The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (18 page)

The Budapest network continued to operate effectively for some time, working directly with the official Polish Intelligence Service.
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Father Laski kept the courier routes open under the cover of getting information on the persecution of the Church in Poland, with the unwitting help of an ecclesiastical office providing religious and social support to Polish refugees. He was arrested in October 1941 and died in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Michal ‘Lis’ Gradowski, ‘the Fox’, was caught trying to cross into Yugoslavia but escaped by jumping from a moving train. Managing to pass himself off as a Baltic German baron of Estonian nationality, he found himself entertained in a German airfield mess in Belgrade, where he was able to observe all the aircraft. He then accepted a lift to Istanbul from the German consul. In the early morning of the day he arrived Christine introduced Gradowski to de Chastelain, who enlisted him formally into SOE while still in his pyjamas.
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Marcin Lubomirski and Andrzej’s personal assistant, Antoni Filipkiewicz, continued to support the ‘exfiltration’ of British POWs from Poland, sometimes temporarily hiding the men in their homes. It was only in 1944 that the Gestapo broke the organization, with tragic results.
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The eight key remaining circuit members were all arrested. Only Lubomirski and Filipkiewicz would survive their incarceration in Mauthausen concentration camp, being released in 1945. The other six met their deaths in the gas chambers. ‘They were the best of the bunch,’ a report in the SOE files notes, but ‘as none of them has … any surviving relatives, posthumous awards in this case would seem to have no point.’
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Not long after Jerzy left for Budapest, Christine and Andrzej moved on to Cairo, where the British had a regional command base. They had somehow secured visas to travel through pro-Vichy Syria and Lebanon, then part of the French Mandate. According to SOE files, it was at the time possible to buy Hungarian, Bulgarian and German passports and visas ‘in blanco’ in Istanbul.
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On the other hand SOE specified that ‘only travel with a genuine passport is recommended. Other methods are still in the experimental stage, or are so hazardous as to be impractical’.
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In Andrzej’s account it was Christine who secured the visas, fluttering her eyelashes at the Vichy officials in the French consulate. The apparent ease with which she did so later caused a great deal of speculation about her contacts, but at the time Andrzej was more worried about retrieving his Opel from the Turkish authorities. A hefty bribe finally reunited them, and Christine and Andrzej were able to set off. When they stopped briefly at the British Embassy in Ankara they met Julian Amery. A British agent, who like Aidan Crawley later became an MP, Amery described Christine as ‘one of the gentlest looking girls I have ever met’, and found it hard to credit her with some of the exploits that had already earned her a fine reputation in intelligence circles.
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In mid-May, Christine and Andrzej quietly crossed into Syria.

Having wrapped up in coats and gloves as they drove through the wintry Balkans, Christine and Andrzej now wound down the Opel’s windows to try to catch the sea breeze as they drove through Syria on the narrow coastal road towards Beirut. Andrzej cursed the oppressive heat but Christine turned her face to the sun. Stopping in villages, or beside golden fields darkened by purple thistles and deadly nightshade, they lingered over figs, goats’ cheese, baklava, and local wine, soaking up the views of the Mediterranean and the crusader castles that dominate the Lebanese coast. At one point they stopped in silent admiration to watch thousands of storks gathering to migrate north, before pressing on in the opposite direction, the Opel sparkling in the heat, its chrome fittings too hot to touch. As they drew closer to Beirut, the monotony was broken by Christine’s shrieks whenever she saw a dog or cat dart across the road, until she became ‘almost hysterical’ if she thought one had strayed too close to their wheels, though Andrzej swore he always swerved in time.
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Once they reached the city, they headed for the St George’s Hotel, only to find it full of smartly dressed German officers. Seeing their British passports, the receptionist loudly offered them the best rooms at the standard rate, and Andrzej spent the whole night expecting to be murdered.

Next day they started early for Palestine. Unable to face the long hot queue at the border controls, Andrzej revved the Opel and made a final break for freedom. They were stopped by the police, of course, but when they handed over their passports the officers saluted them. The British authorities in Turkey had sent word that they were to be expected and they were quickly furnished with ration books, petrol coupons, and a room in a hotel in Haifa, on the northern slope of the great plateau of Mount Carmel. In the morning Christine insisted on taking some time to walk barefoot on the beach, curling her toes and smiling for Andrzej’s camera, and, with her tanned skin and dark sunglasses, looking as carefree as any tourist anywhere. Eventually Andrzej dragged her back to the car, and they followed the rising tide of military traffic moving towards Jerusalem. Now it was Andrzej’s turn to be the tourist, marvelling at ‘the weight of history which seemed to seep from the very stones’ of the ancient city.
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Having checked in with the British authorities, headed here by the sociable Peter Porter, Christine and Andrzej felt they could finally relax for a while. Christine arranged to meet Zofia Raczkowska, the sister of her journalist friend, Florian Sokolow. Like Florian, and their father Nahoum Sokolow, Zofia was a great advocate for an independent Israel, and she had toured Palestine for several years, promoting the Zionist cause. Andrzej and Christine also met Zofia’s twenty-year-old son, who was active in the Jewish underground, and many of their local comrades, as well as British military personnel and civilians working for the British civil service in Palestine. Even as the war against the Nazis continued, tensions were growing between the Jewish underground, fighting for a future state of Israel, and the British authorities, who had still not endorsed the idea. The British were well aware that Zionists were successfully smuggling arms into Palestine, but as Gladwyn Jebb told the head of SOE, ‘we simply cannot afford to alienate the Jews at this particular moment’.
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Despite, or perhaps partly because of, Poland’s own historic anti-Semitism, the Poles were more supportive of the idea of a Jewish state and had provided finance and training for Jewish insurgents since the 1930s. Half-Jewish, Polish, but working for the British, Christine must have had some interesting evenings at Zofia’s house in the hills overlooking Jerusalem. All Andrzej recorded of this time, however, was that she ‘fell in love with the family dogs, two fine boxers, which we used to take for drives’.
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Less than two weeks later Christine and Andrzej were summoned to Cairo. After another long, hot drive, the Opel was again waved through the border, this time into Egypt, and they were directed to the rambling Continental Hotel, whose bars and shady verandas had been all but taken over by the services. Here they were met by Peter Porter, who told them, rather stiffly now, to rest and relax while their future was being decided. It was not the welcome they had anticipated, but they knew the Cairo office had other priorities: the Germans had reached North Africa, the siege of Tobruk was in full force, and Vichy France was in the process of giving Germany access to its military facilities in Syria. Christine and Andrzej were soon surrounded by old friends including Andrzej Tarnowski and Kowerski’s cousin, Ludwig Popiel, recently returned from service in the desert with the Carpathian Lancers. The Lancers were commanded by Colonel Władysław Bobinski, whose horses Christine had ridden when she was just fourteen, and who was also stationed at the Continental along with many of his officers. And yet, given the number of people they knew at the hotel, the atmosphere surrounding Christine and Andrzej was surprisingly tense. Stranger still, apart from Ludwig, Tarnowski and Bobinski, none of the Polish or British officers at the Continental, or even the Polish Ambassador, whom Christine knew well, were talking to them.

Having driven fairly blithely across hundreds of miles of Nazi-sympathizing territory, often carrying incriminating letters and sometimes microfilm, and just weeks or at times days ahead of the Nazi advance, they were finally safely in British controlled territory. But two days later they were interrogated, separately, and at length, at SOE’s Cairo office, then a small villa on the banks of the Nile. Something was terribly wrong.

7: COLD IN CAIRO

‘X & Y are now in Cairo’, the Middle East branch of SOE informed London at the end of May 1941, glad to have an unassailable fact to report concerning the pair. X and Y were, of course, Christine and Andrzej, currently sheltering in the bars of the Continental Hotel both from the city’s increasingly oppressive heat at the start of the long summer and from the unexpected chill of their welcome. It was obvious that they were being cold-shouldered by both the Poles and the British in the city, but far from clear why. Although complicit in this treatment, the British in Cairo were little better informed than Christine and Andrzej. A few weeks earlier they had been keen to embrace their returning agents, Peter Wilkinson telling Colin Gubbins, now head of SOE Military Operations, that they were ‘under a very considerable obligation to these people’.
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But by late May, Wilkinson’s tone had changed and he was referring to Christine and Andrzej as ‘rather a problem’.
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The problem stemmed from a top-secret Polish intelligence report claiming that at least one Polish agent had been killed as a result of what were described as Christine’s ‘indiscretions’.
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Although the Poles refused to elaborate, and this accusation was never either effectively substantiated or disproved, they demanded that Christine and Andrzej should not be employed again until there had been a full investigation. Both of them were ‘very well thought of’ by Colonel George Taylor, the SOE office in Cairo informed London, but ‘viewed with grave suspicions’ by Polish intelligence. ‘Please discuss fully’, they begged, and telegraph by return, ‘what to do with X, Y’.
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‘Nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue which embittered the relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during that summer of 1941’, the SOE officer Bickham Sweet-Escott wrote.
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Internal relations between the various British services were strained enough, but tensions between the Poles and the British were in another league. Christine had a foot in each camp, which left her open to suspicion and politicking from both sides. From the British perspective, she had proved herself a valuable and trustworthy agent; ironically it was her Polish nationality – her greatest asset to them – that was now causing difficulties. The Poles had fought hard for independence from their rather overbearing British allies from the start of the war, securing the right to run their own operations, and to send their own signals using their own codes. In 1940 British secret services had agreed that all their clandestine communications with Poland would go through official channels. Arguably, in directly employing first Christine and then Andrzej the British had failed to honour this arrangement. With Christine now being monitored by the Poles themselves, her presence in the British offices in Cairo was a decided embarrassment.

The official Polish intelligence and counter-espionage unit, known as the ‘Second Bureau’, had far greater concerns, however. They had been keeping Christine under surveillance ever since she had appeared in Budapest. It was no surprise to them that she was reporting to the British, but they had recently begun to suspect that she was hiding something more sinister: that she might be a double agent working for the Nazis. These suspicions were seemingly supported by the apparent ease with which, in Istanbul, Christine had secured visas for Andrzej and herself to travel through pro-Vichy Syria and Lebanon, both then in the French Mandate. The British knew that visas could be obtained at a price, but it seemed impossible to the Poles that anyone other than a German spy could have achieved such a thing. This was just seen as corroborating evidence, however; the Second Bureau’s concerns about Christine had much deeper roots.

The fundamental issue was her close working relationship with Stefan Witkowski and his clandestine Polish intelligence group, ‘the Musketeers’. Ironically it was precisely because the Poles had considered Christine a liability, and would not use her as a courier between Hungary and Poland with the mainstream ZWZ, that she had first started working with the determinedly independent Musketeers. In 1940 the British had been desperate for intelligence on the German position inside Poland, and were delighted to employ Christine to bring out information that had not been sourced by official Polish intelligence and filtered through the Polish government-in-exile. Christine meanwhile, pleased to have found a job valued as much by her compatriot Witkowski as by the British, if anything became over-enthusiastic about her role. In early May 1941, Peter Wilkinson, who was censoring her letters, described the information they contained as ‘rather good stuff’, but was shocked to find one enclosing photographs of documents committing the British government to unreserved support for the Musketeers. ‘These latter rather alarming’, he reported. ‘We mustn’t make this sort of mistake again!’
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Christine was perhaps naive about the sensitivities of her position, but to the British her commitment to the Allied cause and to Poland seemed beyond doubt. However, by early 1941 the ZWZ and the Second Bureau were beginning to have serious doubts about Witkowski’s activities – and his loyalties.

At their height, the Musketeers had around 800 members, with agents operating inside the Russian-occupied area of Poland and across Europe, including over 200 actually inside Germany. Witkowski himself had travelled around the Reich purporting to be senior SS officer ‘Artur August von Tierbach’, while gathering high-quality intelligence for both the Poles and the British. His ambition and effectiveness reportedly enraged his official Polish intelligence rivals, who were determined to discredit him unless he agreed to pass all intelligence exclusively to the Second Bureau in return for a monthly budget and continued operational independence. Nonetheless, tensions continued to mount. Witkowski complained that the Second Bureau was not giving the Musketeers due credit for their intelligence reports. The Second Bureau in turn became furious when Witkowski bypassed them and gave intelligence directly to General Sikorski, now head of the Polish government-in-exile and commander-in-chief of the Polish forces, and indirectly to the British. A significant part of this intelligence went through Christine.