A espia que veio do frio: Christine Granville, alias Willing (book review)

Through Enemy Lines‘The Spy Who Loved,’ by Clare Mullen

By BEN MACINTYRE

THE SPY WHO LOVED

The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

By Clare Mulley

Illustrated. 426 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99

The New York Times Review of Books, July 19, 2013

Christine Granville was one of the bravest, toughest and strangest secret agents of World War II. Her feats of derring-do included acting as a courier in Nazi-occupied Europe, parachuting into France in support of the Allied invasion and rescuing three of her comrades from certain execution. She was said to be Winston Churchill’s favorite spy — a considerable accolade given how much Britain’s wartime prime minister liked spies. She may have been the model for Vesper Lynd, the female agent in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale.” She won medals for bravery from both Britain and France. Men found her irresistible, and she did very little to resist them.

Keystone/Getty Images 

Christine Granville, circa 1950.

Yet this woman, so ripe for Hollywood hagiography, is almost unknown today. Her obscurity is the consequence of her gender (spy history is notoriously sexist), her nationality (she was Polish, and Communist Poland did not encourage praise of British spies) and above all her character. She was a complex and mysterious individual. She survived the war only to be murdered by an obsessed former lover in the lobby of a London hotel. As Clare Mulley reveals in her admirable and overdue biography, “The Spy Who Loved,” Granville was not a straightforward personality, and all the more fascinating for that.

Born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, the daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and a wealthy Jewish heiress, she enjoyed a comfortable, uneventful and spoiled upbringing. Indeed, her main achievement before the war was to be a runner-up in the 1930 Miss Poland beauty contest. War changed her utterly.

She was in South Africa, the wife of a Polish diplomat, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. She immediately headed for London, presented herself to the British secret service and offered to ski over the Carpathian Mountains into Poland in order 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.”

She was duly recruited into Section D, which would evolve into the fabled Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), the sabotage, subversion and espionage unit established by Churchill to operate behind enemy lines and “set Europe ablaze.” She adopted the name Christine Granville, received a British passport and shaved several years off her real age on official forms — self-reinvention was part of her makeup, as it is of many spies. The British gave her the code name “Willing,” an apt reflection of her attitude toward sex as well as her readiness to embrace extreme peril.

Deployed to Hungary, Granville spent the first part of her war ferrying messages and people in and out of Poland. She crossed the mountains between Hungary and Poland no fewer than six times, bringing out Polish resisters and soldiers who would go on to fight for the Allied cause. She was usually accompanied by Andrzej Kowerski, a one-legged Polish patriot who would become her most enduring (and long-suffering) lover.

The stories of her exceptional sang-froid come thick and fast: skiing 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, and thus convincing her captors that she was ill with tuberculosis.

According to one account, she could even charm her way around 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.” Such tales, as Mulley observes, are “the stuff of legend,” and she is too good a historian to take them entirely at face value. Granville was an expert at her own mythologizing, telling her stories of pacifying enemy dogs “right and left, to whoever was willing to listen.”

Along the way, she picked up lovers at astonishing speed, and dropped them just as fast. Sometimes, they took rejection badly. One hilarious British intelligence report describes how Granville’s “attractiveness appeared to be causing some difficulty in Budapest.” One spurned lover had gone to her flat and threatened to shoot himself “in his genital organs.” He missed, and shot himself in the foot.

Granville was “politically naïve”: “An opportunist, keen on action, who fell in with whichever personal contact would give her an assignment to work for the freedom of her country.” Her patriotism was whole-souled, ferocious and probably the only uncomplicated thing about her.

In 1944, she was parachuted into southern France to aid Francis Cammaerts, the celebrated (and married) S.O.E. agent who became, inevitably, her lover. She carried vital messages and matériel between resistance groups; she addressed Polish conscripts in the German Army, urging them to change sides; she carried a razor-sharp commando knife and a cyanide tablet sewn into the hem of her skirt.

Her crowning achievement was to spring Cammaerts and two other captured agents from the Gestapo jail where they were awaiting execution. She 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 swift and lethal reprisal from the advancing Allies. The Frenchman saw the force of this argument, and escaped along with his prisoners.

Granville’s postwar life was as grim and bleak as her war had been vivid and exhilarating. Dismissed from S.O.E., she was, like so many other exiled Poles, unable to return to a homeland now under Communist rule. She found work as a telephone operator, a sales assistant and finally a stewardess on a shipping line. Britain’s failure to support a woman who had risked her life so many times was shameful, but in truth Granville was fickle, demanding and virtually unemployable, at least in the way she wanted to be employed. She did not want to be a typist, a wife or a mother; she wanted to be a spy.

Mulley — the author of “The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children” — makes excellent use of newly released archive material, the voluminous secondary sources and interviews with former colleagues, friends and lovers. But there is an unavoidable gap at the heart of this book, and that is the missing voice of Christine Granville herself. Only 11 of her letters seem to have survived. She never wrote an account of her exploits or described her own feelings. On the rare occasions that we do hear her voice, it is in fractured English that comes as a jolt: “Tell them that I am honest and clean Polish girl. . . . I like to jump out of a plane even every day.”

Granville’s story is told, inevitably, through the eyes of others, principally men, who tended to project onto her the fantasy of what they wanted to see. Of no man is this truer than the one who killed her: Dennis Muldowney, an unstable and infatuated ship’s steward unable to cope with Granville’s rejection after a brief affair. Muldowney stalked her, and then stabbed her in the heart in June 1952. He was condemned to death, and went to the gallows proclaiming he was “still very much in love” with the unsung heroine he had killed.

Ben Macintyre is the author of “Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies.”