The intelligence her network provided was astonishing. One of her assets was the brilliant Jeannie Rousseau, who spoke five languages and at age 20 began working as a German translator. Rousseau hung around with Nazi officers, who seized the chance to mansplain their exploits, including a new rocket technology, the V‑2, the first ballistic missile. As she later put it: “I was such a little one sitting with them, and I could not but hear what was said. And what they did not say, I prompted.” They also showed her their plans. Rousseau had a photographic memory. Fourcade passed the material to the British, who bombed the rocket plant at Peenemünde. Impressed, the British sought to bring Rousseau to London for debriefing. En route, she was captured and taken to a concentration camp, where she survived through remarkable acts of defiance.

In 1943, when the Germans began to crack down on saboteurs in grim earnest, the Alliance network was a chief target. Scores of agents were arrested in successive waves. Among them were women tortured by Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” who burned their breasts with cigarettes. “In my network, no woman ever faltered, even under the most extreme kinds of torture,” Fourcade later remembered. “I owed my freedom to many who were questioned until they lost consciousness, but never revealed my whereabouts, even when they knew exactly where I was.” She was exfiltrated to England, after a two-and-a-half-year career running operations against the Nazis—most Resistance leaders lasted no more than six months in place before their cover was blown—and continued to work from there. “I’ve often wondered what you were like,” one male British colleague confessed upon meeting her.

If obstacles hone leadership (as research suggests), few female spies cleared more hurdles than Virginia Hall, one of the SOE’s first operatives of either gender and the subject of A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. She became, as the British journalist Sonia Purnell writes, “the most successful Allied female secret agent,” unimpeded by her sex or by a wooden leg she nicknamed “Cuthbert.” (According to a famous anecdote, Hall was trekking across the snowy Pyrenees to escape the Gestapo, and radioed to her handlers that Cuthbert was giving her trouble. The response from a novice: “Have him eliminated.”)

Born into Baltimore high society in 1906, Hall grew up outdoorsy, adept with horses and guns. She ditched a boring fiancé, attended Barnard College, traveled to Jazz Age Paris, and studied in Vienna. When her father lost his fortune during the Depression and then died, she took jobs as a clerk in the American embassies in Poland and Turkey (where, while snipe-hunting, she blew off her foot and nearly died of sepsis). She tried over and over to join the U.S. diplomatic corps, but the State Department kept turning her down on flimsy pretexts. After war broke out, she began driving an ambulance in France, among the few active jobs for which women, even one missing a leg, were accepted.

Viking

What many of these women spies had in common—along with grit and remarkable courage—was a man who saw their potential. Key in Hall’s case was George Bellows, an undercover British agent milling around a Spanish border-town train station in 1940, gathering intelligence for the SOE. He chatted with Hall, whose sights were set on England as the Nazis overran France. The British realized that an American—the U.S. was still neutral—could move freely without attracting suspicion in occupied France.