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

by Clare Mulley

  Christine met Witkowski at the flat of the aristocratic activist Teresa Łubienska. Having lost her only son in the battle for Warsaw, Łubienska was both helping to fund the Musketeers through the sale of her jewellery and taking an active part in its operations.26 Although she and Christine were very different sorts of women, from different generations, they would soon come to regard each other with the greatest respect. Christine also quickly gained Witkowski’s confidence, and handed over her parcel of papers. Picking up on the vibrant energy of the slight young woman in front of him, he gave her the pseudonym ‘Mucha’, or ‘Fly’.27 Then, pacing the room, he outlined the Musketeers’ objectives, structure, and the type of intelligence he could provide, in the hope that she could secure some British funding. Later he would introduce her to several key people in the organization, including Michal Gradowski, known as ‘Lis’, ‘the Fox’, who was also a courier on the Warsaw–Budapest route, and who would soon be passing microfilm to Christine in Hungary.*28 Witkowski also introduced her to the great Polish hero Kazimierz Leski, then the Musketeers’ chief of counterintelligence. Leski clearly remembered the ‘lovely, graceful, very intelligent and absolutely charming girl’, but later claimed that as he looked at Christine he could not help wondering why he had been invited to meet her.29 Finally he decided that Witkowski was trying to build his prestige by flaunting his new contact from British intelligence.† Witkowski arranged to meet Christine again the following month, to give her the Musketeers’ latest reports to be smuggled out of the country. With a deep bow, he then kissed her hand, and the fly was waved away. It was only once she was back in the street that Christine realized she had made no demands or suggestions of her own. Witkowski had controlled their relationship from the start.

  Christine spent three weeks in Warsaw on this, her first visit to occupied Poland. Officially the objects of her mission were ‘to counter the anti-British propaganda of the Germans by spreading British propaganda’ and ‘to collect and transmit intelligence’.30 She proved highly effective at both. She had already handed over her propaganda reports for reproduction in the underground press, and shared, she wrote rather enigmatically, ‘everything Harrison had given me’ with the Musketeers.31 She then assessed the impact of British contact so far. Leaflet drops over Poland had been ‘magnificent’ she reported diplomatically, but when repeated they should give straight news rather than propaganda. She went on to devise a new scheme for broadcasting special news bulletins at a fixed time and on a fixed wavelength, to be picked up by ordinary radio sets in Poland. These were to supplement the British and Allied broadcasts being subjected to German jamming, and were also to be used as a news agency service, to supply the many small illegal news-sheets across the country. One of her contacts, a well-known left-wing Polish journalist, was so keen about the potential of the plan that he put in a request for £100 a month to fund a new weekly newspaper with a circulation of 10–15,000 copies. British Section D was impressed. But Christine would later report that she also faced serious difficulties owing to the work of some ‘Volksdeutsche’ (ethnic Germans living in Poland), who claimed to be British agents and started a campaign to discredit her among resistance networks. She was ‘in danger of being killed as an agent provocateur’, she wrote, and was only cleared by old friends and contacts who vouched for her.32

  Not all of Christine’s activities went down well with her British bosses, however. Somehow, almost certainly through the Musketeers, she made contact with General Stanisław Bałachowicz, a renowned champion of Polish liberty prior to 1919. Bałachowicz, whose ‘prestige is very great’ the British noted, had organized some 500 officers for guerrilla work inside Russia ‘when the moment arrives’. Their plan was to start a revolt in Poland and the Ukraine against Russia, and, carefully stressing that the organization was ‘purely military and had no political affiliations’, Christine wanted to help supply British anti-tank guns, rifles, ammunition and money. ‘No! – This on no account’, one British Section D officer scribbled in the margins against the suggestion.33 British and Polish views of the Russians would never be reconciled, and their interests would become diametrically opposed after Russia joined the Allies in 1941.

  Christine also told London of her astonishment at ‘the terrible disorder of the German administration’.34 The Gestapo and the Wehrmacht distrusted one another, and as a result new orders were being posted daily, withdrawn, cancelled, contradicted and reenacted, causing chaos. Christine tried to keep a mental note of everything she witnessed. She watched Warsaw’s residents, often dressed in little more than rags, forced to clear snow from the roads and railways lines, before being rebuked for breaking the curfew. She saw children emerging from damaged buildings to take messages and parcels of bread and other goods across the city. She saw groups of Jews, some wrapped in blankets, all with beautifully hand-stitched Star of David armbands sewn on to the sleeves of their shirts or jackets, running together in the middle of the road to conform to recent edicts about their freedom of movement, and then being beaten for being in a group of more than three. Once she witnessed an elderly Jewish gentleman, dressed in a decent overcoat and felt hat, being pushed into the road by a Wehrmacht officer with his hand on the perforated barrel of his sub-machine gun. Having instinctively held out her hand, Christine quickly drew back and a moment later found herself smiling at the officer when he asked for her papers.35 Momentarily hating herself, she began to understand a little more about the campaign of terror that enabled the Nazis to control even Warsaw with its huge and passionate underground resistance. Later she would report that ‘in Warsaw alone over 100 Poles are shot every night. The terror is indescribable. Yet the spirit of the Poles is magnificent’.36

  Christine was staying with different close friends who could be trusted not to talk, but one afternoon an old acquaintance recognized her by chance in a crowded café and called out her name across the room, adding loudly, ‘What are you doing here? We heard you had gone abroad!’37 Having denied being Mrs Giżycka, wife of the well-connected diplomat serving overseas, let alone Krystyna Skarbek, well known to be the daughter of a Jew, Christine ordered more coffee, deliberately lingering to show she had nothing to hide. That evening she left Warsaw, spending two weeks crossing Poland mostly by rail, but also by horse and cart, and on foot. She was collecting local information on the continuing industrial production around the country, the transit of German supplies and equipment, and the composition and distribution of large military units both inside the country and along the demarcation lines, noting that many troop transports were leaving Poland, either crossing the Russian frontier, or heading towards Romania and Turkey.

  One incident, though, was particularly distressing: the containment and eventual massacre of thousands of Bavarian troops kept in railway coaches for two weeks without food. Poles caught throwing food through the train windows were shot at. ‘Finally they were taken out, lined up and shot down’, Christine reported. ‘It is believed they had tried to revolt.’ In the same dispatch, she examined the morale of the German army and their attitude towards the Polish population. As a rule, troops in transit were ‘very drunk on vodka’, issued, she noted, ‘purposely to keep them in good spirits’. All in all she felt that there was significant dissatisfaction, with the occupying troops fearing ‘that if Germany loses they will all be massacred’.38

  Most of Christine’s information came from the local resistance groups who had been observing railway stations and the traffic on the major roads since the start of the occupation. Travelling in winter was cold, dispiriting and tiring. She passed ruined villages, towns full of burned-out houses, and the broken equipment of war: shattered tanks, wrecked gun-carriages and vehicles destroyed in dive-bombing attacks on columns of Polish troops and crowds of refugees just a few months before. In places soldiers’ graves lined the roadside, some still marked with makeshift crosses in the snow, and occasionally with the helmets of the fallen. Elsewhere the graves were more recent. But Christine knew her work was
valuable, her false papers were good, and despite the ubiquitous – and often random – shootings she felt safer in the country, where there were fewer arbitrary round-ups of civilians than in the capital. She only returned to Warsaw to keep her appointment with Witkowski and collect the small package of ‘Foto-Plat’ microfilm that had been prepared for her to take out of the country. Then, as Zakopane was now the headquarters for the Gestapo in the Polish highlands, she learned that Witkowski had arranged for her to join a ZWZ courier, operating under the name of ‘Jan Grodzicki’, taking a different route back to Budapest.

  ‘Grodzicki’ was in reality a courageous and intellectual nobleman – Count Wladimir Ledóchowski, most of whose family estates had been confiscated by Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. Wladimir had the natural self-belief of the upper echelons of Polish society. According to one admiring female friend he was also possessed of ‘explosive intelligence’, along with ‘brilliant agate-streaked blue eyes … and intense charm, felt by all women’.39 Having fought heroically with the Polish Horse Artillery Division in the September campaign, Wladimir had been given command of a battery of guns defending Warsaw. The way he told it, it was over a bowl of flamingo soup in the capital’s zoo, the night before the Nazis entered Warsaw, that Wladimir secured his colonel’s permission to disobey orders to surrender, and instead continue the fight with the resistance. An excellent skier, he was employed by the ZWZ to memorize messages and courier reports from Warsaw to the Polish Embassy in Budapest. On his first crossing, in December 1939, he brought out the first reports of the situation inside occupied Poland.

  Wladimir was sent to Budapest again in early February and spent three weeks there. One evening he happened to meet Andrzej Kowerski in a Budapest bar where they spent a pleasant evening swapping war stories over bottles of red wine. They seemed set to become great friends, until Andrzej recounted how in September he had led a successful attack against a local German HQ in Krakowiec, wiping out the enemy with the loss of only the elegant country house in which they were based. Wladimir had to choose his words carefully when he explained that Krakowiec was the estate where he was born, and which he had been due to inherit from his grandmother.40 It would not be the last uncomfortable moment in their friendship.

  Wladimir was sent back to Poland in late February 1940, although he spread the story that he was going to Paris to put any German agents off his scent. A few weeks later, buying a ticket for the night train to Nowy Sącz, Wladimir was struck by the girl in the queue behind him, her pretty face half hidden beneath a Tyrolean hat with a snipe’s feather stuck in the ribbon. It was Christine, and when she happened to join him in the same second-class carriage he began to wonder where she was going with her jaunty hat, duffle-coat and rucksack, but no skis. Discreetly he watched her yawning like a cat and struggling to find a comfortable position before she finally fell asleep. In the morning Christine cheerfully brandished her third-class ticket, threw him a look and a smile, and disappeared into the crowds. Some hours later, when Wladimir arrived at his ZWZ safe house, there in the front room was Christine, brushing her auburn hair.41 Not for the first time, he noticed that she was ‘remarkably pretty’.42

  Over breakfast, Christine told Wladimir that she had left Salisbury for London when war broke out and was now returning from her first trip to Poland for the British.43 She then spoke about her desperate journey across the Tatra mountains, and the bodies of the young couple she had found. Not realizing that she had given away her identity with her story, Christine began to sweat as Wladimir outlined exactly who she had been talking to in Warsaw, before finally confronting her with her real name. It was only after Christine had countered by boasting that her Budapest contacts included not only Andrzej Kowerski but his friend Wladimir Ledóchowski, currently in Paris, that Wladimir conceded she had the better of him, as according to his information Wladimir Ledóchowski was right here, in his own shoes.44 He then roared with laughter at his victory, delighted by Christine’s frown.*

  Christine, Wladimir and their ZWZ guide caught a train bound for the mountains in the late afternoon. Told to try to look like a local, not a tourist, Christine stuffed her hat into her rucksack. It was dusk by the time the train slowed down at the points near the mountain station, and they jumped, three shadows peeling off from the side of the train and disappearing between the goods trucks on the tracks before heading into the woods. Some gendarmes fired a few shots after them, but they were clear.45

  After several hours hiking along forest tracks and cattle paths, and through deeper and deeper drifts of snow as they climbed higher, they passed the low concrete posts that marked the Slovak border. To mark the moment also, Wladimir pulled Christine over and planted a kiss on her lips. ‘She kissed me slowly and passionately, as though she was prepared for it’, he wrote in his diary, after which she climbed on to the border post, opened her arms wide and called out ‘more, more!’46 As she shouted her encore over the mountains, it was not just more kisses that she seemed to be demanding, but more freedom and more adventure: more of the very stuff that gave her life meaning. Later, with Christine leaning on his shoulder as they walked through what Wladimir called ‘the snowy desert’, they talked about their first impressions of each other, and how fortunate they were to have been thrown together in this way. But when Christine thanked the war for liberating her from boredom and routine, enabling her to take risks and experience real danger, Wladimir protested. Christine retorted that Andrzej Kowerski ‘blesses the war every day’ for giving him an alternative to life as a farmer, and a predictable future as ‘an ordinary man who has children and goes out to drink vodka after the harvest’.47 Ordinary, Wladimir had to admit, was not a word that sat comfortably with Christine.

  It took two days for them to walk through Slovakia, and although they got lost more than once, despite their guide, they were now walking downhill and away from the winter lingering in the mountains. At night they slept together, sharing the warmth of their bodies and satisfying the desire that had grown with the fear of the last few weeks. Christine smiled at finding that Wladimir wore a Madonna medallion under his shirt, and was later woken by his fingers drumming out coded messages on her body as he slept.48

  Finally they left their guide, and took a taxi through a series of villages until they reached a deserted stretch of road near the last Slovak town before the Hungarian border. That afternoon, Christine’s boots got stuck in the mud of a flooded field. Wladimir swung her, ‘swearing like crazy’, over his shoulder, her feet pummelling his chest until he grabbed her ankles, and carried her to firm ground. ‘I wonder’, she challenged him on being set down, ‘whether you realize that I let you do it to please you?’ ‘Of course,’ he laughed, ‘I simply adore being saddled by you. Pity you had no spurs, it could have been so much nicer.’49 But Christine responded by sulking rather than smiling; even their sparring could not distract her from their imminent return to the comparative safety and routine of Budapest. ‘I feel my holiday is over’, she sighed.50 The next day they boarded an express train for the capital. In the carriage Christine brushed her hair, smoothed her eyebrows and painted her lips crimson, but her mood was still morose. It was only when they reached their destination and Wladimir told her he had nowhere to stay that she suddenly brightened.

  5: A STRING OF ARRESTS

  When Christine and Wladimir arrived at her flat on Budapest’s Derék Utca, the door was opened by Józef Radziminski. Christine’s hasty explanation that he was simply a journalist colleague using the flat while she was away was somewhat undermined when, having sullenly packed his bags, Radziminski kissed her on the mouth, ‘as though taking his due’, Wladimir later wrote resentfully.1 Christine then bundled Radziminski out, pointedly making him promise not to tell anyone she was back. Dodging any difficult questions, she then ushered Wladimir into the bath, before taking him out for dinner where, he noted, ‘she ordered wine with the assurance of someone who knows best’.2 Back at the flat she emerged from the bathroom in a la
cy negligee and took him to bed. In the middle of the night the phone rang. Wladimir listened as Christine whispered, ‘Oh, it’s you darling…’ When he asked what was going on, she only answered angrily, ‘Radziminski, the pig. It is all his fault.’3 Some uneasy months followed.

  It did not take long for Wladimir and Andrzej to work out what was going on, but both were keen to make their own excuses. Wladimir respected but also pitied Andrzej, the ‘wounded soldier’, but he underestimated his bond with Christine.4 He assumed that her inability to break with Andrzej stemmed from pity. Christine encouraged this belief, once rather cruelly questioning how anyone could make love to a one-legged man. Wladimir refused to have an affair with Christine under Andrzej’s nose, but neither could he let her go. He swore he did not love her, but also swore that he would do anything for her. Andrzej, meanwhile, understood the intensity of relationships formed in the face of extreme danger, but he remained confident that his relationship with Christine, based as it was on more than just a shared taste for risk, would endure. To Andrzej, Wladimir was a pest, deluding himself that the heat of the moment was anything greater. Christine, selfishly abandoning herself to the thrill of living life on the edge, saw Andrzej while he was in Budapest, but when he was smuggling Polish internees to safety in Yugoslavia she would meet Wladimir, ‘shut his mouth with kisses’, and assure him that they would resume their affair on their next trip to Poland.5 Often, though, the three of them would go out together, Wladimir burning with jealousy when he saw Christine in Andrzej’s arms. ‘Red wine covered my eyes’, he wrote rather sentimentally in his journal after a long evening that had ended with him ranting impotently at ‘the same stars that saw our kisses’.6

  If this was not enough, Christine’s husband, Jerzy Giżycki, who was still in France, writing news and propaganda for the British, now started pressing for news of his wife, in the hope of a reunion. Christine had been keeping in touch with him, both through Section D and directly, but at the start of April 1940 Jerzy was ‘seriously worried’ that he had not heard from her for some time.7 Section D replied explaining, with wartime delicacy, that Christine was ‘in your own country, visiting her relatives, consequently it is not very easy for her to write to you as you will understand’.8 Their letter crossed with one from Christine, though it seems that hers was just as delicate, since Jerzy reported that it had put his mind at ease. But soon he grew anxious again. Christine had been recalled to London, and should have been travelling through Paris, where Jerzy hoped to meet her, but by mid-May, France was at imminent risk of military and political collapse, and Christine’s plans had to be postponed. She was stuck in Budapest. ‘Hard luck for me’, Jerzy wrote, seemingly unconcerned about any danger he might be facing; ‘I just hope she does not get into any serious trouble.’9