8. Return of The Limping Lady (Season 2)

Explicit content warning

11/22/22 • 35 min

Virginia Hall’s prison cell in northeastern Spain was something out of a nightmare. Hall imagined the moment in which the Spanish police would hand her over to the Gestapo and their glee at having finally captured "The Limping Lady." Hall knew the Nazis wouldn’t risk letting her escape. They’d transfer her to a secret facility, interrogate her, torture her, and kill her. Or sometimes the Nazis kept their prisoners alive and attempted to leverage them against the Allies. Months of psychological torture would give way to more physical punishments. Dousing with freezing water. Electric shocks. Beatings and cutting. This was the way of the Nazis.

Virginia's Hall's American nationality was maybe the one thing that could save her. In late 1942, Spain was still considered technically neutral in the war. The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had offered Hitler Spain’s allegiance in return for aid in nation-building. There was a division of Spanish volunteers fighting for the German army, but Spain still remained reluctant and fickle.

Andrew Orr says, "Franco's regime is ideologically complex and people still fight over whether or not it was fascist or just really authoritarian and traditionalist. Regardless of how anyone's individual sees it, the regime was very friendly to Nazi Germany and especially fascist Italy because Italy and Germany had backed Franco in the civil war. So Spain tended politically to like the Axis powers a lot."

But Virginia Hall’s capture by the Spanish was too big a threat to the British. Hall knew too much, and the Nazis could assume that the British would change battle strategy once the Special Operations Executive, Hall’s intelligence agency, discovered she’d been captured. Hall’s information would be useless to the Axis Powers, and so she was as good as dead.

This episode contains interviews with:
• Andrew Orr: a professor in the Department of History at Kansas State University, a specialist in modern military history, intelligence operations in the Middle East, imperialism, civil-military relations, and the history of French Communist Party identity; author of Women and the French Army
• Chris Costa: Executive Director of the International Spy Museum, a 34-year veteran of the Department of Defense, and he served 25 years in the United States Army working in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces in Central America, Europe, and the Middle East.
• Judith Pearson: expert on Virginia Hall and author of the book The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy
• Dr. Ludivine Broch: A scholar of World War II French history and lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK; Editor of Contemporary European History, associate fellow of the Birbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism; co-founder of the French History Network
• Brad Catling: great nephew of Virginia Hall
Learn more at diversionaudio.com/good-assassins

“Good Assassins” is a production of Diversion Audio, in association with iHeartPodcasts. Featuring the voices of Matthew Amendt, Orlagh Cassidy, Raphael Corkhill, Manoel Felciano, Sean Gormley, Mikaela Izquierdo, Lenne Klingaman, Andrew Polk, John Pirkis, Steve Routman.
This season is hosted by Stephan Talty and written by C.D. Carpenter. Produced and directed by Kevin Thomsen for Real Jetpacks Productions. Story Editing by Jacob Bronstein with editorial direction from Scott Waxman. Additional research and reporting by Sophie McNulty. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering by Paul Goodrich. Sound Editing by Justin Kilpatrick. Executive Producers: Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman for Diversion Audio.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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7. Escape into the Mountains (Season 2)

Virginia Hall’s identity was exposed. Now she had to get out of France and into Spain, and that meant an excruciating climb over 30 miles of tumultuous mountain terrain. Virginia knew that attempting the trek alone would mean death, especially given that she’d be hiking with her prosthetic leg. Luckily, Perpignan, the town she’d landed in, had a Resistance contact she knew fairly well. A man known to her by his codename: Gilbert.
Edward Stourton: "If they were found out, things could be very, very nasty indeed and many of them who were caught went off into camps in Germany. A lot of 'em died. A lot of 'em died in really awful ways. The Germans had a system called ‘Nacht und Nebel’, Night and Fog, which meant that people just disappeared into the system of concentration camps, and nobody knew where they were. Which of course was intended to frighten anybody considering, going onto the wrong side and, and joining an escape line and helping people to get over over the Pyrenees."
This episode contains interviews with:
• Edward Stourton: BBC broadcaster who made a commemorative trek across the Pyrenees some 70 years after Virginia Hall; author of the book Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees
• Judith Pearson: expert on Virginia Hall and author of the book The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy
Learn more at diversionaudio.com/good-assassins

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9. Agents of Sabotage (Season 2)

Virginia Hall was back in occupied France, but she was no longer working for the British. She was an agent of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Virginia was living in the farmhouse of a respected Resistance leader. She was spending her existence in disguise as an old woman, decked out in multiple wool skirts, makeshift prosthetics, and dyed gray hair; all the while constantly walking by wanted posters stapled around town with sketches of The Limping Lady. But this new life promised Virginia something she’d been waiting for since she’d had to flee France almost 18 months earlier: the opportunity to take the fight directly to the Nazis.
The Maquis was a new faction of French, British, and German freedom fighters. They were scrappy guerrilla warfare fighters who sabotaged German trains, trucks, and tanks. In May of 1944, Virginia had split Colonel Vessereau’s Maquis faction into smaller groups of twenty-five fighters each, allowing them to continue working in secret without attracting attention from the Nazis. The Maquis were ecstatic to be led by a real secret agent, though they were slightly put-off by the sight of Virginia in disguise as an elderly, limping woman.
By late May of 1944, French resistors were getting antsy. They’d been told to expect the arrival of the Americans, who were planning their invasion of Europe. And every day of waiting saw the Nazis become more and more brutal, as they upped their retaliations against the French citizenry. The Germans were expecting the American invasion too, and they wanted to dwindle French forces as much as possible.
On June 6, 1944 over 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France and led the invasion against the Germans. It was the beginning of the end for the Nazi occupation of France—and is regarded as the turning of the tide for all of World War II.
This episode contains interviews with:
• Brad Catling: great nephew of Virginia Hall
• Richard Lucas: radio enthusiast and author of Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany, the first biography of Mildred Gillars AKA Axis Sally
• Karen Schaefer: worked at the CIA for 26 years in Latin America, Europe, Afghanistan and Iraq; she was Chief of Base and held leadership positions including Chief of Operations, Directorate of Science and Technology; Deputy Associate Director of Military Affairs; and Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence, Near East Division
Learn more at diversionaudio.com/good-assassins

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Good Assassins - 8. Return of The Limping Lady (Season 2)

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:07.120

Diversion audio. A note this episode contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some audiences. Please take care in listening. This series is based on historical characters and real events. Some dialogue has been imagined for dramatic purposes when no primary source material is available. Virginia Hall's prison cell in San Juan de la Sabad, Sas small town in the northeast of Spain, was something out of a nightmare. Cold, damn cl