The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (68 page)

    The spy who loved : the secrets and lives of Christine Granville / Clare Mulley.—1st U.S. edition.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-250-03032-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-03033-7 (e-book)

1. Skarbek, Krystyna, 1908–1952. 2. Women spies—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Spies—Great Britain—Biography. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. I. Title.

D810.S8G727 2013

940.54'8641092—dc23

[B]

2013010210

First published in Great Britain by Pan Books, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd

First U.S. Edition: June 2013

eISBN 9781250030337

First eBook edition: June 2013

*
 Bill Stanley Moss’s book
Ill Met By Moonlight
was published in 1950. The Pinewood Studio film based on it, starring Dirk Bogarde, was released in 1957.
Odette,
a biopic of Odette Sansom, had been released in 1950, and
Carve Her Name with Pride,
based on R. J. Minney’s book of the same title about Violette Szabo, came out in 1958.

†
Zofia Tarnowska, Bill Stanley Moss’s wife and a good friend of Christine’s, told this story in 2001. As no direct pronouncements by Churchill on Christine are known, this seems to be the source of the much-disputed line that Christine was Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’. However, Kurt D. Singer, who claimed he knew Christine, also recorded that ‘Winston Churchill personally praised her and thanked her’. See his
Spies and Traitors
(1953), p. 201.

*
 Although she was ‘Krystyna’ until 1941, to prevent confusion I consistently use her adopted name, ‘Christine’, of which, she later wrote, she was so proud.

*
 Jerzy Skarbek referred to himself as Count, and was named as such in his press obituary and on his tombstone. Christine listed her parents as Count and Countess Skarbek on her British Certificate of Naturalisation, dated December 1946, and elsewhere. For Polish genealogy and titles see Tomasz Lenczewski, ‘The Marriage of Coats of Arms and Accounts’,
Rzeczpospolita,
22 VII (2008).

*
 Jerzy Skarbek is listed as the landowner of the Wechadlow estate, in the Pinczo district, where Christine probably lived until she was three years old, when they moved to Trzepnica.

*
 The Warsaw address of the Goldfeder bank was ul. Zielna 45. It formed part of the ghetto border before it was destroyed during the war.

*
 The region around Jazłowiec fell under Soviet control with the outbreak of the Second World War. The town is now in the Ukraine.

*
 Address unknown. Between 1931 and 1932 they lived at 6 Chocimska Street, Warsaw, and later Stefania moved to 15 Rozbrat Street.

†
 An undated Skarbek genealogy among Mary
ś
Skarbek’s family papers, probably produced by Jan Skarbek, and based on Jerzy Dunin-Borkowski’s
Almanach Bł
ę
kitny (Blue Almanac),
mentions a second wife for Jerzy Skarbek, listed simply under her family name: Kresiolowska. Jerzy could not have married Kresiolowska legally, but may have been living with her as his wife in Switzerland.

*
 Miss Polonia 1930 was Zofia Batycka from Lwów, a young actress who went on to represent Poland at Miss Europe 1930, before trying to carve out a Hollywood career.

†
 Gustav’s witness was Andrew Szarski, later a famous war hero.

*
 There are unconfirmed rumours that Christine had an abortion in pre-war Warsaw, and stories of other abortions or miscarriages later. If true, this might be one explanation as to why she never had children, even when contraception was hard to come by.

*
 Christine lived at Filtrowa 25, Warsaw, a small flat in a good part of town. Stanisław Rudziejewski remembered her passion for silk stockings with the seam up the back.

*
 In 1935 Italy had claimed Ethiopia for the Italian empire, having invaded with the support of Nazi Germany. Despite the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s impassioned pleas to the League of Nations, within a few years Japan, France and Britain all recognized Italian control in Ethiopia. Unimpressed by arguments of empire, and unconvinced by the likely ability of Polish smallholders to settle effectively in Africa, Jerzy argued strongly against Polish colonial ambitions, but was ignored. Poland bought territory in Liberia, but those Polish immigrants who survived the colonial experiment were quickly repatriated.

*
 Jerzy and Christine’s wedding took place on 2 November 1938, at the Evangelical Reformed Church in the Leszno area of Warsaw. The church archives were destroyed during the Second World War.

*
 This is the route outlined by Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki in his memoir. Other accounts, including those by Masson and Ledóchowski – both indirectly informed by Christine, and by Larecki, present routes through Rhodesia or by steamship to Mombasa and then train to Nairobi. Neither Christine nor Jerzy is a reliable witness, but in this case Jerzy’s account carries more weight.

*
 Christine and Jerzy travelled on the
Cape Town Castle,
arriving in Southampton on 6 October 1939. Jerzy was listed as being with the Polish consulate, Christine as ‘housewife’. See TNA, BT26/1186, UK incoming passenger lists 1878–1960.

*
 In late 1939 many Poles viewed the Polish political leaders who had so quickly left the country as traitors, before they set up government-in-exile.

*
 Perkins’s estate was at Bielsko-Biała, quite close to Zakopane. Larecki, Christine’s Polish biographer, and a former intelligence officer, believes that Perkins may have sent Christine to the Brown Deer Club in 1938 on behalf of Claude Dansey. This is possible, but there is no publicly available evidence.

*
 Voigt’s BBC radio broadcasts were designed to spread a dismal view of the war inside Germany. In June 1940 he was joined by the
Daily Express
reporter Sefton Delmer, to broadcast from a ‘German Soldiers’ Radio Station in Calais’, in fact operating from a country mansion near London. See Sefton Delmer,
Black Boomerang: An Autobiography,
volume 2 (1962).

†
 Christine’s friendship with Voigt was interrupted by an intriguing episode. All that is known is that in 1942 she wrote ‘he is an exceptional being … only I am not in a position to write to him as I no longer have the courage to talk of a famous incident, it makes me vomit!!!’ See O’Malley papers (28.8.1942).

‡
 In his autobiography,
The Mist Procession,
Lord Vansittart records that he wrote a prescient memo in 1934: ‘Poland is in no yielding mood … Poland will fight but – a few years hence – will thirty million human beings be able to hold sixty? Of course not – alone. But if Poland is destroyed and if it is out of the picture, Germany will be able to do the very thing she could never hope to in 1914 – to fight on one front.’

*
 Christine told a Budapest-based friend, Erica de Bosdari, that ‘you don’t need more than two dresses and two pairs of shoes … you have to travel light in this life … you don’t need all that luggage and all that clutter.’ Mieczysława Wazacz (director),
No Ordinary Countess
(2010).

*
 The Polish expression ‘
pies kulawy
’ is more self-deprecatory than its more insulting-sounding translation, ‘lame dog’, may suggest.

†
 The Hungarian László Biro had developed the ‘biro’ pen to prevent his daughter’s school class from dipping her long plaits in their open ink-wells. He first presented it at the Budapest International Fair in 1931, and patented it in Paris in 1938. Being Jewish, that year he also wisely fled Hungary for South America, where he survived the war.

*
 The boys remained in Hungary, Andrzej studying medicine at Budapest University, until the Red Army arrived, when they fled to relatives in Austria. Once old enough they joined the Polish forces in Italy.

*
 The secret services have a distinguished history of one-legged employees. The first head of SIS, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, hacked his own leg off with a penknife to release himself from a car accident. The American WWII agent Virginia Hall had a false leg she called Cuthbert. After she mentioned that Cuthbert was causing her trouble in a few signals home, one of her colleagues replied he wanted to come over and kill that Cuthbert for her.

*
 This nickname had the bonus of associating Andrzej with the dashing Leslie Howard, who had depicted the Pimpernel on screen just five years earlier, and who was now filming a WWII version released as
Pimpernel Smith
in 1941. Howard himself was reportedly supplying intelligence to the Allies until he was killed when the plane he was travelling in was shot down in 1943.

†
 Paddy Leigh Fermor later wrote that Christine and Andrzej belonged to the same Polish class, defined by ‘its fluent French and its vast tangle of cousins’. See the
Spectator,
‘The One-Legged Parachutist’ (1.1.1989).

*
 Café Hangli was owned and run by the father of the Hungarian food critic Egon Ronay.

†
 In Warsaw, a month after the invasion, two women were shot simply for tearing down an anti-British poster, but such terror failed to cow the resistance in the city. See Terry Charman, ‘Hugh Dalton, Poland and SOE, 1940–42’, in Mark Seaman (ed.),
Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War
(2006), p. 66.

*
 It is possible that Radziminski had become Christine’s lover in early 1940, as he later stayed at her flat and was seen kissing her on the mouth ‘as though taking his due’, a jealous Polish officer, Wladimir Ledóchowski, later noted. If so perhaps Christine’s damning report on Radziminski can be read on two levels. Christine did harbour a sense of responsibility towards Radziminski. However, in July 1940 she offered to put Section D in touch with him in France, where she understood he had decided ‘to stay and
vork
’. ‘He has certain “defauts”’, Christine wrote, ‘but is energetic and courageous’. The War Office was not convinced. ‘[I] cannot conceive of him being the slightest use’ one official wrote after interviewing Radziminski. ‘On general grounds, I consider him useless and untrustworthy, and suggest that he should be got rid of at once, or at least interned.’ TNA, HS9/1224/6 (15.5.1940).

*
 Jan Marusarz was an intrepid mountaineer, but his younger brother, Stanisław, was more famous as Polish skiing champion. See Stanisław Marusarz,
On the Ski-ramps of Poland, and the World
(1974).

*
 The first, the
Information Bulletin,
appeared regularly for the next five years with a circulation of over 50,000.

*
 The ZWZ was the ‘Zwi
ą
zek Walki Zbrojnej’, ‘Union of Armed Struggle’. It was not until February 1942 that the official Home Army, the ‘Armia Krajowa’ or AK, which was also loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, was established from the ZWZ, and went on to absorb most of the other underground Polish forces.

*
 Peter Wilkinson later argued that it would have taken an impossible 8,000 sorties to arm Gubbins’s initial plans for Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. Eventually 485 successful sorties delivered a total of 600 tons of supplies to Poland. This was one-tenth the amount dropped to Greece, and less than a quarter of that sent to Yugoslavia. Britain was more successful in training Polish troops, agents and pilots in Britain.

†
 In his history of the Musketeers, Roman Buczek says that Witkowski was recruited for intelligence work by Stefan Mayer, who supervised the pre-war Polish Enigma cipher-breaking operation that led directly to Britain’s ‘Ultra’ Enigma-reading operation, exerting a profound influence on the course of the war.

*
 In fact Christine knew Gradowski from before the war. It was his wife who, years earlier, had been expelled from the same convent school as Christine for climbing trees while not wearing knickers.

†
 Leski’s account is also interesting in that it contains a number of disparities, such as the claim that Christine discussed her experiences in Turkey with Witkowski at this meeting. This is not possible, as Christine’s last visit to Poland was in 1940, and she did not reach Turkey until 1941. Either Leski was confused – although other details such as Christine’s pseudonym, Mucha, are correct – or he had another agenda, perhaps relating to his portrayal of the controversial Witkowski.

*
 Ledóchowski wrote several different accounts of his first meeting with Christine. This version is taken from his memoir journal, later lost in the Polish Embassy in Ankara and only published after his death. Written at the time, and without the intention of publication, it is the most likely to be accurate. His draft biography of Christine has a similar romantic story, set on a train station in the sun.

*
 Unfortunately the rifle never saw service with the Allies because reverse engineering was too time-consuming. Meanwhile captured Polish anti-tank rifles were used to great effect by both the Germans and Italians. This account of the rifle-smuggling story comes from Bill Stanley Moss, ‘Christine the Brave’,
Picture Post,
vol. 56, no. 11 (13.9.1952), p. 14. A different account has Christine and Andrzej taking the rifle from Ludwig, without his approval, so that they could supply it to the British/French rather than to the Polish authorities. See Anna Potocka,
Through Hills and Valleys …
(2011), p. 140.

*
 Despite constant caution and occasionally hostility towards Christine from the Polish VI Bureau (Polish military intelligence), Christine was listed as a VI Bureau courier under the ‘pseudonym’ of Gi
ż
ycka, in 1941, receiving a small amount of ‘danger pay’. Ledóchowski was listed in the same report. See TNA, HS7/183, ‘Polish VI Bureau’, Captain Venner to Colonel Perkins (21.2.1946).