Thoughts on Resistance: Part I

The American WW2 Spy Virginia Hall Showed us How it's Done

Virginia Hall. Photo courtesy of the CIA.

It’s Inauguration Day in the U.S. and I’m avoiding the news. I’m struggling with how we navigate this strange, new reality. During the election season, what I thought was happening wasn’t what was happening. Since November 5, I have done a 180 in my understanding of the U.S. and my political vocabulary has transformed to include terms like oligarchical autocracy and transnational kleptocracy. All of this is new. All of it is raw.

I read up. I’ve learned a lot from Jared Yates Saxton’s Dispatches from a Collapsing State. I just finished Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. about the international network of autocrats who seek to subvert democracy in what has become a decentralized global struggle. I also enjoy Applebaum’s newsletter, Open Letters. I subscribe to Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, which addresses corruption in the U.S. and rising autocracy around the world, billed as “non-fiction horror stories.” And I follow Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Lucid, which offers big-picture thinking about threats to democracy around the world.

One of Saxton’s recent podcasts, Authoritarianism as Clarity, discusses Vichy France, an authoritarian regime that collaborated with the Nazis. People there faced a choice: Accept the brutality and try to live as normal or begin resisting with every breath. It was a bad world then, much as it is now. It put me in the mind of the incredible exploits of Virginia Hall, the most feared Allied spy of World War II and the linchpin of the French Resistance. She was so good that Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, ranked her No. 1 on his most wanted list. She was so good the CIA dedicated a page to her on its website. She was so good it doesn’t seem like she could be real, but she was and her story is beautifully told in A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell.

Born to a wealthy Baltimore family and educated at Radcliffe, Barnard and the Sorbonne, Hall fell in love with France, which freed her from her bourgeois upbringing to live as she wished. When France fell to Nazi occupation, Hall wanted to help. But no government service would take a disabled, 35-year-old female desk clerk seriously. Until she stumbled upon the newly formed British Special Operations Executive (SOE), AKA the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The SOE was founded by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” with sabotage, subversion, spying and other “irregular means” to weaken the enemy.

In what was an almost insane gamble, Hall was sent on a blind mission into wartime France, pitted against the sadistic and depraved genius of the Gestapo. The times were desperate: England stood alone in Europe against Hitler. From her base in Lyon, she established a circuit of résistants that would form the nucleus of a secret army. When the Allies returned at long last, that army would rise up to attack the Germans from within. In the meantime, though, it should look like nothing was happening.

Hall worked quietly and competently in a climate of profound fear. One of her radio operators transmitted his messages with a Colt pistol by his hand, a poison capsule in his mouth, and an ear cocked for sound in the hallway outside. Purnell writes:

“Fear never abated,” recalled one candid French resister. “Fear for oneself; fear of being denounced; fear of being followed without knowing it; fear that it will be ‘them,’ when at dawn one hears or thinks one hears a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs … Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it.”

Hall had a gift for people. She chatted to everyone and in this way felt out their sympathies. If she found a sound prospect, she recruited them on the spot. People wanted to help her. From the nuns of Lyon’s La Mulatière convent, who gave refuge to her network, to Germaine Guérin, a local madam who dispensed cash, contacts and safe houses. Madame Guérin also offered her coterie of prostitutes, who willfully passed on venereal diseases to Vichy officers and then, for good measure, sprinkled their uniforms with itching powder. They spoiled food bound for Berlin by inserting chunks of putrefied meat into carcasses, making pinholes in tinned provisions, and dampening vegetables and cereal. They did what they could.

Hall, meanwhile, pressed on relentlessly. Starting with nothing and no one, she parlayed cigarettes, money, arms, shoes, ration coupons, wine, and black market goods into a silent army, organized, trained and waiting. While she was setting up these vast networks, she continually provided top-grade intelligence to the Allies and also busted a number of her associates out of prison. That included twelve men in a single night from Mauzac prison. They took the time to lock the cell door behind them, leaving Vichy officials mystified.

She did this even though her mom wanted her to stop all this running around and just marry a wealthy man already. Even though the State Department rejected her application to the foreign service three times and posted her to desk jobs, heavy on the typing, time and again. Even though she lost a leg in a hunting accident while posted in Izmir, Turkey and battled pain every day from her prosthetic leg (nicknamed “Cuthbert”). Even though she was approaching 40. Even though she was spying in wartime in a country that wasn’t her own for another country that wasn’t her own, and doing so in a heavily accented second language. Even when she had to flee the Gestapo over the Pyrenees in November, on one leg.

Virginia Hall was exactly what the times required: An irregular person who could wage irregular warfare. The sabotage campaign in France that Hall helped build was nothing short of astonishing. Factories, aircraft, railway tunnels, lock gates, electricity pylons, and locomotives were repeatedly blown sky-high. There were frequent attacks on power lines and telephone wires. Explosives were disguised in fake manure, loaves of bread, bottles of milk. Saboteurs cut railway ties, blew up bridges, and even removed signposts to confuse the Germans. New signs were installed directing the Germans the wrong way and then, if possible, straight over precipices. Everyone did what they could.

Now, we’re in for a long struggle. I hope it seems like nothing is happening because something is happening. The first rule of the resistance is: You do not talk about the resistance. I hope people are chatting with their neighbors and feeling each other out. I hope they are quietly making plans and arranging for contingencies. I hope there are loose plans to fuck shit up, if need be. I don’t know how people will meet whatever is coming, but I do know it will have to be together. As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes in her essay, On Organizing:

“All of the wisest people that I've been listening to have been saying basically the same thing: Solidarity is the only way home. We must build collective power. We must deepen our relationships of trust and care across lines of difference, across coalitions, across communities. That's the foundation upon which everything else resides.”