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

by Clare Mulley

  It has been suggested that Christine’s great tragedy was not to have been killed in action, but perhaps the real tragedy was that she was denied the chance to discover what she might have been in a post-war world. Although, like many former special agents, at first Christine found the harness imposed by peace intolerable, it is unlikely she would have let this defeat her. It was what Paddy Leigh Fermor once called ‘her fatal gift of inspiring love’ that would finally lead to her death.19 Laura Foskett went even further, commenting: ‘one cannot help feeling that her early death was somehow inevitable and the manner of it in keeping with the many dramas of her life’.20 But such a neat synopsis is reductive, and responsibility for a murder cannot be ascribed to its victim, however much they once chose to live life on the edge.

  Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing a thought for the many casualties that fell in her wake. Dennis Muldowney, the last of her ‘lame dogs’, made a full confession and declined to submit any pleas in mitigation. He was hanged at Pentonville prison on a rainy morning in September 1952. Obsessed with Christine to the end, his last statement as he left his cell was, ‘to kill is the final possession’. But Muldowney was wrong. He had never possessed Christine; the resistance burning within her was too great. No one ever really possessed her. Not her parents. Not her two husbands, though Giżycki had a good shot at it. Not her many lovers. Nor even her closest ally in life, Andrzej Kowerski. If anything she was possessed by her drive to free Poland. Christine’s defining passion was for liberty: in love, in politics, and in life in its widest sense.

  Epilogue: the Afterlife of Christine Granville

  For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine’s story is, surprisingly, little known today. The reasons are both personal and political. In 1952, when sensational headlines blazed across the British papers, ‘Kindness Led to Murder’, ‘Stabbed Heroine told her Story’, ‘Drama of Quiet Countess who was British Secret Agent’ and ‘Heroine Dared Me Three Times to Kill Her’ among them, a coterie of men who adored Christine, led by Andrzej Kowerski, collectively agreed to protect her reputation, and in many cases their own, by refusing to be publicly drawn into commenting about her.1

  It was in the traumatic days immediately after Christine’s murder that Andrzej began a campaign that would sustain him throughout the police investigation and Muldowney trial. After all her years in active service, in some of the most dangerous theatres of the war, Andrzej had lost the woman he loved, pointlessly. Such a meaningless death did not befit Christine. Andrzej had not been able to save her life, but he was damned if Muldowney would also destroy her reputation: that, at least, was something he could defend.

  Two weeks later Andrzej telephoned Chief Superintendent Jennings to raise his concerns about ‘possible aspersions of immorality’ that might surface during the murder investigation or the publicity surrounding Muldowney’s trial.2 He was worried that as Muldowney was pleading guilty, there would be no cross-examination and no opportunity to refute publicly Muldowney’s claims that he had had an affair with Christine. In a second statement to the police, Andrzej made clear that while in London Christine was ‘constantly’ in the company of her Polish friends, emphasizing that ‘I do not think Muldowney had the chance of seeing her alone’.3 He now roped in Christine’s friends to help press this point. Behind the scenes Aidan Crawley agreed to do his ‘utmost to see that her name is not sullied’ and wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions.4 Ultimately the court would be sympathetic, the director making clear that he ‘would be glad if Counsel would take any opportunity which might present itself to re-establish the good name of Christine Granville’.5 In the event the press widely reported the statement prepared by ‘certain relatives and friends’ of Christine, making it clear in court that ‘there is not one particle of truth in the allegations contained in those statements by Muldowney that he was on terms of intimacy with Miss Granville and that he was in fact carrying on a love affair with her’.6 Perhaps Andrzej even believed this.

  Whatever the truth behind their relationship, Muldowney had killed Christine, a decorated war heroine, in an appalling act of premeditated murder, and the papers’ sympathies were entirely with her. Most focused on presenting rather fantastical stories of her heroism alongside large photographs of the Polish beauty queen turned British agent. According to the Mail Christine had ‘saved hundreds of lives’, and the Evening Standard not only had her and Andrzej escaping into Polish woods under gunfire, but also reported that Christine had married an English agent who later failed to return from a mission.7 It was the Express – ‘that sewer’ as Kate O’Malley called it – whose reporter had met Christine a few years earlier, that had the most fun though.8 Presenting Christine as raised among ‘warfare, Cossacks, bandits and wolves’, they reported that she had killed ‘many people’ in the war, and returned to London ‘in clothes that were practically sackcloth’.9 And if this was not sensational enough, the Polish journalist Karol Zbyszewski later claimed to have seen ‘a strip cartoon about Countess Skarbek and her fight with the German in a Spanish local paper’, and in France Daniel Huillier, the young man who had briefly fought beside Christine and Francis in the Vercors, even read a report that Christine’s body had been found ‘floating in the water in the London docks’.10

  Seeing Christine’s life so wildly reported across the papers was too much for Andrzej to bear. Aidan Crawley’s wife, the journalist Virginia Cowles, had known Christine in London and was now commissioned to write a biography with Andrzej’s blessing, but pulled out when she decided there was not enough material. Bill Stanley Moss was a close friend and was, by 1952, also a well-established author and journalist. Andrzej thought the solution might be for Moss to write something definitive on Christine and, with the help of her friends, ‘make the book as valuable and dignified as possible’, after which any independent requests for interviews could be politely refused.11 In 1952 Picture Post published a series of four illustrated articles on Christine by Moss.12 At the same time Andrzej pulled together his ‘Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville’, comprised of Francis Cammaerts, John Roper, Patrick Howarth and Michal Gradowski. As Francis later explained it, knowing that the world’s media would ‘fantasize quite wrongly’ about the nature of Christine’s life and death, they ‘made a pact’ that her name should not be sullied, and succeeded in stopping several press reports and two books.13 The first book was Moss’s. Despite spending some years researching Christine, both at Andrzej’s flat in Bonn, ‘a transit camp’ as Moss described it, and touring the scenes of Christine’s service in France, when Moss completed his manuscript Andrzej was not impressed.14 ‘It was not a hagiography’, Moss’s daughter Christine Isabelle later commented, ‘but Christine was no saint.’15

  Twenty years later Wladimir Ledóchowski’s manuscript, also researched with help from Andrzej, was also rejected by the panel. The essential problem, Wladimir’s son Jan later wrote, was that Wladimir ‘saw Christine as a kind of train that had stopped at numerous railway stations in her life, marked from “Charles Gottlich” at the beginning to “Dennis” at the end, and she had simply stopped at the station called “Andrew” more frequently than the others’. Andrzej, by contrast, ‘saw a planetary system: Christine and he coupled at the centre with satellites with names like “George” and “Wladimir” orbiting round them’.16 While it is doubtful that Christine subscribed to either view, it is clear that these were incompatible perspectives.

  Just two years later, however, an approved biography of Christine was published. The author, Madeleine Masson, was herself a resistance worker in France during the war, and had met Christine briefly when she was working as a stewardess in 1952. Masson remembered that initially she found it extremely hard to research the book as, she said, there were ‘twelve me
n who all loved Christine, not physically, who banded together to make sure that no-one wrote rubbish about her’.17 She was then hindered further by the reticence of officers like Peter Wilkinson, who when approached for information sent ‘a rather chilly reply’ which played down Christine’s official role, describing her early work for Section D as ‘uncoordinated efforts … encouraged by the British government’ but ‘strictly a private enterprise’.18 Eventually, fearing Christine’s story might be permanently lost, Andrzej decided to give his guiding support to the Masson book, essentially taking over the narrative drive himself. Despite the pleading of some of the women who knew Christine, such as SOE’s Vera Atkins, who told Masson not to ‘diminish her by whitewashing her faults. She was no plaster saint’, the book presented a thoroughly scrubbed version of its subject.19 There is much here ‘that is interesting and admirable’, Francis Cammaerts wrote in his foreword, but ‘much more still remains hidden and unknown’.20 ‘It was not the real Christine’, Zofia Tarnowska Moss felt sadly, ‘just the version Andrew wanted told’.21

  Andrzej had been trying to protect Christine’s reputation for over twenty years but, ironically, he succeeded only in creating an intriguing void that was inevitably filled with growing numbers of rumours and conspiracy theories. First among these was that Christine had been assassinated. In 1952 it was rumoured that the Soviet NKVD were sending executioners all over the world to liquidate people who knew too much. As Christine had worked as a British special agent with knowledge of the Polish anti-Communist underground, Scotland Yard conducted a criminal investigation into the possibility that her murder had in fact been a political assassination. Sir Percy Sillitoe, chief of MI5, studied the reports prepared by Special Branch, but concluded there was no evidence that either Communists or Nazis had been behind the murder. MI5 and Scotland Yard concluded it was a crime of passion, with Jennings recording that ‘there is no suggestion whatsoever that the crime is in any way connected with her former activities as a Secret Agent’.22

  But the stories persisted. For some the idea that such a brilliant agent could have let a plodding stalker surprise her with a knife seemed curious. For others, Muldowney seemed to be an obvious blunt instrument who would have needed little further encouragement by the NKVD, or any other agency, to turn his already murderous thoughts into action. ‘Too many agents have been liquidated by foreign secret services in the same manner’, the former agent Kurt Singer wrote in 1953, before asking whether her death was arranged by Soviet Poland, Trotsky’s killers or another ‘Kremlin gang’.23 Four years later the debate was reignited by the brutal stabbing of Christine’s friend and fellow former-Musketeer, Teresa Łubienska, by then campaigning for former political prisoners from German prisons and concentration camps.* Łubienska died in hospital the evening she had been attacked at Gloucester Road underground station. Her killer was never apprehended, but although her murder may have been political, it is just as likely to have been the failed mugging of a woman who put up greater resistance than expected.†

  For conspiracy theorists, however, the field had been thrown open. Some suggested that Christine had simply known too much about the death of Sikorski in 1943, warning Patrick Howarth or even Churchill himself about the general’s impending ‘assassination’. Others recognized that she had a dynamic sense of service and believed that, like Andrzej, she maintained her connections with British intelligence during the post-war years. Perhaps, it was suggested, her role as a ship’s steward was a cover to enable her to collect information about the political and economic situation in her ships’ ports of call, especially where Polish émigrés were settling, or gossip from the captain’s table. There is nothing to support this in any of the recently opened files, however, and although in 1944 and 1945 there had been some discussion about maintaining links with key Poles known to SOE, as ‘in the event of war against Russia they would be of inestimable value to us’, Christine was unlikely to have been selected for inclusion.24 The British knew the NKVD already had her details, because they had handed them over, and she was generally just too well known, especially after her decoration. Furthermore, after Zionist extremists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing over ninety people, there was increasing concern about Zionist terrorism and, fearing divided loyalties, MI5 stopped recruiting from the Jewish community altogether. Christine’s mother was Jewish, and Christine was known to have close links with the Sokolow family.25 It seems extremely unlikely that the British would have re-employed an angry, exiled, female, Jewish, Pole whom they had so often considered a liability and had thrown off so casually a few years earlier.

  Other rumours focused on Christine’s romantic life. Ironically, given the number of secret lovers she had taken, entirely new candidates began to be linked to her name, most notably the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming, now famous as the creator of James Bond. According to Fleming’s biographer, Donald McCormick, the two had been introduced through a mutual friend, the journalist Ted Howe, who had first met Christine in Hungary in 1940, and knew Fleming as his commissioning editor at the Kemsley newspaper group. McCormick has Howe meeting Christine again in Cairo in 1947, where he gives her Fleming’s address as a possible employer.26 After lunch with Christine in Charlotte Street in London, McCormick claims Fleming reported back enthusiastically to Howe, eulogizing that ‘she literally shines with all the qualities and splendours of a fictitious character. How rarely one finds such types’.27

  The dates fit, and Howe certainly knew both Fleming and Christine. Indeed he is one of several mutual friends who might have introduced them, including Aidan Crawley, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Colin Gubbins. Furthermore, Fleming was Christine’s type, upper-class, tall, fair and blue-eyed, and Christine is a perfect match for Fleming’s ideal woman as described by another biographer, Andrew Lycett: ‘thirtyish, Jewish, a companion who wouldn’t need education in the arts of love’.28 She is also a good match for Vesper Lynd, the first ‘Bond-girl’, a dark and enigmatic European agent, perpetually caught between sunbathing and action, who serves as Bond’s love interest in the first 007 outing, the 1952 Casino Royale. Lynd was ‘very beautiful … very beautiful indeed’, with black hair, ‘cut square and low on the nape of her neck, framing her face to below the clear and beautiful line of her jaw … her skin was lightly suntanned and bore no traces of make-up except on her mouth … On the fourth finger of her right hand she wore a broad topaz ring’.29 A wireless expert who speaks French like a native and is in love with a Pole, she manages to combine being ‘full of consideration without compromising her arrogant spirit’, and believes in ‘doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does’.30 Fleming teasingly referred to his Bond books as ‘autobiography’ and took many of his characters’ names and natures from the people he knew, reportedly including Colin Gubbins and Vera Atkins, so the idea of his using Christine and her childhood nickname ‘little star’ – given as ‘Vesper’, the evening star – is appealing.31 ‘Can I borrow it?’ Bond asks Vesper of her name at an early meeting, in the sort of in-joke that Fleming liked to play.32

  But if Christine was immortalized as the carelessly beautiful double agent Vesper Lynd, Fleming is more likely to have been inspired by the stories he heard than the woman in person. In later interviews and writing he would sometimes refer to Christine as being a ‘dark haired beauty’ or having ‘a fabulous record in wartime espionage’, but he never claimed to have met her, even in passing.33 The name ‘Vesper’, meanwhile, came from an evening cocktail once served to Fleming at a mansion in Jamaica.34 In fact the only known source for the much-quoted story of Christine’s affair with Fleming is McCormick, who claims to have seen the letter from Fleming praising Christine, and his supporting witness, an Olga Bialoguski (sic), who testified to McCormick that she was the sole person Christine confided in, and who is also untraceable.* McCormick had already written a history of the British Secret Service, and a ‘Spyclopaedia’, both of which mention Christine without refere
nce to Fleming.35 It seems that the opportunity to bring them together finally proved irresistible.†

  Whether or not Vesper Lynd was partly inspired by stories of Christine, memories of the real woman did live on. As well as the two known unpublished biographies by people who knew her, and Masson’s official version, there is a Polish novel by Maria Nurowska, whose father had known Christine in Poland.‡ Xan Fielding and Patrick Howarth also dedicated their own war memoirs to Christine’s memory, and Howarth even immortalized her in verse.36 More poignantly, not only Christine’s brother, but also Francis and Nan Cammaerts, Bill and Zofia Tarnowska Moss, and Jan and Maryś Skarbek all named their daughters ‘Christine’, as too did Gwendolin Lees, a FANY Christine had known in Cairo; Wladimir’s son, Jan Ledóchowski; and even, most surprisingly, Dennis Muldowney’s half-brother, Jack Muldowney, who gave the name to his daughter, born in 1953, even though there had never been a Christine in their family before.

  Only Jerzy Giżycki tried to leave the memory of Christine behind, choosing not to attend her funeral, and staying in Canada until the mid-1950s. Ever a controversial character, after alienating the Canadian Polish community he settled in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he ended his days writing books on chess, cinematography and Chopin, godson of Christine’s illustrious forebear. Christine’s cousins, Jan and Andrzej Skarbek, both settled in Britain. Jan married Maryś Tyszkiewicz and they had four children. Andrzej and his wife Shelagh also had four children, and after qualifying Andrzej became a pioneering psychotherapist who helped to develop psychotherapy services in the NHS. He later married the writer Marjorie Wallace, who went on to found the mental health charity SANE.