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

  During the seventeenth-century Turkish occupation, the British Legation at Buda had been a palace complete with harem, and its gardens ran right up to the medieval bastion that surrounded the Old City. At the top of the stone steps from the porte-cochère was a long passageway leading directly to Sir Owen’s study. Here Christine and Andrzej sank wordlessly into armchairs. Sir Owen took one look at their bruised and swollen faces and helped them to a drink from the tray that stood permanently on his desk between red diplomatic boxes, a few old copies of the New Statesman, and his telephone, which he kept in a baize-lined wooden box in case it had been bugged to enable his private conversations in the room to be overheard.10

  Sir Owen had suspected for some time that the Gestapo, working through the Hungarian police, were closing in on Christine. ‘I begged her and implored her to leave the country while there was still time’, he later claimed, ‘but she was obdurate.’11 Now he was determined to get her safely out, and if Andrzej, of whom Sir Owen vaguely disapproved for eliciting his daughter’s affections, could be evacuated too, then all the better. Sir Owen’s plan was to hide Christine in the boot of a Legation car the following day, and get a junior member of his staff to drive her across the border into Yugoslavia, and on to Belgrade. Andrzej was to follow in the Opel, which they would need to take them on through Europe.

  ‘On Sunday, after breakfast,’ Sir Owen later wrote with remarkable lack of drama, ‘I noticed signs of perturbation in the courtyard.’12 None of the available Legation cars had a boot large enough to hold Christine. Fortunately Sir Owen’s car was a generously proportioned Chrysler. The boot was hastily cleared and its diplomatic pennants attached as the tank and some spare jerrycans were filled from the huge petrol storage tank that Sir Owen had thoughtfully had sunk in the Legation courtyard.13 Sir Owen now pressed his guests, with growing urgency, for the new names and other personal details that his clerk required to complete the false passports and visas needed to take them across the border and on through Europe.

  Andrzej as yet spoke only two words of English, and they were ‘double whisky’, but he opted for the name ‘Andrew Kennedy’, in honour of both Sir Owen’s Irish roots and a relative of his own who had married an Irish Catholic émigré whose story he could appropriate. Christine, hastily advised by Kate, picked the more ambiguously European, almost aristocratic-sounding, ‘Christine Granville’. Her cover story, that she was born of French parents in the Channel Islands, was designed to supply a reason for her perfect French but shaky and heavily accented English. In return for her new name, Christine gave Kate her talisman of the Madonna of Częstochowa that she had carried with her since childhood, saying, ‘Keep this for me, I shall probably never need it again.’14

  The farewells were taking too long and even Sir Owen began to get agitated, but Christine was unfazed. When the clerk pressed her for her date of birth she smiled, looked up at him, and coolly took the opportunity to knock seven years off her age. From then on Christine would always give 1915 as her birth year. Perhaps she was simply completing her disguise, but it is equally likely that vanity played a part. Seven minutes later the ink was drying on her new passport, and an apparently twenty-six-year-old Christine Granville was ready to be delivered to the free world.*

  They had to move fast. While the police at the Legation’s wrought-iron gates, who were used to getting hot cocoa in the porter’s lodge on snowy nights, looked the other way, Christine practised folding herself up ‘like a penknife’ in the boot.15 There was no time for any further attempt at concealment. Stifling her cough, she was driven out of the Legation, out of Budapest, and swiftly down the nearly deserted roads through southern Hungary. As agreed, Andrzej, in the Opel, arrived at Lenti, his chosen frontier checkpoint, just ahead of the Chrysler. Seeing it drive up, flags flying, he waited respectfully for the Legation car to cross the border first. With his heart in his mouth he watched as the Hungarian customs official leant his palm on the Chrysler’s boot, and ordered it to be opened. Then, noticing the British pennants, the official touched the visor of his cap with one hand and waved them through with the other.16 In high spirits, Andrzej, who had no exit visa in his Polish passport, then cheekily asked the border guards to help push his little Opel across the frontier, ostensibly to be collected for hard currency by a buyer on the other side. Once over the border he jumped in and drove off at top speed, waving his new British passport out of the window.

  When Andrzej and Sir Owen’s driver released Christine from the Chrysler’s boot, some distance inside Yugoslavia, she simply stretched, laughed, kissed them both, and suggested a small celebration. Andrzej produced a flat bottle from his hip pocket and they toasted Yugoslav freedom with Hungarian brandy. To Christine it was as if the whole escapade were just a big adventure, Andrzej later proudly recalled, ‘like it was a picnic’.17 Arming themselves against the freezing January air with further nips of brandy, Andrzej then drove the much-loved but unheated Opel non-stop to Belgrade. They arrived in the city, cold and stiff, late that evening.

  An atmosphere of menace hung over Belgrade in early 1941. Hitler was rapidly extending his grip on the Balkans and threatening Yugoslavia more openly, but the Yugoslav population was still resolutely defiant. While hoping to avoid direct provocation, small military units marched through the capital most days, often followed by groups of well-wrapped schoolchildren singing martial songs, as residents watched from behind the closed windows of the classical apartment blocks that typified the city.

  On arrival Christine and Andrzej presented themselves to the British Legation, briefed by Sir Owen to expect them, and then headed for the bar of the Hotel Majestic, which famously stayed open until five in the morning. Here they blended in with the expats, among them a number of Poles sitting around reading Time magazine, smoking endless cigarettes, discussing the increasingly bleak future of the Balkans and drowning their anxieties in glasses of slivovitz.18 One of these turned out to be an old friend, Andrzej Tarnowski, who had once helped to save Kowerski from an avalanche. Despite Christine’s nagging cough, they felt safe and welcome. ‘Here I sit in a little café with a cup of Turkish coffee’, Christine began her first letter to Kate the next morning, but as their visas were good for only seven days, she added, ‘all is uncertain, come quick’.19 ‘Finally … we can sleep and sleep without fear of the sirens’, Andrzej continued the letter. ‘Christine is busy reading guidebooks to the city, finding the best places to eat oysters, but we miss you and our beautiful days in Budapest.’20

  Sir Owen arrived a few days later.* Together they spent a celebratory evening drinking champagne in Belgrade’s nightclubs and belly-dancing bars: ‘low haunts’ as Sir Owen described them. Coincidentally they met the two RAF pilots that Christine and Sir Owen had helped to evacuate from Poland some weeks earlier. Christine’s delight that they remembered her added to the festive spirit of the occasion. ‘I did not embarrass the Foreign Office by reporting to them Christina’s escape’, Sir Owen later recorded drily in his memoirs; it ‘was not part of a Minister’s duties’, any more, presumably, than entertaining escaping airmen in Serbian belly-dancing clubs.21

  Sir Owen did, however, continue to champion Christine with the British. Having helped to save her life he felt responsible for her, he told Harold Perkins. But he also had a great respect for Christine’s abilities, and was more than a little in love with her, ‘devoted to her’ as Andrzej put it.22 ‘She is a rare and peculiar character and for all her attractiveness not everybody’s cup of tea’, Sir Owen wrote, perhaps thinking of Peter Wilkinson’s reaction to Christine, or possibly the feelings of his wife and other women in the Legation who found Christine intimidating or simply infuriating. He then went on to characterize Christine as a true patriot, ready to give her life for the causes she believed in. She had ‘an almost pathological tendency to take risks’, he continued, saying that one of his difficulties now was to find her work that was ‘sufficiently risky and bloodthirsty to appeal to her’.23 In fact this was not Sir Owen’s
responsibility, and the British were in any case only too happy to keep Christine, and now Andrzej, on their growing books.

  In 1940 Section D had been closed down. Its best people were integrated into the new Special Operations Executive, or SOE, a politically led sabotage organization modelled in part on the IRA, and which was famously launched by Winston Churchill in July 1940 with the rousing injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’. This was ‘easier to command than achieve’, Wilkinson later commented drily. Indeed SOE ‘sometimes came nearer to setting Whitehall ablaze’.24 The problem was double-edged. In operational terms, with the exception of Poland, most of occupied Europe in 1940 was not ‘smouldering with unchannelled resistance’, but rather stunned by defeat.25 Meanwhile SOE faced huge internal resistance from the other service chiefs and the Foreign Office, and only survived through Churchill’s personal support.

  Churchill had become Britain’s prime minister only two months previously, ‘at a time’, noted Gubbins, later head of SOE, ‘when British fortunes and hopes were at their lowest’.26 As minister of defence, as well as PM, Churchill was directly responsible for the conduct of the war in all its military aspects and he gave ‘special consideration’ to the possibilities of irregular types of warfare, which had held an almost romantic appeal for him since he had himself witnessed guerrilla action as a young soldier and war correspondent. The secretive new organization, known publicly only as the ‘Joint Technical Board’ or the ‘Inter-Service Research Bureau’, and simply as ‘the firm’ to insiders, was charged with conducting guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers. This was to be achieved through instructing and aiding local resistance groups to facilitate espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance behind enemy lines. After a first successful drop of agents into Poland, SOE slowly began to grow. Operations were controlled by sections dedicated to specific countries, sometimes with more than one section per country, depending how unified or disparate the various national resistance movements were. Most were run from London, but SOE’s operations in the Middle East and the Balkans were controlled from Cairo, and further stations were later set up in Algiers to support southern France, and in Italy for the Balkans. Christine would get to know them all, but it was her old contact George Taylor, the man who had first approved her for Section D work in December 1939, who now met her in Belgrade, as head of SOE’s Balkan Section.

  Christine was keen to re-establish contact with the Musketeers, the independent Warsaw-based resistance organization. But before she could do so, Taylor wanted to reactivate the links with Andrzej’s courier and ‘exfiltration’ organization in Hungary. Someone had to be found to replace her as the Budapest contact. To Andrzej’s dismay, Christine suggested her husband. Jerzy was indeed the perfect candidate. He spoke fluent Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, French, German, Italian and English; he was a good organizer, a great skier, intelligent and charming; and he had been angling for a posting in the Balkans since November 1940. To date the British had been cautious. ‘I think you will find that 4826 [Jerzy Giżycki’s] anxiety to return to the Balkans is to find his wife, who is one of our agents and a very charming woman’, Taylor had advised in December 1940. ‘My impression is that if we pushed 4826 out to the Balkans, and his wife, as is quite possible, has gone into Poland, we should not see 4826 for smoke.’27 As a result the British stalled Jerzy, but in January 1941 he had taken it upon himself to terminate his Polish mission in West Africa and head for the Balkans – and Christine – via the British base at Cairo. With Taylor’s blessing, Christine now wrote to her husband, arranging to meet him in Istanbul, where she hoped to persuade him to take over her Budapest role.

  In late February, Christine and Andrzej set off again in the valiant Opel, still with its Polish number plates but its nose now pointing south-east and ultimately, they hoped, for Egypt, via Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and Palestine. The car was crammed with luggage and cans of petrol, and Christine had a wad of official letters in her bag, providing introductions to various British contacts on the way. Just before leaving she also collected another parcel of microfilm from a Musketeer courier who had reached Belgrade. She shoved it unceremoniously into her gloves – the car was not warm enough to travel in without being well wrapped up – and off they went on the Belgrade–Sofia Rally route, and, as it turned out, not far ahead of the Nazi advance.

  Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, is 250 miles south-east of Belgrade. In 1941 the roads were winding and often unsurfaced, and in February that year the weather was miserable, with incessant rain turning much of the route into a river. Christine found the radio grating – she did not care much for music except for occasional bursts of Chopin – and preferred to talk or be left to her own thoughts, so most of the drive was punctuated only by increasingly gloomy news reports. At some point the Opel lost its exhaust-pipe, among several other underpinnings, but as dawn broke, the rain eased and they could see the outlines of the trees and houses on the outskirts of Sofia. As they drove into the city, its beautiful tree-lined avenues, flanked by pink and white stucco buildings, seemed to reflect the first promise of spring but, as throughout Eastern Europe, life in Sofia was becoming unseasonably tense. The city was crawling with journalists, intelligence operatives, and agents from all sides. The British Ministry of Foreign Affairs alone had doubled its presence over the past month, and the city’s main hotel, the Bulgaria, was so full of Nazis that it had become unofficially known as the ‘Brown House’.

  Christine and Andrzej reported at the British Legation on the last Sunday of February 1941. Aidan Crawley, the young air attaché, was more than a little surprised to have his quiet weekend disrupted by ‘a beautiful young Polish woman’ and a ‘round-faced, jolly ex-Polish officer’, who claimed they had just driven from Budapest, but his ‘two unusual visitors’ wasted no time in handing over their letters of introduction from Sir Owen, and several rolls of microfilm.28 Christine was as impressed with Crawley as he was with them. ‘Blonde, big, blue eyes…’ she wrote to Kate mischievously. ‘… If I wasn’t so old and hadn’t sworn to shun affairs of the heart until the end of the war … I’m not making any rash promises, though. If the war doesn’t end soon, I’ll run the risk of remaining a virgin until I’m middle-aged – and after that it will be too late.’29 It is a comment that reveals both her easy intimacy with Kate and, at the very least, a slight frustration with Andrzej.

  The microfilm Christine had given to Aidan Crawley had the potential to change the entire direction of the war. It was footage of hundreds of tanks, Wehrmacht regiments, Panzer divisions and stores of ammunition, being amassed along Russia’s eastern borders. There was also an impressive list of petrol depots, apparently organized to support a mechanized invasion.* In Crawley’s opinion there could be no doubt that Hitler was making large-scale preparations for an aggressive campaign against his Soviet ally. He was aware that Christine was ‘officially working for the other organisation’ – the Musketeers, who were subject to growing suspicion from Polish, and correspondingly British, intelligence. As a result any information she delivered had to be treated with caution. However, he also recognized the significance of a possible Nazi invasion of Russia.30 Since the fall of France, Britain’s primary allies had been two exiled leaders reliant on the remnants of their armies also in exile – hence the investment in resistance and sabotage within occupied territories. Should Hitler now alienate Stalin there was the potential for an alliance with a world power whose military and economic resources might well prove decisive for the outcome of the war.

  Hitler’s rationale for invading Russia was not only to defeat the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy’ and protect Nazi oil interests in Romania, which the Soviets appeared to be threatening; he also hoped that his ambitious plan to defeat Russia in six weeks would ‘clarify to the British the hopelessness of their situation’.31 Instead, the prospect of a conflict between Germany and Russia gave new hope to the Allies; hope that at first they hardly dared credit. ‘This was the first positive evidence of its kind’, Crawley later
wrote, and once Christine had entrusted him with the films he sent them to the British Air Ministry, who passed them straight to Churchill. ‘That Germany should at this stage, before clearing the Balkan scene, open another major war with Russia seemed too good to be true’, Churchill recorded.32 Despite further reports on extensive troop movements towards Russia from ‘Ultra’ – the German intelligence signals decoded at Bletchley Park – and other sources, it was not until the end of March that Churchill became convinced that Hitler was resolved on what he called ‘mortal war’ with the Soviets.

  Once she had been thoroughly debriefed by the British in Sofia, Christine’s report was filed, and Andrzej was officially recruited to SOE.33 Crawley had already sent urgent reports to both Cairo and London, and he now warned his Polish colleagues to press on towards Turkey before Britain severed diplomatic relations with Bulgaria in the wake of the Nazi advance. Early the next morning, Christine and Andrzej folded themselves stiffly back into the Opel, to which Andrzej had made some rapid repairs, and headed optimistically towards Istanbul.*

  After a long day trailing behind ox carts, and pushing the Opel out of swathes of mud, it was nearly dusk when they reached the last village before the Bulgarian–Turkish border. The Ottoman Empire had supported Germany in 1914 and, as a result, lost all its European territories. Now a republic, Turkey would remain neutral throughout the Second World War. Within sight of relative safety, Andrzej was determined to get Christine, who had still not shaken off the flu, across the border that evening. Polish number plates, white with dark lettering, were very similar to their German equivalents, and in the half-light the Bulgarian frontier guards mistook the Opel for a German car. Andrzej took care not to disillusion them, asking in German what time the border closed. To his relief he was told it would be open all night. Once he had handed over their British passports, however, the story quickly changed: the border had just closed, he was told; they could not go on. Andrzej started to bristle. ‘Keep calm’, Christine whispered in French, squeezing his hand. It was, she said, just ‘a ruse to annoy subjects of His Majesty King George VI’, but they had a long night ahead of them.34