The woman in the jail cell was proving to be a problem. It was November 13, 1942, and she’d arrived in San Juan de las Abadesas the day before. She was discovered at the train station with three strange men. When the Spanish officers demanded to see their passports, none of them could produce one. The woman was separated from the group and thrown into a cold, isolated cell. The notes in her arrest file only deepened the mystery of her identity. Her Spanish was formal and her accent sounded French to their ears. Among other notes in the woman’s arrest report were her dirty clothes, and a general appearance that made it seem like she hadn’t slept or eaten well in days. And notably, she couldn’t move without displaying a bad limp. Whoever this woman was, she certainly didn’t belong in San Juan de las Abadesas, a small mountain town in the far northeast of Spain just over the border with France. With her formal Spanish and slight French accent, the woman was obviously not a Spanish citizen. So she was transferred to Miranda del Ebro prison some 40 miles away, outside the town of Figueres, where her only comfort was a blanket as dingy and tattered as her dress. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the Spanish Guard had managed to achieve what the Nazis had not, despite years of intensive searching: they had captured Virginia Hall, a woman who would go down in the annals of history as the greatest spy of World War II.

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