On a drab London night in June 1952, a 37-year-old woman crossed the lobby of a cheap hotel and walked toward the last moments of her life. Within minutes she was dead, stabbed in an attack that was no ordinary murder. The victim was Christine Granville, remembered today as Britain's finest female spy.
For five years during the Second World War, she had repeatedly risked her life to arm resistance fighters and carry back intelligence crucial to the defeat of Germany. Beautiful, charismatic, and cunningly intelligent, she is said to have inspired the original Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. What made her a great spy was her willingness to take risks, and that same quality led to her death on a cheap hotel floor.
The old town of Warsaw today offers a glimpse of what life was like in Poland in its heyday in the 1930s. The city was still celebrating its status as the new capital of a country that had only finally achieved independence after the First World War. With pretty cobbled streets and tiered houses, it was quickly becoming one of the most fashionable cities in Europe, a place where people came to enjoy themselves, talk, eat, and have fun.
Despite the turmoil of the Second World War and decades of domination by Communist Russia, the city appears to have survived surprisingly well, until you look closely and realize that it did not. The beautiful buildings are fakes, and even the statues are modern copies. Sixty years ago this most attractive of old cities lay in rubble, obliterated by Nazi bombs, shells, and dynamite. Every house, church, and shop was destroyed.
Since the war, the city has been rebuilt so painstakingly and meticulously that the new old town fools most visitors. In 1980 it even became a world heritage site. It is a project Christine Granville would have approved of, because all her life she showed a talent for reinvention.
Born Krystyna Skarbek in 1915, her mother came from a well-off family that had been settled in Poland for centuries. As a girl, her mother found her quite uncontrollable. Her mother was Jewish, a point that is rarely emphasized but is of considerable importance considering the risks to which she allowed herself to be exposed.
It was her father, however, that the young girl took after and worshipped. An impoverished Polish aristocrat with a deep love for his country and its countryside, Count Jerzy Skarbek taught his daughter to ski, hike, and ride as well as any man. His death when Christine was just 15 years old ignited in her a burning desire to live a life of which he would approve.
Ten years later, she got her chance. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland as a key part of his strategy to create a new German empire. Despite heroic resistance, the Polish army proved no match for the German Panzers. Over 60,000 Polish soldiers were killed and 400,000 were captured.
The fate of Poland was sealed two weeks later when Soviet troops invaded from the east and the country was divided between the Russians and the Nazis. Poland effectively disappeared. The German administrators made a huge effort to remove any kind of intellectual leadership, transporting doctors, lawyers, and other leaders to concentration camps in order to turn the country into a vassal serf state that could be exploited for agricultural purposes and raw materials.
Poles who had money or influence, like Christine, became part of an exodus of professional refugees fleeing from all over Eastern Europe. They made their way to safety first to France and then to England. But it was a somber England that they discovered in the autumn of 1939. The country had already declared war on Germany and was gearing itself up for blackout, blitz, and battle.
Christine got used to the dark and gloomy London streets, especially around the heart of the British government in Whitehall. There she was introduced to officials from British intelligence who were keen to meet Poles who might be persuaded to spy for their country. Christine needed little persuasion. They thought she was ideal spy material.
As a youngster she had been passionate about riding, skiing, and other outdoor pursuits, which in many ways were ideal qualifications to be an agent. She was very courageous and something of a gambler. She typified many of the features recruiters looked for: a passionate patriot, someone with very good language skills, an ability to work alone, and the fitness to survive under potentially grim conditions.
The recruitment of agents in wartime Britain in late 1939 was uncoordinated and haphazard. Spying was not top of the agenda since all eyes were focused directly across the Channel and a possible German invasion. But anybody who wanted to try to sabotage the Nazis and stood the smallest chance of succeeding was encouraged, either officially or through the back door.
Christine convinced one official that she knew what she was doing and was taken on and given an alias as a journalist. Nobody really expected her to succeed. Christine, though, had other ideas. She decided to smuggle propaganda leaflets into Poland that could lift the spirits of the resistance.
All the obvious ways into Poland were blocked apart from the Tatra Mountains, which were so treacherous to cross that the Germans did not even bother to patrol them. Nobody could get into Poland that way. Nobody, that is, apart from Christine. She was purely self-motivated and set it all up herself, with her own affair. No secret service had heard of her.
When the Polish secret service did hear of her, they said it must be a plot and that she could not possibly have done it without German collaboration. That was quite wrong. They had not been sportsmen themselves, and that was the key. Christine was a sportswoman. She had skied mountains so many times in her youth that they were a second home. Soon she was in Poland, and that is where her career as a spy really began.
To go back to Poland in 1940 was very courageous. Within the Warsaw community she was a known person, and the Germans were quite ruthless about removing any kind of resistance. It was very courageous of her to go back because you did not know who had survived, what kind of contacts were safe, or whether you would be recognized by people who were hostile. It was a real jump into the dark, and to do that was in itself a very brave act.
In the city, Christine's life was at risk every moment of the five weeks she was there. The Germans were everywhere. The city was crawling with the Gestapo. And it was not just the enemy that she needed to look out for. The Poland she had known had vanished, and it was now a place of double agents and spies. Even those who had been friends could turn out to be untrustworthy.
Sitting in a cafe in Warsaw one day in February 1940, just before she was due to make the perilous journey back to Hungary, Christine was recognized by an old acquaintance who was surprised to see her in the city. Christine replied that the woman was mistaken and that she had never seen her before. The woman left. Christine's cover was not blown. If it had been, she would have been tortured and then shot. But such risks were part of the job.
Soon Christine was not simply bringing information to the Polish resistance. She also carried contacts and information back to Britain, particularly about the new German weapons being made by Poles forced to work in German ammunition factories. Then she was trusted with the most important piece of information of all.
She was given a precious microfilm shot by Poles of the massive buildup of German tanks and troops on the Russian border. It was the first evidence that Germany was preparing to attack Russia in what became known as Operation Barbarossa, the most vicious and crucial conflict of the entire war. As dawn broke, nearly 200 Axis divisions, more than 2 million men, plunged into a front 2,000 miles long, reaching from the White Sea to the Black Sea. Their aim was the annihilation of the Red Army.
The information Christine smuggled back to the Allies in London gave them vital advance knowledge of the Nazi plans. This alone made her journeys across the mountains worthwhile. She made that crossing six times. There were roadblocks everywhere she went, and anyone without a pass was arrested. Half a dozen other couriers were caught and ended up in the gas chambers. Christine did not just survive. She flourished. It was perhaps the happiest time in her life.
For the next couple of years, Budapest became her base and her home. In 1940, Hungary was still neutral, and the city Christine settled into was a haven for thousands of Poles who could live openly even if they were involved in organizations opposed to the Nazis. It was a mad, dangerous, exciting time. For Christine, danger was a stimulus. It made everything intense and gave her relationships intensity too.
Within a few minutes of meeting you, she could become your best friend. Christine Granville had a large number of admirers. She was very good looking, though not with film star looks, but there was something curiously attractive about her. Everybody who met her wanted to know her better still. She had a reputation that nothing could save her from.
From her teens, Christine made it quite clear she preferred the company of men to women. By the time she was in Budapest, she had been married twice. She was able to develop an instant rapport with any man who took her fancy and became used to collecting stray dogs, young men who worshipped her.
But one of the men who flocked around her was a little different, a little older, and more charismatic. Andrzej Kowerski was a fierce Polish patriot and former officer in the Polish army who had lost a leg in a hunting accident. He fell passionately for her in Budapest and was at first rejected. But slowly she came round. Soon she realized she had met the love of her life. They became very close and spent most of 1942, 1943, and early 1944 together.
Andrzej's disability meant he could not undertake the journeys to Poland. Instead he organized an escape route for refugees and prisoners of war. Krystyna joined in, and soon dozens of Polish officers were making their way to the west through their network, including trained pilots who were desperately needed by the Allies. She made it her job to smuggle people out of Poland.
The secret service told her to do it, but she also knew that the Polish army had been catastrophically defeated and that a lot of officers had survived and that the army was being reconstituted elsewhere. So it was manifestly her duty as a good Pole. So successfully did she do her duty that soon she and Andrzej were at the top of the Gestapo wanted list.
Budapest was becoming as dangerous as Warsaw. As the war progressed, the Nazi grip on Central Europe tightened, even on countries like Hungary that were meant to be independent. The Gestapo piled on the pressure on the Hungarian authorities to crack down on any dissidents. Krystyna was arrested twice, the last time only escaping deportation to Germany and certain death by feigning illness and persuading a Hungarian doctor to say she was about to die. The Gestapo vowed to get revenge.
Soon they got their chance. In late 1940, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and threw its lot in with the Nazis. Now people like Andrzej and Christine were fair game. It was time to leave. With the help of the British ambassador, they escaped in Andrzej's small car, making a perilous journey across Southern Europe and the Middle East to the safety of Cairo.
This was British territory, but hardly a war zone. The North Africa front was hundreds of miles away in the desert, and Cairo was a haven for relaxation and pleasure. Cash nearly exhausted, Christine and Andrzej made their way back to camp. Stockings were a welcome treat after the deprivations of occupied Poland.
But after a few weeks' rest in Egypt, Christine started looking forward to her next assignment for the British. She expected to be back in Europe to continue her work against the Nazis. But her success in Poland now counted against her. When Christine arrived in Cairo, she was regarded with some suspicion for various reasons by the Poles and the British, and she was sidelined.
The Poles told the London Poles that it was impossible that she should move all these people out of Poland without some degree of German connivance. They did their best to hold her at arm's length and warned the British secret service that it should think carefully about employing her, suggesting she must have links to the Germans.
In war-torn Cairo, few British intelligence officers who had met Christine believed any of this. But it was clear that her links with Andrzej had made her known to the Germans, and she was deemed too high risk to go back to Central Europe. She was paid a small pension and ignored.
Being sidelined in Cairo must have been a soul-destroying experience. She was clearly a girl who lived on adrenaline and was a passionate patriot. To be stuck in Cairo, when the war had moved well away from the city, must have been absolutely depressing. For two years, Christine was given absolutely nothing to do. Cairo was enjoyable for a while, but soon the glamour could not disguise an emptiness Christine felt about not being able to do anything for her country.
She was saved by something entirely unexpected. In July 1940, as he surveyed the ruins of occupied Europe, the newly appointed Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, decided a fresh initiative was needed to hit Germany hard where it most hurt, behind its own lines. Britain already had several espionage organizations, but Churchill wanted more. All the raiding, the sabotage, the assassinations, all the dirty tricks of war would now come under a new organization, the Special Operations Executive.
The Special Operations Executive, or SOE, was a clandestine organization set up early in the Second World War by the British. It has been said that Churchill described its task as setting Europe ablaze. What it did was liaise with resistance forces within occupied Europe, and its aim was to target the morale of German troops. The idea was to mount guerrilla attacks on vulnerable points like communications, factories, and other key installations valuable to the Germans.
SOE's task was to coordinate these attacks by supplying ammunition and organizing resistance groups on the ground. One of the important things Churchill and the cabinet felt was that SOE should not be part of the British intelligence fraternity. It should be a separate organization, so it drew on talent right across the board.
In a secret hideaway in the Scottish Highlands, teachers, architects, plumbers, and other assorted oddballs who had been recruited by word of mouth, the only qualification needed being fluency in another language, were taught sabotage and espionage. They were issued with a gun and taught how to fire, not according to military principles, but in a style developed by the Shanghai police. Do not bother to aim, just point and fire, and then fire again.
They were taught how to deal with a sentry: stalk him from behind, strike across the Adam's apple, punch him in the small of the back, and drag him away. Finally, they were given the famous cyanide pill, just in case. They were told almost apologetically about lethal tablets, suicide pills, to be taken only as a last resort.
The first agents were sent into France in 1941. By the end of the war, SOE employed over 13,000 people. Three thousand of them were women, and they were not just secretaries. Many were involved in planning and strategy, and a small select few were working undercover as spies and secret agents.
But early in 1944, SOE had a problem. It was clear that the coming invasion of France required an increased amount of activity on the ground to tie up German troops and stop them amassing in Normandy. The trouble was they could not train agents fast enough. They had agents in training, but these people had to be refined as operatives. They did not have trained agents who could be parachuted into France and literally hit the ground running.
But there was one highly trained agent, fluent in several languages, who had the courage and resourcefulness to survive deep in enemy territory. And all she was doing was kicking her heels in peaceful Cairo. In early 1944, SOE offered Christine Granville a job, but this time not in occupied Poland. It was in a hidden corner of the south of France, the Vercors.
It is a land of rough terrain and high limestone plateau. It is difficult enough getting around now, but 70 years ago these roads were almost impenetrable. Not surprisingly, the occupying Germans found them impossible. So the Vercors became one of the most celebrated strongholds of the French resistance, the Maquis, who used the secret mountain paths, the dense forests, and deep caves and ravines to come and go at will.
It was ideal because the land approaches were narrow roads coming up through gullies and valleys. You could watch and see where the German troops were coming up and potentially ambush them. On the plateau itself there was an open area where you could take deliveries of parachuted supplies. In fact, the Vercors set up its own free republic.
The farther north the Allies moved, the more German resistance stiffened. But the FFI was organizing on a larger scale than ever before. From the farms and towns, French men and women were forming scouting patrols and regular rifle companies. They had self-liberated themselves, and central to this liberation was an Englishman.
Francis Cammaerts was perhaps the most outstanding SOE operative working out of occupied France. Born in London in 1915 to a Belgian father, Cammaerts was a pacifist until the death of his brother produced a change of heart. He volunteered to fight, and his intelligence and fluency in French made him a prime candidate for SOE. Although his height, six foot four, made him hardly an inconspicuous spy.
SOE had a real problem in the south of France. Many of its agents had been caught, betrayed by collaborators. Most had been tortured, and entire networks and circuits had been compromised. The British knew they had to do something drastic. They had to assume that the whole organization built up in the area was blown and send out a new organizer and wireless operator as soon as possible to get the area going again.
Cammaerts was the man chosen. When he was parachuted into France in the autumn of 1942, he soon realized it was far too dangerous to rely on the old contacts. He had to start again and build his own network, one he could absolutely rely upon. He had one very good rule for a head of circuit: never to sleep two nights in the same bed. He kept constantly on the move. And an even better rule: nobody at all knew where he was going to sleep.
He had two circuits in parallel, a fighting circuit and a sleeping circuit. The sleeping circuit was a series of safe houses in which he could go to sleep knowing that nobody would know where he was. From a security point of view, this was an admirable arrangement. He traveled all the time by public transport or by bicycle under the disguise of a sick retired teacher.
As he recalled in an interview a few years before his death in 2006, he once got out of a train at Avignon station and there was a rather heavy control. They were spending a lot of time looking at his papers. He coughed and spluttered, bit his lip, and spat blood on the platform. His papers were returned very quickly and he was sent on his way. He did not say he had TB or anything like that.
By the start of 1944, he had survived far longer than most other SOE agents in France and had set up his own circuit of several thousand French men and women, all involved in sabotage against the Germans. But he had had a serious setback. His Irish assistant had been captured by the Germans and would subsequently die in the gas chambers. Cammaerts needed a replacement urgently. SOE had just the woman.
Christine was given the identity of Pauline Armand, a French noblewoman who had fallen on hard times. Complete with a revolver and cyanide pill, she was parachuted into the Vercors. It is difficult now to appreciate what risks agents like Christine were taking. By 1944, 100 British SOE agents had been captured in France. Almost all were tortured. One method was to immerse them in water until they almost drowned.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, said that British spies should only be allowed to die after they had been tortured to the point of revealing everything they knew. One British spy who was captured by the Germans remembered the experience vividly even 50 years later. He survived, but only just. The beating usually started with a slap in the face and then went on. It was meant to break you physically and morally at the same time. This is what Christine was risking, and she did not give it a moment's thought.
She was exactly what Cammaerts needed. His main job was to recruit people and keep their spirits up, and Christine helped enormously. She exuded a subtle, delicate charm and created a climate of friendship so rapidly that people felt they had known her forever. Her courage, reliability, and appreciation of detail ensured that she was trusted by resistance groups across the south of France, who became not just her allies but her friends.
Her role, though, was not just supportive. One of the fascinating things about Christine was that she realized the German garrisons in occupied France were composed in many cases of former prisoners of war captured on the Eastern Front and then recruited into the German army. They were called Ostbataillon or Ostlegion. These troops had basically joined the German army because otherwise they would not have survived in the prisoner of war camps.
Several people attempted to get the Osttruppen, of whom the Germans had thousands in France, to change sides. A friend in the SAS tried to do what he could with the Russians and Georgians in Brittany without much success. Christine reckoned it was worth putting pressure on them, telling them they had to get out of the German army because they were now on the losing side.
Christine made contact with many Ost battalion troops. She managed to persuade hundreds of them to change sides. In one small village alone, she was responsible for the defection of an entire garrison of conscripted Polish troops from the German army to the Maquis, complete with ammunition, supplies, and German prisoners. And it was not just Poles she worked with, but Serbians, Czechs, Russians, and Italians. Christine became a recruiting officer for many Italian units that had turned against Germany. She made many trips across the Italian border, busy but, according to Cammaerts, always unhurried and unruffled.
She was very useful in another way too. Through her contacts with SOE, she became known for her ability always to be able to deliver the small arms the Maquis needed to make life very difficult indeed for the Germans. What she could not do was deliver any heavy artillery, despite all her requests.
The Maquis kept asking for heavy weapons, and SOE kept failing to provide them for a perfectly sound reason. Heavy weapons could be managed in small numbers, but ammunition supply could not. You might get a dozen rounds in with a gun, which for SAS purposes is useful, but for the purposes of fighting an artillery battle you need shells by the hundreds of tons, which cannot be provided by parachute. Therefore it was an SOE and SAS rule: nothing heavier than a bazooka. It was stern but necessary.
This was never understood at the ground end. The Maquis kept asking for heavy artillery. Christine kept pleading to London for it, but none came. This was not just a pity. It turned out to be a tragedy.
On June 6, 1944, the long-awaited Allied invasion of France began. On the beaches of Normandy, 200,000 troops landed. To coincide with this, resistance groups across France were ordered to engage directly with the Germans to tie up their forces. In Paris, this worked well. The city provided camouflage for the resistance to capture tanks and heavy artillery from a German army that was less interested in fighting than escaping.
But further away from Normandy, the Germans did not give up anywhere near as easily. In the Vercors, they took their revenge. In the small village of Vassieux, there is a cemetery dedicated to the memory of the resistance. Here dozens of young men are buried. Many died on a single day in 1944, the 21st of July. It was a day that would shock the world, one of the last acts in France of Nazi brutality in a brutal war.
Taking his cue from the Normandy landings, the mayor of Vassieux had rashly proclaimed his own town the center of the free Republic of Vercors. For a few days it seemed he might get away with it, and the Vercors would follow Paris and become part of the new free France. Instead, it became the place for the Nazis to strike back in what became known as the Battle of Vercors. Actually, it was not so much a battle. It was a massacre.
The people of the Vercors expected the Allies to parachute in and help them rid themselves of the Germans. What they got instead was the SS. The Germans did not do much about it for a bit, but eventually in July they diverted several thousand men and a squadron of SS glider-borne expert killers and cleaned up the Vercors in ghastly circumstances, raping most of the women and shooting most of the men, wounded included.
The tragic thing is that as the planes flew in, the partisans and resistance workers on the ground saw these planes in the skies and thought the Allies had come. Then the parachutes started to deploy, and they thought these were British parachutists. The gliders came in, and of course they were not. These were German paratroopers and German gliders. The partisans were caught completely off their guard, and there was a level of brutality that was quite appalling in the fighting in the Vercors.
The SS even discovered the resistance's secret hospital in a cave deep in the Vercors forest. The nurses, doctors, and patients who could walk were deported to concentration camps. The rest were shot.
Watching the battle with Francis Cammaerts was Christine. When it was clear that there was no help coming to the resistance and the Vercors could not be held, she and Cammaerts were advised to leave, as they were needed for vital work elsewhere. Cammaerts said to himself that this was an important battle but not a decisive one, and that he had larger responsibilities. He and Christine escaped from the Vercors in a 72-hour march practically without stopping.
Francis went back to his job commanding all resistance forces east of the road. But soon he would need Christine's help again, this time to save his life. For two years Cammaerts had traveled thousands of miles across the occupied south of France without hindrance. Even though there was a price on his head and he was stopped many times by the local police, his disguise held up. Now his luck ran out.
On August 13, 1944, just two days before the Allied invasion of Southern France, he was traveling with two other British agents when he was stopped at a routine roadblock and recognized by an observant policeman. The policeman noticed that he stood six foot four and remembered there was a man of that height high on the wanted list. He told him he must stay there and took him off to prison.
The three men were arrested and held in a small town. They looked likely to be tortured and were certainly going to be shot. But news of their detention spread. When Christine heard about it, she moved fast. She came up with a plan that meant risking her life.
She watched where the Gestapo were holding Cammaerts. Then she approached an officer and confessed she was a British spy. But she said she was the niece of the famous British General Montgomery, and that unless they released Cammaerts and his colleagues, the Germans would be lynched when the Allied troops arrived.
The officer said he would let him out for three million francs plus a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted. She said fine. They shook hands on it. She went back to her wireless operator and turned up the next day with the three million francs, which had been parachuted in by Algiers. The people in Algiers said to themselves that she would not ask for it if she did not need it. That sort of character.
It worked. The prisoners were freed. She saved Francis Cammaerts from execution. He was going to be shot the following morning. He remained profoundly grateful to Christine for the rest of his life.
This extraordinary action summed up Christine's war, which combined exceptional courage with audacious and sometimes foolhardy bravery. In two quite separate and very different war zones, occupied Poland and Vichy-controlled France, she had risked her life to work for the Allies as a spy and saboteur. Compared to most other female agents, who were often quickly caught, Christine evaded capture and never compromised other agents in the field.
Five years of successful opposition against the Nazis well behind their lines earned her a George Medal and the Croix de Guerre. The war ended, and Christine, like many SOE agents, found herself eventually back in a London that was celebrating victory. But the celebrations did not last long as the country faced up to the ravages war had brought.
Soon Christine was out of a job as SOE was wound up. It happened to lots of people. Most people in SOE were anxious to get out, get back to business or politics or whatever. For most agents, the rapid winding up of SOE after the war was absolutely fine. They went back to what they were doing before the war.
But for a few, adjusting to a more humdrum life after the excitements and dangers of spying was not easy. They found civilian life boring, as indeed it was by comparison with what they had been up to. Some could not take it. A few drank themselves to death.
Whiskey was not the answer for Christine, but she found adapting to civilian life in a strange country particularly hard. Spying, after all, was all she had ever done. She could hardly go back to Poland now that it was controlled by the communists. Perhaps one of the most tragic things about Christine was that when the war ended, the British government thanked her for what she had done, gave her a month's pay, and told her she was on her own.
The next few years saw Christine try, and mostly fail, to adapt to life outside. She worked in Harrods. She waited tables. Then she took a job as an ocean liner stewardess. But in 1952 her life took a turn for the better. She was back in touch with the love of her life, Andrzej Kowerski.
Then came the final tragedy. She had always had a talent for attracting men who were quite desperate and needy, her stray dogs. One such stray dog was a young man she met on a ship, whom she befriended mainly because she felt sorry for him. Now, though, Christine's ability to keep herself safe, which had served her so well in the war, deserted her.
This stray dog was not just needy. He was mentally ill. He wanted her all for himself. When she told him she was leaving to join Andrzej in Belgium, he asked to see her. When she refused, he was waiting at her hotel. If he could not have her, nobody could. She died immediately. She was just 37 years old.
The tragic thing is that you live absolutely on the edge, a high-risk life in your twenties, and 10 or 15 years down the line, here you are in early middle age, and you do not expect that some crazy fellow is going to murder you.
In the Catholic Cemetery of St. Mary's in Kensal Green in West London, Christine Granville's modest grave is now a little overgrown and forgotten. But in 1952 she was buried here in a ceremony attended by 200 people, including representatives from the British, French, and Polish governments. Present too were the two men who meant most to her in life, Francis Cammaerts, whose life she had saved, and Andrzej Kowerski, the only man she had really loved.
Andrzej never recovered from Christine's death. When he died, his ashes were placed here in her grave. As a woman agent, Christine is outstanding. She is hugely courageous. But at the end of her career, she was treated very shabbily by the government. In 1945 there was very much a feeling that it was over, that people wanted to get on with ordinary life and not be involved with the aftermath of the war.
Today, however, Christine is remembered and honored. She was one of the most heroic and successful SOE agents of the war, serving the British state longer than any other female agent. Her bravery, brazenness, and intelligence represented everything that SOE sought in its agents. She was Winston Churchill's favorite spy.