The Other Agents — Krystyna Skarbek (Christine Granville) - Article

Saturday, June 15, 2002

by Dr David Stafford

Forget Charlotte Gray, this woman was one of Britain’s bravest women secret agents. Her brilliance as a spy was matched only by her voracious appetite for life - including a ménage a trios.

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Fifty years ago today, one of Britain’s bravest wartime women secret agents was found murdered in a London hotel. Christine Granville (who was born a Polish countess) had been awarded the George Medal for her undercover work against the Gestapo. She had revelled in the world of espionage with its heroism and sexual freedom but then never managed to adapt properly to civilian life...

The startled gendarme well-known as the local liaison officer with the Gestapo, could hardly believe his ears. ‘I’m a British agent and the niece of Field-Marshal Montgomery,’ declared the slim, raven-haired young woman.

It was August 1944 In Digne, a spa town In the foothills of the southern French Alps. The Americans had just landed on the Mediterranean coast and were poised to head rapidly north towards the town. Allied D-Day forces had finally won victory in Normandy, and within days jubilant crowds in Paris would be celebrating the city’s liberation. The writing was on the wall for the Germans in France.

But still there was plenty to do by way of harassing their efforts to resist the advancing Allies and bring up reinforcements. Agents continually cut the railway line between Lyon and Marseille, and targeted telephone cables, making the Wehrmacht resort to wireless messages that were then intercepted and decoded by the Allies.

‘Your men have arrested three Important Allied agents,’ continued the young woman. ‘One is my husband. If either he or his friends are shot, things will go bad for you; If our men don’t shoot you, the Maquis (French Resistance) surely will.’ During the dark years of Nazi occupation in France, the Gestapo had ruthlessly detained, tortured and eliminated opponents who had blown up railways and factories. They frequently swooped at night, leaving their sinister black Citroen cars in the street with the engines running while they snatched their victims from their beds.

But now the tide was turning, and it was the turn of the Gestapo and their hated collaborators to suffer a fate they could only too well imagine.

One of these was the gendarme —the Gestapo liaison officer called Max Waem. He was a Belgian who acted as an interpreter for the secret police, and he was particularly eager to save his skin.

So that is how he came to meet the young English woman agent that night in a flat. He knew he had the power to release the three Allied agents and in return might be able to guarantee his own safety in the face of defeat.

Alerted to their arrests, the young woman had tried unsuccessfully to organise an attack by the Maquis on the prison. Then, leaping onto a bicycle, she made her way to Digne and posed as an anxious wife Innocently seeking news of her ‘husband’ who, in reality, was the Allied agent and her boss, codenamed ‘Roger’.

For three hours she bargained hard with Max Waem. At first, he cautiously kept her covered with his revolver. But faced with her Irresistible powers of persuasion, he finally struck a remarkable deal.

If she could find two million francs, the Gestapo would free her ‘husband’ and two Mends. In return, Waem would himself be given protection from the Maquis. Later, having returned to her secret base In the hills outside Digne, the Englishwoman sent an urgent radio message to Algiers, the allied headquarters for all clandestine activities in the Mediterranean and southern France, requesting the money be dropped by parachute. Her controllers arranged for the money to be handed over within 24 hours - one of the fastest such drops ever arranged.

But back in town, the captured agents, spending their fourth day in their filthy cell, were unaware that a deal had been achieved. Then Max Waem, wearing his Gestapo uniform and with revolver in hand, suddenly flung open the cell door and marched them out to the front gate of the prison and a waiting Citroen. They all scrambled aboard. In the front sat the composed young woman. ‘Roger’ took the wheel As he drove off at speed, she said simply: ‘It’s worked.’ The next day, the secret agents were back at work with the Resistance. The Allies kept their side of the deal and the Belgian Gestapo man was in turn protected from reprisals.

So who was this brave young woman who took such an extraordinary risk to rescue her fellow agents?

She was not, as she had claimed, a niece of Field-Marshal Montgomery; nor was she married to one of the imprisoned agents. Nor was she called Pauline, the name she was known by in the area. In fact, in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - the top secret agency founded in 1940 by Winston Churchill ‘to set Europe ablaze’ - she was known as Christine Granville. And the man she described as her husband was Francis Cammaerts, the top SOE officer for south-eastern France and one of its outstandingly successful operatives.

Much has been written about the women agents whose work was recently highlighted by the film Charlotte Gray. Women were a minority of SOE agents, but often outperformed the men. Working as messengers or wireless operators, they found it easier to travel around without attracting suspicion, and often showed more adaptability than men.

Some suffered terrible torture and perished in Nazi concentration camps. The rest eventually returned home to take up civilian careers and become wives and mothers. Embracing peace, they got on with their lives.

Christine Grandville’s fate was sadly different. Of all the exceptional women who fought behind enemy lines in World War she remains the most mysterious (not least because she was at the centre of a sexual ménage a trois) - and most tragic. For exactly 50 years ago, on June 15, 1952, she was brutally stabbed to death in a small hotel in Kensington, London.

Her killer was a man she had befriended while sailing as a stewardess on a liner between Southampton and Australia, one of several Jobs she took up in restless years after the war. She had felt sorry for him, and tried to help.

An inadequate loner and obsessive, Dennis Muldowney turned into a pest. She tried several times to shake him but then he finally confronted her at the hotel where she was living, and in a fit of rage he killed her. She was 37 years old.

At his Old Bailey trial, Muldowney pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. On his way to the gallows in Pentonville prison, he uttered the fateful words: ‘To kill Is the final possession.’

A week after her death, Christine was buried at Kensal Green Roman Catholic cemetery. Today a white marble gravestone surmounted by a large cross bears the name Krystyna Skarbek-Granville. For this bravest of women, who won the French Croix de Guerre and both the George Medal and OBE for her exploits with the quintessentially British SOE, was originally a Pole who had been born a Countess.

Poles had reason enough to hate the Nazis after Hitler’s invasion and the savage rule he imposed on their country. But Christine had an additional motive to fight his regime.

Her mother was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Count George Karbek, who was deported from Warsaw early in the war and who was one of the millions murdered in the Holocaust.

Rarely did Christine, who was brought up a Catholic by her father, talk about her Jewish heritage. But she was immensely proud of it. Undoubtedly, It added fuel to her determined hatred of the Nazis and the risks she ran for freedom.

She had been born near Warsaw In 1915 and enjoyed a youth of parties, horse riding and skiing In the fashionable Tatra Mountains resort of Zakopane. After her playboy father finally squandered the family fortune, she made a short-lived marriage, took a quick succession of jobs and then married again to George (Jerzy) Gizycki, a wealthy international adventurer and former gold prospector and cowboy.

The Gizyckis made a glamorous couple Indeed. George was extremely well-connected In the diplomatic world and they travelled extensively through Europe, spending much time in France and Africa.

But with the outbreak of war, they sailed on the first ship available to England. Christine felt that with Winston Churchill In government, Britain was the strongest bastion against Hitler.

She wanted to fight for her country and made contact with Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service, the predecessor to SOE. She was recruited and sent to Budapest, from where she carried out several perilous journeys to Nazi-occupied Poland. Her mission was to spread British propaganda, collect and transmit Intelligence, sabotage equipment, arrange the escape of British POWs, and smuggle in arms and money for use by the Resistance.

Her escapades involved long and arduous treks on foot via occupied Slovakia through the treacherous High Tatra mountains and across closely patrolled frontiers. On one of her trips, she pleaded in vain with her mother to leave the country. She was never to see her again.

On another mission in the spring of 1941, she brought back invaluable microfilm about Hitler’s massing of troops on the Soviet border.

It was while in Budapest that Christine met a fellow Pole named Andrzej Kowerski, who had been awarded the Virtuti Militari (equivalent of the Victoria Cross) during the city’s doomed defence against the Nazis. He had become a Polish Scarlet Pimpernel by creating a one-man escape organisation for fellow Poles.

They soon became lovers, and remained close until her death. His ashes now lie buried alongside her in London. When her husband learnt of their affair, he left for Canada, where he remained after the war and didn’t even return for her funeral.

But neither Christine nor Andrew remained sexually faithful. Briefly they lived in a ménage a trois with another young Polish agent. Others were also deeply smitten by her charms. One even broke his leg while jumping into the frozen Danube after she turned him down.

‘She was no plaster saint,’ remembered Vera Atkins, the legendary SOE intelligence officer who came to know many of the female agents well. ‘She was a vital, healthy, beautiful animal with a great appetite for love and laughter.’

As the Gestapo steadily infiltrated Hungary, Christine and Andrzej, now a recognised couple, were frequently subjected to brutal interrogations by the police, who suspected what they were up to.

Finally, when it was obvious they would soon be arrested, they turned to Sir Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador in Budapest. Sir Owen and his wife, the novelist Ann Bridge, knew them well, and they were quickly issued with British passports.

Indeed, Sir Owen once said of Christine: ‘She was the bravest person I ever knew, the only woman who had a positive nostalgia for danger. She could do anything with dynamite except eat it.’

Christine at this point chose her British name, partly because she liked the sound of It, partly because it matched her married initials. Likewise, Andrzej chose the name Andrew Kennedy, which also reminded him of a distant Irish relation. After being smuggled over the Yugoslav frontier in the boot of a car, they pursued a remarkable odyssey that took them via Istanbul, Syria and Palestine to Cairo.

On the way, they reconnoitred bridges over the rivers Tigris and Euphrates to check their suitability for sabotage if the Germans broke through into the Middle East.

But setbacks soon followed. In Cairo they fell foul of bitter jealousies and personal rivalries among Intelligence factions of the Polish government-in-exile, and were denounced as German agents.

A cautious SOE then refused to employ them, and for over a year they kicked their heels impatiently, waiting for the charges to be dropped.

Christine spent much of the time lounging in the opulent surroundings of the legendary Gezira Sports Club with its gardens, terraces and swimming club.

When suspicions of their loyalty were finally lifted, Christine trained as a wireless operator and learned how to parachute. Andrew became an SOE training Instructor in Palestine.

Finally, on the eve of the American landings on the Riviera, Christine was chosen as the courier for Francis Cammaerts, the top SOE officer In southern France. Taking the name ‘Pauline Armand’, she was dropped in by parachute in July 1944 — the first female agent to be sent into France from Algiers.

She took part in the heroic Vercors uprising, an ill-fated battle launched by the Maquis high up on a rocky plateau outside Grenoble against superior German forces. There were hundreds of casualties, and she only narrowly escaped with her life.

She also persuaded dozens of Poles serving In a nearby German garrison to surrender. As if that were not enough, she then hiked through the mountains to Italy, slipping past road blocks, and made contact with a 2,000-strong group of partisans.

Her rescue of SOE boss Cammaerts was merely the last In a long line of remarkable deeds and amply deserved the George Medal.

The Cammaerts-Armand network went on to keep open the whole Route Napoleon from the Riviera to Grenoble for the advancing Americans. Cammaerts himself was awarded the DSO and named one of his daughters Christine.

After the war, Christine Granville chose to stay in Britain and was granted British nationality, but found postwar life difficult. Occasionally she met Andrew Kennedy, and even made a pilgrimage with him to France to visit her old Resistance comrades. Her old SOE friends tried to help by offering her a variety of jobs, but she proved hard to please.

Eventually Christine took a variety of menial jobs: telephone switchboard operator, Harrods dress seller and finally stewardess on passenger liners. It was on one of these that she met the man who was to kill her.

She found solace within the large Polish emigré community in London, but was not universally welcomed because some felt she had ‘sold out’ to the British. But without her ‘selling out’ to the British, Hitler would have proved much more difficult to defeat.

Dr David Stafford is author of Secret Agent: Britain’s Wartime Secret Service, published by BBC Worldwide.