The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (22 page)

It seems strange then that in April 1942, SOE sent a cipher telegram to Moscow, arranging for Christine and Andrzej’s names to be passed to the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
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It was envisaged that Britain could help Russia through intelligence-sharing and a coordinated campaign of subversive activities. Having signed an agreement with Britain, in January 1942 NKVD representatives started arriving in various Allied-held territories in the Middle East to facilitate joint working. The Poles were rightly concerned that the Soviets were trying to penetrate their organizations, and it is possible that the NKVD were given Christine and Andrzej’s names to distinguish them from other Poles they might be watching. Or Christine and Andrzej may simply have been convenient small fry, worth passing on to establish good relations.

Unaware of these arrangements, Christine now had her work cut out for her trying to keep the British in Cairo even partially up to speed with Polish intrigues. It did not help that she was politically naive. Christine was not working to any grand scheme. She was an opportunist, keen on action, who fell in with whichever personal contact would give her an assignment to work for the freedom of her country. She was loyal only to Poland. The Musketeers, and the British, were means to an end.

In January 1942, SOE reported that Sikorski was growing increasingly concerned about the Musketeers’ political influence.
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Their leader, Stefan Witkowski, taking an independent line on what constituted Poland’s greatest threat, had become involved in highly secretive, possibly collaborationist, discussions with the Nazis. When it seemed likely that Germany would win the war, a clandestine mission was dispatched, with German knowledge and support, to the Polish general Władysław Anders, who was raising an army from Polish internees recently released in Russia. Microfilm hidden in a bar of shaving soap revealed a letter from Witkowski and other senior but independent Polish figures, ordering Anders to attack the Red Army from behind their own lines. Unwilling to act against his Russian ‘allies’, at least without direct orders from Sikorski, Anders ordered the arrest of the men he had welcomed just hours before.

Denials swiftly followed. The official Polish resistance confirmed they knew of the mission, but not of the military order. The couriers were tried before a military court and condemned to death for cooperating with the enemy. A spirited defence by the Musketeer agent Klementyna Mańkowska, from whom the British were still secretly accepting intelligence, led to their sentences being commuted. Christine officially denied knowing Mańkowska.
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In June, Witkowski sent Christine a warning that their reports were being intercepted, and told her he had been informed that she was in a concentration camp. Not long afterwards the Musketeers were disbanded, with most of their personnel joining the Home Army. Others, including Christine’s friend Teresa Łubienska, were arrested by the Gestapo.

Witkowski was accused of insubordination, profiteering, conducting assassinations without investigations or trials, and collaboration with the Gestapo and the Abwehr. In August 1942 a Home Army Special Court passed a sentence of death on him and on 18 September Witkowski was assassinated by a Polish execution squad dressed in German police uniforms. Only a year earlier he had been recommended for the highest Polish military honour, the Virtuti Militari.
*
How independent Witkowski’s actions were is not known, but less than a week before his death at least one British SOE intelligence officer, a friend of Christine’s, had also been in conference with senior Polish officials and the Gestapo in Istanbul.
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General Anders and his troops and their families had now arrived in Palestine, where the men were drilled daily in the hot desert sun, while waiting to head to Italy. Visiting Palestine, Harold Macmillan was impressed by the Polish troops’ spirit, describing them as having ‘an extraordinary sense of romance – not gaiety exactly, but chivalry, poetry, adventure’.
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Andrzej was an old friend of Anders, and when the general visited Cairo in May 1942 he agreed to arrange work for both Andrzej and Christine in Tehran. Christine was at first delighted, but as the possibility of working directly for the Poles edged closer she had to face some awkward truths. Despite her friends in high places, Christine was neither liked nor trusted by the majority of the Second Bureau. Her reputation, already tainted by association with the Musketeers, was now further jeopardized by her intelligence work for the British, informing on her fellow Poles. ‘The English have managed to position us on very bad terms with the Poles’, Christine raged in a letter to Kate. ‘I think I will never be able to return to Poland as they will treat me as a traitor and a British spy. And here I am, risking my life and those of others.’
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When the Poles specified that if Christine were to work for them she would first have to give up her British passport, she became intensely suspicious. In July she told Tamplin she feared that the Second Bureau would lose no time in having her interned ‘on any convenient pretext’, or that she would otherwise be ‘deliberately compromised’ or ‘put in the cooler’, should she give up the protection of her passport.
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Later a friend, possibly Colonel Bobinski, who was deeply involved in Polish intrigues, wrote to Christine ‘begging her for her own sake’ not to accept any Polish assignment.
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She now understood that she would never be able to work directly in the service of her own country. Despite his excellent military record Andrzej shared Christine’s dim view of their situation, telling SOE that, if he worked for the Poles now, he too ‘would probably be shot down at the first … opportunity’.
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When he was finally offered employment under his former commander, General Kopanski, he turned it down.

Christine now petitioned to join the ATS, the women’s branch of the British army, offering to ‘do any kind of duty, except office work, preferably near the front’.
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Inactivity was driving her crazy, and she even applied for a job with the new American mission in Cairo. In mid-July she sent an SOS to a friend in Hungary saying she was reduced to working as a waitress in Cairo, and ‘on the rocks’.
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Hearing of this, Gubbins quickly telegraphed Cairo demanding to know what had happened to her and Andrzej. Within a few weeks Andrzej was employed as a transport officer with the SOE Middle East motor fleet, a job that could hardly have been more perfect for him. He was working ‘in cars’, Christine noted drily, while ‘I am still waiting’.
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Suggestions that she might serve as Andrzej’s secretary left her ‘very browned off’ indeed.
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But there were distractions, at least. In June, Richard Truszkowski arrived in Cairo to temporarily take over from Guy Tamplin, who had been promoted.
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Truszkowski was a senior British SOE intelligence officer of Polish extraction, usually based in London, who had accompanied Gubbins on his first military mission to Warsaw. Hungry for Polish conversation, he now moved into the same Zamalek boarding house as Christine and Andrzej. In the evenings, while the resident WAAFs and FANYs were out dancing at the Continental or the Turf Club, Christine, Andrzej and Truszkowski would eat at Shepheard’s or at the Gezira Club where there was dancing on an outdoor terrace, under lights among the trees. Back at the pension they would stay up talking in French and Polish late into the night over whisky that Truszkowski described as ‘almost pure fusel oil, with a headache in every drop’, and gin that was ‘faintly corrosive’.
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Sometimes they wrapped up against the sand-flies and slept under the brilliant night sky on the building’s flat roof, counting the stars and discussing the kind of Europe that might emerge from the war.

Christine was soon providing Truszkowski with full organizational overviews of both the Musketeers and the ZWZ, as well as specific nuggets of local information. Once she informed on the mistress of a Polish officer whom she suspected of being a German double agent. SOE investigations revealed that the woman was ‘definitely suspect’, using the diplomatic post to send uncensored letters to Hungary referencing particular pages from a specific edition of Goethe.
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When the officer involved was reprimanded for ‘mixing business with love’, he angrily telegrammed Sikorski, demanding that those who accused him of ‘working for the Gestapo’ should be disciplined.
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Instead, he was removed to ‘an insignificant post in East Africa’, clearly showing the importance attributed to Christine’s intelligence.
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The incident also reveals that Christine was not the only beautiful spy in Cairo. Soon the British had a nickname for the German equivalent of Olga Pulloffski: ‘Venal Vera … from Gezira’.
†
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In July 1942 Tamplin’s permanent replacement arrived. Gubbins had appointed Captain Patrick Howarth, a comparatively junior officer in the Intelligence Corps who spoke fluent Polish. As Howarth arrived at Shepheard’s Hotel he overheard some Sudanese waiters teaching each other German. It was not an encouraging start. There was now heavy fighting in the Egyptian desert as Rommel’s advance halted just sixty miles from Alexandria. Recognizing that many Egyptians were not unhappy at the prospect of a change of European guest, Rommel’s Afrika Corps Radio broadcast to the capital: ‘Get your party frocks out, we’re on our way.’
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Allied Egypt suddenly seemed at risk, and the whole of Cairo was soon in a flap. On the day that would become known as ‘Ash Wednesday’, Christine walked to Rustum Buildings through a swirl of charred papers as the British and other embassies burnt their most sensitive files. Story has it that Andrzej was among those selected to stay behind enemy lines in Cairo should the Germans take the city. Certainly, although the huge crowds heading for Jerusalem filled the stations and jammed the streets with traffic, neither he nor Christine packed their bags. Nor did their headstrong friend Zofia Tarnowska, who defiantly took a train to the now deserted Alexandria, where she went to the best restaurant and was given bottle of their finest wine. Before the end of the month, however, the Axis advance was halted at the first battle of El Alamein. Patrick Howarth, who had a weak stomach, found it all ‘a bit of a strain’.
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From then on he survived in Cairo on a diet of weak tea, boiled rice, Stella beer and whisky, which in no way prevented him from socializing with his Polish agents.

During his London briefing, Howarth had been shown files leading him to believe that Christine and Andrzej were people best avoided, but in Cairo Richard Truszkowski firmly told him to look after them. ‘Christine was a very remarkable woman,’ Howarth soon decided, ‘we became very close friends.’
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He would never forget the first time he saw her, ‘stretching in cat-like delight with the Gezira sun’ in her ‘dull dark-brown jacket, dull light-brown skirt, [and] brilliant brown mobile arresting eyes’.
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She had just flatly turned down another offer of office work from Tamplin. When Howarth asked her reasons she replied that while she had plenty of physical endurance, she had no intellectual stamina. Howarth believed her real reason was her determination never to accept anything second-rate. ‘In issues that were important to her,’ he wrote, ‘she wanted the best or nothing.’
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Later he would describe her aversion to office work as ‘almost pathological’.
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Truszkowski, however, believed that Christine’s fear of being desk-bound came from a deep-seated ‘inferiority complex’.
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She was proud and, being surprisingly thin-skinned, likely to ‘burst into tears’ at the slightest criticism, giving ‘the worst possible impression of herself’, he wrote.
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‘I am incapable of working in an office’, she admitted.
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In the field, Christine’s self-belief and determination were steely enough to overcome the most extraordinary challenges; but she had little interest in, or aptitude for, paperwork and, unsuited to the faintest shadow of constraint, the etiquette of an office left her cold. She was, however, quite prepared to guide Howarth on the intricacies of Polish politics, provide background on particular officers, or discuss the possibilities for getting Polish workers to defect across the Balkans. She even proposed Michal Gradowski for an SOE mission in Albania, but Christine was also still holding out for a mission of her own, and ‘the more difficult and dangerous’, Howarth recognized, the better.
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It did not take Howarth long to see that Christine’s considerable talents were being wasted with her ‘salamander existence’ at the Gezira Club, and he made up his mind to rehabilitate her.
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Later he would claim, only half-joking, that ‘the most useful thing I did in World War Two was to reinstate Christine Granville’.
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It was also perhaps one of the more difficult. A man of his time, Howarth was not a natural advocate of treating his female colleagues on the same terms as their male counterparts. When his secretary undertook to darn his socks he praised her initiative alongside her complexion and ‘tinkling voice’.
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But although ‘thoroughly feminine’, Christine was clearly exceptional: she had worked for British secret services in the field for two years before SOE was officially given the green light to recruit women for operational duties.
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She herself, Howarth noted, had no time for any kind of discrimination. ‘She set her own standards, which were high … [and] would treat a General or a Sergeant with exactly the same courtesy and, if she thought their human qualities merited it, the same degree of attention’, and she had an ‘aristocratic disdain’ for differences of creed or colour. She was never intolerant of failure or inadequacy, but she was tersely dismissive of people she found pretentious, sending them away with such comments as ‘bloody fool’ or ‘quel poltron’.
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Howarth judged Christine to be at once attractive, intelligent, passionate about her country and her people, experienced, able and under-utilized. With support from Churchill, the first female SOE agents had been dropped into France the previous autumn. It was time to get Christine ready to return to the field.