The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (69 page)

*
 Christine’s SOE personal files state that ‘in the course of her duties Mme Gi
ż
ycka, operating from Hungary, undertook four journeys to Poland on foot via Slovakia in circumstances of great danger and hardship’. However, the reports contain inaccuracies, and conflicting dates are given for these journeys. On 31 May 1940 the British reported she had made two successful trips into Poland, but elsewhere only one is recorded. The most likely sequence is a first journey in February/March, two attempts in June, and a successful journey in November 1940. She made additional trips across Hungarian borders as part of her and Andrzej’s evacuation work.

*
 Bór-Komorowski would later give the orders for the Warsaw Rising, become Commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, and for a few years serve as prime minister of the post-war Polish government-in-exile.

*
 The French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was best known for his book
The Little Prince.
He was famous in pre-war Poland, and Christine probably met him during her French travels with Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki. They might have crossed paths again in Algiers in 1943 before Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a flying mission in 1944, never to be found.

*
 Harrison arrived back in Britain on 3 June 1940, and never returned to Budapest. In October SOE decided his services were no longer required and he left the firm the following January. See TNA, HS9/668, SOE personal files, Hubert Harrison.

*
 Masson
Christine, SOE Agent,
names the colonel as Zoltan Schell, p. 81.

*
 There are various stories as to where Christine and Sir Owen first met. In her novel
The Tightening String
(1962), Ann Bridge, Sir Owen’s wife, described these Monday events as being attended by ‘a few Poles who had managed to escape to Hungary’, some British, Hungarians and a few Allied diplomats. They may have been introduced here by a mutual friend, the Polish consul in Budapest.

*
 The Romanian Ploie
ş
ti oilfields were eventually bombed by the RAF and US Air Force, with considerable loss of life.

†
 The limpet mines used time-delay detonators that were originally concealed inside Woolworths aniseed balls whose dissolving rate had been vigorously tested in Bedford Modern School swimming pool the year before, before the sweets were replaced with corrosive acid. See
BBC WW2 People’s War,
‘Aniseed Balls and the Limpet Mine’, article A4376153 (6.7.2005). Later the British used ‘sticky bombs’ to sabotage many more German oil barges on the Danube: see Jozef Garlinski,
Poland, SOE and the Allies
(1969), pp. 25–6.

‡
 Plastic explosive developed at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich just before the war could be safely eaten, ‘though it can hardly have been either tasty or nutritious’. M. R. D. Foot,
SOE: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946
(1999), p. 107.

*
 Stefania Skarbek (Goldfeder) is not listed in the surviving Auschwitz records. According to Pawiak Museum archives, Edmund and Józef Skarbek were sent from Pawiak to Auschwitz in 1940, and Tadeusz, Menaszel and Zofia Goldfeder were interned in Pawiak between 1940 and 1942, before being sent to Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, but their relationship to Christine, if any, is not known.

*
 Christine may have got this idea from a British leaflet entitled
How To Fake An Illness,
which recommended simulating internal bleeding by biting lips or gums – although how to bite your own gums is not fully detailed.

†
 It has been speculated, but never confirmed, that a bribe may have been paid for Christine and Andrzej’s release, or that Sir Owen O’Malley pulled a few strings with Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s regent.

*
 Christine was not the only one to exploit the minor advantages of living under a false identity in this way. In his unpublished memoirs, her husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, states he was born in 1889, but in his 1941 application to serve with the British he gave his date of birth as 1895. But if Jerzy thought he could reduce the considerable age gap between himself and his wife, at least on paper, he was wrong. Christine had beaten him to the same trick, even as the Gestapo were combing the streets of Budapest for her.

*
 Kate’s daughter Jane later wrote that this was the weekend of 10–12 February 1941, and that ‘doubtless’ Kate would have gone too. See O’Malley papers, Jane O’Malley, ‘Christina’ (nd).

*
 The Polish resistance officer Kazimierz Leski later claimed that the Musketeers stole these microfilms from the ZWZ. See Larecki, p. 137.

*
 In his book
Leap Before You Look: A Memoir
(1988), p. 162, Crawley says that he arranged for Christine and Andrzej to take their films to Egypt via Istanbul. Other sources say that Crawley relieved them of the films in Sofia.

*
 The British were careful not to let the Polish administration know about the award, in case complications arose from their employment of a Pole.

*
 This allegation was made by the Second Bureau officer Lt Col Jozef Matecki, under his operational pseudonym of Jakob Alec. See TNA, HS4/198, MX to M (28.5.1941).

*
 She also half told Kate a story that Andrzej had ‘saved my life by taking me out of the sea, and at the risk of his own life. It’s quite a funny story although it nearly ended tragically.’ Sadly she provides no more information. See O’Malley papers, Granville to Kate O’Malley (30.1.1942).

*
 Peter Wilkinson’s decision was supported by George Taylor.

*
 In his 2008 biography of Christine, Poland’s Colonel Jan Larecki speculates that Christine might have been sent to Palestine as an agitator, to help form Jewish units to fight with the Allies, or for counterintelligence purposes to encourage cooperation with the British: pp. 165–80.

*
 This was the son of the deposed emperor of Afghanistan, whom she and Andrzej had met in Aleppo the previous year.

*
 Aly, as Prince Ali Khan was popularly known, was then married to Joan Guinness, but would later have an affair with Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, before marrying Rita Hayworth, the favourite pin-up of the Middle East.

*
 Both children died of natural causes, the eldest aged two, on the birthday of his younger brother.

*
 Retinger would be linked to the discovery of an unprimed explosive device in the plane carrying Sikorski to Washington in December 1942, and was later removed from Poland on a special British flight in fear for his life.

*
 Wladimir in fact rejoined the Polish secret service, and was sent to Istanbul under the guise of being a diplomat. He was then posted to Ankara, where he lost his diary journal, which was only published posthumously. From Ankara he was sent to Paris. After the war he married the daughter of the Polish ambassador to France.

*
 There is no record of Christine’s reaction to Witkowski’s death, or even that she knew of it, although she must have suspected.

*
 Guy Tamplin died of a heart attack at his desk in November 1943. ‘His funeral in the desert was a sad affair.’ See Annette Street,
Long Ago and Far Away.

†
 There was so much intrigue that in 1942 MGM released a spy spoof, called
Cairo,
in which a warbling Jeanette MacDonald is mistaken for a Nazi agent by an American hack who follows her between the souks and the pyramids.

*
 Twenty words a minute was considered good, but some operators could send up to thirty. See Patrick Howarth,
Undercover: The Women and Men of the SOE
(1990), p. 79.

*
 See William Deakin,
The Embattled Mountain
(1971) for an account of his work in Yugoslavia.

*
 In November 2011 the Russian parliament declared that the Soviet dictator Stalin had personally ordered the Katyn massacre.

*
 In September 1943 Klimkowski was arrested on charges of embezzlement. He was later prosecuted as a Soviet spy and removed from the Polish army.

†
 Major Victor Cazalet replaced Peter Wilkinson on the flight.

‡
 Although no evidence of foul play has been found, conspiracy theories still surround General Sikorski’s death. After the war Captain Klimecki, one of Anders’s adjutants, returned to Poland and accused Anders of Sikorski’s assassination, only to later face accusations of being a Communist agitator himself. In 1947 the military governor of Warsaw made the same accusations against Anders in the Polish parliament. Some years later Moses Szapiro, an intelligence officer also known as Edward Szarkiewicz, confessed to planning the assassination attempt in Cairo, although his testimony is also open to question. It is quite possible that Christine met all these men in Cairo, but there is no record that she knew of any assassination plans.

*
 The ‘M’ came from Gubbins’s middle name, McVean, as the initial ‘C’ was already taken. Ben Macintyre suggests that Gubbins was one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’ in the Bond series, as was Fleming’s mother, who also signed her letters to her son ‘M’. See Macintyre,
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond
(2008), p. 63.

*
 The surviving cousin, Dominik Horodyński, later married Wladimir Ledóchowski’s niece, and became a well-known journalist. After the fall of Communism in Poland he was allowed to build a memorial to his family at their estate.

*
 Kate O’Malley burnt the manuscript of her novel, but ten years later helped her mother, the author Ann Bridge, to rewrite the story. It was published as
A Place to Stand
in the 1950s. See Ann Bridge,
Facts and Fictions
(1968), p. 83.

*
 Porter soon made good use of these tricks himself behind the lines in Romania.

*
 Francis Cammaerts’s parents were Émile Cammaerts and Helen Braun.

*
 Francis called Auguste ‘the best man and most reliable friend I had’, and regularly pressed for him to be decorated for his ‘heroic work’. Despite having the longest record of unbroken wireless service in France, Auguste did not receive British decorations. In his February 1945 SOE debrief, the interviewer concluded: ‘Informant gave the impression that he had been over cautious during his clandestine activities … did not give the impression that he ever took those risks which have to be taken if positive results are to be obtained.’ All of Auguste’s family had been arrested by the Nazis and his wife and teenage daughter were sent to Ravensbrück. See HS6/570, Deschamps, interrogations (27.2.1945).

*
 The officers evacuating compromised agents and resisters from this sheltered bay to Falmouth were using the same route as the real-life Scarlet Pimpernels of the French Revolution.

*
 Francis lobbied for Gormal to be decorated, but having returned to Britain with rest of the crew he was shot down and killed twenty-four hours before VE day.

*
 The Imperial War Museum has a Polish Vis Radom gun, displayed as having belonged to Christine Granville, but without any provenance. There are no references to this gun in her files, but she may have acquired it in Warsaw, Budapest, Cairo or Algiers.

*
 It has been claimed both that de Gaulle used the phrase in his broadcast of 5 June 1944, but that it was not included in the list of transmitted messages in the BBC archives. See Michael Pearson,
Tears of Glory: The Betrayal of Vercors 1944
(1978), p. 42.

*
 Their affair was kept quiet. Maurice Buckmaster, SOE’s Head of F Section, said agents were organized into groups ‘that would get on well together, but not too well. I mean, in other words, that the organiser wouldn’t want to go to bed with the courier all the time … we never had any problems of that kind’. IWM, Sound Archive, 8680.

*
 Captain Jean Tournissa, alias Paquebot, died a week later, on 18 August 1944.

*
 MI9’s Christopher Hutton created silk maps so that they would not rustle inside clothes should an agent be searched.

*
 Paddy O’Regan was not surprised that the Germans believed these rather wild claims. ‘I would have believed anything that Christine told me and done anything she asked. So would and did anyone who knew her’, he wrote. His wife, however, pointed out that they would only have had to start speaking in English to catch Christine out. See Liddell Hart archive, Paddy O’Regan papers; and Mieczysława Wazacz (director),
No Ordinary Countess
(2010), Ann O’Regan interview.

*
 This ruse had already been played successfully, with more circumstantial evidence if no more truth, by Odette Sansom. After her arrest Sansom had claimed (falsely) to be fellow agent Peter Churchill’s wife and (spuriously) therefore a relation of the British PM. It was a bluff that may have helped to save her life.

*
 Xan Fielding later returned to Digne as an adviser for the film of Bill Stanley Moss’s book,
Ill Met By Moonlight.
When the film team discovered that their hotel was adjacent to the building where Fielding had been interrogated, they suggested moving at once. Fielding laughed it off, saying he was glad to be back under such different circumstances. ‘This calls for a bottle of champagne’, Dirk Bogarde responded. See Daphne Fielding,
The Nearest Way Home
(1970).

*
 Francis stayed in touch with Vercors veteran Daniel Huillier, whose father had been ‘like a brother’ to him, sending a bottle of ‘Don Chevalier Huillier’ Bordeaux wine every year. Daniel remembered that in his last letter Francis ‘considered himself French, he wasn’t with you foreigners. He considered himself French’. M. R. D. Foot mentioned that at one point Claude Renoir gave Francis one of his grandfather’s paintings, though Francis’s daughter, Joanna, had not heard of this.

*
 Vera Atkins had a reputation for excellent judgement. Her eyebrows were ‘as poised as a Georgian candelabra’, one agent recalled, while Riols found her ‘terrifying … very formidable’ and only dared call her by her first name when they were both in their seventies, and then ‘only at Vera’s insistence’. George Millar,
Maquis
(1946), p. 19; Noreen Riols interview (October 2011).