Spy story

She was a legendary spy. He worked for three CIA directors. Now he’s writing a novel in her voice.

Craig R. Gralley spent more than 30 years at the CIA, where he worked as a chief speechwriter for three agency directors: William Webster, Robert Gates, and R. James Woolsey Jr. When Gralley, now 62, retired from Langley in 2013, he began writing in the voice of someone quite different: legendary World War II spy Virginia Hall, a woman known as “The Limping Lady.”

For the past four years, Gralley, who still works as a part-time CIA contractor, has been researching Hall’s life for a book. Not a work of nonfiction, though. Two Hall biographies already exist, and another volume — along with a movie starring Daisy Ridley of “Star Wars” — is apparently  on the way.

Instead Gralley has written a novel, tentatively titled “Hall of Mirrors,” that he hopes to sell to a publisher. It’s narrated in the first-person, in the voice of Hall, who worked for the British in France during World War II and later became a CIA officer. The Maryland-born operative helped organize the French resistance against the Nazis and once fled the Gestapo by hiking through the Pyrenees on a wooden prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert.