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

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Preface: Stories of Trust and Betrayal

  1: BORDERLANDS

  2: TWO WEDDINGS AND A WAR

  3: HUNGARIAN EMBRACES

  4: POLISH RESISTANCE

  5: A STRING OF ARRESTS

  6: TRAVELS IN AN OPEL

  7: COLD IN CAIRO

  8: THE BEAUTIFUL SPY

  9: OUR WOMAN IN ALGIERS

  10: A FRENCH OCCUPATION

  11: THE BATTLE OF VERCORS

  12: SWITCHING ALLEGIANCES

  13: OPERATION LIBERTÉ

  14: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

  15: SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN

  16: DEEP WATER

  17: BRUTAL END

  Epilogue: the Afterlife of Christine Granville

  My Search for Christine Granville: a note on sources

  Photographs

  Appendix I: Christine ‘preferred dogs to children’: a note on Christine Granville’s childlessness

  Appendix II: She ‘murdered me’ Muldowney said: a note on Dennis Muldowney

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Index

  Also by Clare Mulley

  In Praise of The Spy Who Loved

  Copyright

  To my parents, Gill and Derek Mulley, who watched the sky turn red over London during the Blitz, and have reached out for better international relations ever since.

  ‘A few rare people, who live for action, are never in any doubt what they should do. For them capture is always unbearable and escape their only interest from the start.’

  AIDAN CRAWLEY1

  ‘In the high ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL2

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you Ian, for your kindness and cleverness, and the wonderful Kate, Gill and Derek Mulley, Michelle Wheeler and George Morley, for all their excellent editing. Thanks also to my agent, Andrew Lownie, who first introduced me to Christine.

  This book could not have been written without the generous support of many people who knew Christine and her circle, and their relatives, including Countess Maryś Skarbek and Count Andrew Skarbek, Elizabeth Skarbek, Maria Pienkowska, Count Jan Ledóchowski, Christine Isabelle Cole, Suzanna Gayford, Christopher Kasparek, Jane Bigman-Hartley, Ann Bonsor, Julian de Boscari, Tim Buckmaster, Harriet Crawley, Diana Hall, Eva Hryniewicz, Daniel Huillier, Krystian Jelowicki, Princess Renata Lubomirski, Zbigniew Mieczkowski, Steven Muldowney, Izabela Muszkowska, Countess Jolanta Mycielska, Maria Nurowska, Ann O’Regan, Margaret Pawley, Julian Pope, Ivor Porter, Noreen Riols, Teresa Robinska, Krystyna Sass, Matt Smolenski, Tom Sweet-Escott, Ada Tarnowska, Andrew Tarnowski, Dorothy Wakely, Michael Ward, Joanna Cammaerts-Wey, Katharine Whitehorn, Sarah Willert and Virginia Worsley. Thank you all for taking the time to share your memories and family stories.

  My very sincere thanks are also due to the very knowledgeable and generous Dr Jeffrey Bines, oral historian Martyn Cox, the late SOE historian M. R. D. Foot, former coder Maureen Gadd, Nicholas Gibbs, Maciek and Iwona Helfer, Major Chris Hunter, Krystyna Kaplan, SOE historian Steven Kippax, Michal Komar, Captain Kozac, Christine’s Polish biographer Colonel Jan Larecki, Warsaw genealogist Tomasz Lenczewski, Eugenia Maresch, Dr Michael Peske, Monika Plichta, Dominik Rettinger-Wieczorkowski, Ian Sayer, Albertine Sharples, Dr David Stafford, Dr Penny Starns, Benita Stoney, Bęczkowice parish priest Henryk Szymanski, Anna Teicher, and film director Mieczysława Wazacz, as well as the archivists and historians at the British Library; the Imperial War Museum; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London; Le Musée de la Résistance de Vassieux-en-Vercors, France; the Museum of Pawiak Prison; the National Archives, Kew; the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, London; the Warsaw Royal Castle archive; the Warsaw Uprising Museum; and specifically to Susan Tomkins, archivist at Beaulieu; Duncan Stuart, former chairman of the Special Forces Club’s Historical Sub-Committee; Dr Władysław Bułhak and Natalia Jarska at the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw; and Krzysztof Barbarski and Dr Andrzej Suchcitz at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London.

  Preface: Stories of Trust and Betrayal

  In 1973, twenty-one years after Christine Granville’s tragic death, two of her lovers entered into a studiously polite, and short-lived, correspondence. The Polish count Wladimir Ledóchowski thanked his compatriot and former fellow special agent Andrzej Kowerski for his ‘willingness to cooperate’ in a book about Christine. Ledóchowski wrote optimistically that he took Kowerski’s cautious promise of help ‘as a token of your trust’.1 But there was little real trust between these old rivals, and the rest of the letter was set out in neat points, clarifying their agreed approval process for any manuscript to be written about Christine.

  Ledóchowski had suggested that he and Kowerski set up what he called a ‘Club of the Saved’, composed exclusively of those men whose lives had been saved by Christine, several of whom, he had added ‘with a twinkle in his eye’, had been saved in more ways than one.2 By his tally there were six potential members who had ‘jumped … into Christine’s life, like parachuters into unknown territory’, including himself and Kowerski representing Poland, three British agents including the decorated hero Francis Cammaerts, and a French officer.3 Ledóchowski conceded that there was little hope of weaving their experiences into a ‘logical whole’, since: ‘I doubt you should look to logic to explain any girl, particularly one like Christine.’4 But perhaps, from their collective memories, Christine might emerge ‘not as a performer of illustrious feats’ but, he hoped, ‘just as a person’.5

  Ledóchowski was now surprised to learn that there was already a Christine-focused gentlemen’s club in place, with a slightly different remit, and that membership had not been extended to him. Kowerski and four wartime friends, Cammaerts, John Roper, Patrick Howarth and Michal Gradowski (aka Michael Lis), had set up the ‘Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville’ soon after her death in 1952.6 Ledóchowski felt that his life had been irreconcilably intertwined with Christine’s, but he had always known that he was not the only person to claim a special relationship with her, nor even the first to hope to write about her. Kowerski’s ‘panel’ had come together when the newspapers were having a field day with stories about the Polish beauty queen who had served as a British special agent. ‘We, her friends, did not want her to become a press sensation,’ Cammaerts later explained. ‘We tried to defend her reputation.’7 Yet, as Ledóchowski’s son later wrote, ‘the death of heroes is not usually followed by panels to protect their memories and stop books about them’.8 Several articles and biographies were quashed but, within months, another of Christine’s former friends and colleagues, Bill Stanley Moss, whose daughter had been named in Christine’s honour, had serialized her life for the news weekly Picture Post, under the title ‘Christine the Brave’.9

  Moss, who had already published an account of one of his own wartime SOE missions in the book Ill Met By Moonlight, recognized a good sto
ry and was planning a full biography and screenplay for a biopic to star Winston Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah.* Asked why she had chosen the role, Churchill replied it was because Christine was her father’s favourite spy, further stoking the burgeoning legend.† During his research in 1953, the year after Christine died, Moss had got in touch with Ledóchowski. ‘It is probably impossible,’ Ledóchowski had written back, ‘if Christine’s remarkable character is to be properly depicted, to picture her as an angel of virtue, to desexualise her. On the other hand this rather embarrassing for Andrew situation can, in my opinion, not be reflected in your book’.10 Moss never resolved the issues and the project was shelved.

  Twenty years later Ledóchowski decided to pick up the torch and was seeking Kowerski’s support for his own biographical project. The last clause in the agreement between them specified that, ‘in case of condemnation of the manuscript’, the book was not to be published.11 Although Moss’s widow, Christine’s friend Zofia Tarnowska Moss, felt that Ledóchowski’s manuscript was written ‘very tenderly’, she was not in the club, and four of the five members of Kowerski’s all-male panel rejected the draft out of hand.12 ‘So outraged’ were they, that they even appointed a lawyer ready to start a lawsuit.13 Ledóchowski honoured his word, however, and his manuscript was never completed or published.

  1: BORDERLANDS

  Perhaps appropriately for a secret agent, the deceptions and confusions that surround Christine’s life start with her birth.* One story has it that Christine was born at the Skarbek family estate on a stormy spring evening in 1915, and that her arrival coincided with the appearance of Venus, the evening star, in the sky. As a result she was nicknamed ‘Vesperale’. In an even more romantic version of events, she was born ‘in the wild borderlands between Poland and Russia’, to a family that was noble, ‘tough, used to invasions, warfare, Cossacks, bandits and wolves’.1 In fact Christine arrived in the world on Friday 1 May 1908. One of her father’s childhood nicknames for her was ‘little star’, but she was born at her mother’s family house on Zielna Street, in central Warsaw, now the capital of Poland. Then, however, Warsaw was technically in Russia. Poland as we know it today was not a recognized country: apart from a brief reappearance, courtesy of Napoleon, for more than a century Poland had been partitioned into three sections, each of them subsumed into the empires of Russia, Austro-Hungary and Prussia. Christine was born into a family of aristocratic patriots, loyal to a country that would not officially exist again until she was ten years old.

  She was a small and seemingly frail baby, so frail in fact that her parents feared for her life, and she was hastily baptized Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek by a local priest less than two weeks after her birth. Five years later, Christine would go through the rite a second time in Bęczkowice, where her parents had moved in 1913. The record of this second event has somehow survived in the local parish archive despite a series of wars and regime changes. Written in Russian, it was dated with the Russian Julian and Polish Gregorian calendars, as both the 17 and 30 November 1913.2 The Church does not officially sanction second baptisms, but Christine’s parents, one a rather lapsed Roman Catholic, the other a non-practising Jew, had long wanted a more elaborate celebration of their daughter’s arrival than had been possible at her birth. Their move out of Warsaw had conveniently provided a new local parish priest with whom to make arrangements.

  Two certificates of baptism, five years apart and showing three different dates, serve as notice for Christine’s birth. But she has a single death certificate, part typed, part closely penned into the printed boxes of a Royal Borough of Kensington register office form. Here her given name is ‘Christine Granville’, her occupation is listed as ‘former wife’, and although the certificate is dated 1952, her age is recorded as just thirty-seven. Somewhere between 1908 and 1952, Warsaw and London, life and death, she had changed name and nationality, left two husbands and numerous lovers, won international honours but buried her career, and cut seven years from her life.

  Christine’s father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, was a charming man. Described by his cousins as darkly attractive with ‘a seductive little moustache’, and by his nieces as ‘a very handsome man of patrician beauty’, he had that enviable ability to be at once hugely popular among his male friends, and almost irresistibly attractive to women, who seemed to constantly surround him.3 But the Count’s dark good looks were matched by his dark intentions. He was the archetypal aristocratic cad and bounder.

  Jerzy Skarbek led a privileged life, typical of the landed gentry and very far from the struggle for existence faced by much of the Polish population in the late nineteenth century. The Count had been a ‘master’ since childhood, accustomed to having a valet and a groom. It was part of the innate order of the world. And yet, arguably, Jerzy Skarbek was not a Count at all.

  With the exception of some Lithuanian princely families, historically Poland’s large enfranchised class, or ‘szlachta’, did not hold aristocratic titles. It was traditional for them to regard each other as equals, to be addressed as ‘dear brother’, and even – when Poland was still an independent country – to elect the Polish king. But many of the ancient nobility became so impoverished that they were effectively peasants with coats-of-arms. And many families who sported illustrious titles, as opposed to simply having noble names, owed these to their imperial overlords, who were, as a rule, buying favours. It was the Russian tsar Nicholas I who granted the Skarbeks’ title in the mid-nineteenth century. The fact that Jerzy Skarbek was not descended from this branch of the family made little difference to his social status. He was known to be a member of one of the oldest families in Poland, and was certainly accepted as an aristocrat in the circles that he believed mattered.*

  Jerzy Skarbek certainly felt the honour of his family keenly, and any perceived slight rankled. As a child Christine remembered him rising from the table when a guest claimed descent from the last Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski. ‘[And I am] descended from a cobbler!’ Jerzy responded with some style, referring to the medieval Kraków cobbler who had killed the fabled Wawel dragon by enticing it to devour a sheepskin stuffed with sulphur, and from whom he claimed descent.4 Few families boast a dragon-killer among their ancestors, let alone one who then married a king’s daughter. There were plenty more such stories in which the Skarbeks’ history was intertwined with Polish legends, and these would later fuel Christine’s own deeply held sense of personal, family and national pride. The one piece of jewellery that she wore throughout her life was not a wedding ring, but a Skarbek signet ring. This was designed with a slice of iron embedded in its face to commemorate the defiant eleventh-century Skarbek who would not bow to a German emperor for all his war chests of gold. Instead the proud Pole defiantly tossed his gold ring into the German coffers, shouting, ‘Let gold eat gold, we Poles love iron!’ The insulted emperor was later routed in a great battle when Polish swords indeed proved their might over the mercenary imperial German forces.

  Not all notable Skarbeks had been so warlike, however. The nineteenth-century count Fryderyck Florian Skarbek was a highly respected economist, historian, author and social and political activist who, as president of the Charities Council, had introduced many important social reforms. Count Fryderyck had grown up on the family estate of Zelazowa Wola in the flat but not particularly productive plains west of Warsaw, where he was tutored by a distant relative called Nicholas Chopin. The estate was not hugely rich, and the house itself was quite modest, with the traditional long stretch of low rooms flanking a four-column portico entrance with balcony above. Despite the grand piano in the drawing room, it was essentially a comfortable family home, with geese and ducks free to wander on the porch. When the tutor’s son was born in 1810, he was named after the count, who had sensibly been invited to be the boy’s godfather. Fryderyck Chopin’s first printed work, a polonaise, would be dedicated ‘to Her Excellency Countess Victoria Skarbek, composed by Fryderyck Chopin, a musician aged eight’.5 Count Fr
yderyck probably paid for the piece to be published, which would account for its dedication to his sister, and he went on to be one of Chopin’s earliest and most ardent supporters. The Skarbek family remained immensely proud of the connection, especially when, after Chopin’s death in 1849, he was widely regarded as the embodiment of Poland’s nationalist politics and poetic spirit.

  Jerzy Skarbek had inherited a noble name, a rich family history, and little sense of restraint. The Skarbeks owned acres of land, an assortment of houses, a collection of farms, and stables full of thoroughbred horses, but by his mid-twenties Jerzy’s indulgence in wine and women, roulette and racing had quickly diminished his income. In 1898 his family arranged for him to marry an exceedingly wealthy, clever and ‘absolutely beautiful’ Jewish banking heiress.6 In December that year, Stefania Goldfeder, newly baptized, was delighted to be embraced into the fold of one of Poland’s oldest families. The marriage was solemnized in the rites of the Helvetic Reform Church, apparently acceptable to both the Roman Catholic Skarbeks and the Goldfeders, who were non-observant Jews.

  The wedding caused a scandal, albeit a minor one. No one in Warsaw had any doubts about the bridegroom’s motives, and there were some knowing smiles when the society pages chose to celebrate the Goldfeder family as belonging to ‘a class of financiers actively involved in the task of the material reconstruction of our martyred nation’.7 Jews, once sheltered by the Polish Commonwealth, had been heavily discriminated against by the Russian occupiers, and although there was a small assimilated Jewish intelligentsia, most Polish Jews spoke a different language, ate different food and wore different clothes. They were a source of curiosity, to be patronized or avoided. Even assimilated Jewish families were still subject to social ostracism, and if Jewish doctors and lawyers were popular it was partly because they brought with them a certain sort of professional distance. Once Jerzy and Stefania’s wedding ceremony was over, the members of the nobility and those of ‘the financial circles’ went their own ways, each with good reason to frown upon the motives of the other in this union. But while it was said that Jerzy did not marry Stefania, but rather he married her money, it is perhaps equally true that Stefania married the noble Skarbek name. The following year Jerzy bought a grand country estate at Młodzieszyn, which he felt both befitted a married man of his station, and was far enough removed to soften some of the noisier Warsaw gossip.*8