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

by Clare Mulley

  In fact Christine was finding it hard to get anywhere near close enough to the danger she craved. She had handed her Musketeers’ microfilm over to Section D’s Hubert Harrison as soon as she got to Budapest. A few days later she followed this with her own report, which Harrison forwarded to London before he headed to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. When he returned, six weeks later, Christine was still waiting to be contacted by his stand-in, but – as ever – she had not been idle. She was now the Musketeers’ reception point for couriers like Michal Gradowski, bringing information out of Poland, and with Andrzej she was soon also supporting a secondary courier and escape route across the Tatra mountains, managed by her Zakopane skiing friends.

  Christine had never developed a good relationship with Harrison. From the start he had frequently missed their prearranged rendezvous, he was lax in paying her salary and expenses, and was often seen drunk in public with other British officers like Ted Howe, whom she also held in scant regard.10 Now Christine felt that she had to badger Harrison daily to ensure that he actually read the reports that her contacts were risking their necks to bring out of Poland. Even then, she later reported angrily, often ‘he failed to act on it in any way’.11 Later she received a letter from Witkowski, saying that he thought the British ‘seemed very queer people and were acting very strangely’.12 Christine did not yet know that the Polish government-in-exile was developing serious concerns about the allegiances of both Witkowski and the Musketeers, and that all information provided by them was being treated with extreme caution. ‘There has been some disagreement among the Poles themselves as to what they really want’, Hugh Dalton, the head of British special operations, reported to Churchill later that year. ‘Ways and means to help them have been closely examined but it has not been found possible to do much to date.’13

  Christine and Andrzej’s response to Britain’s apparent – and, to them, inexplicable – failure to act on the intelligence provided was to work more broadly with any representative of the Allies in Budapest. A conversation about state-of-the-art Polish high-velocity rifles, designed to pierce the armour of a German tank, had lit up the ‘fishy eyes’ of the impeccably moustached French military attaché in the city.14 The speed of the German invasion had been such that the top-secret rifles had never been used in Poland, and as the blueprints had been hastily destroyed any future production would require reverse engineering.15 When the attaché promised expenses and French decorations for a sample of the gun, Andrzej arranged for his distant cousin in the resistance, Ludwig Popiel, to collect the rifle he had buried in a sealed box in the forests on his family estate the previous September.

  As a major in the Carpathian Lancers, Ludwig would twice be awarded the Virtuti Militari, and later won the British Military Cross for capturing a German machine-gun nest when armed only with a handful of bricks.16 He now threw himself into resistance work with equal courage. Accompanied by a friend, he took the same treacherous mountain crossing into Poland as Christine had done and retrieved the rifle. Having sawn off the stock and barrel, a few days later the two men smuggled the gun back to Budapest, where they hid it, rather unimaginatively, under Ludwig’s bed. They then met Andrzej and Christine in a bar. Before long a loud and heated argument broke out about what to do with the gun. Increasingly irritated, Christine decided to leave the men to it. When Ludwig returned home late that evening, he found that the Hungarian police, now full of pro-Nazi officers, had ransacked his room. Worse still, the rifle was gone. Seeing that he was compromised, Ludwig was about to flee when there was a knock at the door. Christine stood on the threshold, fighting a smile as she looked steadily at him. It was only after Ludwig had stammered out his shameful confession that she put an end to his torment. She had driven over that afternoon, broken into his boarding-house room, collected the rifle, dismantled it, taken it to Derék Utca and sewn it inside the mattress of her bed. She had beaten the police to their quarry by an hour, her quick thinking saving both the rifle and Ludwig’s neck. That night, she told him, she fully intended to enjoy sleeping on the gun, before delivering it to the French herself in a diplomatic bag.*

  Shortly after this, Christine was recalled to London, but the Belgians had surrendered at the end of May, Panzer divisions were fanning out across northern France and the French and British were in flight. With Harrison again away, Christine was temporarily cut off from London, and from her source of income. She applied to Polish intelligence in Budapest but they were still nervous about taking her on.* British policy and Polish interests were aligned for the time being, but the Poles were well aware that there might be some future divergence. One officer summed it up: ‘We are the Polish Underground, and we do not wish the British to peek inside our underpants.’17 Furthermore, believing that as a British agent Christine was likely to be under German surveillance, the Poles also cautioned Wladimir about being seen in public with her.18 That riled Christine, and her vocal criticism of her Polish counterparts probably did her no further favours.

  Once it was clear that there would be no funding for her proposed radio station to broadcast news into Poland, Christine decided instead to take fresh news and propaganda material into Warsaw herself. Sitting in cafés by the Danube, she, Andrzej and Wladimir would scour the Polish News, Paris-Soir and the evening edition of Pester Lloyd, the leading German-language publication outside the Third Reich, and discuss the progress of the war with the friendly Hungarian, British and Polish journalists in the city. One of these was Basil Davidson, the former Economist correspondent who was now running a legitimate Budapest-based news agency and, as yet unknown to Christine, serving as a British intelligence officer publishing and circulating large amounts of propaganda. Davidson liked and admired Christine for her courage and ‘great gallantry’, but he did not always admire her judgement. ‘She was very Polish’, he later commented, ‘in the sense that she was very romantic.’19 Christine’s fierce, almost blind, pride reminded Davidson of the courage demonstrated by the Polish cavalry that rode against the German Panzers in the full knowledge of their fate. Davidson resisted the temptation to tell her about his own clandestine work. Instead he let Christine upbraid him, as a young man of military age, ‘for sitting in Budapest apparently doing nothing except drinking in bars and dancing in night clubs where I had no right to be, instead of fighting for my country’.20

  Soon the exiled former editor of the Polish News group commissioned Christine to take some funds into Warsaw, along with a quantity of propaganda material assembled for the underground press.21 Then, despite the official intelligence attitude towards Christine, an attaché at the Polish consulate gave her a large envelope of glossy photographs showing General Sikorski decorating Polish officers in Paris, and even meeting Winston Churchill, all to be republished in the Polish underground press as evidence of continued Allied support. It was all the encouragement she needed.

  Given that his artificial leg prevented him from making the crossing himself, Andrzej agreed that Wladimir would make the best escort for Christine. Wladimir was also keen to get back to Warsaw, but when the expected commission from the Budapest ZWZ was slow to materialize, Christine decided to wait no longer. In the first week of June, she set off alone.* Just before she left, while Andrzej was out buying cigarettes, Wladimir gave her a parting gift, ‘a necklace of flint glass which cast tiny coloured flecks of light’, that he had bought having pawned his watch that morning.22 ‘Are you mad?’ Christine had exclaimed, with a furtive glance in the mirror. ‘You would have done better to buy yourself a pair of decent shoes.’23 Both her lovers then saw her to the station. Afterwards Andrzej and Wladimir went to Budapest’s Palais de Danse to get drunk together on slivovitz, the local plum brandy. It was a rare emotional truce, and by the end of the evening they had agreed that if the situation in Hungary continued to deteriorate they would help each other to get out.

  Two days later Christine was back. The border guards had been increased, the fields were flooded and the rivers bursting their banks
with spring rain. She had not been able to get across. ‘Not a mouse could have made it’, she told the men, and Wladimir thought she looked defeated, her self-assurance gone.24 Full of pent-up frustration, she was outraged when she heard about the pact that he and Andrzej had made in her absence, shouting ‘To hell with you both’, and bursting into tears like an angry child.25 It was not her finest moment. Although she loved risk on her own terms, for someone who could be remarkably cold-blooded when occasion demanded, she was also incredibly thin-skinned; any knock to her pride revealed a surprising insecurity. But perhaps this time something deeper had been triggered: the realization that Andrzej and Wladimir had both entertained the possibility that she might not return. She steeled herself to try to cross again, as soon as possible. ‘The news I have from my wife is not encouraging’, Jerzy Giżycki wrote to Section D. ‘It does not look as if my desire to be with … or at least nearer to her, should be fulfilled soon.’26

  Just after Christine’s return, Wladimir’s orders at last came through. He had been commissioned to smuggle in microfilm of papers, signed by Sikorski, that confirmed the promotion of commander Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski to the rank of general.* After a furious morning studying maps and collecting materials, Christine, Wladimir and Andrzej headed out of Budapest to the honey-scented acacia woods beyond for a last carefree afternoon. Leaving Andrzej on the lower slopes, Christine tugged Wladimir into the flowery trees, where he kissed her passionately. They were both intensely happy at the thought of returning to Poland and of resuming their romance. That evening the three of them packed two rucksacks with maps, compass and peppermints, the microfilm hidden inside a torch, clandestine mail, propaganda material, false identity papers and passes with Gestapo stamps, American dollars, Polish zlotys, Czech koruna and Hungarian pengos, ‘any of which’ (apart from the mints), as Section D noted, ‘in the event of her arrest, might have seriously compromised her’.27 For Andrzej, however, the Sikorski photographs were too blatantly incriminating. The risk of what might happen to Christine if she was found carrying them was more than he could bear, and he quietly removed them from her rucksack. Then he drove them to the station.

  Christine spent a long time saying her goodbyes to Andrzej, and when the train finally started moving she and Wladimir sat opposite each other ‘like enemies’.28 Before nightfall they had completely fallen out. Wladimir bitterly told her how much pain she had caused him, but added that at least now he finally felt free of her. It was an inauspicious start. Meanwhile, when Andrzej got back to Budapest he found that, despite his best efforts, Christine had repacked the glossy propaganda photographs.

  At dawn the next day, Christine and Wladimir took a taxi towards the mountains. In the foothills they started hiking up the most sheltered tracks, walking between fields of green wheat and budding blackthorn hedges until they entered the forests that lay across the border. It was midnight before they stopped to sleep, Wladimir lying restlessly in Christine’s arms. Starting off again at dawn they found that they had travelled in a circle the day before and were back near the Hungarian border, close to a Slovak checkpoint.

  By now the Hungarian police were more or less completely controlled by the Gestapo, and were especially vigilant in the frontier areas. Czechoslovakia, like Poland, was occupied by the Germans. Unwilling to lose another day, however, Christine and Wladimir decided to bolt across the road where a dip in the terrain was just enough to keep them below the seated border guards’ line of vision. Wladimir went first, ‘sprinting the one hundred metres in a stylish way, except for my half-bent posture’. Looking back he saw Christine, leaning against a tree, silently applauding. A while later, tired of waiting for the signal to follow, Christine started crawling after him. Wladimir’s fingertips were starting to sweat when he saw the border guard stand up, screen his eyes against the slanting rays of the sun, and with his other hand clutch the leather strap of his rifle. ‘Run’, Wladimir shouted, as ‘there was a loud report of a shot, then another one, the next ones fired blindly, showering us with clipped off twigs and leaves.’ ‘Bloody bastards’, Christine commented, when they finally stopped to catch their breath.29 She was living up to her Musketeer code-name, Fly: irritating, but fast, and hard to catch.

  On the Slovak side of the border the climb quickly grew steeper, and as the day heated up they started to peel off coats and jumpers, stuffing them into their bags. Seeing that Christine was tiring, Wladimir discreetly shifted the heavier stuff into his own rucksack. By midday they were above the lower forests and momentarily out in the hot June sunshine, but they were moving too slowly. Dizzy and sunburnt, Christine suggested they take a train, but Wladimir’s ZWZ training made him reject the idea. Stopping at a house for milk, they learned that Paris had been taken by the Germans. Wladimir was deeply shaken. If France had fallen then England would be next, he predicted, and there would be no safe place in the world for the Poles.30

  After two more hours’ hiking, they were exhausted as well as demoralized. When Wladimir took Christine’s bag and water bottle against her will, she sat under a tree in protest, tears streaming down her face at both her own situation and the whole course of the war. Coerced and cajoled, she pulled herself together, and Wladimir agreed to head for the nearest railway station for the final stage of their journey, the crossing into Poland.31

  It was dusk when they hid behind the station’s goods sheds, but the stationmaster’s dog barked at them, so they pressed on down the line and finally crossed an iron railway bridge spanning a deep river, towards the next station. As it was now pitch-black, and about to rain, they risked sheltering on the platform. Perhaps they dozed off. Either way they were quickly held at gunpoint, and told, in Slovakian, to put their hands up. Wladimir explained that he and his sister had escaped from an internment camp outside Budapest and were heading home to Poland. Then, as Christine painted a sorry story of their life in Hungary and begged the guard to let them go, Wladimir discreetly clicked the torch in his pocket to expose the microfilm and dropped some of his forged travel papers on the fire. The guard seemed to soften as Christine spoke, but he still called the police, telling them that if their story was true they had nothing to fear. Soon an armed patrol arrived to escort them to the local police station, and then on to the nearest Gestapo headquarters the following day.

  As they approached the iron bridge, Christine began to limp and, stopping for a moment, she bent down to rub her blistered feet. Wladimir quickly leant forward and offered to get a bandage from her rucksack while he slipped the bulky envelope of propaganda material and Sikorski photographs from her bag into his coat. Once on the bridge he threw the package into the river below. Chaos erupted. One guard ran to retrieve the envelope. Another hauled Wladimir to the other end of the bridge, demanding he tell them what was in the package if he did not want to be shot ‘like a dog’.32 Christine threw herself between them, screaming that it was some money and magazines; stuff of hers that Wladimir knew nothing about. For a moment the envelope hovered on the water, just out of reach of the shore, then it disappeared. The guards were furious, shouting that it would be better if Christine and Wladimir confessed to being spies now, before the Gestapo arrived and forced the truth out of them. Either way they would be shot. ‘Your story stinks’, Wladimir recorded one officer screaming. ‘It’s shit!’33 ‘They cross-questioned us, keeping me up against a wall for several hours, covered with revolvers,’ Christine later reported, in an account clearly tailored for her British handlers, ‘but I swore I did not know the English.’34

  Soon all of Christine and Wladimir’s possessions were laid out on the grass: peppermints, tea, torch, the different packages of zloty and other currencies, Wladimir’s wallet, Christine’s forged travel documents, lipstick and even, Wladimir noticed with astonishment, a bottle of perfume. Dollars and Czech korunas quickly disappeared, but it was Wladimir’s Madonna that caused the most excitement – too many people had been caught crossing the mountains with the same pendant round their necks for it to be coincid
ence. The medal was indeed a ZWZ tag, and with growing horror Wladimir realized he was now a liability. ‘Feeling he was ready to die’, he started to consider how, should it become necessary, he could share with Christine the cyanide powder hidden deep in his pocket.35

  By 2 a.m. there was still no sign of the Gestapo and the first shock of their arrest had begun to pass. The forest was fifty metres behind them, and in between was a guard on the tracks. Wladimir measured the distance with his eyes and decided that, given enough of a distraction, they could make it. Christine, her hair ‘falling charmingly’ around her face, was talking softly with the guards who were counting out the money. Two minutes later Wladimir noticed one of the men holding up her glass necklace to examine it in the beam of his torch. A small fight ensued as Christine snatched for it, breaking the string of what she loudly called her ‘diamonds’, and scratching the officer’s face. The sergeant slapped her, but also tried to grab at the falling stones. In the confusion Wladimir knocked the torch from his hand and grabbed Christine, dragging her up the embankment. They heard the wind in their ears as they ran, jumped over the track and threw themselves down the other side. There was shouting and gunshots behind them as the cold wet branches of the first trees hit their faces, and then they were climbing and crawling, holding on to branches and tree trunks as their feet slid across the damp needles, until Christine crashed down a slope and straight into a tree. She did not get up. ‘So that’s it’, Wladimir thought.36