The story of Virginia Hall sounds like a blockbuster premise. A one-legged spy who spent the entirety of World War II dodging capture from the Nazis through a series of aliases. She even earned a nickname, the Limping Lady.
Born in 1906 to a wealthy family in Baltimore, Virginia Hall had no interest in the life of an heiress. Instead, she sought adventure, and her ultimate goal was to become a U.S. diplomat, a career that would take advantage of her love of traveling and fluency in other languages. Women made up almost no percentage of the State Department, though, and she found herself in a clerk job in Turkey at an American consulate.
This unspectacular start to her story worsened in 1933 when she accidentally shot herself in the leg during a hunting trip. The leg had to be amputated below the knee, and Hall received an uncomfortable wooden prosthetic humorously named "Cuthbert." However, rather than letting Cuthbert hinder her, she adapted, and she began to find her true calling when the Nazis invaded France.
