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

by Clare Mulley

  * Christine lived at Filtrowa 25, Warsaw, a small flat in a good part of town. Stanisław Rudziejewski remembered her passion for silk stockings with the seam up the back.

  * In 1935 Italy had claimed Ethiopia for the Italian empire, having invaded with the support of Nazi Germany. Despite the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s impassioned pleas to the League of Nations, within a few years Japan, France and Britain all recognized Italian control in Ethiopia. Unimpressed by arguments of empire, and unconvinced by the likely ability of Polish smallholders to settle effectively in Africa, Jerzy argued strongly against Polish colonial ambitions, but was ignored. Poland bought territory in Liberia, but those Polish immigrants who survived the colonial experiment were quickly repatriated.

  * Jerzy and Christine’s wedding took place on 2 November 1938, at the Evangelical Reformed Church in the Leszno area of Warsaw. The church archives were destroyed during the Second World War.

  * This is the route outlined by Jerzy Giżycki in his memoir. Other accounts, including those by Masson and Ledóchowski – both indirectly informed by Christine, and by Larecki, present routes through Rhodesia or by steamship to Mombasa and then train to Nairobi. Neither Christine nor Jerzy is a reliable witness, but in this case Jerzy’s account carries more weight.

  * Christine and Jerzy travelled on the Cape Town Castle, arriving in Southampton on 6 October 1939. Jerzy was listed as being with the Polish consulate, Christine as ‘housewife’. See TNA, BT26/1186, UK incoming passenger lists 1878–1960.

  * In late 1939 many Poles viewed the Polish political leaders who had so quickly left the country as traitors, before they set up government-in-exile.

  * Perkins’s estate was at Bielsko-Biała, quite close to Zakopane. Larecki, Christine’s Polish biographer, and a former intelligence officer, believes that Perkins may have sent Christine to the Brown Deer Club in 1938 on behalf of Claude Dansey. This is possible, but there is no publicly available evidence.

  * Voigt’s BBC radio broadcasts were designed to spread a dismal view of the war inside Germany. In June 1940 he was joined by the Daily Express reporter Sefton Delmer, to broadcast from a ‘German Soldiers’ Radio Station in Calais’, in fact operating from a country mansion near London. See Sefton Delmer, Black Boomerang: An Autobiography, volume 2 (1962).

  † Christine’s friendship with Voigt was interrupted by an intriguing episode. All that is known is that in 1942 she wrote ‘he is an exceptional being … only I am not in a position to write to him as I no longer have the courage to talk of a famous incident, it makes me vomit!!!’ See O’Malley papers (28.8.1942).

  ‡ In his autobiography, The Mist Procession, Lord Vansittart records that he wrote a prescient memo in 1934: ‘Poland is in no yielding mood … Poland will fight but – a few years hence – will thirty million human beings be able to hold sixty? Of course not – alone. But if Poland is destroyed and if it is out of the picture, Germany will be able to do the very thing she could never hope to in 1914 – to fight on one front.’

  * Christine told a Budapest-based friend, Erica de Bosdari, that ‘you don’t need more than two dresses and two pairs of shoes … you have to travel light in this life … you don’t need all that luggage and all that clutter.’ Mieczysława Wazacz (director), No Ordinary Countess (2010).

  * The Polish expression ‘pies kulawy’ is more self-deprecatory than its more insulting-sounding translation, ‘lame dog’, may suggest.

  † The Hungarian László Biro had developed the ‘biro’ pen to prevent his daughter’s school class from dipping her long plaits in their open ink-wells. He first presented it at the Budapest International Fair in 1931, and patented it in Paris in 1938. Being Jewish, that year he also wisely fled Hungary for South America, where he survived the war.

  * The boys remained in Hungary, Andrzej studying medicine at Budapest University, until the Red Army arrived, when they fled to relatives in Austria. Once old enough they joined the Polish forces in Italy.

  * The secret services have a distinguished history of one-legged employees. The first head of SIS, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, hacked his own leg off with a penknife to release himself from a car accident. The American WWII agent Virginia Hall had a false leg she called Cuthbert. After she mentioned that Cuthbert was causing her trouble in a few signals home, one of her colleagues replied he wanted to come over and kill that Cuthbert for her.

  * This nickname had the bonus of associating Andrzej with the dashing Leslie Howard, who had depicted the Pimpernel on screen just five years earlier, and who was now filming a WWII version released as Pimpernel Smith in 1941. Howard himself was reportedly supplying intelligence to the Allies until he was killed when the plane he was travelling in was shot down in 1943.

  † Paddy Leigh Fermor later wrote that Christine and Andrzej belonged to the same Polish class, defined by ‘its fluent French and its vast tangle of cousins’. See the Spectator, ‘The One-Legged Parachutist’ (1.1.1989).

  * Café Hangli was owned and run by the father of the Hungarian food critic Egon Ronay.

  † In Warsaw, a month after the invasion, two women were shot simply for tearing down an anti-British poster, but such terror failed to cow the resistance in the city. See Terry Charman, ‘Hugh Dalton, Poland and SOE, 1940–42’, in Mark Seaman (ed.), Special Operations Executive: A New Instrument of War (2006), p. 66.

  * It is possible that Radziminski had become Christine’s lover in early 1940, as he later stayed at her flat and was seen kissing her on the mouth ‘as though taking his due’, a jealous Polish officer, Wladimir Ledóchowski, later noted. If so perhaps Christine’s damning report on Radziminski can be read on two levels. Christine did harbour a sense of responsibility towards Radziminski. However, in July 1940 she offered to put Section D in touch with him in France, where she understood he had decided ‘to stay and vork’. ‘He has certain “defauts”’, Christine wrote, ‘but is energetic and courageous’. The War Office was not convinced. ‘[I] cannot conceive of him being the slightest use’ one official wrote after interviewing Radziminski. ‘On general grounds, I consider him useless and untrustworthy, and suggest that he should be got rid of at once, or at least interned.’ TNA, HS9/1224/6 (15.5.1940).

  * Jan Marusarz was an intrepid mountaineer, but his younger brother, Stanisław, was more famous as Polish skiing champion. See Stanisław Marusarz, On the Ski-ramps of Poland, and the World (1974).

  * The first, the Information Bulletin, appeared regularly for the next five years with a circulation of over 50,000.

  * The ZWZ was the ‘Związek Walki Zbrojnej’, ‘Union of Armed Struggle’. It was not until February 1942 that the official Home Army, the ‘Armia Krajowa’ or AK, which was also loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, was established from the ZWZ, and went on to absorb most of the other underground Polish forces.

  * Peter Wilkinson later argued that it would have taken an impossible 8,000 sorties to arm Gubbins’s initial plans for Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. Eventually 485 successful sorties delivered a total of 600 tons of supplies to Poland. This was one-tenth the amount dropped to Greece, and less than a quarter of that sent to Yugoslavia. Britain was more successful in training Polish troops, agents and pilots in Britain.

  † In his history of the Musketeers, Roman Buczek says that Witkowski was recruited for intelligence work by Stefan Mayer, who supervised the pre-war Polish Enigma cipher-breaking operation that led directly to Britain’s ‘Ultra’ Enigma-reading operation, exerting a profound influence on the course of the war.

  * In fact Christine knew Gradowski from before the war. It was his wife who, years earlier, had been expelled from the same convent school as Christine for climbing trees while not wearing knickers.

  † Leski’s account is also interesting in that it contains a number of disparities, such as the claim that Christine discussed her experiences in Turkey with Witkowski at this meeting. This is not possible, as Christine’s last visit to Poland was in 1940, and she did not reach Turkey until 19
41. Either Leski was confused – although other details such as Christine’s pseudonym, Mucha, are correct – or he had another agenda, perhaps relating to his portrayal of the controversial Witkowski.

  * Ledóchowski wrote several different accounts of his first meeting with Christine. This version is taken from his memoir journal, later lost in the Polish Embassy in Ankara and only published after his death. Written at the time, and without the intention of publication, it is the most likely to be accurate. His draft biography of Christine has a similar romantic story, set on a train station in the sun.

  * Unfortunately the rifle never saw service with the Allies because reverse engineering was too time-consuming. Meanwhile captured Polish anti-tank rifles were used to great effect by both the Germans and Italians. This account of the rifle-smuggling story comes from Bill Stanley Moss, ‘Christine the Brave’, Picture Post, vol. 56, no. 11 (13.9.1952), p. 14. A different account has Christine and Andrzej taking the rifle from Ludwig, without his approval, so that they could supply it to the British/French rather than to the Polish authorities. See Anna Potocka, Through Hills and Valleys … (2011), p. 140.

  * Despite constant caution and occasionally hostility towards Christine from the Polish VI Bureau (Polish military intelligence), Christine was listed as a VI Bureau courier under the ‘pseudonym’ of Giżycka, in 1941, receiving a small amount of ‘danger pay’. Ledóchowski was listed in the same report. See TNA, HS7/183, ‘Polish VI Bureau’, Captain Venner to Colonel Perkins (21.2.1946).

  * Christine’s SOE personal files state that ‘in the course of her duties Mme Giżycka, operating from Hungary, undertook four journeys to Poland on foot via Slovakia in circumstances of great danger and hardship’. However, the reports contain inaccuracies, and conflicting dates are given for these journeys. On 31 May 1940 the British reported she had made two successful trips into Poland, but elsewhere only one is recorded. The most likely sequence is a first journey in February/March, two attempts in June, and a successful journey in November 1940. She made additional trips across Hungarian borders as part of her and Andrzej’s evacuation work.

  * Bór-Komorowski would later give the orders for the Warsaw Rising, become Commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, and for a few years serve as prime minister of the post-war Polish government-in-exile.

  * The French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was best known for his book The Little Prince. He was famous in pre-war Poland, and Christine probably met him during her French travels with Jerzy Giżycki. They might have crossed paths again in Algiers in 1943 before Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a flying mission in 1944, never to be found.

  * Harrison arrived back in Britain on 3 June 1940, and never returned to Budapest. In October SOE decided his services were no longer required and he left the firm the following January. See TNA, HS9/668, SOE personal files, Hubert Harrison.

  * Masson Christine, SOE Agent, names the colonel as Zoltan Schell, p. 81.

  * There are various stories as to where Christine and Sir Owen first met. In her novel The Tightening String (1962), Ann Bridge, Sir Owen’s wife, described these Monday events as being attended by ‘a few Poles who had managed to escape to Hungary’, some British, Hungarians and a few Allied diplomats. They may have been introduced here by a mutual friend, the Polish consul in Budapest.

  * The Romanian Ploieşti oilfields were eventually bombed by the RAF and US Air Force, with considerable loss of life.

  † The limpet mines used time-delay detonators that were originally concealed inside Woolworths aniseed balls whose dissolving rate had been vigorously tested in Bedford Modern School swimming pool the year before, before the sweets were replaced with corrosive acid. See BBC WW2 People’s War, ‘Aniseed Balls and the Limpet Mine’, article A4376153 (6.7.2005). Later the British used ‘sticky bombs’ to sabotage many more German oil barges on the Danube: see Jozef Garlinski, Poland, SOE and the Allies (1969), pp. 25–6.

  ‡ Plastic explosive developed at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich just before the war could be safely eaten, ‘though it can hardly have been either tasty or nutritious’. M. R. D. Foot, SOE: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (1999), p. 107.

  * Stefania Skarbek (Goldfeder) is not listed in the surviving Auschwitz records. According to Pawiak Museum archives, Edmund and Józef Skarbek were sent from Pawiak to Auschwitz in 1940, and Tadeusz, Menaszel and Zofia Goldfeder were interned in Pawiak between 1940 and 1942, before being sent to Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, but their relationship to Christine, if any, is not known.

  * Christine may have got this idea from a British leaflet entitled How To Fake An Illness, which recommended simulating internal bleeding by biting lips or gums – although how to bite your own gums is not fully detailed.

  † It has been speculated, but never confirmed, that a bribe may have been paid for Christine and Andrzej’s release, or that Sir Owen O’Malley pulled a few strings with Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s regent.

  * Christine was not the only one to exploit the minor advantages of living under a false identity in this way. In his unpublished memoirs, her husband, Jerzy Giżycki, states he was born in 1889, but in his 1941 application to serve with the British he gave his date of birth as 1895. But if Jerzy thought he could reduce the considerable age gap between himself and his wife, at least on paper, he was wrong. Christine had beaten him to the same trick, even as the Gestapo were combing the streets of Budapest for her.

  * Kate’s daughter Jane later wrote that this was the weekend of 10–12 February 1941, and that ‘doubtless’ Kate would have gone too. See O’Malley papers, Jane O’Malley, ‘Christina’ (nd).

  * The Polish resistance officer Kazimierz Leski later claimed that the Musketeers stole these microfilms from the ZWZ. See Larecki, p. 137.

  * In his book Leap Before You Look: A Memoir (1988), p. 162, Crawley says that he arranged for Christine and Andrzej to take their films to Egypt via Istanbul. Other sources say that Crawley relieved them of the films in Sofia.

  * The British were careful not to let the Polish administration know about the award, in case complications arose from their employment of a Pole.

  * This allegation was made by the Second Bureau officer Lt Col Jozef Matecki, under his operational pseudonym of Jakob Alec. See TNA, HS4/198, MX to M (28.5.1941).

  * She also half told Kate a story that Andrzej had ‘saved my life by taking me out of the sea, and at the risk of his own life. It’s quite a funny story although it nearly ended tragically.’ Sadly she provides no more information. See O’Malley papers, Granville to Kate O’Malley (30.1.1942).

  * Peter Wilkinson’s decision was supported by George Taylor.

  * In his 2008 biography of Christine, Poland’s Colonel Jan Larecki speculates that Christine might have been sent to Palestine as an agitator, to help form Jewish units to fight with the Allies, or for counterintelligence purposes to encourage cooperation with the British: pp. 165–80.

  * This was the son of the deposed emperor of Afghanistan, whom she and Andrzej had met in Aleppo the previous year.

  * Aly, as Prince Ali Khan was popularly known, was then married to Joan Guinness, but would later have an affair with Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, before marrying Rita Hayworth, the favourite pin-up of the Middle East.

  * Both children died of natural causes, the eldest aged two, on the birthday of his younger brother.

  * Retinger would be linked to the discovery of an unprimed explosive device in the plane carrying Sikorski to Washington in December 1942, and was later removed from Poland on a special British flight in fear for his life.

  * Wladimir in fact rejoined the Polish secret service, and was sent to Istanbul under the guise of being a diplomat. He was then posted to Ankara, where he lost his diary journal, which was only published posthumously. From Ankara he was sent to Paris. After the war he married the daughter of the Polish ambassador to France.

  * There is no record of Christine’s reaction to Witkowsk
i’s death, or even that she knew of it, although she must have suspected.

  * Guy Tamplin died of a heart attack at his desk in November 1943. ‘His funeral in the desert was a sad affair.’ See Annette Street, Long Ago and Far Away.

  † There was so much intrigue that in 1942 MGM released a spy spoof, called Cairo, in which a warbling Jeanette MacDonald is mistaken for a Nazi agent by an American hack who follows her between the souks and the pyramids.

  * Twenty words a minute was considered good, but some operators could send up to thirty. See Patrick Howarth, Undercover: The Women and Men of the SOE (1990), p. 79.

  * See William Deakin, The Embattled Mountain (1971) for an account of his work in Yugoslavia.

  * In November 2011 the Russian parliament declared that the Soviet dictator Stalin had personally ordered the Katyn massacre.

  * In September 1943 Klimkowski was arrested on charges of embezzlement. He was later prosecuted as a Soviet spy and removed from the Polish army.