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

by Clare Mulley

  Wladimir Ledóchowski settled in South Africa, where he worked as an engineer, journalist and author, criticizing apartheid and reporting on the progress of the Communist regime in Poland. Keeping his word to Andrzej, however, he never published anything on Christine. He became involved in the anti-apartheid movement and through this, Wladimir and his wife formed a strong friendship with the author Nadine Gordimer, who later remembered his ‘fine dialectical mind and bright spirit’, and suggested that ‘he died, perhaps, from an overdose of avidity for life’.37

  Francis Cammaerts lived to be a very distinguished old man. By 1948 he had become the first director of the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, a UNESCO body set up to support the post-war enthusiasm for cultural exchanges and international bridge-building. Later he became a member of the Committee for World Peace, and worked in education in Britain, Kenya and Botswana. Although he loved his family he also craved independence and finally settled in southern France, where he died, aged ninety, his life celebrated by the whole village. He was, according to his nephew, the writer Michael Morpurgo, ‘a much honoured and much loved man’.38

  Andrzej Kowerski-Kennedy lived in Germany, but kept a flat in London. ‘For the most part he spends his time travelling about the Continent in fast cars, of which he has two, staying with friends, of whom he has legion, or in small hotels, of which he seems to know one especially good one in any town, village or hamlet in which he happens to find himself’, Bill Moss wrote in 1956.39 Andrzej maintained his love of fast cars throughout his life and was still proudly driving a blisteringly fast red Ferrari in 1975.* Although he never married, and always kept the Aniela Pawlikowska pastel sketch of Christine on his bedroom wall, he found love again, sharing his life with Angela von Koelichen, to whose sons he also became close. Always laughing and joking, he was dearly loved by all the young people who knew him, including his niece Maria, to whom he gave Christine’s few pieces of dress jewellery including the gold and ivory bracelet he had once bought her. Christine’s family signet ring, however, he gave to her cousin, Jan’s daughter Elizabeth, as she was considered the wildest of the next generation of Skarbek girls. Bill and Zofia Tarnowska Moss’s daughter, Christine Isabelle, also adored Andrzej, whom she remembered always arriving in a Porsche full of presents. When, aged six, she asked why he had a wooden leg, he told her he was a pirate, and when she looked at his ‘twinkly, twinkly eyes and wonderfully bristly moustache’ and told him she wanted to marry him, he told her to eat more porridge so she would grow up quickly.40 He rarely talked about the Christine she was named after and whom he had once hoped to marry. Andrzej died of cancer in Munich in December 1988. He was seventy-eight. In accordance with his last wishes, his ashes were flown to London and interred with Christine. A memorial plaque was added to the foot of her grave: ‘a humble and faithful position’ some have commented, but also a deeply romantic gesture.41

  It is not known whether Andrzej ever saw the finished Aniela Pawlikowska oil portrait of Christine. In 1971 the Shelbourne Hotel came under new Polish management who cleared out twenty years’ worth of junk from the storerooms. Among the finds was Christine’s heavy shipping trunk, still unlocked and full of clothes and papers, her SOE wireless set and standard-issue commando knife. Leaning against it, lost for twenty years, was the finished portrait.*

  My Search for Christine Granville: a note on sources

  Researching the life of a secret agent entails inherent difficulties. Christine herself kept few records; I have seen only eleven letters actually written in her own hand, and one of these was just a note scrawled on the squared paper used for coding radio messages. Many official and unofficial papers relating to her have been destroyed by accident or on purpose, while others may remain unreleased. Those papers that are available are often contradictory. Letters are notoriously unreliable, and reports and interrogations often had a hidden agenda during and after the war. Even when first-hand testimony is available, Christine herself was not above telling a good story, and sometimes a very blunt lie, from her use of a commando knife to her date of birth, so it is sometimes hard to discriminate between fact and fiction. I am not the first to struggle with these problems. There have been three previously published biographies of Christine, and two unpublished. Of these, two are self-proclaimed ‘fictional-biographies’, although they are both based on first-hand accounts.

  The first biography of Christine was written by Bill Stanley Moss, her friend and a fellow former SOE agent. When he started work on it, Moss was already well known as the author of Ill Met By Moonlight, an account of his and Paddy Leigh Fermor’s successful mission to kidnap the German general Heinrich Kreipe on Crete during the war, and there was talk of turning Christine’s story into a screenplay for a film to star Winston Churchill’s actress-daughter, Sarah, in the title role. However, Christine’s soul-mate and posthumous protector, Andrzej Kowerski, rejected the manuscript. The whereabouts of Moss’s draft is now unknown, but his daughter, Christine Isabelle (named after Christine), invited me to see his notes, full of humour and opinion, along with his collection of papers relating to Christine, including some unlikely love letters, Andrzej Kowerski’s Polish passport and Christine’s false French identity papers.

  Count Wladimir Ledóchowski, another war hero and one of Christine’s Polish lovers, started his account of Christine twenty years later. The unfinished manuscript presents a very lyrical and critically admiring picture of Christine, and was also rejected by Andrzej. Ledóchowski’s son, Jan, kindly gave me a copy of the manuscript among other papers (and lent me his Warsaw flat during my research, outside which I was held up by the Gestapo during a Polish film shoot one afternoon). Although subtitled ‘A Biographical Story’, it is clear that Ledóchowski undertook thorough research, both on location and through interviews with people now deceased.

  The first published biography was Madeleine Masson’s Christine: A Search for Christine Granville, which came out in 1975. Masson had met Christine on a passenger ship in 1952, just before she was killed. Twenty years later her biography was mainly informed by Andrzej Kowerski, and the circle of male friends who had known Christine during the war and stayed in touch with each other after her death. The resulting book is invaluable for presenting Andrzej’s perspective on Christine. Unfortunately he wished to present her in what he considered a good, rather than necessarily true, light.

  Some years later came the Polish author Maria Nurowska’s novel, Miłośnica. Although often dismissed as pure fiction, the book was informed by three primary sources: interviews with some of Christine’s London friends; Wladimir Ledóchowski’s manuscript; and the recollections of the author’s father, who knew Christine before and during the war. Maria met me in Zakopane to disentangle fact from fiction, and told me how struck she had been with the overlap between Ledóchowski’s account and her father’s own memories.

  A final publication, Krystyna Skarbek: Agent with Many Faces, by Colonel Jan Larecki, a former intelligence officer with the postwar Communist government in Poland, is a helpful facts-and-stats account of Christine’s life with a few new theories of its own. Colonel Larecki agreed to meet me, in Warsaw, to discuss stories and sources. It is not often in life that I have had my hand kissed by a chain-smoking, espresso-drinking, former Communist spy, and afterwards I had to think hard about just how charmed I had been.

  It is still sometimes suggested that there is another published portrait of Christine, found in Ian Fleming’s first Bond outing, the 1952 Casino Royale. The story that Christine and Fleming had an affair is appealing. She was certainly his type, and his descriptions of the dark and enigmatic Eastern European agent, perpetually caught between sunbathing and action, fit Christine well. But although Fleming and Christine had several mutual friends, and he talked about her after her death had made her momentarily famous, there is no reliable evidence that the two ever actually met. A more evidence-based, if still fictionalized, account of Christine appears in Kate O’Malley and her mother A
nn Bridge’s novel, A Place to Stand, based on their wartime exploits in Budapest.

  The National Archive in Britain has many files on Christine, her colleagues and operations, which have been released over the last few years, and the Freedom of Information Act enabled me to access some more. Other documents are available in the Imperial War Museum, which also claims to have her gun; the Special Forces Club, which has her picture of a Madonna; and the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, which has the only known oil portrait of Christine, as well as her wireless radio, commando knife, medals and a few documents including her 1949 pocket diary. The Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College London contains papers relating to Christine’s work in France and Italy. There is considerable contextual information in the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London, the National Institute for Remembrance, and the Central Military Archive both in Warsaw, and the Vercors museums in France. Many more private archives yielded further nuggets of information, as did a fabulous range of secondary-source British, Polish, French and American books, translated by good friends in all these countries, including Maciek and Iwona Helfer, Jan Ledóchowski, Christopher Kasparek and Albertine Sharples.

  However, it was the people who knew Christine and her friends, and their children, who provided me with the most vivid source of new stories and information. At an annual memorial ceremony in France I met resistance veterans who had fought alongside Christine in the Vercors. In Poland Maria Pienkowska, Andrzej Kowerski’s niece, showed me his medals and let me try on Christine’s coral necklace and the beautiful gold and ivory bracelet that Andrzej had once bought her. Sadly my hand was too large to fit through her wooden bangle – she must have been very slight. I also explored her childhood home in Trzepnica, central Poland, now covered in creepers, its beautiful stucco ceilings collapsing, and met the Roman Catholic parish priest who showed me the record of her baptism, but strongly advised me not to continue with the book. One evening over cherry vodka, after a long afternoon in the Polish National Institute of Remembrance, my Polish friend and translator Maciek Helfer and I realized that a few years after my mother had watched the sky turn red over London, where my grandfather was on voluntary night fireman duty during the Blitz, his grandmother had sat watching the sky burn over Warsaw during the Rising. My husband’s grandfather, meanwhile, had died fighting with the Germans at Stalingrad.

  Back in Britain, Polish networks led me to Mieczysława Wazacz, who kindly shared her 2010 film on Christine, No Ordinary Countess, for which she had interviewed many of Christine’s friends. This in turn brought me to Nicholas Gibbs, a man with a great knowledge of public school, and secret agent, networks, which he generously talked through with me for several hours, all the while a small green parrot nuzzling his neck. A Second World War author and collector in Spain, Ian Sayer, who had known Andrzej Kowerski in the 1970s, tried to help me to trace his papers, unseen for nearly forty years. I was sent Christine’s school reports, her first marriage certificate, the press coverage of the 1930 Polish national beauty contest in which she had been honoured as a Star of Beauty, and her second husband Jerzy Giżycki’s unpublished memoirs. Count Andrzej and Countess Maryś Skarbek, Christine’s cousins, invited me to lunch and to look through family photograph albums. The children of her friends and colleagues in Budapest, Cairo, London and Nairobi pulled out letters, photos and unpublished autobiographies, and dusted off anecdotes, which they shared both over sandwiches and over the internet.

  Requests made through the Special Forces Club, FANY newsletters, and an SOE Yahoo group, brought me reminiscences of wartime Cairo, dates with Christine, and illicit photographs taken of secret buildings. I met British FANYs who had worked alongside her in Cairo and Algiers, and Polish women who had known and worried about her in post-war London. I drank a glass of wine with Katharine Whitehorn, dear friend to Francis Cammaerts’s wife Nan, and had lunch with Zbigniew Mieczkowski, who had served in the Polish armoured regiments, and had lunched with Christine in the same restaurant, on the day that she was killed. SOE historians including Martyn Cox and Jeff Bines allowed me to hear recorded interviews with other officers and agents who remembered Christine. The O’Malley family generously shared a collection of letters written by Christine and Andrzej to Kate O’Malley, along with Kate’s account of Christine’s work in Budapest and funeral in London. A note on a family genealogy website even led to my being contacted by Steven Muldowney, the nephew of the man who murdered Christine in 1952, who shared his own family’s story.

  But there were also numerous times when I arrived too late. Christine’s brother’s papers have been thrown away, stacks of letters and boxes of photos have been lost, their existence confirmed only in memories. And there are now very few people left who knew Christine personally. As time erodes the human coastline we are lucky that many of those who did know Christine wrote their own memoirs or agreed to be interviewed by the Imperial War Museum for their sound archive, for Mieczysława Wazacz’s 2010 documentary on Christine, or for other film projects such as Martyn Cox’s Our Secret War, and Channel Four’s The Real Charlotte Grays. But it was when I saw the most focused set of photographs of Christine, which slipped from a manila envelope in the Home Office folders in the archive at Kew, that I felt she had ultimately evaded me. These were the crime scene photographs, so sharp that they revealed every detail, from the single drop of blood on her fingers to the fillings in her teeth, and yet ironically what they showed most clearly was that she had already left.

  There are still secrets surrounding Christine, as is perhaps right: a buffer to keep her from the real world in which she always inhabited the margins. But I hope that this book presents a more balanced picture of a remarkable woman who can only truly be seen in the context of her country, although it often excluded her, and her times, although she was in many ways ahead of them. I also hope that it at least catches the fierce independence, and slight vulnerability, of the woman who loved and was loved by so many, and the courageous and fiercely patriotic Pole whose greatest tragedy was perhaps that she would not live to see her country free again.

  CLARE MULLEY

  April 2012

  1. Trzepnica manor house, 2011: Christine’s childhood home.

  2. The Skarbek coat of arms on Jerzy Skarbek’s tomb, Powązki cemetery, Warsaw.

  3. The Skarbek legend, ‘Let gold eat gold’.

  4. Christine, aged nineteen, as a ‘Star of Beauty’ in the Miss Poland national beauty contest, Warsaw, 1930.

  5. Andrzej Kowerski, aged about sixteen.

  6. Christine’s Polish identity card, issued in Warsaw, December 1928.

  7. Jerzy Gizycki, Christine’s second husband, Washington, 1922.

  8. Andrzej Kowerski.

  9. Count Wladimir Ledóchowski.

  10. Andrzej Kowerski’s Polish passport, issued September 1939.

  11. Christine c.1940.

  12. Sir Owen O’Malley, Head of the British Legation, Budapest, 1940, later British Ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile.

  13. Christine and Andrzej in Syria, 1942.

  14. Christine and Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain at the Gezira Club.

  15. The pool at the Gezira Sporting Club, Cairo, c.1943.

  16. Christine, Andrzej seated behind, and an unknown officer, Cairo 1942.

  17. Zofia Tarnowska Moss, Cairo, c.1943.

  18. Bill Stanley Moss, Cairo, 1940s. ‘She throve on danger’, Moss said of Christine, ‘it was a tonic for her’.

  19. Christine in Palestine, 1942.

  20. Christine’s British Forces identity card, showing her in FANY uniform, Cairo c.1943.

  21. Christine’s code card. One of the three code-poems written for her roughly translates: ‘Far behind me my southern French loves. My memories of happy years long gone. The weight and the hate, infernal desires, have destroyed my happiness and peace. I would like to forget.’

  22. Christine’s commando knife.

  23. Major General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins KCMG, DSO,
MC, Executive Head of SOE 1943–1946.

  24. Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Cammaerts, DSO.

  25. The Vercors Maquis, August 1944.

  26. Christine sitting by a water duct near the blown up bridge at Embrun, Haute-Savoie, France, August 1944.

  27. Gilbert Galletti, Paddy O’Regan, John Roper, Christine, Leonard Hamilton, Bramouse, France, August 1944.

  28. Christine in France, August 1944.

  29. Colonel Harold Perkins, Head of SOE’s Polish Section.

  30. SS Grenadiers in street battles during the Warsaw Uprising, 1 August to 2 October 1944.

  31. A Polish Home Army soldier captured as he emerges from the Warsaw sewers.

  32. Letter from Christine to ‘Perks’, Cairo, 25 March 1945, ‘May be you find out that I could be useful getting people out from camps and prisons in Germany – just before they get shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day’.