The CIA's art collection

Nothing about the government should surprise me, but I didn't know the CIA has its own art collection. Today I picked up the CSI's Studies in Intelligence Journal, vol.52, no.2, 2008, to read

"By the end of 2008, 52 percent of CIA’s workforce will have entered on duty since 11 September 2001. CIA’s history and museum programs provide institutional cohesion to communicate CIA’s corporate culture and identity during this demographic revolution. Recent additions to the Agency’s historical holdings include intelligence-themed paintings and sculpture that record for posterity the experiences of intelligence officers in peace and war."

It was a non-circ item (from OSUL), but it is available on the web, or at least parts of it. Here's a sample of the art. The painting depicts Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native who joined the State Department in the 1930s, with many assignments abroad until an accident cost her a leg and she resigned. At the outbreak of WWII, she "joined the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). . . Her fluency in French landed her a clandestine assignment in Lyons, where she went to work developing the area’s resistance operations. Over the next 15 months, every British agent arriving in France passed through her flat for instructions, counterfeit money, and contacts. In addition, she orchestrated supply drops and helped endangered agents escape to England. Betrayed in November 1942, she had to use her own escape route out of France, just steps ahead of her now infamous pursuer, Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyons.”

Hall then joined the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services in March 1944 and asked to return to occupied France. OSS promptly granted her request and reinfiltrated her aboard a British PT boat. Disguised as a farmwoman, she carried cheese to local villages to count German troops and identify drop zones for the Allied invasion to come." After the war she received the Distinguished Service Cross—the only one given to a civilian woman during that war. "Hall later worked for the CIA, serving in many jobs as one of CIA’s first female operations officers."

Throw in some romance (Branjelina?) and this would be a great movie. She married her husband, Paul, in 1950 who was also an OSS officer. Her story was told in The Wolves at the Door : The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson, The Lyons Press, 2005. That left leg looks pretty real to me in the painting. Maybe the artist didn't know?