The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (26 page)

By the end of March 1944 she had also received training in elementary explosives, and had undertaken an SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) course in firearms, in particular pistol handling and use of the SOE weapon of choice, the Sten gun. Although Christine had grown up with guns at her family estate, she had preferred racing to hunting and had little shooting experience. Now she was taught to shoot from the hip, aiming intuitively at a target and firing two shots, in the style taught by Major Bill Fairburn and Captain Eric Sykes, SOE’s two combat experts, previously employed by the Shanghai police force. Although a brilliant technique, what Christine mainly learnt was that she hated firing guns, finding them too loud and too shocking. Fortunately Fairburn and Sykes had also developed the ‘ideal’ fighting knife, with a seven-inch, double-edged, steel blade that could easily penetrate a ribcage, and which was issued as standard. Christine’s fitted neatly into a leather sheath designed to be strapped to her thigh.

The SIS course also covered personal security and silent killing, the extreme version of unarmed combat using only a knife, a noose or bare hands. The methods were a mixture of karate, ju-jitsu and what Fairburn had learnt ‘from hard practice on the Shanghai waterfront’.
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Such training not only gave the slender Christine more physical confidence, it was designed to drill into her that her task might, at times, have to be aggressive. ‘This is
war,
not sport’, the SOE training manual instructed. ‘Your aim is to kill your opponent as soon as possible.’
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She was also taught ‘tradecraft’, ranging from simple personal disguises such as changing her hair or putting bungs in her mouth or nose to alter the shape of her face, to the art of covert surveillance. Finally she was trained to organize dropping grounds for arms and explosives, and prepare reception committees for Allied agents being sent in to support specific actions. For this she needed to know how to identify suitable fields, organize a landing committee, arrange communications with London or Algiers and, if necessary, control an aircraft landing with the use of pocket torches. It was work she loved and in which she excelled.

In February 1944 Gubbins found a telegram in his in-tray, informing him ‘with regrets’ that his eldest son, Michael, had been killed by a shell at Anzio while moving into no-man’s-land in advance of the Allied landings. ‘A totally useless death’, he told Wilkinson.
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Yet his professional focus did not falter. By the spring preparations were well under way for the Allied invasion of Europe, and numerous SOE missions were taking place in Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Italy, Greece and France.

Throughout the early months of 1944 Zofia threw a series of parties at Tara, and other suitably flamboyant venues such as the Cairo racetrack, whenever one of their group was sent on a mission. At some point in the evening a car would come and quietly collect whoever was due to be dropped into enemy territory. The unspoken rule was that no one was to feel anxious, as that would have been ‘to accept the possibility of something dreadful happening to them’.
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Even the SOE secretaries put a brave face on the farewells, writing poems like ‘Darling Joe, Please Go’ – Joe being the secure code-name given to all agents in transit – which begged them to stop ‘hanging around the office, waiting for the planes, slowing the arrangements, of our fertile brains’.
45
For Christine, however, each departure raised a different anxiety; that her turn to be dropped would never arrive and she would be left hanging around the office for months to come. But in March 1944 ‘Operation Kris’ was tailor-made for her.

SOE’s plan was to drop Christine back into Hungary, without the knowledge of the Poles, to reactivate the networks that had lost contact with London and the British base in Istanbul earlier that year. The aim was to encourage national resistance, and specifically the sabotage of vital communications, transport lines, industry and oil installations. To achieve this they needed to re-establish wireless communications and make reception arrangements for SOE agents and supplies to be dropped into the country. It was, Howarth wrote, ‘an operation involving the greatest risks and only a slight chance of success’, and yet the strategic importance given to Hungary was deemed great enough to warrant the attempt.
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Christine was SOE’s only trained wireless operator with knowledge of Hungary, and ‘the requisite personal qualities’ to ‘stand at least a chance of survival’.
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She was delighted. Building her case, she told SOE she had a number of close personal friends in Hungary, mostly among the landed gentry although also some of a ‘more left-wing nature’. The drawback was that she could only speak a few words of Magyar but, Howarth concluded blithely, this was compensated for by the fact that ‘she is a person of quite outstanding courage with exceptional charm’.
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Christine, someone scribbled at the bottom of the page, had ‘obviously worked overtime’ on Howarth.
49

The first hurdle was getting her into Hungary. She could be parachuted into Slovakia, either to a reception team or ‘blind’ (without any support), and then cross the border on foot. But, given the mixed loyalties of the Slovakian population, the risks involved were deemed too great. Sending her into Poland, however, undercover as a refugee escaping the Russian advance, meant involving the Poles, and so inevitably ‘creating too many unnecessary difficulties for ourselves’.
50
In any case, SOE admitted, as
persona non grata
with the Polish community in Hungary, Christine was ‘likely to be betrayed’.
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The only option was a blind drop. This, Howarth now argued, ‘would probably amount to little short of homicide, and while this would not deter the operator [Christine], the advantages likely to be derived are so slight that this course cannot be conscientiously recommended’.
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Nonetheless, ‘as it has been agreed that Hungary must be penetrated, and as Christine is willing to take the risks involved’, it was decided, ‘we must adopt the courses which would offer the greatest chances of survival’.
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Christine was immediately put forward for a further ‘SIS and short sabotage’ course.
54

At the start of April ‘Operation Kris’ was designated ‘most urgent’, and Christine had been given a new name and cover story. In her papers she was to be ‘Marja Kaminski’, from ‘Lwowun’, born in 1914 – a year older than Christine was believed to be by the British, but still six years shy of the truth.
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One week later, to Christine’s intense frustration, the operation was cancelled. ‘In view of the fact that she is well known to Hungarian police and speaks little Magyar [I] do not feel justified in taking large risk involved’, the new head of the SOE Balkans section in Cairo, Bickham Sweet-Escott, reported to London. ‘If therefore you have some other project in mind for her, for example FRANCE please let us know soonest.’
56

Sweet-Escott was another of Christine’s many Cairo fans. ‘She is a Polish lady of considerable beauty and great courage…’, he wrote, ‘as brave as a lion’, and he refused to sacrifice her on what he considered an ill-thought-out mission.
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Instead he repeatedly suggested she should be dropped into France, a country she knew well from before the war, and whose language she spoke fluently. Sweet-Escott knew that Christine’s morale had taken a serious blow with the cancellation of Operation Kris, and yet at the end of April, as D-Day loomed ever closer, her future was still undecided.

It was only in May 1944 that the decision was finally taken to send Christine to the SOE base in Algeria, code-named ‘Massingham’, in preparation to be dropped into occupied southern France. Before she left she was given a temporary commission in the RAF, in the hope that if captured in the field she would be treated as a prisoner-of-war, rather than shot as a spy. Her one concession to the danger of her new mission was to send a message to Andrzej in Italy, letting him know her movements. Then, impatient to be off, she wore her steel-blue RAF uniform to her Cairo farewell party, a ‘merry affair’ at which ‘vodka flowed and cucumber sandwiches were munched’, and laughter quickly drowned out the familiar din of the city that could be heard through the open windows.
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‘I do not think I ever saw her look happier’, Bill Stanley Moss later remembered.
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She left at midnight.

Massingham, the British base at Guyotville, just west of Algiers, had been established a year earlier at the once luxurious ‘Club des Pins’ among the sandy dunes of the Mediterranean coast, on the beach over which the main assault had come a year earlier, and behind hundreds of miles of barbed wire. Originally a resort for rich Algerians and French families escaping the heat of the capital, Massingham’s offices and messes were set up in a series of marble villas, whose grounds ran from wooded inland hills right down to a sheltered bay. A bar was built on piles above the water. A couple of hundred men and about thirty FANYs were already billeted there. The women worked as wireless operators, coders and teleprinters, and at night, when not on duty, they had parties on the beach and swam naked in the warm sea.

Beach aside, conditions were tough. There was no hot water, except that scrounged from the cooks, and Christine was lucky to arrive in the summer, as there was no heating in winter. But the army rations of spam, corned beef and peanut butter were cheered up by dates and other local fruit, and the villas were covered in the beautiful bougainvillea that grew like a weed all over the camp. Under the exceptionally well-connected Douglas Dodds-Parker, ‘an antelope of a Colonel’, Massingham was a highly efficient HQ.
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The working day began with a compulsory run before breakfast, and with all the sea-bathing, bare knees and general enforced enthusiasm, the atmosphere was ‘somewhat reminiscent of a racing north Oxford preparatory school’.
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Having helped to coordinate the Italian surrender, Dodds-Parker was well respected, and he was now preparing for ‘Operation Dragoon’, the Allied invasion of France. Christine would become his only active female agent.

But Dodds-Parker had no immediate plans to drop Christine. ‘It was decided’, he wrote diplomatically, ‘that her courage was best restrained until nearer the time of liberation.’
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Later he admitted that she was held back because she was still considered ‘too flamboyant’ to work undercover effectively.
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In the meantime Christine underwent more training alongside other agents being prepared to drop into France. Among these were the ever-kilted Havard Gunn, tall, thin, quiet but charming, and just back from Yugoslavia; Leonard Hamilton, who had escaped from a POW camp in northern Italy; the chipper Paddy O’Regan, just back from ops in Greece; and John Roper, on his first mission, whose ‘pudding face’ was constantly animated by the effort of delivering stories from ‘a mixture of the Tatler and Scots Guard magazine’.
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Roper was soon under Christine’s spell, and took to carrying a clean handkerchief for her and, if possible, ‘a twist of tea’, whenever he thought he might meet her.
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All of them would become lifelong friends.

Christine was taught her personal cipher code, and true and bluff passwords, by Paddy Sproule, the senior FANY coder at Massingham, who was more used to working with American officers who brought treats of butter, bacon, eggs and waffles, than penniless Polish aristocrats. To help Christine remember the three unpublished poems she would need for coding messages, they were written for her personally. One was a nostalgic tribute to the lost happiness of her pre-war life, the others more optimistic in tone, celebrating the ‘bliss of a gentle existence’ and the ‘luminous hearth of a woman adored’.
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Considered ‘very bright’ by Paddy, Christine learnt her poems and complex personal code in less than half a day, building on the long hours of training she had undertaken in Cairo.
67
Her wireless skills, however, although satisfactory, were not up to the twenty words per minute that FANYs were expected to achieve. Now the process of numbly translating and signalling Morse was drilled into her until she could hardly hear a bird sing without trying to catch its meaning, but the high speeds needed for time-effective signalling remained beyond her. Dorothy Wakely, the Signals Planning Officer, astutely surmised that Christine was simply too old to be trained as a good Morse operator. Nevertheless Christine learnt to repair wireless sets, and was taught security measures such as hooking her radio to car batteries rather than town power supplies so that her location could not be isolated by systematically turning off power zones. Her parachuting skills were also reinforced with test jumps from a fragment of fuselage rigged up in the hills, and at the RAF facilities established at Blida, surrounded by vineyards a few miles to the south. As a result, unlike so many female SOE agents, Christine did earn her prized paratrooper’s ‘wings’.

She also worked on her small-arms and explosives skills. Hours were spent on target practice with a revolver, pistol or German machine gun, and at certain times at night the whole beach was out of bounds for target practice with whatever firearms the agents were carrying. Louder explosions were caused during demolitions practice, when Christine and the men learnt to mould plastic charges, add primers and tie them in bundles using sticky paste before the fuses were lit and the group ran to hide behind the dunes. Paddy O’Regan found ‘the bang and the result very satisfying’, but Christine still hated the noise.
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She was better at picking up courier skills, learning how to arrange appropriate rendezvous for meeting different types of people, how to find sites where a radio might be safely operated, drop prearranged passwords into conversation, and set up live letter drops (where someone would receive her post without asking questions), and dead letter boxes (where messages could be passed on without any personal contact). In Algiers she learnt to find and follow a contact or, conversely, shake off a tail. Finally she was taught how to survive exhausting interrogations by the police, or the Gestapo, designed to break her morale and resistance, and how important it was to hold out for at least the first forty-eight hours to give any colleagues a chance to escape. This ‘boys’-own’ stuff, demanding intuition, courage and determination, came as second nature to her, and she thrived in the competitive, and very male, atmosphere at the camp.