CODE NAME BADASS

A long-overdue biography of the only female civilian to win the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II.

Virginia Hall—called Dindy all her life—was born in 1906 to a life of privilege and adventure. Class president of her private girls’ school in Baltimore, she also loved shooting and riding on the family farm. She studied at Radcliffe and Barnard, then in Paris and Vienna, acquiring knowledge of French, Italian, and German before coming home to take the Foreign Service exam. Family lore says she passed it but was disqualified due to her gender. She became a secretary in the Warsaw embassy instead and continued to attempt the exam even after a gun accident blew off her left foot, requiring amputation below the knee. Dindy named her wooden prothesis Cuthbert and, when World War II began, joined Britain’s Special Operations Executive as one of its first female spies. She not only survived the war, but was among SOE’s most successful operatives—and then entered the CIA. Demetrios tells this fascinating story in an uber-modern narrative voice that is snarky AF, LOL, with plenty of hits to the patriarchy and a glorious sense of celebrating Dindy’s badassery. It’s breezy and lighthearted in tone but meticulously well-researched, including interviews with Dindy’s surviving family.

A remarkable telling of an extraordinary woman.