Sonia Purnell - Agent Most Wanted: The Never-Before-Told Story of the Most Dangerous Spy of World War II

Mrs. Barbara Hall had raised Virginia, her only daughter and youngest child, born on April 6, 1906, in the expectation that she would marry well. It was Virginias duty to restore the family to the heights of Baltimore society by marrying into money. But Virginia did not oblige. Tall and rangy, with sparkly nut-brown eyes and a melting smile (when she chose to use it), she was a free-spirited girl with a strong independent streak. I must have liberty, she proclaimed in her school yearbook in 1924, at the age of eighteen.

She took pleasure in defying convention. At a time when girls traditionally wore only skirts, she chose trousers and shirts whenever she could, and enjoyed hunting with a rifle, skinning rabbits, and riding horses bareback. Once she wore a bracelet of live snakes into school. It was clear that the fearless young Dindy, as her family called her, had no intention of settling down.

Dindys classmates recognized her gifts for organization and initiative. They viewed her as their natural leader and elected her class president, editor in chief, captain of sports, and even class prophet. Her father, Edwin Lee Hall (known as Ned), a well-to-do Baltimore banker and movie theater owner, allowed his daughter the freedom to be herself. But her mother, Barbara, had quite different views, and determined that her daughter would forsake adventure for the prize of a rich husband and a fashionable household. So, at the age of nineteen, Virginia dutifully became engaged to be married. Like many young society women, she seemed destined for a confined and domestic life.

Virginia (right) as a little girl, with her father, Ned, and brother, John.

However, rebellion was in the air. Confident young women, the independence-loving, modern flappers, scandalized their elders by cutting their hair short into bobs and dancing to jazz music. Some rejected the restrictions of traditional marriage, preferring to make their own way in societyespecially after 1920, when American women won the right to vote. The prospect of a quiet life at home was stifling to Virginia when the outside world offered such enticing new freedoms. And soto her fiancs indignationshe ditched him and went to university. (She made the right decision; he went on to have three unhappy marriages.)

Yet the studious atmosphere of Radcliffe College, which she attended for a year in 1924, bored Virginia, and in 1925 she transferred to Barnard College in Manhattan. She enjoyed the bright lights of New York City, particularly the theaters on Broadway, but her college tutors rated her only an average student. Virginia knew she needed a college education to get a job as a diplomatrepresenting her country abroad was her dream careerso she persuaded her parents that she would do better if she could study abroad.

Like many well-to-do East Coast Americans at the time, Virginia set her sights on Paris as her gateway to independence. In 1926, at twenty years of age, she enrolled at the cole Libre des Sciences Politiques. She discovered in Paris a thrilling scene of art, literature, and music, and mixed with actresses, race car drivers, intellectuals, and budding politicians in cafs and jazz clubs. Here, at last, she felt she could be herself.