The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (6 page)

In Poland the summer of 1939 had been long and hot, a last glorious hurrah before the country descended into a war for which they were ill prepared. The first reserves only began to receive their army summons towards the end of August, when call-ups started to arrive daily. One of Christine’s friends later remembered a romantic last view of ‘unploughed stubble in the fields, [which] shone in the golden sunlight’, before reporting for duty.
21
This sense of nostalgia was percipient: they were leaving behind a young nation but one still proudly steeped in the traditions of centuries. The German invasion ended nearly twenty years of freedom and independence for Poland, but also a social structure that, for better or worse, would be completely destroyed.

Having received no instructions from the Polish Foreign Office after the German invasion, Jerzy and Christine turned their estate car round and headed back for Cape Town. Any dreams they might have had of a diplomatic role in the sunshine, and perhaps of land, freedom and horses, disappeared overnight. Despite their connections, like most Poles they were stunned by news of the German invasion, but unlike most they were over 5,000 miles from home and unable to play any role in the defence of their country. The return drive was miserable. Hot, exhausted, shocked, terrified for his country, and in a rage at his own impotence, the worst side of Jerzy’s domineering character came to the fore, and Christine, who could be equally fierce in her own distress, was no longer in a mood to humour him.

In Cape Town they sold the car and, after a frustrating wait, managed to buy passage on a mail steamship bound for Southampton.
*
It was, in Jerzy’s words, ‘the most nightmarish trip’.
22
German submarines had been sighted along the western coast of Africa, so they were forced to travel in convoy, their speed set by the slowest cargo boat, and they stopped for days in different ports on the way. Every morning, news of the latest Polish defeats, and the rapid advance of the German Wehrmacht into Polish territory, was posted up on the ship’s bulletin board.

Germany had gained air supremacy within twenty-four hours of invading Poland, bombing both the Polish air force on the ground and targeted sites within Warsaw later the same day. Working through a well-prepared plan, key bridges were then destroyed, trains derailed and refugee columns strafed from the air. Polish troops mounted a constant attack, with some incredible acts of heroism against German armoured tanks, but the wonderful Indian summer worked against them. ‘Hitler’s weather’ they called it, while praying bitterly for rain to fill the marshes and hold up the German tanks.
23
But the clear skies held, and by 6 September the Polish Command was forced to abandon its courageous defence of their frontiers. With a huge advantage in both numbers and technology, and few natural defences to impede their progress, Hitler’s Panzer divisions now rolled with relative ease across Poland’s plains.

Warsaw was surrounded within a fortnight. Under the terms of their agreement with Britain, Poland had been asked to hold out for two weeks before the Allies would launch a major offensive. Instead Britain’s only action was an air campaign that dropped thousands of ‘perfectly useless’ propaganda leaflets on German cities, and which as even the head of the British Mission to Poland, Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, raged, ‘had no physical effect on the Germans, and no moral effect’ on the Poles.
24
Then, on 17 September, just as Poland was beginning to show signs of withstanding the German assault, the Soviet army crossed Poland’s eastern frontier ‘uninvited and unannounced’, and the Polish president, government and commander-in-chief were forced to cross the border into Romania to evade capture.
25
Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, claimed to be taking measures to protect the Polish population, with the result that many Polish regiments welcomed Red Army troops only to be marched into Russia as prisoners: 181,000 in all. It was Poland, not Germany, that now faced a war on two fronts. Within a week of entering Warsaw, at the end of September, Wehrmacht troops were the victorious occupiers. Poland had been crushed between two invading armies, both better equipped and prepared for war than herself.

On 28 September, the day that the Polish capital fell after a brave defence mounted by both the military and civilians, the bulletin board on Jerzy and Christine’s ship announced: ‘
Lost
– a pair of lady’s pink panties.
Lost
– Warsaw’. ‘A sample’, Jerzy wrote bitterly, ‘of the famous British sense of humour.’
26
Poland had lost at least 60,000 troops in the September battles, and many more civilians both in the fighting and in the campaign of terror that the SS Death’s Head Division now unleashed on the population while hunting down Jews and other ‘suspicious elements’. In the industrial town of Bydgoszcz, 800 individuals were immediately arrested and shot, the first victims a group of boy scouts aged twelve to sixteen.
27
The figures were even more terrible in Warsaw. Jerzy had no idea what had happened to his mother and sisters, and Christine had had no news of her young Skarbek cousins, let alone her mother, who she could only hope had found shelter when needed in the basement of the nearby Prudential Building, or her brother Andrzej, who would certainly have joined the defence of his country.

By the time that Jerzy and Christine reached Britain, on 6 October 1939, Polish casualties were estimated at 200,000. Christine felt the humiliation of her country deeply, but although Poland was being brutally occupied, the Poles had never officially surrendered to the Nazis. The words of the national anthem, ‘Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live’, must have been ringing in her head. There were no instructions waiting at the Polish Embassy in London, but sitting out the rest of the war in Britain was not an option that either Christine or Jerzy would countenance. It was too late to enlist in the army at home, but they could still offer their services abroad to help defeat a common enemy.

Before 1939 few Poles knew much about Britain except that it had a large fleet and a vast colonial empire. Only the very well-to-do, like Christine and Jerzy, had visited. France, however, had long-standing political and cultural ties with Poland, dating chiefly from the Napoleonic era, and until June 1940 France was widely regarded as the most likely agent of Nazi Germany’s defeat. It was there that the Polish army was re-forming under the leadership of Jerzy’s old tennis partner General Sikorski, and there too, in Paris, that the fledgling Polish government-in-exile would soon be established. Jerzy travelled to France but, to his disgust, although he was on the reserve list, at over fifty and with several serious ski injuries behind him, he was rejected for military service. He tried to join a Red Cross unit in Paris, but was again rejected.

Christine was just as determined and impatient to help her country, but she too was barred from active service – because she was a woman. It would take her just a few weeks, however, to find a brave and innovative way around this seemingly insurmountable barrier. Unlike Jerzy, Christine would soon be employing her gift for languages, her adroit social skills, formidable courage and lust for life directly against the occupiers of her homeland.

3: HUNGARIAN EMBRACES

In December 1939 a ‘flaming Polish patriot … expert skier and great adventuress’, according to British Secret Service records, submitted a bold plan to ski into Nazi-occupied Poland from Hungary, via the Carpathian mountains. The patriot was Christine and her aim was to take British propaganda into Warsaw to bolster the Polish spirit of resistance at a time when many Poles believed they had been abandoned to their fate, and to return with intelligence on the Nazi occupation. ‘She is absolutely fearless,’ the report continued, before concluding rather pathetically, ‘she says the matter is urgent.’
1

‘I first met T…’ Christine’s own initial report to her new British bosses opened, ‘in 1939, in London, on the introduction of Sir Robert Vansittart and Frederick Voigt of the
Manchester Guardian.
’
2
‘T’ was George Taylor, who had been recruited to Section D (for ‘Destruction’) of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, six months earlier. Taylor’s mandate was to investigate the potential of sabotage and subversion in time of war. He was soon running Section D’s Balkan network. At first nearly all secret agents recruited to Section D, and its June 1940 successor, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, of which Taylor became chief of staff, came through the old-boy network. As a result, even the most rigorous systems of code-names and false identities were often compromised by agents recognizing each other from past meetings on a public-school rugby pitch. But despite this reliable route into the service, these men politely waited to be recruited; they did not apply. Christine meanwhile, a foreigner, and, shockingly, a woman, walked off the boat in Southampton, arrived in London the next day, found the right person to approach and demanded to be taken on.

Christine had formed her plan to volunteer for British intelligence well before she arrived from South Africa. They were, after all, heading to Southampton, and there was not, as yet, any Polish government-in-exile in place to which she could offer her services.
*
Furthermore ‘she did not believe in political solutions…’, a close friend and fellow agent later commented, but ‘she housed an ironic respect for the British government … For her there were only good people and bad people’, and the British, she decided firmly, were good and ready to go.
3
‘Having talked it over with my wife, we came to the conclusion…’, Jerzy recorded rather patronizingly in his memoirs, that ‘she would look for some exciting underground work.’
4
Christine, however, may have had another, supporting, motive for approaching the British. She was ‘hugely afraid of accusations of being a coward,’ one of her Polish friends in London wrote, ‘and therefore demanded more from herself than from anyone around her.’
5
It seems that Christine was more vulnerable to criticism and the opinion of her fellow Poles than she cared to show.

The business of espionage does not encourage openness, and it is impossible to trace entirely the convoluted process that brought Christine so quickly to the door of the British Secret Service. Jerzy claimed that he met the journalist Freddy Voigt, ‘one of the most interesting men I have known’, through Christine.
6
This is quite possible. She had dabbled in journalism and had long been socializing with a wide group of writers and foreign correspondents, such as her friend Florian Sokolow, who also knew Voigt. Or the introduction might have come through Józef Radziminski, the Balkans representative of the Telegraph Agency Express, which was in fact a cover operation for Polish Intelligence. Radziminski had met Christine at the Brown Deer, an international press club in Cieszyn in Poland, some years before the war, and may have been sharing sensitive information with her since. Another journalist who met Christine at the Brown Deer noticed ‘something about her which put other women in the shade’, and asked for her number, but decided against using it when he learnt both that Radziminski was ‘madly in love’ with her, and that she was already rumoured to be a British agent.
7
As early as 7 December 1939, Section D files certainly recorded that Radziminski ‘will do anything for her and with her’, so the British clearly knew something about this relationship.
8
Alternatively Christine’s introduction to the British could have been through Harold Perkins, later known to Christine as ‘Perks’, a tough English businessman who could bend a poker with his bare hands, and who had long had close connections with British intelligence.
9
Perkins had an estate and factory near Zakopane and would have been a regular on the slopes and at après-ski parties, giving him plenty of opportunity to mix with both Christine and Jerzy over the years.
*

It is equally possible that Jerzy was dissembling, however, and the introduction to Voigt was in fact the other way round. Jerzy almost certainly had unofficial connections with British intelligence before the war. He had been in Rome after Italy invaded Ethiopia, at the same time as Claude Dansey, Britain’s greatest spy-master in the mid-1930s, and he had coincided with Dansey again in Switzerland while travelling with Christine. The appropriately hawk-faced Dansey had been asked to set up an independent intelligence network, outside the official British SIS, in 1930. His recruits included diplomats, journalists and businessmen and women all over Europe, many of whom were not English, but all of whom were strongly opposed to Nazism and were willing to give their services freely in the fight against it. Harold Perkins was almost certainly one of Dansey’s contacts, and Jerzy also had the perfect profile. Dansey was backed by Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office and the first cousin of Lawrence of Arabia, and by their mutual friend the MP Winston Churchill, both of whom had taken a consistently hard line against Nazi Germany. Those few people aware of Dansey’s network knew it as ‘Vansittart’s Private Detection Agency’, but it was known even more clandestinely as the ‘Z Organisation’.
10

However they were introduced, and in whatever capacity, by 1939 Freddy Voigt had been moving in the same circles as Jerzy and Christine for several years. Christine adored him, but Jerzy was torn between admiration for this ‘extremely intelligent’ journalist and apparent disgust at his rosy cheeks, permanent lack of overcoat and hat, and hair worn ‘long at the sides and brushed over the bald top – the slightest gust of wind … giving him the look of a long-haired Afghan hound’.
11
Born to German parents, but naturalized as a British citizen, Voigt spoke fluent English, French and German, and had been a European correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
since 1920. Although he was based in Berlin, he travelled widely and had developed a particular interest in Poland. In 1935, already convinced that a second war with Germany was ‘inevitable’, he returned to London to start fortnightly foreign affairs talks for the BBC.
*
12
Whether or not Jerzy and Christine knew that Voigt was on Z Organisation books, he was the obvious person for her to get in touch with in London.
†
Knowing her potential usefulness, Voigt introduced Christine to Vansittart, whose name and details Christine would still have scribbled in her pocket diary ten years later.
13
Vansittart, who held the Poles in high regard and believed they had been foolishly let down by their allies, interviewed Christine, judged her capable, and directed her to George Taylor.
‡