The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (23 page)

As a first step, Howarth arranged for Christine to be recruited into the FANYs. In 1943 women in the British military were not allowed to carry guns or explosives. To get around this Gubbins enrolled female SOE agents into the FANYs, which officially operated outside the Armed Forces but still offered some protection under the Geneva Convention in case of capture, and provided pensions should the women become casualties. For a couple of weeks Christine was placed in the care of Gwendolin Lees, who was soon captivated by this ‘most remarkable’ woman.
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Christine practised her cover story on Lees, presenting herself as a penniless patriot, married at the age of just seventeen, and so now unable to marry the love of her life, ‘Andy Kennedy’. But her passion and patriotism were undisguised. She was completely dedicated to helping SOE to liberate Poland, Lees reported, hugely impressed.
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Although the two women spent only a short time together, years later Lees would name her eldest daughter after Christine.

Apart from this Christine had little to do with the FANYs, either operationally or socially. The only time she wore the uniform was for the photograph for her papers, and then she had to cadge the correct buttons from a friend’s summer drill set. Christine carried any uniform well, but the resulting photo was a far cry from the naked-beneath-a-fur-coat shot that had once graced her Polish identity papers; there would be little chance of even the most efficient card-index putting the two together. Her once deliberately provocative beauty was now hidden behind a clean face, beret, khaki uniform with shirt, tie, and borrowed brass buttons. Only her signature, squashed up against the document’s spine as it overran the allotted space, hinted that there was more to this woman than could be contained on paper.

By September 1942 Howarth was working to find Christine a job as a wireless operator in the field, sending information, and messages for drops of men and supplies to aid national resistance, back to base in London or Algiers. The idea appealed to her, but Howarth was concerned that training would be difficult to arrange, as she would be ‘the only woman housed with some 300 thugs’ in Rustum Buildings.
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Nonetheless Christine started a course in October and was soon reportedly ‘very happy with her Morse alphabet’.
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She had much to smile about. Her teacher was a handsome young half-British, half-Italian sergeant-instructor called Dick Mallaby, known at least as much for his ‘gentle, almost dreamy manner’, as for his fine record of service.
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Her greatest source of pleasure, however, was an offer of employment in Turkey on completing her training. But despite many weeks spent on the roofs of various Cairo buildings with her SOE suitcase transmitter bleeping and whispering on its dials as she sent practice transmissions to Baghdad, Christine could not get the hang of her wireless.
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After early sessions she would throw her hands in the air, her skin flushing, and exclaim loudly to all around that she could not do it; it was impossible.
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It was not an office job, but it was the kind of repetitive work she abhorred, and when, in August, her proposed mission was cancelled because it was decided that she was too well-known in Turkey, her patience with the authorities who were still forcing her to remain away from active service began to wear perilously thin. But ‘slowly and with some difficulty’, she at last began to master her wireless set, and was able to send a decent fifteen words a minute by the end of the year.
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She now needed to work on her coding, ‘the deadliest of parlour games’, as SOE’s Head of Coding, Leo Marks, put it.
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The best signallers and coders were ‘girls straight from higher education schools…’, Gubbins wrote, who ‘had not lost the classroom’.
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Once again Christine was not a natural, and once again her famously courageous, and now infamously temperamental, figure became a familiar sight in Rustum Buildings, where, to the irritation of the other FANYs, even the most taciturn officers would fall over themselves to be introduced. She ‘had the most extraordinary grace and a casual sort of chic’, Margaret Pawley remembered, along with ‘qualities of fascination which men found irresistible’.
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‘As soon as she came in all the men stopped to look at her, even the very austere Colonel, who usually had his nose in his books, would leap up to offer her a seat.’
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In the autumn of 1942 relations between Poland and the Soviet Union were rapidly deteriorating. General Anders’s army was now more than 75,000 strong, including plenty of Soviet spies and agitators. Soon rumours began to circulate suggesting that the tide of support was shifting to Anders from Sikorski. By mid-September Sikorski felt compelled to denounce plotters in a speech to the National Council. If anything, however, the intrigues became more complex. Anders was a brilliant professional soldier, not a natural conspirator. According to Richard Truszkowski, now in London, when told by the Polish authorities that ‘if he stuck to straight soldiering he would be a howling success, but that he was a mere child where politics was concerned’, Anders reportedly ‘took it all like a lamb and promised to be more circumspect in the future’.
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Christine, however, reported that ‘cavalry officers of her acquaintance’ all believed that the established Polish authority’s days were numbered.
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In December, Truszkowski outlined the ‘numerous’ difficulties still surrounding the operational deployment of both Christine and Andrzej. The main problem was ‘the violent opposition to them by practically all Polish organisations’, a position exacerbated by what he called ‘their somewhat complex personalities’.
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But there were also other concerns. The two of them had stated that they were little known to the Gestapo and would be able to move around occupied territory without risk, but Truszkowski had his doubts. ‘Their somewhat striking personal appearance’, combined with Andrzej’s wooden leg, made them ‘the sort of people who once seen are never forgotten’, he wrote very reasonably, and to make matters worse they had ‘literally hundreds if not thousands of friends [and] enemies, all over Europe, Africa and Asia Minor’, increasing the risk of recognition.
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‘They would shine under conditions in which personal courage and determination are essential’, Truszkowski noted, but he continued, rather unfairly given the amount of information Christine had been passing to the British in Cairo, neither of them ‘have any special talents for conspiratorial work’.
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As a result of Truszkowski’s report it was suggested that Christine should be kept in the Middle East and found work as a nurse, preferably within a danger zone, as a wireless operator, or with prisoners-of-war. Christine was happy with all of this, asserting only that she could not countenance the humiliation of receiving any further pay for no active service. Then a radical new idea was floated. George Taylor reported that Christine was ‘convinced she could live in France as a Frenchwoman’, and that Andrzej might pass as a French Pole.
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The Poles could have no objection to them being dropped into France or French North Africa. With the prospect of a new mission, Christine, Andrzej and Patrick Howarth celebrated Christmas at a flurry of charity balls and military dances. The future suddenly seemed worth looking forward to.

1943 started optimistically. Christine was still waiting for orders, but while she did so she took classes in English and Italian. When Howarth had first arrived in Cairo he noticed that she always spoke French as, ‘her English was not very good’.
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In fact she spoke English charmingly, if not very accurately, with a lilting accent and similarly seductive turn of phrase, often translating idioms literally if she felt it added impact. But then even her French was ‘fluent but rather breathy’, a friend noted, and her natural manner was to speak in what Wladimir Ledóchowski had once described as a ‘halting … panting fashion’.
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Always conscious of the power of language, when she felt charm would not help her Christine would simply petition friends to write ‘in your King’s English’ on her behalf.
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While preparing for an unknown future, she also now took the opportunity to re-establish contact with old friends, exchanging letters through the diplomatic post with, among others, Kate and Sir Owen O’Malley. The next month Sir Owen was appointed as the British Ambassador to the Polish Republic, represented by the Polish government-in-exile in London under Sikorski, a position he retained until the end of the war. ‘Do you think he loves me still’, Christine asked Kate, ‘for months I have tried to write, but the problem of how to begin defeats me’.
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She need not have worried. Christine could ‘still rely absolutely on his undying friendship’, SOE reported, having read their exchanges.
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Andrzej’s prospects were also improving. In March he was sent on a paramilitary course in Haifa in Palestine. Despite his false leg, he did well. Happy and popular, he was soon being considered as a potential instructor. While Andrzej was away Christine shared a small flat with Livia ‘Pussi’ Nasta, the daughter of a well-known Romanian journalist, and who worked for the British, broadcasting news back to her country despite being terrified that her voice would be recognized and harm would come to her family. She would later marry Bill Deakin, who ran SOE’s Yugoslav section.
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Christine still moved in an international crowd, although more and more of her British officer friends had arrived in Cairo, among them Aidan Crawley, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelaine, Ivor Porter and Ted Howe.

One new face was Colonel Cookham, a British officer who had rented a fine villa near to Christine, with a garden overgrown with bougainvillea and poinsettia, and lawns sloping gently down to the Nile. By day Christine joined Cookham on tours of Cairo’s mosques and historic sites and, story has it, by night on ‘excursions by felucca’ to watch the flamingos and ibis in their evening flight upriver, eat kebabs, and drink red wine beside the water.
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Cookham was, Truszkowski reported, ‘a very decent sort’, but he was not a permanent fixture.
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Having tried unsuccessfully to persuade Christine to marry him, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia on a mission to Marshal Tito. There he was killed in action. After news of his death reached Cairo, Christine never mentioned his name again.

Throughout everything, Christine kept up her private information service for the British SOE, providing ‘a good deal of valuable information’ despite being under surveillance herself by the Polish Second Bureau, who were keeping ‘a long account’ of her activities.
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The Russian victory against the Nazis at Stalingrad in February 1943 – ‘surely’, in the words of SOE’s chief coder, ‘the most effective eviction notice ever served on an invader’ – turned the tide of the war.
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Terrified that Stalin and Hitler might negotiate an independent peace treaty, Churchill and Roosevelt put increasing pressure on the Poles to accept the Soviet–Polish frontier changes. Dissent within the Polish forces increased correspondingly.

Christine was now approached by General Anders’s aide-decamp, Captain Klimkowski, whom SOE, with their usual dry humour, had code-named ‘Plague’. Christine agreed to meet Klimkowski at the Continental Hotel. She was followed, she reported, by a fat Second Bureau agent with a limp, who managed to sit at the next table despite her frequent moves. Sadly there is no record of their conversation, but SOE understood that Klimkowski’s star was in the ascendant. ‘Nobody…’, they wrote, ‘dares to oppose Plague openly for fear he may be the coming man’.
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Two weeks later there was an abortive coup, aiming to replace Sikorski with General Kazimierz Sosnkowski. Klimkowski, who belonged to a different faction of conspirators, warned Anders about the intended action, and Anders remained loyal to Sikorski. However, SOE now reported that rumours had begun circulating ‘to the effect that if Gen Sikorski pays a visit to the Middle East he will be assassinated’ by a group of extremists led by Klimkowski.
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Patrick Howarth called for urgent action, and British concern that ‘an “attempt” is contemplated’ by a secret military clique ‘on the life of General Sikorski’ led to a significant increase in security around the general in London.
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By April 1943, Cairo was again humming with stories of ‘impending crises’ and ‘tales of calamity’.
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April was the month when the hot desert wind, the khamsin, blew through Cairo’s streets, choking the city with sand and dust, which camouflaged the buildings and trees in the municipal parks. This year a khamsin of rumours whirled through Cairo at the same time, obscuring the intelligence picture just as effectively. Truszkowski urged London to treat Christine’s reports with caution. ‘Willing is certainly a most delightful person’, he wrote, ‘and I have no doubt that she believes very much of what she says’, but she is ‘very highly strung’, and her information ‘coloured by its emotional context and by feelings of friendship’.
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No doubt this was true, but something was going on and Christine was caught up in it. The Poles suddenly wanted rid of her, and offered her unconditional work in Romania. Christine was ‘distinctly suspicious’, and Truszkowski conceded that he saw why the Poles ‘would be very glad to have her out of the way at this particular moment in view of the extent to which [Anders, Klimkowski] and the rest of them talk to her’.
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Klimkowski’s conversations with Christine had by now confirmed British opinion that he was ‘fanatically’ anti-Sikorski.
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Despite her doubts, Christine offered to take the Polish job and then report directly to the British from Romania, although her real aim was to get back to Poland and file reports from there. Truszkowski argued against such a move. Double-crossing was a ‘dangerous game’, he wrote. ‘Willing would be very foolish if she started any such game.’
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So she stayed in Cairo, where the Polish political intrigues were becoming ever more involved.