The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (10 page)

Unlike many occupied countries, Poland would never have a significant collaborationist faction, let alone a Quisling leader. Faced with such brutal repression the Poles had only two options: absolute submission or clandestine resistance. Within a month of the defeat of the Polish army, an underground press had been established and two weekly resistance newspapers began to circulate in the capital.
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Third Reich authorities immediately put all printing presses under surveillance, banned the bulk purchase of paper and made the distribution of uncensored publications a crime punishable by death. A daily paper, a digest of BBC reports, and six more periodicals were launched over the next twelve months, all keen for Allied news to fill their pages. By 1941 a highly organized resistance propaganda unit was also producing a range of publications in Polish and German, designed to demoralize the occupiers. Some were satirical, or simply inserted sections of pornography into official-seeming publications. Others were ‘black propaganda’ purporting to be produced by dissenting political groups within Germany, and were so well forged that the Gestapo searched for their source within the Reich. Forged maps, identity and ration papers, and even Third Reich proclamations were also produced; one, plastered across the city one morning, ordered all German civilians to evacuate immediately, causing chaos at the railway stations.
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An ambitious underground supplies unit was also quickly established. It aimed to provide arms and munitions not just for immediate operations such as rail sabotage and the targeted assassination of Nazi officials, but also to arm a general uprising, to take place, it was hoped, in conjunction with Allied action. Weapons left over from the September campaign were supplemented by a few Allied airdrops coordinated by Colin Gubbins, and those guns that could be captured or bought from individual Wehrmacht officers. But the majority of bombs, timing devices, automatic and close-combat weapons were secretly manufactured in underground workshops, or in the German-managed Polish factories where workers would tack resistance-tailored blueprints over the Nazi ones above their workbenches. The nerve of the Polish defiance was extraordinary. When raw materials or parts became an issue, some of the thousands of workers forcibly recruited and transported to factories in Germany redirected deliveries to Warsaw, which soon began to arrive with, for once, pleasing German efficiency. By early 1944 the Polish ‘Home Army’ would be sending out bogus orders to all the main factories in Germany. By then virtually the entire population of Warsaw supported the resistance, either passively or actively, and within four years enough arms and explosives had been produced to fuel a major guerrilla war.
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Despite arrests, transportations and executions, by 1944 Poland boasted the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe, with an army of over 300,000 men and women. In addition, a Polish-Jewish resistance movement was organized in 1942 that would eventually help over 100,000 people evade Hitler’s ‘final solution’.
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In March 1940, however, when Christine first arrived in occupied Warsaw, the city still teemed with a variety of spontaneously established resistance groups, all running their own intelligence, propaganda and sabotage operations. All were keen to establish contact with their émigré government, as much for funding as from political motives, so couriers coming from abroad were in great demand. Christine asked a series of trusted friends to make some introductions. Still new to the game, though, she was not sufficiently discreet. She seems have told the same story of the horror in the mountains to everyone, leaving a clear trail once her more careful contacts started sharing their information.
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Soon there was a growing discussion among the resistance networks as to whether the British intelligence agent Krsytyna Skarbek-Gi
ż
ycka, alias Zofia Andrzejewska, should be trusted.

One of these networks, the ZWZ, was run by a group of senior Polish officers loyal to the government-in-exile, and they regarded Christine, as a British agent, with caution.
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The Poles would fight hard to maintain a higher degree of independence from their British allies than any other resistance movement in occupied Europe. They not only already had their own intelligence and courier networks, they soon had their own radio codes and frequencies. This desire for autonomy was partly driven by Poland’s long history of conspiracy and resistance under occupation, but also by a distrust of British foreign policy that would, in the event, prove justified. The Poles looked to the British to supply arms and money, but the first clandestine British flight to Poland would not take place until February 1941. This operation proved that air links were possible, but ‘the real lesson’, so Peter Wilkinson, Gubbins’s number two, argued, ‘was the sheer impracticability of attempting to equip the underground army in Poland by means of air sorties from the UK’.
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It was a truth that neither Gubbins nor the Polish General Staff could bear to accept, but with limited flights and no air bases within easy range, the supplies Britain dropped to Poland could never be sufficient.
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Meanwhile Polish resistance networks were an essential source of information about the wartime potential of the Third Reich.
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The ZWZ could see no advantage in working with somebody reporting directly to the British rather than trading intelligence through their own hierarchy. Furthermore Christine had little experience in covert operations and was well known in the Polish capital. She was, the ZWZ decided, a liability.

Unfazed, Christine determined to make contact with some of the more independent resistance groups. First among these was the Musketeers, created and led by the ‘eccentric inventor and engineer’ Stefan Witkowski.
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Five years older than Christine, Witkowski had been an ambitious design engineer in the air industry whose confidence and connections had secured him military funding to develop a number of ever more unlikely projects until he destroyed his career, along with part of a Polish castle, while testing his ‘death ray’ machine.
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He then moved to France and Switzerland, where he worked on building aircraft engines and formed links with Polish, and probably also British, intelligence, for whom he ‘analysed’ German industry.
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After the defeat of Polish forces in 1939, he used his Swiss-based company as a cover for more clandestine work. Recruiting many former officers from the anti-tank rifle – or ‘musket’ – unit, with which he had briefly served, he established an intelligence organization known, not very cryptically, as the Musketeers.
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By 1940 they had intelligence and counterintelligence cells across Poland, and courier networks stretching through Budapest into Switzerland and France.
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Although respected as a charismatic leader and brilliant organizer, the ZWZ leadership regarded Witkowski as something of a wild card. Tension grew as it became clear that he had no intention of subordinating the Musketeers to the Polish High Command and was keen to establish his own direct contact with British intelligence. Once word was out that a British agent was seeking contacts in Warsaw, Witkowski quickly arranged a meeting.

Christine met Witkowski at the flat of the aristocratic activist Teresa Łubienska. Having lost her only son in the battle for Warsaw, Łubienska was both helping to fund the Musketeers through the sale of her jewellery and taking an active part in its operations.
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Although she and Christine were very different sorts of women, from different generations, they would soon come to regard each other with the greatest respect. Christine also quickly gained Witkowski’s confidence, and handed over her parcel of papers. Picking up on the vibrant energy of the slight young woman in front of him, he gave her the pseudonym ‘Mucha’, or ‘Fly’.
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Then, pacing the room, he outlined the Musketeers’ objectives, structure, and the type of intelligence he could provide, in the hope that she could secure some British funding. Later he would introduce her to several key people in the organization, including Michal Gradowski, known as ‘Lis’, ‘the Fox’, who was also a courier on the Warsaw–Budapest route, and who would soon be passing microfilm to Christine in Hungary.
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Witkowski also introduced her to the great Polish hero Kazimierz Leski, then the Musketeers’ chief of counterintelligence. Leski clearly remembered the ‘lovely, graceful, very intelligent and absolutely charming girl’, but later claimed that as he looked at Christine he could not help wondering why he had been invited to meet her.
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Finally he decided that Witkowski was trying to build his prestige by flaunting his new contact from British intelligence.
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Witkowski arranged to meet Christine again the following month, to give her the Musketeers’ latest reports to be smuggled out of the country. With a deep bow, he then kissed her hand, and the fly was waved away. It was only once she was back in the street that Christine realized she had made no demands or suggestions of her own. Witkowski had controlled their relationship from the start.

Christine spent three weeks in Warsaw on this, her first visit to occupied Poland. Officially the objects of her mission were ‘to counter the anti-British propaganda of the Germans by spreading British propaganda’ and ‘to collect and transmit intelligence’.
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She proved highly effective at both. She had already handed over her propaganda reports for reproduction in the underground press, and shared, she wrote rather enigmatically, ‘everything Harrison had given me’ with the Musketeers.
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She then assessed the impact of British contact so far. Leaflet drops over Poland had been ‘magnificent’ she reported diplomatically, but when repeated they should give straight news rather than propaganda. She went on to devise a new scheme for broadcasting special news bulletins at a fixed time and on a fixed wavelength, to be picked up by ordinary radio sets in Poland. These were to supplement the British and Allied broadcasts being subjected to German jamming, and were also to be used as a news agency service, to supply the many small illegal news-sheets across the country. One of her contacts, a well-known left-wing Polish journalist, was so keen about the potential of the plan that he put in a request for £100 a month to fund a new weekly newspaper with a circulation of 10–15,000 copies. British Section D was impressed. But Christine would later report that she also faced serious difficulties owing to the work of some ‘Volksdeutsche’ (ethnic Germans living in Poland), who claimed to be British agents and started a campaign to discredit her among resistance networks. She was ‘in danger of being killed as an agent provocateur’, she wrote, and was only cleared by old friends and contacts who vouched for her.
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Not all of Christine’s activities went down well with her British bosses, however. Somehow, almost certainly through the Musketeers, she made contact with General Stanisław Bałachowicz, a renowned champion of Polish liberty prior to 1919. Bałachowicz, whose ‘prestige is very great’ the British noted, had organized some 500 officers for guerrilla work inside Russia ‘when the moment arrives’. Their plan was to start a revolt in Poland and the Ukraine against Russia, and, carefully stressing that the organization was ‘purely military and had no political affiliations’, Christine wanted to help supply British anti-tank guns, rifles, ammunition and money. ‘No! – This on no account’, one British Section D officer scribbled in the margins against the suggestion.
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British and Polish views of the Russians would never be reconciled, and their interests would become diametrically opposed after Russia joined the Allies in 1941.

Christine also told London of her astonishment at ‘the terrible disorder of the German administration’.
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The Gestapo and the Wehrmacht distrusted one another, and as a result new orders were being posted daily, withdrawn, cancelled, contradicted and reenacted, causing chaos. Christine tried to keep a mental note of everything she witnessed. She watched Warsaw’s residents, often dressed in little more than rags, forced to clear snow from the roads and railways lines, before being rebuked for breaking the curfew. She saw children emerging from damaged buildings to take messages and parcels of bread and other goods across the city. She saw groups of Jews, some wrapped in blankets, all with beautifully hand-stitched Star of David armbands sewn on to the sleeves of their shirts or jackets, running together in the middle of the road to conform to recent edicts about their freedom of movement, and then being beaten for being in a group of more than three. Once she witnessed an elderly Jewish gentleman, dressed in a decent overcoat and felt hat, being pushed into the road by a Wehrmacht officer with his hand on the perforated barrel of his sub-machine gun. Having instinctively held out her hand, Christine quickly drew back and a moment later found herself smiling at the officer when he asked for her papers.
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Momentarily hating herself, she began to understand a little more about the campaign of terror that enabled the Nazis to control even Warsaw with its huge and passionate underground resistance. Later she would report that ‘in Warsaw alone over 100 Poles are shot every night. The terror is indescribable. Yet the spirit of the Poles is magnificent’.
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Christine was staying with different close friends who could be trusted not to talk, but one afternoon an old acquaintance recognized her by chance in a crowded café and called out her name across the room, adding loudly, ‘What are you doing here? We heard you had gone abroad!’
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Having denied being Mrs Gi
ż
ycka, wife of the well-connected diplomat serving overseas, let alone Krystyna Skarbek, well known to be the daughter of a Jew, Christine ordered more coffee, deliberately lingering to show she had nothing to hide. That evening she left Warsaw, spending two weeks crossing Poland mostly by rail, but also by horse and cart, and on foot. She was collecting local information on the continuing industrial production around the country, the transit of German supplies and equipment, and the composition and distribution of large military units both inside the country and along the demarcation lines, noting that many troop transports were leaving Poland, either crossing the Russian frontier, or heading towards Romania and Turkey.