by Clare Mulley
The first hurdle was getting her into Hungary. She could be parachuted into Slovakia, either to a reception team or ‘blind’ (without any support), and then cross the border on foot. But, given the mixed loyalties of the Slovakian population, the risks involved were deemed too great. Sending her into Poland, however, undercover as a refugee escaping the Russian advance, meant involving the Poles, and so inevitably ‘creating too many unnecessary difficulties for ourselves’.50 In any case, SOE admitted, as persona non grata with the Polish community in Hungary, Christine was ‘likely to be betrayed’.51 The only option was a blind drop. This, Howarth now argued, ‘would probably amount to little short of homicide, and while this would not deter the operator [Christine], the advantages likely to be derived are so slight that this course cannot be conscientiously recommended’.52 Nonetheless, ‘as it has been agreed that Hungary must be penetrated, and as Christine is willing to take the risks involved’, it was decided, ‘we must adopt the courses which would offer the greatest chances of survival’.53 Christine was immediately put forward for a further ‘SIS and short sabotage’ course.54
At the start of April ‘Operation Kris’ was designated ‘most urgent’, and Christine had been given a new name and cover story. In her papers she was to be ‘Marja Kaminski’, from ‘Lwowun’, born in 1914 – a year older than Christine was believed to be by the British, but still six years shy of the truth.55 One week later, to Christine’s intense frustration, the operation was cancelled. ‘In view of the fact that she is well known to Hungarian police and speaks little Magyar [I] do not feel justified in taking large risk involved’, the new head of the SOE Balkans section in Cairo, Bickham Sweet-Escott, reported to London. ‘If therefore you have some other project in mind for her, for example FRANCE please let us know soonest.’56
Sweet-Escott was another of Christine’s many Cairo fans. ‘She is a Polish lady of considerable beauty and great courage…’, he wrote, ‘as brave as a lion’, and he refused to sacrifice her on what he considered an ill-thought-out mission.57 Instead he repeatedly suggested she should be dropped into France, a country she knew well from before the war, and whose language she spoke fluently. Sweet-Escott knew that Christine’s morale had taken a serious blow with the cancellation of Operation Kris, and yet at the end of April, as D-Day loomed ever closer, her future was still undecided.
It was only in May 1944 that the decision was finally taken to send Christine to the SOE base in Algeria, code-named ‘Massingham’, in preparation to be dropped into occupied southern France. Before she left she was given a temporary commission in the RAF, in the hope that if captured in the field she would be treated as a prisoner-of-war, rather than shot as a spy. Her one concession to the danger of her new mission was to send a message to Andrzej in Italy, letting him know her movements. Then, impatient to be off, she wore her steel-blue RAF uniform to her Cairo farewell party, a ‘merry affair’ at which ‘vodka flowed and cucumber sandwiches were munched’, and laughter quickly drowned out the familiar din of the city that could be heard through the open windows.58 ‘I do not think I ever saw her look happier’, Bill Stanley Moss later remembered.59 She left at midnight.
Massingham, the British base at Guyotville, just west of Algiers, had been established a year earlier at the once luxurious ‘Club des Pins’ among the sandy dunes of the Mediterranean coast, on the beach over which the main assault had come a year earlier, and behind hundreds of miles of barbed wire. Originally a resort for rich Algerians and French families escaping the heat of the capital, Massingham’s offices and messes were set up in a series of marble villas, whose grounds ran from wooded inland hills right down to a sheltered bay. A bar was built on piles above the water. A couple of hundred men and about thirty FANYs were already billeted there. The women worked as wireless operators, coders and teleprinters, and at night, when not on duty, they had parties on the beach and swam naked in the warm sea.
Beach aside, conditions were tough. There was no hot water, except that scrounged from the cooks, and Christine was lucky to arrive in the summer, as there was no heating in winter. But the army rations of spam, corned beef and peanut butter were cheered up by dates and other local fruit, and the villas were covered in the beautiful bougainvillea that grew like a weed all over the camp. Under the exceptionally well-connected Douglas Dodds-Parker, ‘an antelope of a Colonel’, Massingham was a highly efficient HQ.60 The working day began with a compulsory run before breakfast, and with all the sea-bathing, bare knees and general enforced enthusiasm, the atmosphere was ‘somewhat reminiscent of a racing north Oxford preparatory school’.61 Having helped to coordinate the Italian surrender, Dodds-Parker was well respected, and he was now preparing for ‘Operation Dragoon’, the Allied invasion of France. Christine would become his only active female agent.
But Dodds-Parker had no immediate plans to drop Christine. ‘It was decided’, he wrote diplomatically, ‘that her courage was best restrained until nearer the time of liberation.’62 Later he admitted that she was held back because she was still considered ‘too flamboyant’ to work undercover effectively.63 In the meantime Christine underwent more training alongside other agents being prepared to drop into France. Among these were the ever-kilted Havard Gunn, tall, thin, quiet but charming, and just back from Yugoslavia; Leonard Hamilton, who had escaped from a POW camp in northern Italy; the chipper Paddy O’Regan, just back from ops in Greece; and John Roper, on his first mission, whose ‘pudding face’ was constantly animated by the effort of delivering stories from ‘a mixture of the Tatler and Scots Guard magazine’.64 Roper was soon under Christine’s spell, and took to carrying a clean handkerchief for her and, if possible, ‘a twist of tea’, whenever he thought he might meet her.65 All of them would become lifelong friends.
Christine was taught her personal cipher code, and true and bluff passwords, by Paddy Sproule, the senior FANY coder at Massingham, who was more used to working with American officers who brought treats of butter, bacon, eggs and waffles, than penniless Polish aristocrats. To help Christine remember the three unpublished poems she would need for coding messages, they were written for her personally. One was a nostalgic tribute to the lost happiness of her pre-war life, the others more optimistic in tone, celebrating the ‘bliss of a gentle existence’ and the ‘luminous hearth of a woman adored’.66 Considered ‘very bright’ by Paddy, Christine learnt her poems and complex personal code in less than half a day, building on the long hours of training she had undertaken in Cairo.67 Her wireless skills, however, although satisfactory, were not up to the twenty words per minute that FANYs were expected to achieve. Now the process of numbly translating and signalling Morse was drilled into her until she could hardly hear a bird sing without trying to catch its meaning, but the high speeds needed for time-effective signalling remained beyond her. Dorothy Wakely, the Signals Planning Officer, astutely surmised that Christine was simply too old to be trained as a good Morse operator. Nevertheless Christine learnt to repair wireless sets, and was taught security measures such as hooking her radio to car batteries rather than town power supplies so that her location could not be isolated by systematically turning off power zones. Her parachuting skills were also reinforced with test jumps from a fragment of fuselage rigged up in the hills, and at the RAF facilities established at Blida, surrounded by vineyards a few miles to the south. As a result, unlike so many female SOE agents, Christine did earn her prized paratrooper’s ‘wings’.
She also worked on her small-arms and explosives skills. Hours were spent on target practice with a revolver, pistol or German machine gun, and at certain times at night the whole beach was out of bounds for target practice with whatever firearms the agents were carrying. Louder explosions were caused during demolitions practice, when Christine and the men learnt to mould plastic charges, add primers and tie them in bundles using sticky paste before the fuses were lit and the group ran to hide behind the dunes. Paddy O’Regan found ‘the bang and the result very satisfying’, but Christine still hate
d the noise.68
She was better at picking up courier skills, learning how to arrange appropriate rendezvous for meeting different types of people, how to find sites where a radio might be safely operated, drop prearranged passwords into conversation, and set up live letter drops (where someone would receive her post without asking questions), and dead letter boxes (where messages could be passed on without any personal contact). In Algiers she learnt to find and follow a contact or, conversely, shake off a tail. Finally she was taught how to survive exhausting interrogations by the police, or the Gestapo, designed to break her morale and resistance, and how important it was to hold out for at least the first forty-eight hours to give any colleagues a chance to escape. This ‘boys’-own’ stuff, demanding intuition, courage and determination, came as second nature to her, and she thrived in the competitive, and very male, atmosphere at the camp.
Most SOE agents, regardless of working towards the same end, were independent creatures, and often rather solitary. But being able to work in a team was crucial and Christine completed her training with a three-day hike around Blida, at the base of the Tell Atlas mountains, as part of a team-building exercise. Carrying heavy rucksacks, she and her partners had to slide down scree hills in the hot sun, before walking in the shade of the pines that covered the deep valleys cut by zigzagging streams, and scrambling under wild rhododendrons, their branches heavy with flowers, whenever they heard a noise.
After their shifts the FANYs would go to parties in the Officers’ Clubs but, for security, the agents led more secluded lives. The enforced distance suited Christine. She had no interest in FANY parties and was pleased to disappear from observation for a while, spending more time with her fellow agents while trying to cultivate the anonymity required for her undercover work. As the only female agent, however, she inevitably stood out. Dorothy Wakely, the Signals Planning Officer, remembered meeting her occasionally around the camp. Although she thought Christine’s looks were unremarkable, her ‘hair, face and skin colour generally the same uniform brown’, she was still struck by her ‘remarkable grace of movement and charm, and something about her which made one look longer’.69 Christine would have been disappointed.
Christine spent most of her free time with Gunn, O’Regan and Roper. Although its climate was as hot as Cairo, Guyotville had the benefit of the coastal breeze. In fact, that spring the weather was ‘unbelievably bad’ in North Africa, taking some of the pleasure out of Christine’s habitual sunbathing.70 Instead she and some of the men drank coffee in the quieter Officers’ Club, went for picnics along the coast at Tipaza among the ruins of a Roman city, or walked the mile to the Massingham gates and hiked up into the hills. Determined not to be the weakest link, Christine would often leave her companions behind. Gunn strode along more casually, taking off his shirt to soak up the sun, and, O’Regan remembered, ‘occasionally talked mysteriously of our crusade’.71 O’Regan suspected, too, that Gunn was ‘falling in love with Christine’. He certainly called her ‘a wonderful, wonderful person’, chose his code-name, ‘Bambus’, in memory of a clump of bamboo that he and she had once encountered during training, and accepted her dare to drop into France with a teddy-bear she bought him as a passenger.72 But when Gunn asked Christine about her post-war plans she refused to be drawn.73 She could not envisage what her life would be like in peacetime and in any case, she told him with a laugh before striding off, she preferred to concentrate on the here and now, and on getting as fit as possible. ‘She was vital and full of fun … [with] a marvellous sense of humour’, Gunn later commented, but ‘strangely, she did not appear to have any sense of roots. She lived entirely for the moment, and appeared to look upon the future with some trepidation’.74 Gunn’s impression of Christine speaks volumes. To the men she was different for being female, but she had otherwise proved herself to be one of the lads. The implications of her being Polish, the pain of her past and her unimaginable future, had not registered. Christine was keeping herself very private.
Sometimes, if she could get a lift along the coast in a jeep or on a motorbike, she would go alone to visit the old pirate port of Algiers. The FANYs were advised not to go to the Kasbah, the Arab quarter, but most ventured into the fringes. For some the market was disappointing, ‘totally bereft of any buyable thing’, but Christine had little interest in material possessions.75 After the souks of Cairo she was completely at home, chatting away in French over sticky dates and glasses of tea with the shopkeepers and stallholders. Eventually she bought three leather wallets, one for Andrzej, one for Patrick Howarth, and one for herself, all for a few small and colourful Algerian notes.
As soon as he was able, Andrzej secured two weeks’ leave and flew to Algiers to join her. While he could not help noticing that in her RAF uniform Christine ‘looked even more attractive than usual’, he tried to focus on redeploying some of her time from hiking, picnicking, sunbathing and sightseeing towards learning to swim, cycle and shoot accurately – all, astonishingly, talents she still lacked.76 In these endeavours he was helped most of all by the unseasonable weather, which curbed some of her enthusiasm to lounge about in the sun, her ‘inherent laziness’ she called it.77 But despite Andrzej’s best efforts Christine never would learn to swim, or master many of her other weaknesses.
Christine took a deep dislike to bicycles, which, after a while, she refused to ride at all. It was not that she found them unladylike, or worried that cycling might lead to excessively bulging thighs and muscular calves. On the contrary, she was very conscious of the importance of keeping fit, and often cursed how thin she was, fearing it might undermine her physical endurance. But she had ridden astride horses from her earliest childhood, and simply found them stronger and better at jumping fences and testing unsteady ground. Bicycles might be faster than walking, and able to make even the strangest-looking packages seem quite innocuous in a basket or pannier, but for Christine they were flimsy, unreliable and apparently hostile.
Her dislike of guns was similarly tenacious. After weeks of training she still closed her eyes whenever she fired, claiming to hate the noise. ‘Anyway, I could never bring myself to shoot anyone!’ she told Andrzej.78 Howarth later swore that she never did, preferring to employ other weapons in emergencies, above all what he called ‘her formidable powers of persuasion’.79 These, he believed, derived from a combination of her ‘feminine charm’, her ‘controlled indignation which, it was easy to believe, might suddenly erupt into fury’ and ‘her ability to persuade any man on whom she was working that he was unusual in being perceptive enough, not only to understand the arguments she was advancing, but to agree with them’.80 Christine was certainly possessed of an almost reckless self-confidence in most respects. She knew she had a number of basic gaps in her repertoire of espionage skills but, typically, she refused to spend time mastering anything that did not either interest or come naturally to her. To make matters worse, she had been allocated a briefing officer who, according to Andrzej, ‘rubbed her up the wrong way’. This was putting it mildly.81
Francis Brooks Richards, head of Massingham’s French section, had arranged for Christine to be briefed by Major Benjamin Cowburn, code-name ‘Tinker’, and ‘one of the most gallant and courageous SOE agents’, who was temporarily in between missions in France.82 Sparks flew immediately. Cowburn was a short and stockily built, taciturn Lancashire oil technician, altogether the very picture of ‘a dour north-countryman’.83 Furthermore he liked to answer back. Maurice Buckmaster, SOE’s London head of F (French) Section, found Cowburn’s ‘directness of manner as stimulating as it was disconcerting’.84 Although Cowburn had proved he had all the personal resources and determination needed to provide Britain with the first direct intelligence from occupied France, he could not make a connection with Christine. Whether this was because he was a fan of what he called ‘blue stories’, or an even greater fan of bicycles, is not known.85 ‘I think, in retrospect, that there were displays of temperament that were to be expected of a “diva”, even when
attending master-classes by another great performer’, Brooks Richards later wrote.86
In fact, whoever had to sit Christine down to learn about life in occupied France, from political nuances to police uniforms and cultural details such as never to ask for a café-au-lait in case she should be betrayed by not knowing there was no milk, was going to have a hard task. Agents in Britain were sometimes given seven weeks of this kind of ‘head cramming’; Christine could hardly sit still for a couple of days.87 The course was full of exactly the sort of life-saving minutiae that drove her mad, and it took not only Andrzej, but a flying visit from Howarth, to calm her down and get her to pay the lectures, and her own detailed cover story as the fictional ‘Jacqueline Armand’, the level of attention they required.
One evening, a month after arriving at Massingham, Christine pinned down Dodds-Parker, demanding to know when, exactly, she was to be dropped into the field. ‘I want to go to France, I am going to France’, she told him, and when he protested that she was too flamboyant, too brave, and that she would get caught, she told him, her voice heavy with emotion, ‘I’ll keeeel you.’ ‘Kill me?’ Dodds-Parker echoed, and quickly sent her over to see General Stawell, the new regional head of SOE, who was on a visit. After dinner, Christine and the general disappeared behind the sand dunes, and when he came back Dodds-Parker noticed that Stawell was ‘knocking at the knees, and said she had better go to France’.88 At last, and not without some personal intervention, Christine had full clearance.
Francis Brooks Richards was given complete discretion as to where to send Christine. Like so many men before him, he was not impervious to her charms. ‘She was a very handsome woman,’ he said, ‘a woman of great presence’, and he accepted unquestioningly her personal ‘cover’ story that she had been Miss Poland in 1937, as well as a skiing champion, and the wife of ‘the Polish Consul General for the whole of Africa’.89 During his assessment of her, he reported, Christine made it ‘quite clear she was perfectly prepared for cover purposes to become fictively married to somebody’.90 Immediately he thought of Francis Cammaerts, one of F Section’s best agents, running a highly effective resistance network in southeastern France. Cammaerts had put in a request for a new courier to replace the female agent caught by the Gestapo a few weeks earlier. Danger, drama, a fictional romance: it could hardly have been more perfect.
