It’s here where biography moves beyond description to become a creative process. In a complex story like Hall’s, where large sections of her private and clandestine life are missing, the author was faced with the biographer’s dilemma: stay silent where no information exists, or take an informed leap. Purnell took great pains to marshal what remained and broke new ground by persuading the French government to open sealed files on one of Hall’s key agents-brothel owner, Germaine Guerin. Consequently, key pieces of Hall’s complex story-the tissue connecting intelligence officers, intelligence circuits, and codenames-are gone.īy necessity, large gaps in Hall’s life and career had to be filled with interviews, the memoirs of other agents, and duplicate documents that somehow escaped the calamities of time. Overcoming this absence was a daunting challenge: important documents on Hall in the US archives were missing-possibly thrown out-and the British and French archives suffered fires that destroyed much of the history of agent operations in WWII France.
She wrote no memoir, granted no interviews, and spoke very little about her clandestine life, even with her closest friends and relatives. She shunned the spotlight and stayed true to her secrecy agreement long after her career in espionage ended. While many lesser agents publicized their wartime exploits, Hall remained the model undercover agent. Purnell, a former investigative journalist, undertook the formidable task of piecing together an account of Hall’s wartime espionage from the fragmentary government record which formed the backbone of her story. It is a fine exposition that deserves to be on the top shelf of intelligence literature. Sonia Purnell’s biography of Office of Special Operations (OSS) and CIA clandestine officer Virginia Hall, A Woman of No Importance, is by far the clearest, most comprehensive review of Virginia Hall’s life to date. A Woman of No Importance-The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
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