The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  ‘I first met T…’ Christine’s own initial report to her new British bosses opened, ‘in 1939, in London, on the introduction of Sir Robert Vansittart and Frederick Voigt of the Manchester Guardian.’2 ‘T’ was George Taylor, who had been recruited to Section D (for ‘Destruction’) of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, six months earlier. Taylor’s mandate was to investigate the potential of sabotage and subversion in time of war. He was soon running Section D’s Balkan network. At first nearly all secret agents recruited to Section D, and its June 1940 successor, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, of which Taylor became chief of staff, came through the old-boy network. As a result, even the most rigorous systems of code-names and false identities were often compromised by agents recognizing each other from past meetings on a public-school rugby pitch. But despite this reliable route into the service, these men politely waited to be recruited; they did not apply. Christine meanwhile, a foreigner, and, shockingly, a woman, walked off the boat in Southampton, arrived in London the next day, found the right person to approach and demanded to be taken on.

  Christine had formed her plan to volunteer for British intelligence well before she arrived from South Africa. They were, after all, heading to Southampton, and there was not, as yet, any Polish government-in-exile in place to which she could offer her services.* Furthermore ‘she did not believe in political solutions…’, a close friend and fellow agent later commented, but ‘she housed an ironic respect for the British government … For her there were only good people and bad people’, and the British, she decided firmly, were good and ready to go.3 ‘Having talked it over with my wife, we came to the conclusion…’, Jerzy recorded rather patronizingly in his memoirs, that ‘she would look for some exciting underground work.’4 Christine, however, may have had another, supporting, motive for approaching the British. She was ‘hugely afraid of accusations of being a coward,’ one of her Polish friends in London wrote, ‘and therefore demanded more from herself than from anyone around her.’5 It seems that Christine was more vulnerable to criticism and the opinion of her fellow Poles than she cared to show.

  The business of espionage does not encourage openness, and it is impossible to trace entirely the convoluted process that brought Christine so quickly to the door of the British Secret Service. Jerzy claimed that he met the journalist Freddy Voigt, ‘one of the most interesting men I have known’, through Christine.6 This is quite possible. She had dabbled in journalism and had long been socializing with a wide group of writers and foreign correspondents, such as her friend Florian Sokolow, who also knew Voigt. Or the introduction might have come through Józef Radziminski, the Balkans representative of the Telegraph Agency Express, which was in fact a cover operation for Polish Intelligence. Radziminski had met Christine at the Brown Deer, an international press club in Cieszyn in Poland, some years before the war, and may have been sharing sensitive information with her since. Another journalist who met Christine at the Brown Deer noticed ‘something about her which put other women in the shade’, and asked for her number, but decided against using it when he learnt both that Radziminski was ‘madly in love’ with her, and that she was already rumoured to be a British agent.7 As early as 7 December 1939, Section D files certainly recorded that Radziminski ‘will do anything for her and with her’, so the British clearly knew something about this relationship.8 Alternatively Christine’s introduction to the British could have been through Harold Perkins, later known to Christine as ‘Perks’, a tough English businessman who could bend a poker with his bare hands, and who had long had close connections with British intelligence.9 Perkins had an estate and factory near Zakopane and would have been a regular on the slopes and at après-ski parties, giving him plenty of opportunity to mix with both Christine and Jerzy over the years.*

  It is equally possible that Jerzy was dissembling, however, and the introduction to Voigt was in fact the other way round. Jerzy almost certainly had unofficial connections with British intelligence before the war. He had been in Rome after Italy invaded Ethiopia, at the same time as Claude Dansey, Britain’s greatest spy-master in the mid-1930s, and he had coincided with Dansey again in Switzerland while travelling with Christine. The appropriately hawk-faced Dansey had been asked to set up an independent intelligence network, outside the official British SIS, in 1930. His recruits included diplomats, journalists and businessmen and women all over Europe, many of whom were not English, but all of whom were strongly opposed to Nazism and were willing to give their services freely in the fight against it. Harold Perkins was almost certainly one of Dansey’s contacts, and Jerzy also had the perfect profile. Dansey was backed by Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office and the first cousin of Lawrence of Arabia, and by their mutual friend the MP Winston Churchill, both of whom had taken a consistently hard line against Nazi Germany. Those few people aware of Dansey’s network knew it as ‘Vansittart’s Private Detection Agency’, but it was known even more clandestinely as the ‘Z Organisation’.10

  However they were introduced, and in whatever capacity, by 1939 Freddy Voigt had been moving in the same circles as Jerzy and Christine for several years. Christine adored him, but Jerzy was torn between admiration for this ‘extremely intelligent’ journalist and apparent disgust at his rosy cheeks, permanent lack of overcoat and hat, and hair worn ‘long at the sides and brushed over the bald top – the slightest gust of wind … giving him the look of a long-haired Afghan hound’.11 Born to German parents, but naturalized as a British citizen, Voigt spoke fluent English, French and German, and had been a European correspondent for the Manchester Guardian since 1920. Although he was based in Berlin, he travelled widely and had developed a particular interest in Poland. In 1935, already convinced that a second war with Germany was ‘inevitable’, he returned to London to start fortnightly foreign affairs talks for the BBC.*12 Whether or not Jerzy and Christine knew that Voigt was on Z Organisation books, he was the obvious person for her to get in touch with in London.† Knowing her potential usefulness, Voigt introduced Christine to Vansittart, whose name and details Christine would still have scribbled in her pocket diary ten years later.13 Vansittart, who held the Poles in high regard and believed they had been foolishly let down by their allies, interviewed Christine, judged her capable, and directed her to George Taylor.‡

  Taylor was a short, dark man of ‘enormous capacity’, with ‘sharp features and methodological habits’, and was regularly described as ruthless, or brilliant, or both.14 By the time that Christine had outlined her plan, including her proposed route and mention of the smuggler friends who she was confident would help her again now, she had, as a special operations friend later wrote, ‘quickly established the kind of immediate rapport she often had with people of rare and not publicly recognized distinction’.15 Taylor was impressed. ‘She is a very smart looking girl, simply dressed and aristocratic … It appears that she has visited the Polish winter resort of Zakopane for many years and knows every man in the place’, his report notes. ‘I really believe we have a PRIZE.’16

  Christine was indeed a gift for the British. Despite their lack of counter-offensive, Britain had every incentive to support her Polish allies. Just five weeks before the outbreak of war, in July 1939, the Polish Cipher Bureau in Warsaw had given Enigma decryption techniques and equipment to British and French military intelligence – cooperation that would be vital to the Allied victory on the Western Front.

  But British support was not just motivated by gratitude, or the need to honour promises; they must have hoped that bolstering any underground resistance in Poland might also help create some rearguard action against the Germans. Intelligence was sparse and unreliable. The Polish political leadership had fled their country but not yet set up their government-in-exile. Section D reports show concern that, cut off from the West, Poles might be persuaded they had been deserted and given no option but to cooperate with their occupiers. Christine presented them with their first opportunity to ge
t some counter-propaganda into Poland and, in her words, ‘let the Poles know that Britain and the Allies had not forgotten them’.17 If Christine had any concern that there might be some truth in this allegation, she kept it to herself. Unlike the British, however, she had no fears that the Poles might accept German occupation; rather, she was afraid that Nazi brutality might help spread Polish support for Bolshevism.18 Either way, as she saw it, Polish and British interests were aligned. ‘We have decided to subsidize a certain Madame Giżycka’, Section D filed on 20 December 1939. ‘In all further correspondence this lady will be referred to as Madame Marchand.’19 Thus Christine Giżycka, formerly Gettlich, née Skarbek, assumed the first of many false identities.

  Christine left for Hungary the next day, flying from London to Paris, where she caught a train to Budapest. Her transfer to the field was so fast that her MI5 clearance only caught up with her in March the following year, meaning that SIS had managed to approve her plan without officially endorsing it. She was put on the books of Department EH, a somewhat shadowy organization, attached to the Foreign Office but based in Electra House on the Thames embankment, which dabbled in subversive propaganda. A six-month trial period had been agreed, along with a cover story as a French journalist, contacts in Budapest, some basic instruction in the use of explosives, and an initial £250 paid via Voigt’s bank account (worth at least £10,000 today), which, they felt, she was ‘going to earn’.20 Putting his wife on the bus for the airport, Jerzy was touched when he noticed through the window that ‘she was trying to hide the tears running down her cheeks’.21 Whether Christine’s tears were caused by her grief at leaving her husband, or her relief to be finally on her way to serve her homeland, is a matter for speculation.

  Christine arrived at a cold and dismal Keleti station in Budapest just before Christmas, and three months after Hitler had invaded Poland. Hearing Polish as well as Hungarian widely spoken on the streets was cheering, but it was one of the coldest winters on record; snow had brought the city almost to a standstill and in some places drifts reached to roof-level. Christine quickly made her way to the address that had been arranged for her in Derék Utca, a steep walk up from the river in the old part of Buda, and just below the famous Naphegy Hill where the city’s executions had once taken place. The flat was tiny, but had its own small bathroom, a kitchenette able to rustle up hot strong coffee or the tea that Christine liked to drink with lemon but would suffer with slices of bitter green apple if there were no lemons to be had, and a decent-sized living room with chintz curtains at the windows and a large sofa that was also to serve as her bed. In the morning a maid would arrive with breakfast; the rest of the time Christine planned to eat out. She hung up her spare dress and put a change of shoes by the door – she was unpacked and ready to go.*

  Despite long-standing Hungarian–Polish friendship, at the outbreak of war Hungary was already to a significant extent a political and economic satellite of Germany. Officially the country was an independent monarchy, and British secret service reports state that the country’s regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, ‘regarded anything in the nature of democratic progress with abhorrence’.22 Certainly the Hungarian Secret Police was well established and the opposition press effectively censored. The Horthy regime never seriously doubted a German victory in the early years of the war, and in any case, being only a small country with a modest unmechanized army and borders with both Austria and Czechoslovakia, they could not afford to offend Hitler. But they did at first remain neutral, and hoped for a compromise peace between England and Germany, ideally at the expense of Russia. On this basis, and as a ‘matter of Hungarian honour’, Horthy had refused to let Wehrmacht troops attack Poland across the ‘Carpathian Rus’, the much-disputed territory that then formed Hungary’s mountainous frontier with Poland.23

  Section D believed that the situation inside Hungary was ‘well nigh hopeless’, but felt that they should make an effort to establish a base there even though ‘this could not be more than a gesture’.24 Christine’s first point of contact was Hubert Harrison, a correspondent with the News Chronicle, who had been working for George Taylor since October. Harrison was a short, dark, thickset man, ten years Christine’s senior. They fell out from the start. He was meant to provide her with training, contacts and clandestine technical support, in return for which she was to provide a link to the Poles. ‘As a result,’ she complained, ‘my flat in Budapest became a dump for everything being sent to Poland, including high explosive.’25 Meanwhile Polish intelligence in Budapest, already keeping an eye on Harrison, now added Christine to their surveillance.

  Another contact was her old journalist friend and admirer from Poland, Józef Radziminski, who was also now working for Section D. With Radziminski in town, Christine was quickly introduced to a wide circle of journalists and diplomats at a series of drinks parties and open days at Budapest’s various legations. Never one to tolerate a chaperone, she soon found his persistent presence irritating; she was quite able to spot the champagne bottle on a window-box that meant there were drinks at an attaché’s lodging, or to pick up on a signal from a flower-seller outside a café letting people know that German officers were walking their way. But Radziminski could not take a hint, and soon she had christened him, rather unkindly, her ‘pies kulawy’ or ‘lame dog’.* He was the first of many such admirers.

  Radziminski’s presence in Budapest was not so great a coincidence as it seemed. As the free countries closest to the European action, Hungary and Romania were awash with foreign journalists in late 1939. A surprising number of these were women, including the Daily Telegraph’s Clare Hollingworth, who had first broken the story of Germany’s invasion of Poland, so Christine’s cover as a French journalist was utterly credible. At the same time it was an alias that gave her the perfect excuse for running around Budapest at all hours, wrapped up in her duffle-coat with a notebook, various papers and no doubt some Hungarian biros stashed in her bag, as she tried to organize the contacts, plans and papers she would need for her first crossing into Poland.† Meanwhile most of the traffic across the Hungarian–Polish border was coming the other way, as Hungary kept its frontier open to accept tens of thousands of Polish civilian and military refugees.

  Among the ‘slowly moving mass of heart-rending humanity, pushing and pedalling … clutching their children and their pitiful bundles’ were the sorry members of the 1939 British Military Mission to Poland.26 When Germany invaded, General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, the legendary one-eyed, one-armed, but hardheaded leader of the mission, had been hoping to establish contact with the Polish resistance to arrange the supply of heavy weapons and transmitters. His number two was Lieutenant Colonel Colin Gubbins, a wiry Scots Highlander who ‘wore the toothbrush moustache that was then almost a part of the Royal Artillery officer’s uniform’, but who hid behind this formal neatness an original mind and daring spirit that would later take him on to become head of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, Churchill’s later reinvention of Section D.27 Gubbins was supported by Peter Wilkinson, who had already witnessed the German invasion of Prague, and Harold Perkins, the Zakopane factory owner who was now officially working for SIS. All three had strong Polish sympathies, and all would go on to become key contacts for Christine. But at this point they were simply trying to make their way out of Poland, caught up in what Wilkinson described as ‘the procession of dusty motorcars, mostly driven by women, crammed with personal possessions and with pale, wide-eyed children looking out of the windows’.28

  No one at the British Mission would be able to forget the scenes they now witnessed. ‘A few cars bore bullet marks and many had mattresses strapped to the roof as a vain protection against the German dive-bombers’, Wilkinson noted, while in the opposite direction ‘there was a procession of horses being driven westward to the battle’, among them ‘young foals trotting eagerly to the war alongside their mothers’.29 Gubbins felt that the fierce determination of the old men, women and children he saw tearing up paving slab
s to build barricades was typical of the Polish spirit of resistance. Wilkinson watched a peasant woman in a headscarf carrying a bucket across the fields to her mare with its foal, like ‘something Breughel might have painted, a scene that time had forgotten…’ A few minutes later the farmhouse was in flames, and the mare and woman lay dead, ‘the latter with her skirts blown over her head leaving her bare thighs obscenely exposed. Only the foal remained alive, quietly cropping the grass.’30 As they continued their flight, stripping off their uniforms and tearing up their passports, Wilkinson began to question Britain’s moral authority. Then, as he and Gubbins used what he called ‘some intelligent coaxing’ to ‘sort out’ some army trucks blocking the road, Wilkinson turned to find a Polish officer pointing a pistol at him.31 ‘Who are you giving orders to Poles?’ the officer shouted. ‘What are you doing in Poland?’ Before Wilkinson had time to respond the traffic started moving again and the officer moved away, but his question stayed hanging in the air. Walking back to the car Gubbins asked bitterly, ‘What are we doing here? What help have we been able to give the Poles?’32

  Among the Polish refugees slipping across the country’s borders were Christine’s young cousins Jan and Andrzej Skarbek, who eventually crossed the border in a Red Cross train, repatriating wounded Hungarian soldiers from the Russian front. Their father had already joined the Polish army in France. It was some time before Christine learned they had escaped occupied Poland.* But she did meet someone from her childhood while she was in Budapest – Andrzej Kowerski, now a dashing lieutenant.