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

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraphs

Acknowledgements

Maps

Preface: Stories of Trust and Betrayal

1:
B
ORDERLANDS

2:
T
WO
W
EDDINGS AND A
W
AR

3:
H
UNGARIAN
E
MBRACES

4:
P
OLISH
R
ESISTANCE

5:
A S
TRING OF
A
RRESTS

6:
T
RAVELS IN AN
O
PEL

7:
C
OLD IN
C
AIRO

8:
T
HE
B
EAUTIFUL
S
PY

9:
O
UR
W
OMAN IN
A
LGIERS

10:
A F
RENCH
O
CCUPATION

11:
T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
V
ERCORS

12:
S
WITCHING
A
LLEGIANCES

13:
O
PERATION
L
IBERTÉ

14:
M
ISSION
I
MPOSSIBLE

15:
S
ECOND
-C
LASS
C
ITIZEN

16:
D
EEP
W
ATER

17:
B
RUTAL
E
ND

Epilogue: the Afterlife of Christine Granville

My Search for Christine Granville: a note on sources

Photographs

Appendix I: Christine ‘preferred dogs to children’: a note on Christine Granville’s childlessness

Appendix II: She ‘murdered me’ Muldowney said: a note on Dennis Muldowney

Notes

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index

Also by Clare Mulley

In Praise of
The Spy Who Loved

Copyright

To my parents, Gill and Derek Mulley, who watched the sky turn red over London during the Blitz, and have reached out for better international relations ever since.

‘A few rare people, who live for action, are never in any doubt what they should do. For them capture is always unbearable and escape their only interest from the start.’

A
IDAN
C
RAWLEY
1

‘In the high ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama.’

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
2

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you Ian, for your kindness and cleverness, and the wonderful Kate, Gill and Derek Mulley, Michelle Wheeler and George Morley, for all their excellent editing. Thanks also to my agent, Andrew Lownie, who first introduced me to Christine.

This book could not have been written without the generous support of many people who knew Christine and her circle, and their relatives, including Countess Mary
ś
Skarbek and Count Andrew Skarbek, Elizabeth Skarbek, Maria Pienkowska, Count Jan Ledóchowski, Christine Isabelle Cole, Suzanna Gayford, Christopher Kasparek, Jane Bigman-Hartley, Ann Bonsor, Julian de Boscari, Tim Buckmaster, Harriet Crawley, Diana Hall, Eva Hryniewicz, Daniel Huillier, Krystian Jelowicki, Princess Renata Lubomirski, Zbigniew Mieczkowski, Steven Muldowney, Izabela Muszkowska, Countess Jolanta Mycielska, Maria Nurowska, Ann O’Regan, Margaret Pawley, Julian Pope, Ivor Porter, Noreen Riols, Teresa Robinska, Krystyna Sass, Matt Smolenski, Tom Sweet-Escott, Ada Tarnowska, Andrew Tarnowski, Dorothy Wakely, Michael Ward, Joanna Cammaerts-Wey, Katharine Whitehorn, Sarah Willert and Virginia Worsley. Thank you all for taking the time to share your memories and family stories.

My very sincere thanks are also due to the very knowledgeable and generous Dr Jeffrey Bines, oral historian Martyn Cox, the late SOE historian M. R. D. Foot, former coder Maureen Gadd, Nicholas Gibbs, Maciek and Iwona Helfer, Major Chris Hunter, Krystyna Kaplan, SOE historian Steven Kippax, Michal Komar, Captain Kozac, Christine’s Polish biographer Colonel Jan Larecki, Warsaw genealogist Tomasz Lenczewski, Eugenia Maresch, Dr Michael Peske, Monika Plichta, Dominik Rettinger-Wieczorkowski, Ian Sayer, Albertine Sharples, Dr David Stafford, Dr Penny Starns, Benita Stoney, B
ę
czkowice parish priest Henryk Szymanski, Anna Teicher, and film director Mieczysława Wazacz, as well as the archivists and historians at the British Library; the Imperial War Museum; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London; Le Musée de la Résistance de Vassieux-en-Vercors, France; the Museum of Pawiak Prison; the National Archives, Kew; the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, London; the Warsaw Royal Castle archive; the Warsaw Uprising Museum; and specifically to Susan Tomkins, archivist at Beaulieu; Duncan Stuart, former chairman of the Special Forces Club’s Historical Sub-Committee; Dr Władysław Bułhak and Natalia Jarska at the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw; and Krzysztof Barbarski and Dr Andrzej Suchcitz at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London.

Preface: Stories of Trust and Betrayal

In 1973, twenty-one years after Christine Granville’s tragic death, two of her lovers entered into a studiously polite, and short-lived, correspondence. The Polish count Wladimir Ledóchowski thanked his compatriot and former fellow special agent Andrzej Kowerski for his ‘willingness to cooperate’ in a book about Christine. Ledóchowski wrote optimistically that he took Kowerski’s cautious promise of help ‘as a token of your trust’.
1
But there was little real trust between these old rivals, and the rest of the letter was set out in neat points, clarifying their agreed approval process for any manuscript to be written about Christine.

Ledóchowski had suggested that he and Kowerski set up what he called a ‘Club of the Saved’, composed exclusively of those men whose lives had been saved by Christine, several of whom, he had added ‘with a twinkle in his eye’, had been saved in more ways than one.
2
By his tally there were six potential members who had ‘jumped … into Christine’s life, like parachuters into unknown territory’, including himself and Kowerski representing Poland, three British agents including the decorated hero Francis Cammaerts, and a French officer.
3
Ledóchowski conceded that there was little hope of weaving their experiences into a ‘logical whole’, since: ‘I doubt you should look to logic to explain any girl, particularly one like Christine.’
4
But perhaps, from their collective memories, Christine might emerge ‘not as a performer of illustrious feats’ but, he hoped, ‘just as a person’.
5

Ledóchowski was now surprised to learn that there was already a Christine-focused gentlemen’s club in place, with a slightly different remit, and that membership had not been extended to him. Kowerski and four wartime friends, Cammaerts, John Roper, Patrick Howarth and Michal Gradowski (aka Michael Lis), had set up the ‘Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville’ soon after her death in 1952.
6
Ledóchowski felt that his life had been irreconcilably intertwined with Christine’s, but he had always known that he was not the only person to claim a special relationship with her, nor even the first to hope to write about her. Kowerski’s ‘panel’ had come together when the newspapers were having a field day with stories about the Polish beauty queen who had served as a British special agent. ‘We, her friends, did not want her to become a press sensation,’ Cammaerts later explained. ‘We tried to defend her reputation.’
7
Yet, as Ledóchowski’s son later wrote, ‘the death of heroes is not usually followed by panels to protect their memories and stop books about them’.
8
Several articles and biographies were quashed but, within months, another of Christine’s former friends and colleagues, Bill Stanley Moss, whose daughter had been named in Christine’s honour, had serialized her life for the news weekly
Picture Post,
under the title ‘Christine the Brave’.
9

Moss, who had already published an account of one of his own wartime SOE missions in the book
Ill Met By Moonlight,
recognized a good story and was planning a full biography and screenplay for a biopic to star Winston Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah.
*
Asked why she had chosen the role, Churchill replied it was because Christine was her father’s favourite spy, further stoking the burgeoning legend.
†
During his research in 1953, the year after Christine died, Moss had got in touch with Ledóchowski. ‘It is probably impossible,’ Ledóchowski had written back, ‘if Christine’s remarkable character is to be properly depicted, to picture her as an angel of virtue, to desexualise her. On the other hand this rather embarrassing
for Andrew
situation can, in my opinion, not be reflected in your book’.
10
Moss never resolved the issues and the project was shelved.

Twenty years later Ledóchowski decided to pick up the torch and was seeking Kowerski’s support for his own biographical project. The last clause in the agreement between them specified that, ‘in case of condemnation of the manuscript’, the book was not to be published.
11
Although Moss’s widow, Christine’s friend Zofia Tarnowska Moss, felt that Ledóchowski’s manuscript was written ‘very tenderly’, she was not in the club, and four of the five members of Kowerski’s all-male panel rejected the draft out of hand.
12
‘So outraged’ were they, that they even appointed a lawyer ready to start a lawsuit.
13
Ledóchowski honoured his word, however, and his manuscript was never completed or published.