Churchill’s Favourite Spy

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The wife of a Polish diplomat, Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek headed for London when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. She presented herself to the British secret service and offered to ski over the Carpathian Mountains into Poland to take British propaganda into Nazi-occupied Warsaw. “She is absolutely fearless,” a secret service report noted, a “flaming Polish patriot, . . . expert skier, and great adventuress.”

The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and a wealthy Jewish heiress, Skarbek enjoyed a comfortable, uneventful, and privileged upbringing. Although her main achievement before the war was to be a runner-up in 1930’s Miss Poland beauty contest, war changed her.

She was recruited into Section D, which would become the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.)—the sabotage, subversion, and espionage unit established by Churchill to operate behind enemy lines. She took the name Christine Granville, received a British passport, and shaved years off her real age on official forms. As in the case of many spies, self-reinvention came naturally to her. The British gave her the code name “Willing,” a reflection of her attitude toward sex as well as her readiness to embrace danger.
Deployed to Hungary, Granville spent the first part of the war ferrying messages and people in and out of Poland. She carried vital messages and matériel between resistance groups and addressed Polish conscripts in the German Army, urging them to change sides. She crossed the mountains between Hungary and Poland at least six times, bringing out Polish resisters and soldiers to fight for the Allied cause. She was usually accompanied by Andrzej Kowerski, a one-legged Polish patriot who became her most enduring lover. She also skied past the corpses of refugees frozen to death in the mountains, bribing guards, dodging bullets from a Luftwaffe plane on an open hillside and escaping from the Gestapo by biting her own tongue, spitting blood. She thus convinced her captors that she had tuberculosis.
According to one account, she also charmed animals: when a vicious Alsatian dog trained to bite and break necks found her hiding under a bush with some partisans, she placed her arm around it, and it lay down beside her, ignoring its handler’s whistles. But Granville engaged in her own mythologizing, so such accounts must be viewed with a grain of salt. Politically naïve, Granville was an opportunist, who curried the favor of whichever contacts would give her an assignment to work for the freedom of her country. 
Her crowning achievement took place in 1944, when she parachuted into southern France to aid Francis Cammaerts, the celebrated S.O.E. agent. He and two other captured agents sat in a Gestapo jail awaiting execution. Granville bribed her way into the prison, claiming to be General Montgomery’s niece, and informed the French collaborator in command that if the executions went ahead, he would face lethal reprisal from the advancing Allies. Seeing her point, the collaborator escaped along with his prisoners.
One of the bravest, toughest, and strangest spies of the war, she carried a razor-sharp commando knife and a cyanide tablet sewn into the hem of her skirt. Said to be Winston Churchill’s favorite spy, she may have been the model for Vesper Lynd, the female agent in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. 
Men found her irresistible, and she took lovers at astonishing speed, dropping them just as fast. One spurned lover went to her flat and threatened to shoot himself in the crotch. He missed and hit his foot.
When dismissed from S.O.E., she was, like so many other exiled Poles, unable to return to a homeland now under Communist rule. She gained British citizenship and worked as a telephone operator, a sales assistant, and finally, a stewardess on a shipping line. Though Britain’s failure to support a woman who had risked her life so many times was shameful, Granville did not want to be a typist, a wife, or a mother; she wanted to be a spy.
Because of her gender, nationality, and complex and mysterious character, Granville is almost unknown today. Yet she won medals for bravery from both Britain and France. Only eleven of her letters seem to have survived. She never wrote about her exploits or described her own feelings. In 2014, Author Clare Mulley wrote The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, an account of her life.
An unstable and infatuated ship’s steward, Dennis Muldowney, unable to cope with Granville’s rejection after a brief affair, stalked her and then stabbed her in the heart in June 1952 in London. He was condemned to death and went to the gallows proclaiming he still loved her.

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