in Warsaw. It paid two thousand dollars a year, a respectable salary (and a third higher than the median household income of mid-Depression America, when many families were on the breadline). She had also finally broken out of Baltimore and into the ranks of the State Department. But for all her studying and high expectations, it was as a secretary, just like her mother.
Virginia nevertheless made an instant impression at work, conducting her duties—coding and decoding telegrams, dealing with the mail, processing diplomatic visas, and dispatching reports back to Washington on the increasingly tense political situation—with flair and initiative. Warsaw was a vibrant city with the largest Jewish population in Europe, but Poland (an independent state only since the end of the Great War) was precariously squeezed between the two muscular powers of Germany and Russia and its future was uncertain. It was an instructive time and place, and Virginia’s sympathy for the Poles was no doubt heightened by memories of her love affair with Emil. It may be that in having been trained in coding she also got her first tantalizing glimpse of the intelligence world. In any case she felt her extensive studies and experience were being wasted behind a typewriter. So a year later she asked for and received her bosses’ backing—including that of her friend Elbridge who was now her vice consul—to apply to retake the diplomatic corps entrance exam. She was particularly confident about the oral test, in which she had proved herself an outstanding candidate, scoring 100 percent the first time around. Virginia knew she was at her most compelling and impressive in person. Yet mysteriously the oral paper questions never turned up and so she missed the deadline for the application. Just as she thought she was finally about to be accepted into the core of the State Department, she was cast out again onto its fringes.
In her frustration, she applied seven months later to transfer to Smyrna (now Izmir) in Turkey—a perfect posting for someone with her love of the outdoor life because of its proximity to the lagoons and salt marshes of the Gediz Delta, famous for its pelicans and flamingos. When she arrived in April 1933, she found that her official duties were no more exalted than in Warsaw, and indeed that Smyrna was of less strategic interest. It was in this unlikely spot, however, that an adventurous if perhaps still naïve young woman was forged into a figure of exceptional fortitude; it was here that fate dealt Virginia a hand that would change her life. What happened here, where the Gediz River flows into the sparkling Aegean Sea, would help shape a distant nation’s future in a World War that was still six years away.
Soon after her arrival, Virginia began organizing groups of friends for snipe-shooting expeditions in the marshes. Friday, December 8, dawned clear and mild as she prepared for another day of sport, taking the treasured 12-gauge shotgun she had been given by her late father. There were plenty of the party’s long-billed quarry that day and there was high excitement among the group of like-minded hunters, although snipe were always difficult birds to shoot on the wing because of their erratic pattern of flight. Ever competitive, perhaps it was Virginia’s eagerness to be the first to bag one of the well-camouflaged birds that distracted her and also persuaded her not to engage the safety catch. Either way, it was as she climbed over a wire fence running through the tall reeds of the wetlands that Virginia stumbled. As she fell, her gun slipped off her shoulder and got caught in her ankle-length coat. She reached out to grab it, but in so doing fired a round at point-blank range into her left foot.
A creeping slick of blood stained the muddy delta waters around her as she collapsed into unconsciousness. The wound was serious—the cartridge she had fired was large, blunt, and full of spherical lead pellets now embedded deep into her foot. Her friends desperately sought to stanch the bleeding with an improvised tourniquet while they carried her to the car and dashed to the hospital back in town. The doctors in Smyrna acted quickly, and for the next three weeks she appeared to rally and recover. Her friends—and State Department headquarters in Washington—were relieved to be told that Virginia would be back to normal within a couple of months. What the local clinicians did not yet realize was that a virulent infection was seeping into