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

by Clare Mulley

  The prospects for the operation improved in December, prompting Christine to make financial arrangements for an elderly Skarbek aunt living in France. Touchingly she also specified that ‘if a sum of money is needed’ it should be given to her husband Jerzy Giżycki, who, she was informed, had applied for aid to the Association of Polish War Refugees in Montreal, Canada.52 Francis once said that Christine ‘had no interest in money, for her it did not exist’, but she also clearly had no illusions about the personal risks her mission involved, and wanted to settle her affairs as best she could.53 She was now on a tax-free salary of £511.12.0 per annum, well above the national average and at the high end of the scale for a female agent. When she had been in France her expenses had been fully covered, so she had built up some savings. Now she would receive not only her salary but also danger and field pay. And yet she tried to secure even more. ‘The claim for clothing lost by enemy action amounting to (gross) £240.7.0 is out of all proportion for such losses which can be allowed … The items included therein are on a luxury scale both as to quality and quantity’, the finance department informed her curtly when she submitted a ‘Misadventures of Jane’ style claim for lost outfits.54 Given Christine’s penchant for a few plain skirts and well-cut shirts, she was definitely trying it on, but she received £155, to include her RAF outfit grant, while a junior officer reporting to Dodds-Parker was quizzed more thoroughly as to ‘the circumstances leading to the loss of Miss Granville’s Operational clothes’.55 Meanwhile, on 23 December, Christine signed out two white diamonds, $1,000 in gold, $500 in bills, and some thick Polish winter clothes for her ‘Folkestone’ mission.56

  SOE knew, however, that Christine’s worth was not all tied up in diamonds and lost dresses. Accordingly, they now attempted to extract what further value they could from their asset, inviting her input into a new ‘Agent Training Manual’, and arranging for her to liaise with the Polish Military at their London headquarters, where Christine was now received with the ‘greatest respect’ and the traditional kiss on the hand accorded by Polish gentlemen to ladies in lieu of a simple handshake.57

  Finally, just after Christmas, the long-awaited signal that the missions could drop without Stalin’s authority came through. The teams now hoped that their reports would show ‘how the British government could best help the Poles in the face of increasing Russian pressure to abandon them’.58 In the days before they left, the four officers of the Freston team, under the ‘resourceful [and] highly experienced’ Colonel D. T. Hudson, who had previously carried out a similar mission in Yugoslavia, learned new codes, drew their personal arms, and were issued with their cyanide tablets ‘in an atmosphere of grim and silent sympathy’.59 Moments later these lethal pills became muddled up with their aspirins and they were forced to destroy the lot.*

  On the night of 26/27 December 1944, Hudson assembled his men for a cold but traditional Christmas dinner on the edge of the airfield before leaving, but atmospheric conditions again prohibited take-off. The SOE London office sent them consolatory Christmas cakes and a letter with Christine, who flew to Bari the next day, attaching her latest briefing papers so that Hudson could see her final instructions. These boiled down, SOE told him, to ‘the duty of snooping on your behalf’. There was no need ‘to eulogise on her many various good qualities’, the note continued; ‘there is no question about it whatever that she is better informed on Polish political conditions … than almost any other single personality’.60 Freston finally got air clearance the following night, and their safe arrival in south-west Poland was confirmed by the Home Army the next day. The successful landing encouraged everyone, most of all Threlfall, who now made feverish preparations for the dispatch of the next mission, Fernham, comprising Christine, Andrzej, John Roper and two other officers. ‘Folkestone to proceed to the field as quickly as possible’, London ordered.61

  Hudson and his Freston team had quickly run into difficulties, however. Hudson had been knocked out on landing and was concussed for some time afterwards, and another officer had been injured and could not walk. After a warm and well-prepared reception from the Polish 27th Infantry Regiment, complete with farm carts, clean sheets and cherry vodka, the team was on the road, numb with cold and forced to bury their heavy kit, which they never recovered. They saw the new year in at a party in a smoky overcrowded room at a grand country house, getting drunk on champagne that was not to be left for the Soviets, roaring through the chorus of the Polish national anthem, and unwisely firing shots into the air at midnight. Back in Italy, Christine and Andrzej could only knock back glasses of cold Italian wine in Andrzej’s quiet, snow-clad trullo. The next morning Wehrmacht tanks, fighting a bitter rearguard action, arrived at the Polish manor house. In their hasty retreat the Freston team lost a wireless set and a courageous member of their Polish reception committee, Janusz, who was killed with his Sten gun in his hand in the ensuing battle. However, a few days later they rendezvoused successfully with the ‘clear-thinking and confident’ general Leopold Okulicki of the Home Army.62 Over tea and business, Okulicki suggested it might be wise to now send in Andrzej and Christine who, as Polish nationals, could move around more easily. Hudson radioed for them both to be dropped in with extra kit but, before this could be acted on, in mid-January, the Freston mission was overrun by a surprise Soviet offensive. Hudson received radio instructions to report to the nearest Russian formation, and there the team was promptly arrested. ‘Too late to be of any public service’, one of them admitted, they had managed only to witness Poland’s ‘death-throe’.63

  The Soviet Army entered a devastated and deserted Warsaw on 17 January 1945. Having destroyed nearly every building, the Germans had retreated, carrying out horrendous atrocities against the remaining civilians as they went. With the capital reduced to vast mounds of rubble, the universities and museums bombed and looted, hundreds of thousands of books burned and the population decimated, the Communists easily seized control of Poland’s future. In March, ‘with a treachery rarely equaled in history’, Gubbins later wrote, the Soviets arranged talks with the surviving Polish leaders at which they had them arrested and transported, or in some cases ‘liquidated’ on the spot.64 When Okulicki ordered the dissolution of the Home Army, he implored his soldiers to keep the dream of freedom alive. Now thousands of Home Army soldiers were rounded up, interrogated, and required to join the Polish Red Army. Those who refused received death sentences as spies or collaborators. Okulicki himself would die in a Russian prison camp in 1946, and ‘almost every day news was received in London of leading members of the Polish Resistance being arrested and summarily dealt with by the Soviet authorities’, Peter Wilkinson recorded.65 But the British Foreign Office was reluctant to intervene. Few leaders of the wartime underground, landowners, or members of the Polish intelligentsia still in the country would survive. ‘In Lublin they were shooting them down in the cellar in the back of the head…’, one officer reported.66 Then the Moscow-backed Polish provisional government was moved from Lublin to Warsaw, and Soviet administration began.

  Several of Christine’s relatives had managed to get out of Poland. Her mother’s brother, Józef Goldfeder, and his wife, had been killed during the German occupation, but their daughter had escaped to the USA. Another cousin, the son of her father’s sister, had got to Britain, where he settled, and her more distant cousins from Lwów, Andrzej and Jan Skarbek, had been in Poland and Hungary with their immediate family from 1940 until they were old enough to serve in Italy towards the end of the war. Christine’s brother Andrzej had survived the war too. Having joined the Home Army in the early months of occupation, he had stayed in Warsaw, where he remarried in February 1942. He was later arrested, and spent the rest of the conflict in a German POW camp under false papers. His first wife, Irena, and their daughter Teresa Krystyna, named after the aunt she hardly knew, were also still alive and now faced a hazardous future.

  The long winter weeks of early 1945 were the most traumatic of Christine’s life. All autumn in Lond
on she had agonized over the unwillingness or inability of the Allies to assist in the Warsaw Rising as the BBC reported on the deteriorating situation and FANYs decoded ‘heartrending messages’ for help.67 At the end of the year she had come so close to being sent out that Polish reports recorded her as number 317 on their ‘parachute jumpers list’, having ‘dropped from Italy at the end of December’.68 But in January 1945 she was still waiting in a Bari hotel for her mission to be given final clearance. The first few weeks after the departure of the Freston mission had been filled with drama. Christine was in frantic discussions with both Polish and British officers and, bluntly denouncing one proposed team member as ‘useless’, she supported some eleventh-hour changes to the Fernham and Flamstead personnel.69 However, the strain of having to sit in idleness while keyed up for the operation eventually wore her down.

  Every day Christine and the men would drive down the coast to the airbase at Brindisi or operational HQ at Monopoli to collect any messages. On 11 January she heard the first news of her brother Andrzej since she had last seen their mother, Stefania, in Warsaw in 1940. The unexpected possibility of seeing him again added to her frustration at the mission’s delay. She started lobbying Perkins and Threlfall for action, but in return only received seemingly endless briefings and contradictory reports on the situation on the ground.

  Her evenings were mainly spent with Andrzej, either glued to the radio for reports on the Russian advance or discussing the contribution that their mission might make, while huddled round the stove in his trullo in the hills. Sometimes they played cards and, together with the Polish aircrews, cursed the infamy of the Soviets and their British and American allies, while avoiding the mess-hall full of empty chairs – of the thirteen Polish squadrons at the start of the Rising, there were now only two left. Occasionally they would take a jeep and explore Naples, or drive into the mountains to buy wine. Winter began to fade. Christine’s original password to identify herself to her Polish reception committee, ‘Have you got any plums for sale?’, had clearly long passed its use-by date, and still the mission was not approved.70

  It was no coincidence that the Soviets released Hudson and his Freston team on 12 February 1945, the day the Yalta conference ended. By then Churchill and Roosevelt had recognized the Communist provisional government of the Polish Republic, effectively ending the role of the Polish government-in-exile. Poland, it was agreed in absentia, should cede territories to Russia but be compensated with new land annexed from Germany. Churchill alone raised a voice for democratic elections, a request that was repeated at the Potsdam conference later that year, and with that, the Polish question was considered settled. Christine, and the 250,000 Polish servicemen still fighting with the Allies, saw Yalta as a betrayal. They now knew that they were no longer fighting for Poland’s freedom, and there would be no free Poland for them to return to after the war. ‘We were dumbfounded and bitterly resentful when news of the settlement reached us’, one Polish officer wrote. ‘Some just stared into empty space unable to speak, others wept openly, while others still raised their voices in anger and recrimination. How could our British allies and friends betray us so shamefully?’71

  Christine’s mission was finally cancelled in the early spring. ‘The end of the war intervened’, SOE brusquely noted in her file, and Christine was left devastated by her inability to help protect her country from either German or Russian aggression.72 On finally hearing the mission was off, one account has her bundling up the heavy Polish clothes she had been issued with, and shoving them into an iron stove where she watched them burn for a while until she said to herself, ‘That’s the end.’73

  Whether an SOE mission arriving six months earlier might have had any serious influence over events is debatable. Wilkinson, Gubbins’s number two, felt not, but Threlfall, equally well placed to judge, believed that such an operation would have been of ‘historical importance’, as ‘it is doubtful whether the Warsaw Rising would have broken out’.74 At the very least, if successful, the mission might have provided some direct communication between the Home Army and the British, in the absence of which Bór-Komorowski’s ability to judge the intentions and capacity of his Western Allies to support the Rising had been seriously impaired. Furthermore the mere presence of British observers might have limited the German reprisals when the Rising failed, and subsequently enabled them to act as human rights monitors with the Soviets. But perhaps the missions would simply have been arrested sooner and kept out of sight, as Freston was, until the intelligence they had gathered was out of date and could have no influence.

  On a personal level, Christine would have felt greater solidarity with her compatriots had she been able to join them. As it was she was eaten up by feelings of impotence, anger and guilt. She could not stop thinking about the destruction of Warsaw – its opera house and department stores, the cafés and cinemas she had known so well, and the desperate last days of those who had lived in the city, her many friends among them. In the words of one Polish radio transmission, sent just after the fall of the city, ‘absolutely everyone has lost absolutely everything’.75

  Christine told Andrzej that she needed to rest, and he secretly booked a picturesque hotel on a nearby Greek island. He hoped that a change would distract her, restoring her energies and her old bold sense of self. Having shared such traumatic months, he also knew how deeply he loved her and how intimately they were tied to each other, as orphans and exiles together. Once again he planned to propose, hoping that they might face their uncertain future side by side. But Christine was still possessed of an ‘almost violent independence’, as Francis had once remarked, and she felt a desperate need to keep fighting on alone.76 It was not that she did not love Andrzej: she did. But marriage had never been an answer for her, and to marry him now would have felt like giving up. When Andrzej surprised her with his proposal and ill-timed plans for a romantic break, Christine shuddered and took to her heels. She had been offered work in the Movement Section of General Headquarters Multilateral Force, dealing with displaced persons, and was flying via Naples to Cairo, where she still had many SOE friends, like Harold Perkins, who might yet be able to deploy her operationally. Andrzej waved her off, and seeing her leave him again he had the feeling that ‘something had snapped between us – irrevocably’.77 Two days later he returned to London alone.

  Christine felt better just to be on the move. As she was stranded in Naples for a couple of days while waiting for her connection, SOE sent out an officer from Rome, Peter Lee, to keep her company at the villa in the hills, overlooking Vesuvius, where she was lodged. Far from meeting a desolate waif, Lee found a ‘slim, oval-faced, rather olive-skinned, dark-haired girl with beautiful features’ who kept him entertained over two successive dinner dates with her adventure stories from the field.78 ‘She was very free with her favours’, Lee later commented on this ‘amazing’ and ‘extraordinary’ girl, not mentioning whether he spoke from personal experience.79

  Christine found Cairo in a festive mood. Taking victory as being a mere formality away, there was a series of cocktail parties and receptions, and even formal balls. Her friends swarmed round her. Xan Fielding, who promptly lent her £150, a huge sum, and Zofia Tarnowska and Bill Stanley Moss, now a hero from his and Paddy Leigh Fermor’s mission to Crete, headed the welcoming committee. Michael Dunford quietly slipped his arm back through hers, too, albeit slightly more shyly. The returning heroine was suddenly required to lend glamour and prestige to every event, a role for which she had little appetite but accepted to please her friends, ironing her best blouse, straightening the pleats of her Vercors skirt and pulling on a new pair of heels. It was Michael who now took on the role of observer, as Christine was swept away from him to recount her war stories to circles of admiring officers. Watching from across a room he felt that her conversation could be transcribed as a series of Morse signals, intermittent flashes of brilliance, until the signal was abruptly halted as he lost sight of her. One night, having been deserted at an eve
nt, he drove angrily home through the Arab quarter only to catch sight of a new Morse code, ‘flashed as she ran, by her bare heels’.80 When he chastised her for her Cinderella-like behaviour Christine simply laughed at him and blamed the bores at the party and the pain of high heels. True to form, she refused to be disciplined, reprimanded or constrained in any way. Not long afterwards, when Michael introduced her to George Michailov, a Serbian pilot who was reputed to have stolen a German Messserschmitt in Zagreb, she disappeared with the hero, leaving Michael alone in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, nursing ‘murderous instincts’ inside himself. ‘I would have killed Michailov like a dog’, he later admitted.81

  But while Cairo society celebrated, for Christine the war was far from won. Although always happy to enjoy some romantic distraction, she had started manoeuvring for active service as soon as she arrived. She had already submitted an application to the RAF when in mid-March she petitioned ‘Perks Kochany’ (Dearest Perks) for work. ‘I am afraid that the prospect of employing you in an operational capacity, either now or in the near future, have become exceedingly remote’, Perkins told her. ‘In view of the unhappy position of Poland there is obviously no possibility of an operational mission to that country.’82 ‘For God’s sake, do not strike my name from the firm,’ she replied earnestly, ‘remember that I am always pleased to go and do anything for it.’83 Her letter smacks of desperation, even including an uncharacteristically humble apology for her spelling. Dealing first with her RAF application she begs Perkins, in her imperfect English, to ‘write and tell them that I am honest and clean Polish girl’. Should this prove unsuccessful her second plan was to parachute into Germany to ‘get people out from camps and prisons … before they get shot’. ‘I should love to do it,’ she wrote, ‘and I like to jump out of a plane even every day.’84