.

Ben [00:38:33] Spoiler alert.

Pat [00:38:35] Spoiler alert. Yeah, Spoiler alert.

Ben [00:38:37] They worked.

Pat [00:38:38] D-Day worked. Yeah, D-Day, work. And, you know, World War Two comes to a close. I realize I'm skipping over a lot here. So what does what does Agent Hall do? What does our Virginia do? Well, she wants to continue working. So at this point, it's more about working for the CIA rather than the. So we well.

Ben [00:38:57] The so we kind of broke off into like the so we eventually became basically MI6 and the CIA because there were a lot of Americans coming in in the later years to Sochi and there was this combined arms thing and yeah like a lot of like I mean, she was a rogue CIA, right?

Pat [00:39:15] Totally. And you know, this is Agent Virginia. How is coming in with all of this experience, all of these skills, all this know how. And she was hoping to get more fieldwork. She loved being in the field. She was hoping for promotions, but she kept getting passed over. And this is not the first time we've heard that. So she gets stuck in a desk job. She's analyzing the intel that other agents bring in, you know? Yeah. And in the 1950s, she does get some more responsibilities. She was in charge of ultra secret paramilitary operations in France to set up a model that other European countries could follow if they wanted to set up resistance in case there was ever an invasion by the Soviets. Because we're now in the Cold War period. And she was to the people who knew her and actually worked with her, she was incredibly valued member of the CIA. I mean, she is Virginia freakin Hall. But, you know, this is it's a job. And in any job, it's sooner or later you're going to have performance reports. And she got a poor rating. She got a poor performance rating. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Ben [00:40:22] Fantastic. Yeah.

Pat [00:40:24] Yeah. And this is by some higher up who had never even observed her work. And I mean, honestly, that's that's an H.R. violation if I ever heard one. But the colleagues who actually knew her work and actually worked with her, they thought she was great. And they they said that she was clearly being sidelined because she was so badass that clearly other people were feeling threatened by her. So she you know, she worked at the CIA in whatever capacity she was able to until her mandatory retirement. So do you remember that Lieutenant Poggio, who was in one of those parachute drops?

Ben [00:40:56] Yeah, one of the French Resistance guys. He was a French American and he was American agent who parachuted in to help coordinate the resistance.

Pat [00:41:03] Mm hmm. Reader She married him, and they retired to you know, they retired to Maryland. She was from Baltimore.

Ben [00:41:12] How is this not a James Bond thing? Right.

Pat [00:41:14] I know, right?

Ben [00:41:15] You ended up getting together with the parachuting in, like, secret agent while you're doing your own secret agent stuff.

Pat [00:41:21] Mm hmm. Yeah, I guess we can call him a hall boy. Maybe a.

Ben [00:41:25] Hall boy. Yeah, I like that.

Pat [00:41:26] Instead of a Bond girl. I know it doesn't have quite the ring to it. Yeah, yeah, sure. She did receive, you know, various medals and recognitions. I'm not going to list her entire resume. President Harry Truman before Virginia Hall, retired, President Truman wanted to give her public recognition for everything that she had achieved. Because, I mean, obviously, this stuff is so cool, it deserves recognition. But she wasn't she wasn't ready to blow her cover yet. So she said, no, I do not like public recognition. And Truman just gave her her medal in a little private little ceremony was just Virginia Hall and her mom, Virginia Hall, at one point. Yeah. Okay. Not bad for a girl from Baltimore.

Ben [00:42:08] Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what we've been talking about, right? Like she was, you know, the bad ass, deep cover secret agent. Escaping over the Pyrenees and wounded in battle and also hooking up with other secret agents. Like, this is totally a James Bond story, if you like. Just switched her and her husband's genders. Like he would be on that list for James Bond influences on that Wikipedia page. Yeah, I love it. I think it's an awesome story. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that, right?

Pat [00:42:37] Yes, that's Virginia Hall. And and, you know, she now is finally getting some of the recognition that she deserves now that she's no longer you know, she's no longer with us. So I suppose she's no longer worried about blowing her cover.

Ben [00:42:49] Yeah. I mean, that's why we haven't heard of her. Like, I'm totally fired. If she doesn't want and doesn't want anybody to know. Right. There's always those bad asses who just do bad ass shit and then fade off into the darkness and nobody knows what happened to them, and they just disappear forever. Like, there is definitely something cool to that as well.

Pat [00:43:04] Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Ben [00:43:06] Well, that. That is our show. I think we were on an episode 007. We talked about some W seven influences. We talked about some bad as so we. World War two stuff and we talked about some film stuff while we're at it. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed it. So thanks so much for listening.

Pat [00:43:24] See you next time.

Ben [00:43:26] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.