May 23, 2023 • 44 mins
In Episode 007, Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash and author Ben Thompson cover the stories of a couple real-life inspirations for James Bond -- the multi-talented actor (and WWII Special Operations Executive soldier) Christopher Lee, and American super-spy Virginia Hall, the notorious "Limping Lady", who made life hard for the Nazis in occupied France.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It's November eighth, nineteen forty two, and American spy Virginia
Hall is on the run from the Nazis. Her plan
is to escape to Spain, but between Virginia and Salvation
lies a thirty mile trek through the Pyrene of mountains.
On foot in the snow and with a suitcase full
(00:28):
of secret radio equipment. She radios her handlers that she
hopes Cuthbert won't cause any problems for her. They respond
with just five words. If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Hello, and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I'm joined as always by
my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Doing doing okay? Doing okay? Bopping along? How are you?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm doing good. I'm doing good. We've been doing the
show for a while now and we are on episode seven,
and the way we internally number these, it's episode zero
zero seven, So we thought maybe this would be a
good time to talk about some spy stuff. Pat, have
you seen any of the James Bond movies? Have you
heard of this guy? James Bond.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Bond, James Bond, Yeah, I think I've heard of him.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Are you a fan of the movies at all?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
They're fun, They're fun, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
They certainly can be. Some of them are very not fun,
but some of them are pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah. Some of them age better than others.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Oh, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
You know, I'm having a little bit of dejau vou
because starting about two years ago, I was on a
show called Podcasters Assemble where we watched every single James
Bond movie in order and recorded like our takes on them,
and so I saw them all. Within the last two
I've watched every James Bond movie we had.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
The writing got a lot more sophisticated, you can.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Say, absolutely absolutely. Bond's also fun to watch because they
have this thing of like, whatever the most popular movie
was a year or two ago, Bond does the next thing.
So Moonraker was like two years after Star Wars, you know,
and then Casino Royal was a couple of years after
Jason Bourne, and I was like, Okay, whatever action movies
are doing, we're just gonna kind of do that and
put James Bond in it and people will come see it.
(02:26):
So I do have an appreciation for how much this
character in these movies have changed so dramatically and so
drastically in the I mean, what forty years they've been
doing it now fifty years.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
So James Bond was created by Ian Fleming, people probably
already know, and he had served in the Special Operations
Executive during World War Two. So he was like a
real life spy during World War Two working against the Nazis.
And we're going to talk about a couple of people
today that probably helped influence his stories.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, and given that Fleming was working on the front
lines with the SOE, you know, one of the world's
first modern intelligence services, I bet he saw all sorts
of things and he heard about even more, and he
probably got a lot of material that way, not just
for plots and stories, but also characters, like the psychology,
(03:21):
the personality, what is it like to be someone actually
doing these things. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on people
Fleming met who were It's just like a list of
people who probably influenced the fictional James Bond character in
some way.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah. Absolutely, When everybody he's just writing about his job,
I guess right, then it becomes James Bond like you do. Yeah, yeah,
And there's some big names on there, people like Fitzroy
MacLean and Forrest Thomas, that I've written about on the
website or that we will talk about in the future
on the show. But you know, we were talking about
movies and we were talking about influences for James Bond.
So I'm going to talk about a guy who I
(04:00):
might have been an influence for James Bond and also
played a villain in a James Bond movie. I'm going
to talk about Christopher Lee.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Wait, Christopher Lee, do you mean the actor who played
well besides the Bond villain, who was it in Lord
of the Ring, Saruman, the bad guy, one of the
bad guys, and Count Dooku.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
It's the same guy. He was a World War Two
British soldier fighting on the front lines against the Germans.
And there's a great one of my favorite stories with
him is there's this great piece on the behind the
scenes for Return of the King. Saurmon gets stabbed in
the back by Grima warm Tongue and Christopher Lee makes
this noise and Peter Jackson's like, no, no, no, cut.
(04:38):
He's talking about it he's like, I cut And then
I went up to chrispher Lee and I was like, no,
don't when you get stabbed, don't do that, just be
like go like wo. And Christopher Lee looks at him
and he says, that's not the sound a man makes
when he's stabbed in the back. And Peter Jackson was
like and I could feel, I really felt like he
knew that that was true, and I didn't correct him again,
so I just kept the original audio in there. It's fine,
(05:02):
it's probably authentic. Kind of leave it at that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Okay, So how does Christopher Lee get to the point
where he can say that with such authority and clearly
he I mean, either he knew what he was talking about,
or he's such a good actor that he convinced us
that he knew what he was talking about. So yeah,
so yeah, tell us about Christopher Lee.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Let's do it. Probably best known for playing Darth turannas Sourman,
the White Dracula and basically everybody from like fu Manchuw
to Gregory Rasputen to like Weirdly, he was in like
the biopic on the guy who founded Pakistan. He's six
(05:43):
foot five, he's a world champion fencer. He speaks six languages,
He does all of his own stunts, and he, according
to Guinness, has been in more on screen sword fights
than any other actor in history. He also served for
five years defending democracy against the Nazis. No big deal,
like you do. He was a British command and then
in twenty thirteen, at the age of ninety one, he wrote,
(06:05):
performed on, and released his second progressive, symphonic power metal
EP about the life of Charlemagne. Put it up for
free on his MySpace page because why not. So.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
In addition to being a badass actor and fencer and
World War two guy, he's also a history book.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
He's a classicist, pat He has a good playing classics,
just like you all the classics preadfressers can be badass.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
He's quite possibly the most prolific actor in motion picture history.
He was born in nineteen twenty two. His mother was
an Italian countess who is actually descended from Charlemagne, and
she was so important that they let her wear the
Royal Seal of Frideric Barbarossa. He also has an ancestor
on that side through Italy. He was the Secretary of
State for the Pope who refused to attend the coronation
(06:58):
of Napoleon, and that guy's buried in a tomb next
to Raphael, not the Ninja Turtle, but the Painter. Lee's
father is a distant relative of Roberty Lee and was
a decorated war hero who was a colonel fighting in
the Royal Rifle Corps during World War One and the
Boer War. So, like I said, he went and he
got his classics degree. He was on the fencing team.
(07:20):
He also played ice hockey and rugby. He's a big dude.
He's six ' five, right, He's big and strong, and
that's why you know he's so physically imposing in his
film roles. He got this job working as an office
clerk that paid him one pound a week, which seems
like it's probably not very much money.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, Was it like an internship then or just didn't
pay Well, it's just.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
A desk job, that's what desk job's paid in nineteen
thirty eight, I guess, okay. So in nineteen thirty nine,
the Winter War begins where Russia invades Finland and Christopher
Lee and his friends they're only about eighteen years old
at this point, but they try to sign up and
enlisted to the Finnish Army, and he may have actually
gone over there and he was never deployed into but
he did attempt to join the Finnish Army in order
(08:03):
to help them fight the Russians in nineteen thirty nine,
which is pretty cool. Whatever his plans were for fighting
the Russians never really came to be because in nineteen
forty before he was able to see any action in Finland,
Germany and England went to war and he had a
much more pressing duty that he had to fulfill to
king and country. So Christopher Lee joins the Royal Air
(08:24):
Force in nineteen forty. He goes British Home Guard first
during the Battle of Britain, and then he joins the RAF.
He originally wanted to be a pilot, but he had
some kind of problems with his optic nerves, so he
basically was relocated to the intelligence service of the Royal
Air Force. So Christopher Lee is an officer in the
(08:44):
Royal Air Force doing mostly intelligence work. So he's forwardly
deployed into airfields. I think first he's in South Africa
and then he's going through North Africa. Sicily Italy and
probably the Balkans as well, and a lot of what
he's doing is helping coordinate the RAF, working with ground units,
especially like ground units behind enemy lines. And Christopher Lee,
(09:07):
like famously never really liked to talk too much about
his military service, didn't talk about it, didn't really say
much about it, has definitely said that he worked a
little bit with some of the British Special Forces as well,
and so Special Operations Executive, which was behind enemy lines
like counter intelligence, espionage, sabotage, you know. SOEU was part
(09:29):
of the group that sent Eastern European partisans and rebels
into Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements
up to the Western edd Eastern fronts. It was called
the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and they did things like
destroy the German heavy water plant in Norway when they
were getting close to making a nuclear weapon, and they
did things like helped the Yugoslavian partisans fight against the Germans.
(09:52):
They helped the Poles and the French, and they helped
throw off the plans for D Day just deceive the
Germans into thinking that the landing was going to be
either in Italy or in Calais instead of at Normandy.
He's also said that he worked with the Long Range
Desert Patrol, which is really badass stuff. So these guys,
they are the pre version of the sas. Their unit
(10:13):
eventually became the Special Air Service, which is like the
Special Forces of the British military. But what these guys
would do is they would attack German airfields in Northern
Africa behind enemy lines. So they would get like a
jeep and they would mount machine guns on the jeep
and they would drive it around. It's like five British
(10:34):
guys on a jeep that has airplane machine guns mounted
on the front of it, and they're driving around German
airfields machine gunning all the German aircraft on the ground.
They set off bombs and then they'd drive away and
there's just explosions and wreckage in their wake. And it's
so cool, and it's so what they did was so amazing.
Christopherlely is working with these units. He never really talked
(10:56):
about in what capacity he was working with these units.
I don't know, he didn't talk about it in the
In the year or so after he died, a few
news articles came out saying that Oh, you know, we
don't have any record of him being in the SAS
or the SOE like, maybe maybe he embellished some of
these stories. As an RAF liaison officer, he would have
(11:18):
coordinated the Royal Air Force working with these guys. That
is almost certainly possibility. But he's a special operations things,
you know, I don't know that this is one of
these history things that some of this stuff gets a
little fuzzy, right.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, it's hard to pin down. It's hard to it's
hard to document.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right right. Was he on a jeep machine gunning German airplanes? Maybe?
Maybe not. Maybe he was in a forward air base
coordinating the British planes that we're gonna fly and give
cover to whatever German airplanes took off from that airfield.
Maybe he was doing some completely different We don't know.
Nobody really knows, but he didn't want to talk about it.
(12:01):
So what we're talking about with this is influences for
James Bond. And it's worth mentioning that Ian Fleming, the
author of the James Bond novels, the creator of the
character was step cousins with Christopher Lee, so presumably some
of this probably rubbed off funny and Fleming a little bit.
Ian Fleming was in the SOE. Even if Christopher Lee
(12:23):
was completely one hundred percent lying about his entire involvement
in World War two whatsoever, which we know is not
true because we have service records for him that he
was part of it. But even if everything was bullshit,
he could have still told the inflaming some of these stories,
and some of it could have made its way into
the Bond stuff. So I am very comfortable listing him
as a potential influence for the character of James Bond.
Pat you have any problems with that, I'll fight anybody.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
No, I have zero problems with that. I have zero
problems with that because James Bond is fiction and it's
all about the stories, right.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Chris FH. Lee is a real life badass, and I
won't hear anybody say anything else about it. So he
gets an acting in nineteen forty eight. He's doing like
really hard roles, like real work meet kind of stuff
for almost ten years, just little bit parts here and
there wherever he can get it, and he finally gets
his big break in nineteen fifty seven. He got paid
three hundred dollars to play Frankenstein's Monster for Hammer Films.
(13:15):
And I don't know if you're familiar with Hammer Films,
but they were just like they did all of like
the schlocky like Wolfman, Dracula, Mummy movies in like you know,
the fifties, sixties and seventies.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, stuff that shows up on that used to show
up on Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon on whatever TV
station that was when I was growing.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Up, right exactly, Yeah, like they're Elvira movies. Yeah, And
that's exactly what he was in. And he played Frankenstein's Monster,
which he got the role because he was six five
and nobody in Hollywood is even close to as tall
as him, so he looked really good on camera next
to some of these shorter actor guys. So the year
after Frankenstein, he gets Dracula, and then for the next
decade he plays Dracula in seven or eight of the
(13:55):
Horror of Dracula movies and everything kind of blows up
for him from there. So our Bond connection here is
in nineteen seventy four, Christopher Lee played Scaramanga and the
Man with the Golden Gun. It was the ninth Bond
movie and it was based off of the twelfth Bond novel,
which was published after Ian Fleming's death, so Lee was
basically an inspiration for James Bond. Then he went on
(14:18):
to play a Bond villain in a movie which I
think is awesome. The Man with the Golden Gun is
not a great Bond movie, but Christopher Lee lives on
an island surrounded by hot bikini babes and tattoo from
Fantasy Island, and he drives a car that turns into
an airplane. He wants to take over the world using
renewable solar energy, the details of which are not very
(14:40):
well explained over the course of the story, but that's
what he wants to do, and he carries the gun
that is the best gun in the Golden Eyed Nintendo
sixty four game. I feel like if Fleming had been around.
Flemming died ten years before this movie came out, but
if he had been around, he'd probably have approved of
all of this.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
That sounds like Ian Fleming would have been totally into that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
He's been an Academy Award winning movies and he's been
a nel Viram movies right, and the stuff you see
a Channel eight hundred at four o'clock in the morning.
He's almost always a villain, and he's been in something
like three hundred pieces of media, movies, TV shows and things,
so he's probably died on camera more than anybody in history.
And I mean the roles that he's had a are awesome. Right.
(15:18):
He was the he was the Count de Rochefort in
several Three Musketeers movies. He was Dracula, was the Mummy,
it was Willy Wonka's dad who was a Nipper of China,
the Grim Reaper, Lucifer Ramsey's and Vladim Paler. He was
in a Tale of Two Cities and played in a
hamlet alongside Laurence Olivier. But he was also in a
soft core porn based on the works of the Marquis
de Sade. And he was in a movie called Howling
(15:39):
to were Wolf Bitch with the dude from Space Mutiny.
He's all over the place.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I just can I just interrupt and say I have
a lot of questions. I'm not going to ask them,
but I have a lot of questions.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Howling to Werewolf Bitch is not streaming on Netflix. If
that's what you're wondering, I tried.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Then you're performing a public service, you know, watching or
trying to check down movies, so the rest of us
don't have.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
To write it off as a business expense on my taxes.
IMDb lists him as the center of the Hollywood universe
because he's been in so many movies. You can basically
six degrees of Kevin Bacon him in like three steps
instead of six pretty much anybody in the world. I
haven't done it for myself yet, but I should.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You should.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He also belongs to three stuntman unions because he does
all of his own stunts. He got his face busted
once by being thrown through an actual plate glass window
that wasn't a breakaway one by accident. There was like
a props problem and he went right through it. He
died and fell into an open grave in one of
the Dracula movies and hurt himself. And then he had
an off camera drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn. He
(16:41):
got his hand slashed, which is just that's a whole
story that I would love to hear sometime.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I would too, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Christopher Lee has appeared in more on screen sword duels
than any other actor ever. According to the Guinness Book,
he was a very good fencer. He fenced in college
and he was apparently really very successful at like competitive fencing.
And he's been in everything from like pirate duels to
like musketeer fights to taken on a couple guys half
(17:08):
his age with lightsabers on whatever they called the Star
Destroyers in the prequel movies. He's also a classically trained singer,
and later in life, in his eighties, he decided he
wanted to start recording symphonic metal albums, and so when
he was eighty eight and then again when he was
ninety one, he released hardcore symphonic power metal concept albums
(17:31):
about the life of Charlemagne. He's played live shows with
Rhapsody and Mani War. On his ninetieth birthday, he released
a single called let Legend Mark Me as the King,
with music written by the guys from Judas Priest. And
he's got he got like a golden hammer from like
the you know the metal people who like give out
awards for heavy metal albums. It's not bad. I've listened
(17:53):
to it and I can recommend it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Oh cool, cool, And didn't what you're saying earlier, wasn't
he descended from Charlemagne on through some ancestor or something.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, on his mom's side, So he was for real.
I mean, one of the funny things about genealogy is
that if you trace anybody back far enough, they're descended
by Charlemagne or William the Conquer or something like that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh yeah, yeah, or Genghis Khan or something.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, okay, okay. He's also an expert golfer. He was
the only actor to be accepted into the Honorable Company
of Edinburgh Golfers, which is the most prestigious golf country
club in the world. And he married a Danish supermodel
and stayed married to her for over forty years. He
was knighted. He was a Commander of the Order of
Saint John's of Jerusalem, Knight Bachelor of the Order of
the British Empire, once got a medal from Mikhail Gorbachev.
(18:38):
And then he died in twenty fifteen at the age
of ninety three. And just a crazy life.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And the truth of the matter is, you know, okay,
maybe these stories, some of these stories were embellished, but
even if we set aside the stories that some people
are questioning, the stuff that's solid is still so badass.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, exactly exactly right, Oh, he talked to the SOE
on the radio and he didn't actually like walk into
the office, like get out of here, man, get out
of here with this.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And also there's also something about being so there's also
about being a badass kind of person where you have
this sort of aura where people are prone to believe
stories about you even if you know who knows that's true.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Right, And there's definitely an argument to be made here
that let's go back to the beginning, let's go back
to that Peter Jackson story of like that's not the
sound man makes when he's stabbed in the back, right,
I would make a solid argument that if Christopher Lee
had never stabbed a person in the back, had never
seen a person be stabbed in the back, we know
that this is probably not true, because we do have
accounts of him that are like verified of him being
(19:40):
in combat on the front line. The airfields he was
working at were bombed, friends of his were being blown up.
Like I don't want to I mean, we know that
that is true, right, We just don't know the full
details of every little thing that he did during the
course of the war, but like we know he was
in combat. We know he was friends with people who
were killed in action, like people at his airfield, Like
he was wounded a couple times in battle. But let's
(20:02):
take let's say hypothetically, this guy's never killed anybody, never
been around a real dead body his entire life. And
he says that to Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson's like, oh shit,
like that was scary. I'm not gonna talk to this
guy anymore. I'm gonna believe this forever. That's also badass.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yes, agreed, agreed, agreed.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And I'm also wondering maybe some of some of his
records are just still classified. You know, who knows.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I mean, that's what he always said, right, That's what
he has always said, is like I'm not only supposed
to talk about it, And I mean, like, look, there's
a lot of guys who served in the military. They
don't want to talk about it, right exactly. Yeah, yeah,
you can't make them. And whatever the truth is, it
died with him, and I'm okay leaving it that way.
So what I want to leave all of this with, Like,
(20:47):
I know, I've been kind of rambling on about this.
I just discovered these articles like earlier this week when
I was like brushing up on the Christopher Lee research
and I'm still kind of hot under the color about him.
I'll leave it at this. When Christopher Lee was doing
interviews for like various like press things or whatever, interviewers
would you know, would sometimes ask him about his military service.
(21:09):
They'd say like, oh, you know what happened in the war.
Didn't you fight in World War Two and you fight
the Nazis and you were in Italy and he was
at Monte Casino, we know that for sure. And they're like, oh, well,
what happened? What was your service like? And he would go, well,
can you keep a secret? And the reporter would lean
in really close like they were going to get a
good scoop and be like, yeah, yeah, I can keep
a secret, and Christopher Lee would say so can.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I Welcome back from the break. We've been spending a
lot of time talking about James Bond and influences on
James Bond. And you know, if you look at that
(21:51):
Wikipedia entry of influences on James Bond, they're all men.
I mean, they're all bad asses, to be sure, but
they're all men. What about women in the James Bond
universe because you've got Bond girls, right and Bond girls. Okay,
so they're potentially badass, but the way they're presented is like, yeah,
they're never the main stories.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Sometimes it's not great. Yeah, there's some pretty solid ones.
I mean, my favorite, if we're going to go women
in the Bond franchise is probably Dame Judy Dench as
m She's awesome consistently throughout everyone. She's like, maybe my
favorite character in the whole series.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Agreed, Agreed.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
So there are some good ones, yeah, and there's some
pretty rough ones also.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah. Yeah, So we've got fictional special agents and fictional
sidekicks and whatever, and we've got Judy Dench. You know,
at the same time that Ian Fleming was working in
the so you also have plenty of historical real life
women working in the SOE, some of them at dust jobs,
some of them out in the field doing incredibly badass things.
(22:53):
You know. Winston Churchill, what did he call it, the
Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare? And then I mean you could
totally imagine someone like Virginia Hall coming along and saying,
I am no gentleman.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
That's really good. Yous dropped a Lord of the rings
reference in there's tying all together. It's so good.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
So who is this Virginia Hall? Well, she's she's she's American,
but she winds up working for the SOE. She was
incredibly well educated in languages, economics. She went to all
sorts of fancy institutions of higher learning, you know, Radcliffe
and Barnard's women's equivalent of Harvard and Columbia, especially in
(23:31):
those days George Washington University. She continued her education in France, Germany, Austria.
She was really interested in foreign service, international relations. In
nineteen thirty one she got a job as a consular
service clerk in Poland. And that's you know, she's a clerk,
so he has a desk job, paperwork. She wanted to
(23:53):
be a for real diplomat, like an actual diplomat. And
was that a realistic option for an American woman in
the nineteen thirties even one is qualified as Virginia Hall. Well,
you know it wasn't impossible, but realistically, very few women
got hired into got selected to be the actual diplomats.
(24:17):
But she persisted. She kept working in the consular service,
she kept living her best life. At one point. She
was stationed in Izmir, Turkey, and she went hunting, but
there was a hunting accident and she wound up taking
a shotgun shell to her leg and it didn't go well.
She got gangreen, so she needed to have it amputated,
(24:39):
and she got a prosthetic leg. And what would you do, Ben,
if you had a prosthetic leg.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Well, shotgun shell to the leg is like, hopefully not
a thing I'm going to ever have to deal with.
That's like a little outside my realm of bad attitude.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I admit that was an unfair question, Ben, What does
she do with it? She names it like you do.
She names it Cuthbert.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
So this is Cuthbert must be eliminated, yes, being ordered
to literally shoot herself in the foot. So she's hiking
the Pyrenees in the snow and the rain and the
you know, the freezing cold, with the Nazis hunting her,
and she's got a wooden leg.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yes, yes, indeed, because why why should anything be easy?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Women are just held to a higher standard sometimes.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Exactly exactly, yeah, So how does she get from a
hunting accident in Turkey to the Pyrenees. There are a
few years, so let me walk you through those. The
intervening years, she keeps working as a consular clerk. She's
posted to Venice and Italy, she's posted to talent in Estonia,
so she gets to see a lot of Europe, and she,
(25:41):
you know, every time she gets a chance, she applies
for an actual diplomatic job. But in nineteen thirty seven
she's turned down, like officially turned down because apparently there
is this rule on the books and it's, you know,
by our standards, it's incredibly discriminatory. There's a rule on
the books against hiring people with disability for diplomatic positions.
(26:02):
And I mean, honestly, I don't blame her. She's just
got fed up with being a clerk and she resigned
in nineteen thirty nine. But this is Virginia Hall. She
doesn't stay still for very long. This is nineteen forties,
rolling around, and she became an ambulance driver for the
French army. So France was defeated, and so we're now
(26:22):
in VG France and you know, what are you going
to do? You know, you're a former ambulance driver. Virginia
Hall manages to get connected with the British SOE and
she's actually the second women agent sent by the SOOE
to France, and she's the first SOOE woman agent to
be their long term. She's got a great cover story.
(26:44):
She is, or claims to be or poses as a
reporter for the New York Post, and it's great cover
story because she can go around asking people questions.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
She's American, and the America is still neutral, America is
still not part of the war yet, So that's a
great cover because you know, you can't really go attacking
an American journalist when you're Germany and you don't want
America to get involved with the war.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So she goes around as a newspaper reporter. And she's
really good at changing her costume, changing her clothing, changing
her makeup, how she presents herself. And so sometimes she's
a newspaper reporter and like sheic provision couture, and sometimes
she morphs herself into a nondescript person you wouldn't give
a second glance to if you passed on the street.
(27:27):
And she in addition to collecting information, she also has
to do all sorts of things. She has to figure
out the job that she has to do, so she's
setting up contacts, you know, putting the right people in
contact with the right other people. She has to figure
out who to bribe, how much to bribe them, how
to bribe them, where, and how to hide. She's also
you know, she's interacting with or she's in touch with
(27:48):
agents who are on the run. So she's providing support,
you know, sometimes material, sometimes moral support. She oversees the
distribution of wireless sense, so the communication equipment, the radio
equipment that these agents used to report back to London.
And you know these are not little dinky little cell
phones that you can hold, that you lose in the
bottom of your purse. This is you know, these are
(28:10):
radio like bulky radio.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Equipment, right, nineteen forties, nineteen thirty nine radio equipment. Right,
she's got a nineteen thirty nine wooden leg and a
nineteen thirty nine radio equipment. It's like, you know, there's
no computers. This is like, this is a big thing. Right.
You said it was a briefcase or a suitcase or
something that somebody. Yeah, love radio.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, and recruits French operatives. I'm sure she's using her
language skills to great effect. Here fun side note. One
of the operatives she recruits is a woman named Germen
Guerin who is a madam of a brothel in Paris,
and Madame Geren set up safe houses and passed along
info that her employees, which is to say, the sex
(28:51):
workers picked up from their German clients.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
That is a good intelligence contact to have.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Simply managing all of these tasks and all of these logistics,
just simply the logistical side of it is pretty badass.
But then also remember this is you know, this is
nineteen forty nineteen forty one, France, and for Gina Hall
knew that, Okay. In addition to all the logistical stuff,
there's the threat of being captured by the Gestapo, being
tortured by the Gestapo, being killed by the Gestapo, and
(29:19):
also not blowing her cover. So this is you know,
there's this there's this threat, there's this real threat to
her in the mission.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's the Gestapo, right, It's what
everybody like accuses other agencies of being, right, it's the
worst one. Yeah, and she knows what they do, right,
She's probably got like contacts or colleagues or other people
that are like going through you know, torture slash, death slash,
who knows what else by these agents. So it's it's
(29:48):
not like she doesn't isn't imminently aware of the danger
at all times and knows exactly what is going to
happen if she gets.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Caught, exactly exactly, and she just keeps going. At some
point they move her to thet Noi region, which is
more in the southern part of France. A big part
of her job is to make radio broadcasts back to
the SOE in London. But these transmissions could be traced
by the Gestapo, and so you have to imagine this
(30:17):
is Virginia Hall. She's lugging around her briefcase or whatever
with this clunky radio equipment. And she also she has
to mix it up, so you know, maybe one time
she's broadcasting from like some attic somewhere, but then she
wants to, you know, she has to pack up and
move someplace else. Maybe she's broadcasting from a safe house
(30:39):
some other time. Maybe sometimes she's broadcasting from like, you know,
some old abandoned barn.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
This isn't like this is radio transmission. This isn't being
beamed to a satellite over a secure network, right, This
is like somebody standing there with the piece of handheld
equipment can pick up your radio broadcast to trace it
to the barn that you're at. And so you make
the radio broadcast and you move. And these broadcasts are
like drop weapons here, you know, drop paratroopers here, drop
(31:11):
secret agents here, to move on to their next thing.
The rendezvous point is this, the code name is this?
The whatever is this? And then she's got to get
out of there because as soon as she starts that transmission,
German agents are trying to triangulate her position and confinder yees.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
It's like the clock is ticking as soon as she
hits the on switch. And you know, if you want
a visual for this, there's a painting from two thousand
and six by the artist Jeffrey Bass. And I love
this painting because you know, it's an artistic representation. But
the scene is, you know, we're imagining Virginia Hall this
kind of honestly prim looking, you know, nineteen Forti's white
(31:50):
American woman and she's got this equipment, this kind of
clunky equipment set up in a barn. It's in the
room of a barn. There's straw on the floor and
this is okay, this is so not a cell phone,
how do you power this equipment? Well, someone else in
the SOE had devised this way to use an old
(32:10):
bicycle to crank the power to do the radio equipment.
And in this painting she's actually got a guy helping her.
So there's this guy in the background managing the bike
crank like as a generator or something. And then she's
sitting there looking really intently doing her broadcast and making
sure she gets the message absolutely right, and probably part
(32:31):
of her brain is also thinking, Okay, okay, how fast
can I do this? And you know, where's my next
safe house or attic or barn.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
To go to.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's clearly a barn, you know, like wooden walls. It's
kind of dark, straw on the floor, there is some
sunlight coming through a window, and sitting on the window,
Soom without a care in the world, is a cat.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I mean, honestly, like this setup kind of sounds like
exactly what I do when I record my half of
the podcast. So they're just sitting there with somebody hand
cranking like a wheel and some cat that doesn't care
about anything, and suitcase full of equipment.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
So anyway, cat or no cat. Virginia Hall, Agent Hall
we're now in nineteen forty two and she's in the
city of Lyon. Okay, there are so many like side
stories we could go into here. Long story short, She's
feeling way too much pressure from the GESTAPA, like they're
really stepping up things. They're kind of onto her, the
kind of starting to infiltrate her network of contacts in
(33:31):
ways that she's very not okay with. And there is
this guy who was a priest but claimed to be
part of the Gloria Network, which is like this resistance network.
He claimed to have lots of good intel. Virginia Hall
had her doubts, but she went ahead with like interacting
with this guy anyway. This guy his name was Robert A. Leash.
(33:52):
He was even able to send fake messages back to London.
Very not good. So this is all of the danger
that Virginia Hall has been in. It's now doubled, tripled.
She needs to get the hell out of Lyons.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
So this guy was an enemy agent.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Uh huh, yep, yep, yep, yep. He is an enemy agent. Danger. Danger.
So this is November of nineteen forty two. And I
mentioned this because when you know it's nineteen forty two,
this is where we're at in the World War. And
also it's November, so it's not like mild spring weather.
What she decides to do is something that some other
(34:29):
secret agents also do, is go to the Pyrenees. This
is you know, this is the Pyrenees. These are the
this is the three thousand foot high mountain range that
separates France from Spain, and Spain, relatively speaking, is safer
than France for her at this moment.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Right, they're neutral in the war, but they're friendly to
Germany because they have a fascist dictator.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah yeah, so yeah, So she wants to go to
Spain get a breather, and she wants to go across
the Pyrenees. So there's a guide who there's a guide
who has helped other agents. Okay, like there's kind of
a system in place, but it's a system that's kind
(35:11):
of flawed. This particular guide doesn't really like the idea
of guiding a woman spy through the Pyrenees. He's got
this a little bit of a hang up about that.
But okay, sure, fine, So Virginia has to put up
with prejudice from this guy. And it's November in the mountains,
(35:32):
so it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be icy, it's
gonna be rainy, there might be snow, and you know
there are paths through the mountain, but you don't know
how safe they're going to be. And remember she's doing
this with a wooden leg. Now, mind you, she's had
several years of excellent practice with the wooden leg, but
still it's with a wooden leg and lugging her radio
(35:52):
equipment with her. So she's leaping through the mountains and
on the other side of Spain, and well, basically, once
she gets to the other side of the mountains, she
gets thrown in a Spanish prison because, like you said, Ben,
it's run by a bunch of fashions. She festers in
(36:16):
the prison for a while and she manages to get out.
She had the option of staying in Spain and doing
kind of relatively safe work once she got out of
that Spanish prison.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
And I think it's worth saying that she got out
of the prison. Am I understanding of this is that
they didn't know who they had.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, she could keep secrets, she could keep secrets. Yeah,
and the Germans intel wasn't completely one hundred percent accurate anyway,
they thought she was Canadian, and this is so, this
is Virginia Hall. Is she going to cool her heels
doing something relatively safe in Spain? Nope, Nope. She goes
right back to France and she's she goes back to
(36:54):
the same general region her alias or her persona. This
time around, she was supposed to pose as a much older,
heavier countrywoman, like a you know, like a farmer's wife
or farmer's widow type person. She dyed her hair white,
and she you know, probably changed her posture and everything.
(37:17):
So basically her like her cover story was, yeah, she's
taking care of cows in the French countryside, and she
was able to, you know, again just do her thing.
She coordinated parachute drops and you know, among the people,
among the agents she was helping come in and the
(37:38):
parachute drop was Lieutenant Paul Goyol, who is French American
and we'll hear about him just a little bit later.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
And she's trying to throw off the Germans for D Day.
The stuff that I was talking about with Christopher Lee
and the SOE was that, like so much of D
Day depended on misdirection of where the landings were going
to be and when they were coming. When they happened,
the French needed to be ready to fight, right, The
French have to know when and where the Allies are coming,
(38:07):
and the Germans can't know. And so you have that
double agent priest, right, you have people trying to mess
with you, and like this is kind of very high
tension moment here of like the work she's doing is
is incredibly vital to the survival of all of those
people landing on Omaha Beach.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Right exactly. Yeah, Yeah, the stakes are very very high
and it works. It works. Dday was successful.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Spoiler alert, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Alert, Yeah, spoiler alert.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
They worked.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Do they worked? Yeah? Do they work? And you know,
World War two comes to a close. I realize I'm
skipping over a lot here. So what does what does
Agent Hall do? What does our Virginia do? Well, she
wants to continue working. So at this point it's more
about working for the CIA rather than the SOE.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Well, the SAE kind of broke off into like the
SOE eventually became basically six and the CIA because there
were a lot of Americans coming in in the later
years to SOE and there was this combined arms thing,
and yeah, like a lot of like. I mean, she
was a og CIA right totally.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
And you know, this is agent Virginia Hall. She's coming
in with all of this experience, all of these skills,
all this know how, and she was hoping to get
more fieldwork. She loved being in the field. She was
hoping for promotions, but she kept getting passed over. And
this is not the first time we've heard that. So
she gets stuck in a desk job. She's analyzing the
(39:37):
intel that other agents bring in, you know. Yeah, and
in the nineteen fifties she does get some more responsibilities.
She was in charge of ultra secret paramilitary operations in
France to set up a model that other European countries
could follow if they wanted to set up resistance in
case there was ever an invasion by the Soviets, because
(39:58):
we're now in the Cold War period, and she was
to the people who knew her and actually worked with her,
she was incredibly valued member of the CIA. I mean,
she's Virginia frickin' Hall. But you know, this is it's
a job, and in any job that sooner or later
you're going to have performance reports. And she got a
poor rating. She got a poor performance rating, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yeah, fantastic, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And this was by some higher up who had never
even observed her work. And I mean, honestly, that's that's
an HR violation if I ever heard one. But the
colleagues who actually knew her work and actually worked with her,
they thought she was great. And they they said that
she was clearly being sidelined because she was so bad
ass that clearly other people were feeling threatened by her.
So she you know, she worked at the CIA, you know,
(40:46):
whatever capacity she was able to until her meditatory retirement.
And so do you remember that Lieutenant Paul Gollot who
was in one of those parachute trumps.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah, one of the French resistance guys. He was French American.
He was American agent who parachuted in to help coordinate
the resistance.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Reader she married him and they retired to they retired
to Maryland. She was from Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
How is this not a James Vond thing? Right? I know, right,
you ended up getting together with the parachuting in like
secret agent while you're doing your own secret agent stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah. I guess we can call him a hall boy,
maybe a hall boy.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Instead of a Bond girl. I doesn't have quite the
ring to it.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Bye.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Yeah, sure, she did receive various medals and recognitions. I'm
not going to list her entire resume. President Harry S. Truman.
Before Virginia Hall retired, President Truman wanted to give her
public recognition for everything that she had achieved, because I mean,
obviously this stuff is so cool it deserves recognition. But
(41:51):
she wasn't ready to blow her cover yet, so she said, no,
I do not want public recognition, and Truman just gave
her her medal in a little private, little ceremony, was
just Virginia Hall and her mom. Virginia Hall at one
point said, yeah, okay, not bad for a girl from Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of what we've been talking about, right,
Like she was, you know, badass deep cover secret agent
escaping over the Pyrenees and wounded in battle and also
hooking up with other secret agents. Like this is totally
a James Bond story if you like, just switched her
in her husband's genders, like he would be on that
(42:29):
list for James Bond influences on that Wikipedia page. Yeah,
I love it. I think it's an awesome story. I mean,
it doesn't get any better than.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
That, right, Yeah, that's Virginia Hall and and you know
she now is finally getting some of the recognition that
she deserves now that she's no longer No, she's no
longer with us, So I suppose she's no longer worried
about blowing her cover.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah, I mean, if that's why we haven't heard of her, Like,
I'm totally fine if she doesn't want and she doesn't
want anybody to know. Right, there's always those badasses who
just do badass shit and then fade off into the
darkness and nobody knows what happened to them and they
just disappear forever. Like there is definitely something cool to
that as well.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Well that is our show. I think we were on
an episode Double O seven. We talked about some Double
O seven influences, We talked about some badass Sooe World
War two stuff, and we talked about some film stuff
while we're at it. So yeah, I hope you guys
enjoyed it, so thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
See you next time.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson,
and my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Writing by me
and Pat, story editing by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs, and
Allie Lehmer. Mixing and music and sound design by Jude Brewer.
Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio.
(43:47):
Badass of the Week is based off my website Badass
ofdek dot com, where you can read all sorts of
stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out
with questions or ideas, hit me up at Badass podcast
at Badass of the Week dot com. If you like
the podcast, please please subscribe, follow, listen, tell your friends,
tell your enemies, and we'll be back next week with
another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(44:08):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast content.
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It's November eighth, nineteen forty two, and American spy Virginia
Hall is on the run from the Nazis. Her plan
is to escape to Spain, but between Virginia and Salvation
lies a thirty mile trek through the Pyrene of mountains.
On foot in the snow and with a suitcase full
(00:28):
of secret radio equipment. She radios her handlers that she
hopes Cuthbert won't cause any problems for her. They respond
with just five words. If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Hello, and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I'm joined as always by
my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how are you.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Doing doing okay? Doing okay? Bopping along? How are you?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm doing good. I'm doing good. We've been doing the
show for a while now and we are on episode seven,
and the way we internally number these, it's episode zero
zero seven, So we thought maybe this would be a
good time to talk about some spy stuff. Pat, have
you seen any of the James Bond movies? Have you
heard of this guy? James Bond.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Bond, James Bond, Yeah, I think I've heard of him.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Are you a fan of the movies at all?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
They're fun, They're fun, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
They certainly can be. Some of them are very not fun,
but some of them are pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah. Some of them age better than others.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Oh, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
You know, I'm having a little bit of dejau vou
because starting about two years ago, I was on a
show called Podcasters Assemble where we watched every single James
Bond movie in order and recorded like our takes on them,
and so I saw them all. Within the last two
I've watched every James Bond movie we had.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
The writing got a lot more sophisticated, you can.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Say, absolutely absolutely. Bond's also fun to watch because they
have this thing of like, whatever the most popular movie
was a year or two ago, Bond does the next thing.
So Moonraker was like two years after Star Wars, you know,
and then Casino Royal was a couple of years after
Jason Bourne, and I was like, Okay, whatever action movies
are doing, we're just gonna kind of do that and
put James Bond in it and people will come see it.
(02:26):
So I do have an appreciation for how much this
character in these movies have changed so dramatically and so
drastically in the I mean, what forty years they've been
doing it now fifty years.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
So James Bond was created by Ian Fleming, people probably
already know, and he had served in the Special Operations
Executive during World War Two. So he was like a
real life spy during World War Two working against the Nazis.
And we're going to talk about a couple of people
today that probably helped influence his stories.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, and given that Fleming was working on the front
lines with the SOE, you know, one of the world's
first modern intelligence services, I bet he saw all sorts
of things and he heard about even more, and he
probably got a lot of material that way, not just
for plots and stories, but also characters, like the psychology,
(03:21):
the personality, what is it like to be someone actually
doing these things. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on people
Fleming met who were It's just like a list of
people who probably influenced the fictional James Bond character in
some way.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah. Absolutely, When everybody he's just writing about his job,
I guess right, then it becomes James Bond like you do. Yeah, yeah,
And there's some big names on there, people like Fitzroy
MacLean and Forrest Thomas, that I've written about on the
website or that we will talk about in the future
on the show. But you know, we were talking about
movies and we were talking about influences for James Bond.
So I'm going to talk about a guy who I
(04:00):
might have been an influence for James Bond and also
played a villain in a James Bond movie. I'm going
to talk about Christopher Lee.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Wait, Christopher Lee, do you mean the actor who played
well besides the Bond villain, who was it in Lord
of the Ring, Saruman, the bad guy, one of the
bad guys, and Count Dooku.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
It's the same guy. He was a World War Two
British soldier fighting on the front lines against the Germans.
And there's a great one of my favorite stories with
him is there's this great piece on the behind the
scenes for Return of the King. Saurmon gets stabbed in
the back by Grima warm Tongue and Christopher Lee makes
this noise and Peter Jackson's like, no, no, no, cut.
(04:38):
He's talking about it he's like, I cut And then
I went up to chrispher Lee and I was like, no,
don't when you get stabbed, don't do that, just be
like go like wo. And Christopher Lee looks at him
and he says, that's not the sound a man makes
when he's stabbed in the back. And Peter Jackson was
like and I could feel, I really felt like he
knew that that was true, and I didn't correct him again,
so I just kept the original audio in there. It's fine,
(05:02):
it's probably authentic. Kind of leave it at that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Okay, So how does Christopher Lee get to the point
where he can say that with such authority and clearly
he I mean, either he knew what he was talking about,
or he's such a good actor that he convinced us
that he knew what he was talking about. So yeah,
so yeah, tell us about Christopher Lee.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Let's do it. Probably best known for playing Darth turannas Sourman,
the White Dracula and basically everybody from like fu Manchuw
to Gregory Rasputen to like Weirdly, he was in like
the biopic on the guy who founded Pakistan. He's six
(05:43):
foot five, he's a world champion fencer. He speaks six languages,
He does all of his own stunts, and he, according
to Guinness, has been in more on screen sword fights
than any other actor in history. He also served for
five years defending democracy against the Nazis. No big deal,
like you do. He was a British command and then
in twenty thirteen, at the age of ninety one, he wrote,
(06:05):
performed on, and released his second progressive, symphonic power metal
EP about the life of Charlemagne. Put it up for
free on his MySpace page because why not. So.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
In addition to being a badass actor and fencer and
World War two guy, he's also a history book.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
He's a classicist, pat He has a good playing classics,
just like you all the classics preadfressers can be badass.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
He's quite possibly the most prolific actor in motion picture history.
He was born in nineteen twenty two. His mother was
an Italian countess who is actually descended from Charlemagne, and
she was so important that they let her wear the
Royal Seal of Frideric Barbarossa. He also has an ancestor
on that side through Italy. He was the Secretary of
State for the Pope who refused to attend the coronation
(06:58):
of Napoleon, and that guy's buried in a tomb next
to Raphael, not the Ninja Turtle, but the Painter. Lee's
father is a distant relative of Roberty Lee and was
a decorated war hero who was a colonel fighting in
the Royal Rifle Corps during World War One and the
Boer War. So, like I said, he went and he
got his classics degree. He was on the fencing team.
(07:20):
He also played ice hockey and rugby. He's a big dude.
He's six ' five, right, He's big and strong, and
that's why you know he's so physically imposing in his
film roles. He got this job working as an office
clerk that paid him one pound a week, which seems
like it's probably not very much money.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, Was it like an internship then or just didn't
pay Well, it's just.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
A desk job, that's what desk job's paid in nineteen
thirty eight, I guess, okay. So in nineteen thirty nine,
the Winter War begins where Russia invades Finland and Christopher
Lee and his friends they're only about eighteen years old
at this point, but they try to sign up and
enlisted to the Finnish Army, and he may have actually
gone over there and he was never deployed into but
he did attempt to join the Finnish Army in order
(08:03):
to help them fight the Russians in nineteen thirty nine,
which is pretty cool. Whatever his plans were for fighting
the Russians never really came to be because in nineteen
forty before he was able to see any action in Finland,
Germany and England went to war and he had a
much more pressing duty that he had to fulfill to
king and country. So Christopher Lee joins the Royal Air
(08:24):
Force in nineteen forty. He goes British Home Guard first
during the Battle of Britain, and then he joins the RAF.
He originally wanted to be a pilot, but he had
some kind of problems with his optic nerves, so he
basically was relocated to the intelligence service of the Royal
Air Force. So Christopher Lee is an officer in the
(08:44):
Royal Air Force doing mostly intelligence work. So he's forwardly
deployed into airfields. I think first he's in South Africa
and then he's going through North Africa. Sicily Italy and
probably the Balkans as well, and a lot of what
he's doing is helping coordinate the RAF, working with ground units,
especially like ground units behind enemy lines. And Christopher Lee,
(09:07):
like famously never really liked to talk too much about
his military service, didn't talk about it, didn't really say
much about it, has definitely said that he worked a
little bit with some of the British Special Forces as well,
and so Special Operations Executive, which was behind enemy lines
like counter intelligence, espionage, sabotage, you know. SOEU was part
(09:29):
of the group that sent Eastern European partisans and rebels
into Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements
up to the Western edd Eastern fronts. It was called
the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and they did things like
destroy the German heavy water plant in Norway when they
were getting close to making a nuclear weapon, and they
did things like helped the Yugoslavian partisans fight against the Germans.
(09:52):
They helped the Poles and the French, and they helped
throw off the plans for D Day just deceive the
Germans into thinking that the landing was going to be
either in Italy or in Calais instead of at Normandy.
He's also said that he worked with the Long Range
Desert Patrol, which is really badass stuff. So these guys,
they are the pre version of the sas. Their unit
(10:13):
eventually became the Special Air Service, which is like the
Special Forces of the British military. But what these guys
would do is they would attack German airfields in Northern
Africa behind enemy lines. So they would get like a
jeep and they would mount machine guns on the jeep
and they would drive it around. It's like five British
(10:34):
guys on a jeep that has airplane machine guns mounted
on the front of it, and they're driving around German
airfields machine gunning all the German aircraft on the ground.
They set off bombs and then they'd drive away and
there's just explosions and wreckage in their wake. And it's
so cool, and it's so what they did was so amazing.
Christopherlely is working with these units. He never really talked
(10:56):
about in what capacity he was working with these units.
I don't know, he didn't talk about it in the
In the year or so after he died, a few
news articles came out saying that Oh, you know, we
don't have any record of him being in the SAS
or the SOE like, maybe maybe he embellished some of
these stories. As an RAF liaison officer, he would have
(11:18):
coordinated the Royal Air Force working with these guys. That
is almost certainly possibility. But he's a special operations things,
you know, I don't know that this is one of
these history things that some of this stuff gets a
little fuzzy, right.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, it's hard to pin down. It's hard to it's
hard to document.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right right. Was he on a jeep machine gunning German airplanes? Maybe?
Maybe not. Maybe he was in a forward air base
coordinating the British planes that we're gonna fly and give
cover to whatever German airplanes took off from that airfield.
Maybe he was doing some completely different We don't know.
Nobody really knows, but he didn't want to talk about it.
(12:01):
So what we're talking about with this is influences for
James Bond. And it's worth mentioning that Ian Fleming, the
author of the James Bond novels, the creator of the
character was step cousins with Christopher Lee, so presumably some
of this probably rubbed off funny and Fleming a little bit.
Ian Fleming was in the SOE. Even if Christopher Lee
(12:23):
was completely one hundred percent lying about his entire involvement
in World War two whatsoever, which we know is not
true because we have service records for him that he
was part of it. But even if everything was bullshit,
he could have still told the inflaming some of these stories,
and some of it could have made its way into
the Bond stuff. So I am very comfortable listing him
as a potential influence for the character of James Bond.
Pat you have any problems with that, I'll fight anybody.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
No, I have zero problems with that. I have zero
problems with that because James Bond is fiction and it's
all about the stories, right.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Chris FH. Lee is a real life badass, and I
won't hear anybody say anything else about it. So he
gets an acting in nineteen forty eight. He's doing like
really hard roles, like real work meet kind of stuff
for almost ten years, just little bit parts here and
there wherever he can get it, and he finally gets
his big break in nineteen fifty seven. He got paid
three hundred dollars to play Frankenstein's Monster for Hammer Films.
(13:15):
And I don't know if you're familiar with Hammer Films,
but they were just like they did all of like
the schlocky like Wolfman, Dracula, Mummy movies in like you know,
the fifties, sixties and seventies.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, stuff that shows up on that used to show
up on Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon on whatever TV
station that was when I was growing.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Up, right exactly, Yeah, like they're Elvira movies. Yeah, And
that's exactly what he was in. And he played Frankenstein's Monster,
which he got the role because he was six five
and nobody in Hollywood is even close to as tall
as him, so he looked really good on camera next
to some of these shorter actor guys. So the year
after Frankenstein, he gets Dracula, and then for the next
decade he plays Dracula in seven or eight of the
(13:55):
Horror of Dracula movies and everything kind of blows up
for him from there. So our Bond connection here is
in nineteen seventy four, Christopher Lee played Scaramanga and the
Man with the Golden Gun. It was the ninth Bond
movie and it was based off of the twelfth Bond novel,
which was published after Ian Fleming's death, so Lee was
basically an inspiration for James Bond. Then he went on
(14:18):
to play a Bond villain in a movie which I
think is awesome. The Man with the Golden Gun is
not a great Bond movie, but Christopher Lee lives on
an island surrounded by hot bikini babes and tattoo from
Fantasy Island, and he drives a car that turns into
an airplane. He wants to take over the world using
renewable solar energy, the details of which are not very
(14:40):
well explained over the course of the story, but that's
what he wants to do, and he carries the gun
that is the best gun in the Golden Eyed Nintendo
sixty four game. I feel like if Fleming had been around.
Flemming died ten years before this movie came out, but
if he had been around, he'd probably have approved of
all of this.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
That sounds like Ian Fleming would have been totally into that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
He's been an Academy Award winning movies and he's been
a nel Viram movies right, and the stuff you see
a Channel eight hundred at four o'clock in the morning.
He's almost always a villain, and he's been in something
like three hundred pieces of media, movies, TV shows and things,
so he's probably died on camera more than anybody in history.
And I mean the roles that he's had a are awesome. Right.
(15:18):
He was the he was the Count de Rochefort in
several Three Musketeers movies. He was Dracula, was the Mummy,
it was Willy Wonka's dad who was a Nipper of China,
the Grim Reaper, Lucifer Ramsey's and Vladim Paler. He was
in a Tale of Two Cities and played in a
hamlet alongside Laurence Olivier. But he was also in a
soft core porn based on the works of the Marquis
de Sade. And he was in a movie called Howling
(15:39):
to were Wolf Bitch with the dude from Space Mutiny.
He's all over the place.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I just can I just interrupt and say I have
a lot of questions. I'm not going to ask them,
but I have a lot of questions.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Howling to Werewolf Bitch is not streaming on Netflix. If
that's what you're wondering, I tried.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Then you're performing a public service, you know, watching or
trying to check down movies, so the rest of us
don't have.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
To write it off as a business expense on my taxes.
IMDb lists him as the center of the Hollywood universe
because he's been in so many movies. You can basically
six degrees of Kevin Bacon him in like three steps
instead of six pretty much anybody in the world. I
haven't done it for myself yet, but I should.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You should.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He also belongs to three stuntman unions because he does
all of his own stunts. He got his face busted
once by being thrown through an actual plate glass window
that wasn't a breakaway one by accident. There was like
a props problem and he went right through it. He
died and fell into an open grave in one of
the Dracula movies and hurt himself. And then he had
an off camera drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn. He
(16:41):
got his hand slashed, which is just that's a whole
story that I would love to hear sometime.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I would too, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Christopher Lee has appeared in more on screen sword duels
than any other actor ever. According to the Guinness Book,
he was a very good fencer. He fenced in college
and he was apparently really very successful at like competitive fencing.
And he's been in everything from like pirate duels to
like musketeer fights to taken on a couple guys half
(17:08):
his age with lightsabers on whatever they called the Star
Destroyers in the prequel movies. He's also a classically trained singer,
and later in life, in his eighties, he decided he
wanted to start recording symphonic metal albums, and so when
he was eighty eight and then again when he was
ninety one, he released hardcore symphonic power metal concept albums
(17:31):
about the life of Charlemagne. He's played live shows with
Rhapsody and Mani War. On his ninetieth birthday, he released
a single called let Legend Mark Me as the King,
with music written by the guys from Judas Priest. And
he's got he got like a golden hammer from like
the you know the metal people who like give out
awards for heavy metal albums. It's not bad. I've listened
(17:53):
to it and I can recommend it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Oh cool, cool, And didn't what you're saying earlier, wasn't
he descended from Charlemagne on through some ancestor or something.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, on his mom's side, So he was for real.
I mean, one of the funny things about genealogy is
that if you trace anybody back far enough, they're descended
by Charlemagne or William the Conquer or something like that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh yeah, yeah, or Genghis Khan or something.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, okay, okay. He's also an expert golfer. He was
the only actor to be accepted into the Honorable Company
of Edinburgh Golfers, which is the most prestigious golf country
club in the world. And he married a Danish supermodel
and stayed married to her for over forty years. He
was knighted. He was a Commander of the Order of
Saint John's of Jerusalem, Knight Bachelor of the Order of
the British Empire, once got a medal from Mikhail Gorbachev.
(18:38):
And then he died in twenty fifteen at the age
of ninety three. And just a crazy life.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And the truth of the matter is, you know, okay,
maybe these stories, some of these stories were embellished, but
even if we set aside the stories that some people
are questioning, the stuff that's solid is still so badass.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, exactly exactly right, Oh, he talked to the SOE
on the radio and he didn't actually like walk into
the office, like get out of here, man, get out
of here with this.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And also there's also something about being so there's also
about being a badass kind of person where you have
this sort of aura where people are prone to believe
stories about you even if you know who knows that's true.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Right, And there's definitely an argument to be made here
that let's go back to the beginning, let's go back
to that Peter Jackson story of like that's not the
sound man makes when he's stabbed in the back, right,
I would make a solid argument that if Christopher Lee
had never stabbed a person in the back, had never
seen a person be stabbed in the back, we know
that this is probably not true, because we do have
accounts of him that are like verified of him being
(19:40):
in combat on the front line. The airfields he was
working at were bombed, friends of his were being blown up.
Like I don't want to I mean, we know that
that is true, right, We just don't know the full
details of every little thing that he did during the
course of the war, but like we know he was
in combat. We know he was friends with people who
were killed in action, like people at his airfield, Like
he was wounded a couple times in battle. But let's
(20:02):
take let's say hypothetically, this guy's never killed anybody, never
been around a real dead body his entire life. And
he says that to Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson's like, oh shit,
like that was scary. I'm not gonna talk to this
guy anymore. I'm gonna believe this forever. That's also badass.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yes, agreed, agreed, agreed.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And I'm also wondering maybe some of some of his
records are just still classified. You know, who knows.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I mean, that's what he always said, right, That's what
he has always said, is like I'm not only supposed
to talk about it, And I mean, like, look, there's
a lot of guys who served in the military. They
don't want to talk about it, right exactly. Yeah, yeah,
you can't make them. And whatever the truth is, it
died with him, and I'm okay leaving it that way.
So what I want to leave all of this with, Like,
(20:47):
I know, I've been kind of rambling on about this.
I just discovered these articles like earlier this week when
I was like brushing up on the Christopher Lee research
and I'm still kind of hot under the color about him.
I'll leave it at this. When Christopher Lee was doing
interviews for like various like press things or whatever, interviewers
would you know, would sometimes ask him about his military service.
(21:09):
They'd say like, oh, you know what happened in the war.
Didn't you fight in World War Two and you fight
the Nazis and you were in Italy and he was
at Monte Casino, we know that for sure. And they're like, oh, well,
what happened? What was your service like? And he would go, well,
can you keep a secret? And the reporter would lean
in really close like they were going to get a
good scoop and be like, yeah, yeah, I can keep
a secret, and Christopher Lee would say so can.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I Welcome back from the break. We've been spending a
lot of time talking about James Bond and influences on
James Bond. And you know, if you look at that
(21:51):
Wikipedia entry of influences on James Bond, they're all men.
I mean, they're all bad asses, to be sure, but
they're all men. What about women in the James Bond
universe because you've got Bond girls, right and Bond girls. Okay,
so they're potentially badass, but the way they're presented is like, yeah,
they're never the main stories.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Sometimes it's not great. Yeah, there's some pretty solid ones.
I mean, my favorite, if we're going to go women
in the Bond franchise is probably Dame Judy Dench as
m She's awesome consistently throughout everyone. She's like, maybe my
favorite character in the whole series.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Agreed, Agreed.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
So there are some good ones, yeah, and there's some
pretty rough ones also.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah. Yeah, So we've got fictional special agents and fictional
sidekicks and whatever, and we've got Judy Dench. You know,
at the same time that Ian Fleming was working in
the so you also have plenty of historical real life
women working in the SOE, some of them at dust jobs,
some of them out in the field doing incredibly badass things.
(22:53):
You know. Winston Churchill, what did he call it, the
Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare? And then I mean you could
totally imagine someone like Virginia Hall coming along and saying,
I am no gentleman.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
That's really good. Yous dropped a Lord of the rings
reference in there's tying all together. It's so good.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
So who is this Virginia Hall? Well, she's she's she's American,
but she winds up working for the SOE. She was
incredibly well educated in languages, economics. She went to all
sorts of fancy institutions of higher learning, you know, Radcliffe
and Barnard's women's equivalent of Harvard and Columbia, especially in
(23:31):
those days George Washington University. She continued her education in France, Germany, Austria.
She was really interested in foreign service, international relations. In
nineteen thirty one she got a job as a consular
service clerk in Poland. And that's you know, she's a clerk,
so he has a desk job, paperwork. She wanted to
(23:53):
be a for real diplomat, like an actual diplomat. And
was that a realistic option for an American woman in
the nineteen thirties even one is qualified as Virginia Hall. Well,
you know it wasn't impossible, but realistically, very few women
got hired into got selected to be the actual diplomats.
(24:17):
But she persisted. She kept working in the consular service,
she kept living her best life. At one point. She
was stationed in Izmir, Turkey, and she went hunting, but
there was a hunting accident and she wound up taking
a shotgun shell to her leg and it didn't go well.
She got gangreen, so she needed to have it amputated,
(24:39):
and she got a prosthetic leg. And what would you do, Ben,
if you had a prosthetic leg.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Well, shotgun shell to the leg is like, hopefully not
a thing I'm going to ever have to deal with.
That's like a little outside my realm of bad attitude.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I admit that was an unfair question, Ben, What does
she do with it? She names it like you do.
She names it Cuthbert.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
So this is Cuthbert must be eliminated, yes, being ordered
to literally shoot herself in the foot. So she's hiking
the Pyrenees in the snow and the rain and the
you know, the freezing cold, with the Nazis hunting her,
and she's got a wooden leg.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yes, yes, indeed, because why why should anything be easy?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Women are just held to a higher standard sometimes.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Exactly exactly, yeah, So how does she get from a
hunting accident in Turkey to the Pyrenees. There are a
few years, so let me walk you through those. The
intervening years, she keeps working as a consular clerk. She's
posted to Venice and Italy, she's posted to talent in Estonia,
so she gets to see a lot of Europe, and she,
(25:41):
you know, every time she gets a chance, she applies
for an actual diplomatic job. But in nineteen thirty seven
she's turned down, like officially turned down because apparently there
is this rule on the books and it's, you know,
by our standards, it's incredibly discriminatory. There's a rule on
the books against hiring people with disability for diplomatic positions.
(26:02):
And I mean, honestly, I don't blame her. She's just
got fed up with being a clerk and she resigned
in nineteen thirty nine. But this is Virginia Hall. She
doesn't stay still for very long. This is nineteen forties,
rolling around, and she became an ambulance driver for the
French army. So France was defeated, and so we're now
(26:22):
in VG France and you know, what are you going
to do? You know, you're a former ambulance driver. Virginia
Hall manages to get connected with the British SOE and
she's actually the second women agent sent by the SOOE
to France, and she's the first SOOE woman agent to
be their long term. She's got a great cover story.
(26:44):
She is, or claims to be or poses as a
reporter for the New York Post, and it's great cover
story because she can go around asking people questions.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
She's American, and the America is still neutral, America is
still not part of the war yet, So that's a
great cover because you know, you can't really go attacking
an American journalist when you're Germany and you don't want
America to get involved with the war.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So she goes around as a newspaper reporter. And she's
really good at changing her costume, changing her clothing, changing
her makeup, how she presents herself. And so sometimes she's
a newspaper reporter and like sheic provision couture, and sometimes
she morphs herself into a nondescript person you wouldn't give
a second glance to if you passed on the street.
(27:27):
And she in addition to collecting information, she also has
to do all sorts of things. She has to figure
out the job that she has to do, so she's
setting up contacts, you know, putting the right people in
contact with the right other people. She has to figure
out who to bribe, how much to bribe them, how
to bribe them, where, and how to hide. She's also
you know, she's interacting with or she's in touch with
(27:48):
agents who are on the run. So she's providing support,
you know, sometimes material, sometimes moral support. She oversees the
distribution of wireless sense, so the communication equipment, the radio
equipment that these agents used to report back to London.
And you know these are not little dinky little cell
phones that you can hold, that you lose in the
bottom of your purse. This is you know, these are
(28:10):
radio like bulky radio.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Equipment, right, nineteen forties, nineteen thirty nine radio equipment. Right,
she's got a nineteen thirty nine wooden leg and a
nineteen thirty nine radio equipment. It's like, you know, there's
no computers. This is like, this is a big thing. Right.
You said it was a briefcase or a suitcase or
something that somebody. Yeah, love radio.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, and recruits French operatives. I'm sure she's using her
language skills to great effect. Here fun side note. One
of the operatives she recruits is a woman named Germen
Guerin who is a madam of a brothel in Paris,
and Madame Geren set up safe houses and passed along
info that her employees, which is to say, the sex
(28:51):
workers picked up from their German clients.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
That is a good intelligence contact to have.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Simply managing all of these tasks and all of these logistics,
just simply the logistical side of it is pretty badass.
But then also remember this is you know, this is
nineteen forty nineteen forty one, France, and for Gina Hall
knew that, Okay. In addition to all the logistical stuff,
there's the threat of being captured by the Gestapo, being
tortured by the Gestapo, being killed by the Gestapo, and
(29:19):
also not blowing her cover. So this is you know,
there's this there's this threat, there's this real threat to
her in the mission.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's the Gestapo, right, It's what
everybody like accuses other agencies of being, right, it's the
worst one. Yeah, and she knows what they do, right,
She's probably got like contacts or colleagues or other people
that are like going through you know, torture slash, death slash,
who knows what else by these agents. So it's it's
(29:48):
not like she doesn't isn't imminently aware of the danger
at all times and knows exactly what is going to
happen if she gets.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Caught, exactly exactly, and she just keeps going. At some
point they move her to thet Noi region, which is
more in the southern part of France. A big part
of her job is to make radio broadcasts back to
the SOE in London. But these transmissions could be traced
by the Gestapo, and so you have to imagine this
(30:17):
is Virginia Hall. She's lugging around her briefcase or whatever
with this clunky radio equipment. And she also she has
to mix it up, so you know, maybe one time
she's broadcasting from like some attic somewhere, but then she
wants to, you know, she has to pack up and
move someplace else. Maybe she's broadcasting from a safe house
(30:39):
some other time. Maybe sometimes she's broadcasting from like, you know,
some old abandoned barn.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
This isn't like this is radio transmission. This isn't being
beamed to a satellite over a secure network, right, This
is like somebody standing there with the piece of handheld
equipment can pick up your radio broadcast to trace it
to the barn that you're at. And so you make
the radio broadcast and you move. And these broadcasts are
like drop weapons here, you know, drop paratroopers here, drop
(31:11):
secret agents here, to move on to their next thing.
The rendezvous point is this, the code name is this?
The whatever is this? And then she's got to get
out of there because as soon as she starts that transmission,
German agents are trying to triangulate her position and confinder yees.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
It's like the clock is ticking as soon as she
hits the on switch. And you know, if you want
a visual for this, there's a painting from two thousand
and six by the artist Jeffrey Bass. And I love
this painting because you know, it's an artistic representation. But
the scene is, you know, we're imagining Virginia Hall this
kind of honestly prim looking, you know, nineteen Forti's white
(31:50):
American woman and she's got this equipment, this kind of
clunky equipment set up in a barn. It's in the
room of a barn. There's straw on the floor and
this is okay, this is so not a cell phone,
how do you power this equipment? Well, someone else in
the SOE had devised this way to use an old
(32:10):
bicycle to crank the power to do the radio equipment.
And in this painting she's actually got a guy helping her.
So there's this guy in the background managing the bike
crank like as a generator or something. And then she's
sitting there looking really intently doing her broadcast and making
sure she gets the message absolutely right, and probably part
(32:31):
of her brain is also thinking, Okay, okay, how fast
can I do this? And you know, where's my next
safe house or attic or barn.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
To go to.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's clearly a barn, you know, like wooden walls. It's
kind of dark, straw on the floor, there is some
sunlight coming through a window, and sitting on the window,
Soom without a care in the world, is a cat.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I mean, honestly, like this setup kind of sounds like
exactly what I do when I record my half of
the podcast. So they're just sitting there with somebody hand
cranking like a wheel and some cat that doesn't care
about anything, and suitcase full of equipment.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
So anyway, cat or no cat. Virginia Hall, Agent Hall
we're now in nineteen forty two and she's in the
city of Lyon. Okay, there are so many like side
stories we could go into here. Long story short, She's
feeling way too much pressure from the GESTAPA, like they're
really stepping up things. They're kind of onto her, the
kind of starting to infiltrate her network of contacts in
(33:31):
ways that she's very not okay with. And there is
this guy who was a priest but claimed to be
part of the Gloria Network, which is like this resistance network.
He claimed to have lots of good intel. Virginia Hall
had her doubts, but she went ahead with like interacting
with this guy anyway. This guy his name was Robert A. Leash.
(33:52):
He was even able to send fake messages back to London.
Very not good. So this is all of the danger
that Virginia Hall has been in. It's now doubled, tripled.
She needs to get the hell out of Lyons.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
So this guy was an enemy agent.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Uh huh, yep, yep, yep, yep. He is an enemy agent. Danger. Danger.
So this is November of nineteen forty two. And I
mentioned this because when you know it's nineteen forty two,
this is where we're at in the World War. And
also it's November, so it's not like mild spring weather.
What she decides to do is something that some other
(34:29):
secret agents also do, is go to the Pyrenees. This
is you know, this is the Pyrenees. These are the
this is the three thousand foot high mountain range that
separates France from Spain, and Spain, relatively speaking, is safer
than France for her at this moment.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Right, they're neutral in the war, but they're friendly to
Germany because they have a fascist dictator.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah yeah, so yeah, So she wants to go to
Spain get a breather, and she wants to go across
the Pyrenees. So there's a guide who there's a guide
who has helped other agents. Okay, like there's kind of
a system in place, but it's a system that's kind
(35:11):
of flawed. This particular guide doesn't really like the idea
of guiding a woman spy through the Pyrenees. He's got
this a little bit of a hang up about that.
But okay, sure, fine, So Virginia has to put up
with prejudice from this guy. And it's November in the mountains,
(35:32):
so it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be icy, it's
gonna be rainy, there might be snow, and you know
there are paths through the mountain, but you don't know
how safe they're going to be. And remember she's doing
this with a wooden leg. Now, mind you, she's had
several years of excellent practice with the wooden leg, but
still it's with a wooden leg and lugging her radio
(35:52):
equipment with her. So she's leaping through the mountains and
on the other side of Spain, and well, basically, once
she gets to the other side of the mountains, she
gets thrown in a Spanish prison because, like you said, Ben,
it's run by a bunch of fashions. She festers in
(36:16):
the prison for a while and she manages to get out.
She had the option of staying in Spain and doing
kind of relatively safe work once she got out of
that Spanish prison.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
And I think it's worth saying that she got out
of the prison. Am I understanding of this is that
they didn't know who they had.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, she could keep secrets, she could keep secrets. Yeah,
and the Germans intel wasn't completely one hundred percent accurate anyway,
they thought she was Canadian, and this is so, this
is Virginia Hall. Is she going to cool her heels
doing something relatively safe in Spain? Nope, Nope. She goes
right back to France and she's she goes back to
(36:54):
the same general region her alias or her persona. This
time around, she was supposed to pose as a much older,
heavier countrywoman, like a you know, like a farmer's wife
or farmer's widow type person. She dyed her hair white,
and she you know, probably changed her posture and everything.
(37:17):
So basically her like her cover story was, yeah, she's
taking care of cows in the French countryside, and she
was able to, you know, again just do her thing.
She coordinated parachute drops and you know, among the people,
among the agents she was helping come in and the
(37:38):
parachute drop was Lieutenant Paul Goyol, who is French American
and we'll hear about him just a little bit later.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
And she's trying to throw off the Germans for D Day.
The stuff that I was talking about with Christopher Lee
and the SOE was that, like so much of D
Day depended on misdirection of where the landings were going
to be and when they were coming. When they happened,
the French needed to be ready to fight, right, The
French have to know when and where the Allies are coming,
(38:07):
and the Germans can't know. And so you have that
double agent priest, right, you have people trying to mess
with you, and like this is kind of very high
tension moment here of like the work she's doing is
is incredibly vital to the survival of all of those
people landing on Omaha Beach.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Right exactly. Yeah, Yeah, the stakes are very very high
and it works. It works. Dday was successful.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Spoiler alert, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Alert, Yeah, spoiler alert.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
They worked.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Do they worked? Yeah? Do they work? And you know,
World War two comes to a close. I realize I'm
skipping over a lot here. So what does what does
Agent Hall do? What does our Virginia do? Well, she
wants to continue working. So at this point it's more
about working for the CIA rather than the SOE.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Well, the SAE kind of broke off into like the
SOE eventually became basically six and the CIA because there
were a lot of Americans coming in in the later
years to SOE and there was this combined arms thing,
and yeah, like a lot of like. I mean, she
was a og CIA right totally.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
And you know, this is agent Virginia Hall. She's coming
in with all of this experience, all of these skills,
all this know how, and she was hoping to get
more fieldwork. She loved being in the field. She was
hoping for promotions, but she kept getting passed over. And
this is not the first time we've heard that. So
she gets stuck in a desk job. She's analyzing the
(39:37):
intel that other agents bring in, you know. Yeah, and
in the nineteen fifties she does get some more responsibilities.
She was in charge of ultra secret paramilitary operations in
France to set up a model that other European countries
could follow if they wanted to set up resistance in
case there was ever an invasion by the Soviets, because
(39:58):
we're now in the Cold War period, and she was
to the people who knew her and actually worked with her,
she was incredibly valued member of the CIA. I mean,
she's Virginia frickin' Hall. But you know, this is it's
a job, and in any job that sooner or later
you're going to have performance reports. And she got a
poor rating. She got a poor performance rating, you know.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yeah, fantastic, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
And this was by some higher up who had never
even observed her work. And I mean, honestly, that's that's
an HR violation if I ever heard one. But the
colleagues who actually knew her work and actually worked with her,
they thought she was great. And they they said that
she was clearly being sidelined because she was so bad
ass that clearly other people were feeling threatened by her.
So she you know, she worked at the CIA, you know,
(40:46):
whatever capacity she was able to until her meditatory retirement.
And so do you remember that Lieutenant Paul Gollot who
was in one of those parachute trumps.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah, one of the French resistance guys. He was French American.
He was American agent who parachuted in to help coordinate
the resistance.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Reader she married him and they retired to they retired
to Maryland. She was from Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
How is this not a James Vond thing? Right? I know, right,
you ended up getting together with the parachuting in like
secret agent while you're doing your own secret agent stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah. I guess we can call him a hall boy,
maybe a hall boy.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Instead of a Bond girl. I doesn't have quite the
ring to it.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Bye.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Yeah, sure, she did receive various medals and recognitions. I'm
not going to list her entire resume. President Harry S. Truman.
Before Virginia Hall retired, President Truman wanted to give her
public recognition for everything that she had achieved, because I mean,
obviously this stuff is so cool it deserves recognition. But
(41:51):
she wasn't ready to blow her cover yet, so she said, no,
I do not want public recognition, and Truman just gave
her her medal in a little private, little ceremony, was
just Virginia Hall and her mom. Virginia Hall at one
point said, yeah, okay, not bad for a girl from Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of what we've been talking about, right,
Like she was, you know, badass deep cover secret agent
escaping over the Pyrenees and wounded in battle and also
hooking up with other secret agents. Like this is totally
a James Bond story if you like, just switched her
in her husband's genders, like he would be on that
(42:29):
list for James Bond influences on that Wikipedia page. Yeah,
I love it. I think it's an awesome story. I mean,
it doesn't get any better than.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
That, right, Yeah, that's Virginia Hall and and you know
she now is finally getting some of the recognition that
she deserves now that she's no longer No, she's no
longer with us, So I suppose she's no longer worried
about blowing her cover.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah, I mean, if that's why we haven't heard of her, Like,
I'm totally fine if she doesn't want and she doesn't
want anybody to know. Right, there's always those badasses who
just do badass shit and then fade off into the
darkness and nobody knows what happened to them and they
just disappear forever. Like there is definitely something cool to
that as well.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Well that is our show. I think we were on
an episode Double O seven. We talked about some Double
O seven influences, We talked about some badass Sooe World
War two stuff, and we talked about some film stuff
while we're at it. So yeah, I hope you guys
enjoyed it, so thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
See you next time.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Ben Thompson,
and my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Writing by me
and Pat, story editing by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs, and
Allie Lehmer. Mixing and music and sound design by Jude Brewer.
Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeartRadio.
(43:47):
Badass of the Week is based off my website Badass
ofdek dot com, where you can read all sorts of
stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out
with questions or ideas, hit me up at Badass podcast
at Badass of the Week dot com. If you like
the podcast, please please subscribe, follow, listen, tell your friends,
tell your enemies, and we'll be back next week with
another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(44:08):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast content.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com