The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (7 page)

Taylor was a short, dark man of ‘enormous capacity’, with ‘sharp features and methodological habits’, and was regularly described as ruthless, or brilliant, or both.
14
By the time that Christine had outlined her plan, including her proposed route and mention of the smuggler friends who she was confident would help her again now, she had, as a special operations friend later wrote, ‘quickly established the kind of immediate rapport she often had with people of rare and not publicly recognized distinction’.
15
Taylor was impressed. ‘She is a very smart looking girl, simply dressed and aristocratic … It appears that she has visited the Polish winter resort of Zakopane for many years and knows every man in the place’, his report notes. ‘I really believe we have a PRIZE.’
16

Christine was indeed a gift for the British. Despite their lack of counter-offensive, Britain had every incentive to support her Polish allies. Just five weeks before the outbreak of war, in July 1939, the Polish Cipher Bureau in Warsaw had given Enigma decryption techniques and equipment to British and French military intelligence – cooperation that would be vital to the Allied victory on the Western Front.

But British support was not just motivated by gratitude, or the need to honour promises; they must have hoped that bolstering any underground resistance in Poland might also help create some rearguard action against the Germans. Intelligence was sparse and unreliable. The Polish political leadership had fled their country but not yet set up their government-in-exile. Section D reports show concern that, cut off from the West, Poles might be persuaded they had been deserted and given no option but to cooperate with their occupiers. Christine presented them with their first opportunity to get some counter-propaganda into Poland and, in her words, ‘let the Poles know that Britain and the Allies had not forgotten them’.
17
If Christine had any concern that there might be some truth in this allegation, she kept it to herself. Unlike the British, however, she had no fears that the Poles might accept German occupation; rather, she was afraid that Nazi brutality might help spread Polish support for Bolshevism.
18
Either way, as she saw it, Polish and British interests were aligned. ‘We have decided to subsidize a certain Madame Gi
ż
ycka’, Section D filed on 20 December 1939. ‘In all further correspondence this lady will be referred to as Madame Marchand.’
19
Thus Christine Gi
ż
ycka, formerly Gettlich, née Skarbek, assumed the first of many false identities.

Christine left for Hungary the next day, flying from London to Paris, where she caught a train to Budapest. Her transfer to the field was so fast that her MI5 clearance only caught up with her in March the following year, meaning that SIS had managed to approve her plan without officially endorsing it. She was put on the books of Department EH, a somewhat shadowy organization, attached to the Foreign Office but based in Electra House on the Thames embankment, which dabbled in subversive propaganda. A six-month trial period had been agreed, along with a cover story as a French journalist, contacts in Budapest, some basic instruction in the use of explosives, and an initial £250 paid via Voigt’s bank account (worth at least £10,000 today), which, they felt, she was ‘going to earn’.
20
Putting his wife on the bus for the airport, Jerzy was touched when he noticed through the window that ‘she was trying to hide the tears running down her cheeks’.
21
Whether Christine’s tears were caused by her grief at leaving her husband, or her relief to be finally on her way to serve her homeland, is a matter for speculation.

Christine arrived at a cold and dismal Keleti station in Budapest just before Christmas, and three months after Hitler had invaded Poland. Hearing Polish as well as Hungarian widely spoken on the streets was cheering, but it was one of the coldest winters on record; snow had brought the city almost to a standstill and in some places drifts reached to roof-level. Christine quickly made her way to the address that had been arranged for her in Derék Utca, a steep walk up from the river in the old part of Buda, and just below the famous Naphegy Hill where the city’s executions had once taken place. The flat was tiny, but had its own small bathroom, a kitchenette able to rustle up hot strong coffee or the tea that Christine liked to drink with lemon but would suffer with slices of bitter green apple if there were no lemons to be had, and a decent-sized living room with chintz curtains at the windows and a large sofa that was also to serve as her bed. In the morning a maid would arrive with breakfast; the rest of the time Christine planned to eat out. She hung up her spare dress and put a change of shoes by the door – she was unpacked and ready to go.
*

Despite long-standing Hungarian–Polish friendship, at the outbreak of war Hungary was already to a significant extent a political and economic satellite of Germany. Officially the country was an independent monarchy, and British secret service reports state that the country’s regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, ‘regarded anything in the nature of democratic progress with abhorrence’.
22
Certainly the Hungarian Secret Police was well established and the opposition press effectively censored. The Horthy regime never seriously doubted a German victory in the early years of the war, and in any case, being only a small country with a modest unmechanized army and borders with both Austria and Czechoslovakia, they could not afford to offend Hitler. But they did at first remain neutral, and hoped for a compromise peace between England and Germany, ideally at the expense of Russia. On this basis, and as a ‘matter of Hungarian honour’, Horthy had refused to let Wehrmacht troops attack Poland across the ‘Carpathian Rus’, the much-disputed territory that then formed Hungary’s mountainous frontier with Poland.
23

Section D believed that the situation inside Hungary was ‘well nigh hopeless’, but felt that they should make an effort to establish a base there even though ‘this could not be more than a gesture’.
24
Christine’s first point of contact was Hubert Harrison, a correspondent with the
News Chronicle,
who had been working for George Taylor since October. Harrison was a short, dark, thickset man, ten years Christine’s senior. They fell out from the start. He was meant to provide her with training, contacts and clandestine technical support, in return for which she was to provide a link to the Poles. ‘As a result,’ she complained, ‘my flat in Budapest became a dump for everything being sent to Poland, including high explosive.’
25
Meanwhile Polish intelligence in Budapest, already keeping an eye on Harrison, now added Christine to their surveillance.

Another contact was her old journalist friend and admirer from Poland, Józef Radziminski, who was also now working for Section D. With Radziminski in town, Christine was quickly introduced to a wide circle of journalists and diplomats at a series of drinks parties and open days at Budapest’s various legations. Never one to tolerate a chaperone, she soon found his persistent presence irritating; she was quite able to spot the champagne bottle on a window-box that meant there were drinks at an attaché’s lodging, or to pick up on a signal from a flower-seller outside a café letting people know that German officers were walking their way. But Radziminski could not take a hint, and soon she had christened him, rather unkindly, her ‘
pies kulawy
’ or ‘lame dog’.
*
He was the first of many such admirers.

Radziminski’s presence in Budapest was not so great a coincidence as it seemed. As the free countries closest to the European action, Hungary and Romania were awash with foreign journalists in late 1939. A surprising number of these were women, including the
Daily Telegraph
’s Clare Hollingworth, who had first broken the story of Germany’s invasion of Poland, so Christine’s cover as a French journalist was utterly credible. At the same time it was an alias that gave her the perfect excuse for running around Budapest at all hours, wrapped up in her duffle-coat with a notebook, various papers and no doubt some Hungarian biros stashed in her bag, as she tried to organize the contacts, plans and papers she would need for her first crossing into Poland.
†
Meanwhile most of the traffic across the Hungarian–Polish border was coming the other way, as Hungary kept its frontier open to accept tens of thousands of Polish civilian and military refugees.

Among the ‘slowly moving mass of heart-rending humanity, pushing and pedalling … clutching their children and their pitiful bundles’ were the sorry members of the 1939 British Military Mission to Poland.
26
When Germany invaded, General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, the legendary one-eyed, one-armed, but hardheaded leader of the mission, had been hoping to establish contact with the Polish resistance to arrange the supply of heavy weapons and transmitters. His number two was Lieutenant Colonel Colin Gubbins, a wiry Scots Highlander who ‘wore the toothbrush moustache that was then almost a part of the Royal Artillery officer’s uniform’, but who hid behind this formal neatness an original mind and daring spirit that would later take him on to become head of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, Churchill’s later reinvention of Section D.
27
Gubbins was supported by Peter Wilkinson, who had already witnessed the German invasion of Prague, and Harold Perkins, the Zakopane factory owner who was now officially working for SIS. All three had strong Polish sympathies, and all would go on to become key contacts for Christine. But at this point they were simply trying to make their way out of Poland, caught up in what Wilkinson described as ‘the procession of dusty motorcars, mostly driven by women, crammed with personal possessions and with pale, wide-eyed children looking out of the windows’.
28

No one at the British Mission would be able to forget the scenes they now witnessed. ‘A few cars bore bullet marks and many had mattresses strapped to the roof as a vain protection against the German dive-bombers’, Wilkinson noted, while in the opposite direction ‘there was a procession of horses being driven westward to the battle’, among them ‘young foals trotting eagerly to the war alongside their mothers’.
29
Gubbins felt that the fierce determination of the old men, women and children he saw tearing up paving slabs to build barricades was typical of the Polish spirit of resistance. Wilkinson watched a peasant woman in a headscarf carrying a bucket across the fields to her mare with its foal, like ‘something Breughel might have painted, a scene that time had forgotten…’ A few minutes later the farmhouse was in flames, and the mare and woman lay dead, ‘the latter with her skirts blown over her head leaving her bare thighs obscenely exposed. Only the foal remained alive, quietly cropping the grass.’
30
As they continued their flight, stripping off their uniforms and tearing up their passports, Wilkinson began to question Britain’s moral authority. Then, as he and Gubbins used what he called ‘some intelligent coaxing’ to ‘sort out’ some army trucks blocking the road, Wilkinson turned to find a Polish officer pointing a pistol at him.
31
‘Who are you giving orders to Poles?’ the officer shouted. ‘What are you doing in Poland?’ Before Wilkinson had time to respond the traffic started moving again and the officer moved away, but his question stayed hanging in the air. Walking back to the car Gubbins asked bitterly, ‘What
are
we doing here? What help have we been able to give the Poles?’
32

Among the Polish refugees slipping across the country’s borders were Christine’s young cousins Jan and Andrzej Skarbek, who eventually crossed the border in a Red Cross train, repatriating wounded Hungarian soldiers from the Russian front. Their father had already joined the Polish army in France. It was some time before Christine learned they had escaped occupied Poland.
*
But she did meet someone from her childhood while she was in Budapest – Andrzej Kowerski, now a dashing lieutenant.

Christine had first met Andrzej in the stables at Trzepnica when they were children, and had encountered him again in Zakopane when he bought a pair of Jerzy’s old skis. A bachelor and a ladies’ man, Andrzej was tall and well built, with dark blonde hair and intense blue eyes, always smiling and utterly charming. He loved good food, drink, talking late into the night, dancing and – of course – flirting. His round face with its perfect complexion conveyed a certain innocence that Andrzej had long found it convenient to exploit. Always active, he lived life to the full, spending his time riding or skiing while his mother believed he was at a monastic retreat, and as a student in Kraków he claimed to have survived for three years only ‘on vodka and raw meat’.
33
It was a lifestyle not without consequence. When he had last met Christine he had just survived an avalanche, intact, against all the odds, but not long afterwards he lost one leg below the knee when a friend accidentally shot him through the foot on a hunting trip. His prosthetic leg, made in Britain from wood with metal clamps, was heavy, but he refused to let it slow him down. No longer able to ride, he simply transferred his passion for horses into a lifelong love of fast cars.
*

When the Nazis invaded, Andrzej joined the ‘Black Brigade’, Poland’s only motorized unit. Repeatedly leading near-suicidal attacks on the advancing Wehrmacht, in the aftermath of one skirmish Andrzej was found alive but near bursting with rage, pinned by one leg beneath a bombed-out tank. ‘I don’t want a doctor, you blithering idiot,’ he had shouted at the officer who found him, ‘I want a blacksmith.’
34
Other than a crushed prosthesis he was uninjured. Andrzej had reached the rank of Lieutenant, and was awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest award for valour, before his unit was captured. While Christine was courting the British Secret Services in London, Andrzej somehow managed to steal an Opel, the car of choice for discerning Wehrmacht officers, and lead his brigade’s escape. They re-formed, attacked again, and were finally forced to cross into Hungary, where they were interned under the terms of the Geneva Convention in a huge barbed-wire enclosure, already filled with lorries, cars and men.