The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (19 page)

In an attempt to stem such intelligence rivalries, in early 1941 the Musketeers were officially merged with the ZWZ. But although Witkowski had been sworn into the fold he remained impossible to control, continuing to develop independent contacts with White Russian organizations, and becoming involved in secret talks with unnamed German commanders. Like Christine, and indeed many Poles, Witkowski saw Soviet Russia as just as great a threat to Poland as Nazi Germany. With contacts in both camps, he was unable to resist exploring ways to play the two aggressors off against each other, or to cut deals to try to ameliorate the harsh terms of the Nazi occupation. Not only did this undermine the authority of the Polish government-in-exile, inevitably it also left the Musketeers open to enemy infiltration, and certainly to claims of this. Several Musketeer agents were later reported to ‘gradually change their stories until finally they would admit to working for the Germans’ in the hope of cooperating with White Russians against the Soviets.
6
In May 1941 Sikorski decided to withdraw all support from the ‘unsatisfactory and harmful’ Musketeers, and, for the sake of continued good relations with their Polish allies, Britain officially supported this decision.
7
Christine, well known to be Witkowski’s little ‘Fly’, had arrived safely in Cairo, against all the odds, right in the middle of the crisis surrounding the Musketeers. It was no wonder that she was subject to suspicion, and soon fell foul of the bitter jealousies and personal rivalries that followed. As her close companion, although never a Musketeer agent himself, Andrzej was tarred with the same brush.

A series of signals and telegrams now crossed and recrossed between Cairo, London and Istanbul, and between Polish and British intelligence, until at least one British message complained of ‘getting fed up with the bloody chaos’.
8
According to Julian Amery, ‘there was a good deal of spy mania at the time and the authorities were taking no chances’.
9
For a while the idea was mooted of sending Christine and Andrzej to London and offloading them onto the Polish administration there, but it seemed a waste of valuable assets. On the other hand, although SOE might have little doubt about Christine’s loyalty, the British were anxious to preserve good relations with the Poles. With the Baltic states steadily falling to the Axis, France already lost, Russia still treaty-bound to Germany, and the USA studiously avoiding being drawn into the conflict, Britain could not afford to alienate its ally. For Wilkinson this was the critical point. ‘The disadvantages of giving support to an organisation which is not collaborating with the Polish Government are obvious,’ he wrote with regard to Christine and the Musketeers, ‘and, in my opinion, outweigh all possible advantages.’
10
It was decided that Christine and Andrzej should remain in Egypt, at least temporarily, but were not to be used in any connection with Poland, and were not to renew contact with the Musketeers. This last proved more tricky than it seemed, as a series of reports and microfilm still filtered through to Christine, carried by escaping Polish servicemen hoping to rejoin their army in the Middle East, and which she passed on regardless of her official position.

It was June 1941 before Colonel Guy Tamplin, the British liaison officer with the Polish authorities in Cairo, finally explained the situation to Christine and Andrzej. ‘Christine and I were appalled’, Andrzej remembered.
11
Since the start of the war the two of them had risked their lives for Poland, only to be denounced and blacklisted as suspected double agents by their fellow countrymen. Christine felt thoroughly let down. ‘I am so fed up with everything and everyone that I am becoming a desert island’, she wrote to Kate O’Malley.
*
In Belgrade, George Taylor had promised to look after them, she continued, but ‘now he says he can do nothing, and has left us on ice’.
12
And yet the situation continued to be so confused that at times it seemed farcical. Christine had to fend off constant insinuations, but no direct accusation, that she was a Nazi agent, while at the same time contending with the low-key anti-Semitism that was prevalent in Cairo. Andrzej learnt that he had been awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military honour, on the same day that he was officially denounced as a spy by the Second Bureau. Both of them were hugely relieved when they learnt that Peter Wilkinson was arriving from London later that month to resolve their seemingly impossible situation.

It was only when Christine and Andrzej were sitting opposite Wilkinson that it became apparent the news was not going to be good. According to Andrzej, Wilkinson dispensed with their services without a word of explanation, suggesting only that Christine hasten to join the Red Cross and Andrzej to sign up with the Polish armed forces. Both of them were stunned, Andrzej in ‘a furious rage’, Christine ‘pale and silent’.
13
When Andrzej dutifully started to hand over their last rolls of microfilm, Wilkinson abruptly rose to see them out, announcing sharply that ‘Your microfilms are of no interest to us. Good-day.’
14
In Wilkinson’s account of the meeting, however, he made clear that there were serious concerns that the Musketeers’ ‘amateur operations’ might compromise the ‘infinitely more clandestine activities’ of the official Polish resistance; an explanation which he believed Christine and Andrzej accepted ‘philosophically’.
15
Perhaps Wilkinson was simply more optimistic about Christine’s shocked silence than the occasion warranted; later he admitted that it had ‘proved a painful interview’, and one that he had ‘handled badly’.
16
In the space of just five minutes he had made lifelong enemies of both Christine and Andrzej, something he would later sincerely regret. Christine did not apply for a job with the Red Cross, and she swore that she would never again be dictated to by a man behind a desk. Wilkinson did, however, give them both a lifeline by neglecting to have them struck off the SOE payroll. A shrewd judge of both character and situation, he had taken apparently decisive action, while ensuring that ultimately the British retained control of their impressive and still potentially useful Polish agents.
*

It was now mid-June, well into the long Cairo summer that would stretch through until October. Rising early, before the stifling heat of the day started to hang in the air, Christine and Andrzej would head to ‘Grey Pillars’, the massive building also known as ‘Hush Hush House’, to petition the SOE office for an update on their status. As the days ran into weeks they also fired off letters to every senior British and Polish officer they knew. Top of Christine’s list was Sir Owen O’Malley, whose response to her pleas only had Wilkinson commenting drily that Sir Owen ‘seems to have fallen a victim to Mme’s well-known persuasiveness’.
17
The Poles showed no sign of changing their position, and without their support, her case looked hopeless.

Andrzej was less directly linked to the Musketeers than Christine, and, as a decorated officer, was also more generally employable. Gubbins, based in London, approached General Sikorski on his behalf, writing tactfully that ‘I am anxious that this man should not suffer through any fault of ours’, and suggesting that Andrzej should be allowed join the Polish armed forces in Egypt.
18
Andrzej meanwhile wrote to his former commanding officer, General Stanisław Kopanski. When Kopanski was appointed to the Carpathian Brigade, Andrzej cornered him at the Continental and, using an old Polish expression, asked if they could speak privately, ‘between four eyes’. ‘That is impossible’, Kopanski told him, to the obvious delight of a contingent from the Second Bureau who were watching from across the lobby, only to add that with his war wounds they had only three good eyes, and three legs, between them.
19
After their talk Kopanski also fought Andrzej’s corner, but there were still no job offers. ‘He is a very decent officer,’ one Polish report conceded, but he ‘finds himself under the negative influence of Mrs G’.
20

Christine and Andrzej both loathed taking a salary, however basic, without contributing anything to justify it, and they were frustrated and soon rather disturbed by their seemingly idle and purposeless lives while they were surrounded by action. They spent the long summer afternoons lying under the slow ceiling fan in their dark room, shuttered against light and heat and insinuation. When they could they listened to Polish radio, broadcast from the Embassy in Cairo, or dozed on the verandas that ran the length of the hotel. Most Cairo establishments closed from midday until five, when the whole city lay in a motionless stupor of heat. These were the lost hours of the day when, according to the author Lawrence Durrell, who was also caught in Cairo, ‘one feels walked upon by the feet of dead elephants’.
21
Even the covered souks and the Muski, the warren of lanes lined with open-fronted shops jammed between massive gateways and ancient latticed windows, were quiet in the afternoons; the shopkeepers sleeping in the shade until evening brought some relief and some custom. Then Christine would join the crowds of men in long white djellabas and women swathed in black, small boys carrying trays of tea, and donkey-carts piled high with goods, all pressed into the maze of narrow streets in Cairo’s Old City. She had little money to fritter in the fashionable palm-shaded bar at Shepheard’s Hotel, which occupied a villa where Napoleon had once stayed, or in cafés like Groppi’s that sold fresh cream cakes, and few invitations to officers’ parties. Instead she would while away the early evenings petting the long-limbed Egyptian street cats, pitying the city’s exhausted and overworked horses, and sipping tea with the Muski shopkeepers who could tell she had no interest in buying. Andrzej meanwhile greedily eyed the silks, bottles full of perfume, and above all the jewellery, wishing he were in a better position and could buy a gift for Christine.

The rest of their evenings were mostly whiled away over a drink in the Hotel Continental’s roof garden, occasionally entertained by belly-dancers but more often with repeated choruses of Lili Marlene, and the loose security talk of the officers around them. Sometimes they joined the civilian expats on the well-watered lawns of the Anglo-Egyptian club on Gezira Island, but often they would just stroll out to the pyramids together, watch the feluccas dipping in the wind on the Nile, and listen to the long, wailing notes of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer as the kites rose to wheel above the city’s mosques.

Cairo was a deeply cosmopolitan city. Here Muslims, Jews, Copts, Syro-Lebanese Christians and a mixture of European expatriates did business together ‘over endless little cups of sugary coffee and glasses of syrupy tea’.
22
‘After the provincial quiet of Istanbul,’ Christine’s old SOE friend Basil Davidson wrote, between ferrying explosives around the region in diplomatic bags, ‘Cairo had all the bustle of a strange and various metropolis.’
23
For their colleague Julian Amery, too, the city was ‘astonishingly vital’, and among the varied population the military were ‘everywhere, dressed in the simple, tropical uniform of the desert, with every now and then the red tabs of a brass hat or the distinctive cap of a French or Polish officer. All was noise, bustle and hurry.’
24
The city’s souks, cafés, hawkers, beggars, dogs and donkeys created a vibrant, and pungent, picture of Arab street life, but the Egyptian middle classes had long adopted a policy of British administration with a veneer of French polish. Most fellahin wore turbans and djellabas, but the well-to-do effendi landowners wore smart suits with their tarbooshes and drove limousines between the caravans of camels on the streets.

In 1875 Britain had become the largest shareholder in the strategically vital Suez Canal when it acquired the interest of Egypt’s Ottoman ruler, the khedive. In the early 1880s Her Majesty’s forces had intervened to help crush a nationalist revolt against European and Ottoman domination. Although Egypt officially gained independence in 1922, the troops had stayed, and Britain continued to dominate the country’s political life. By the start of the war, however, as Cairo again filled up with British uniforms, Egyptians were divided in their sympathies towards their former colonizers. As Poles, Christine and Andrzej were viewed similarly – with polite suspicion. It was something they both hated but were fast getting used to. The main redeeming feature of these idle early weeks in Cairo was that they were together. ‘We are in a perfect friendship’, Christine wrote, and ‘without him I think I would have already gone into a lunatic asylum’.
25
It was then that Christine’s husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, arrived.

Jerzy had been in Istanbul when the British learnt that all links with the Musketeers were to be broken off. Impressed by his work in Hungary, Russia and Turkey, ‘the firm’, as SOE was known to insiders, was keen to keep him on its books. ‘He speaks a number of languages fluently, is very debrouillard, and seems to hate the Germans as much as is humanly possible’, one report extolled.
26
But the British also knew that Jerzy had a temper. Considering it unwise to inform a volatile man about their sudden change of loyalties while he was in neutral territory, de Chastelain quickly dispatched Jerzy to Cairo. However, nothing could have prepared the British for the extent of his fury when, en route in Jerusalem, he heard the rumours and accusations surrounding Christine, Andrzej, and – by extension – himself.

‘I have been informed by my wife that Maj. Wilkinson has notified her that she, [Andrzej] Kennedy and I are as suspect as the organisation in Poland we were in touch with,’ Jerzy stormed, ‘and which counts between its members well known Polish patriots and friends of Gen. Sikorski!’ Hardly lifting his pen from the paper he continued, ‘This is the reward from the British government for all our efforts, our sincere desire to do some useful work, and the grave risks my wife and Kennedy were running!’
27
Jerzy was livid and, not satisfied with submitting this tirade in his official report, he soon began talking to all his contacts. For the British this was not good news; Jerzy knew senior diplomats in several countries, including the USA, and was a personal friend of Sikorski. Some of the wind was taken out of his sails by a hasty message from London confirming that it was well known that all three of them, now referred to as X, Y and Z, ‘acted out of patriotic motives and are free from suspicion’.
28
Jerzy continued to protest ‘most emphatically against this unfair, ungentlemanly attitude towards us’ over seven closely typed pages, but he knew it was pointless.
29
Any future collaboration with the Poles now seemed impossible. ‘As a former cell of the Witkowski organisation,’ Wilkinson reported, ‘they are barred, for good, from having anything to do with Poland or Polish affairs.’