In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy...

"This is a historical nonfiction book about Virginia Hall, an American spy in France who the Nazis dubbed "the most dangerous of allied spies." It tells the story of her youth and her work in Europe during the second world war."--

"From the co-author of The Zhivago Affair, a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award, comes the riveting story of a wealthy heiress who joined the OSS and was the only American woman in uniform to be captured by the Germans; her imprisonment among the Nazi elite and daring escape in 1945 comprise one of the more remarkable untold episodes of WWII. Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre was a society heiress from South Carolina who lived a charmed...

A former female spy for the CIA during the height of the Cold War discusses the challenges of overcoming a prevailing culture of sexism while undertaking dangerous missions all over the globe.