Christine Granville-The Beauty Queen Who Became Churchill’s Favourite Spy: Kieran Corcoran See the wonderful photos at the site
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2416030/Christine-Granville-Britains-female-special-agent-paved-way-liberation-France.html
She was the deadly special agent who charged headlong into occupied territory to fight for her country and the Jewish mother who was killed in a concentration camp.
Christine Granville – the favourite spy of Winston Churchill – worked for years undermining the Nazi regime despite having a short life expectancy in the field.
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville by Clare Mulley (Jun 11, 2013)
She famously always kept a knife strapped to her thigh, so that she was ready for action at any time.
Christine, a native of Poland who was born Krystyna Skarbek, volunteered in 1939 after her homeland fell to the Nazis.
She was enrolled in what was then known as ‘Section D’ – short for destruction – which would later become the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which undertook espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage missions in occupied territory.
The fledgling spy was given the cover name Christine Granville, which she adopted permanently after the war.
She was sent first on missions between Hungary – then neutral – and occupied Poland, where she proved her mettle as an intelligence courier, skiing by night to dodge border patrols in temperatures of -30 Celsius.
But as well as her feats of physical daring, Christine showed a huge amount of bravado and cunning in the face of the enemy, wriggling out of the most impossible situations.
On one occasion she tricked a Gestapo officer into carrying British propaganda into Poland for her, by pretending the contraband package was tea bought for her sick mother on the black market – and smiling so beguilingly he unquestioningly helped her smuggle it across.
In another, more terrifying, ordeal she and a Polish army officer, Andrzej Kowerski, had been caught by Gestapo and faced torture and death if they were proved to be enemy agents.
She managed to win both their freedoms by biting her tongue so hard that it bled, then pretending to cough up the blood, which convinced her captors she and her accomplice were sick with tuberculosis.
The terrified Gestapo officers released both of them to avoid the devastating disease.
But perhaps her greatest exploit, revealed by the papers filed away in the Imperial War Museum, came shortly before the Allies made their final push into France in 1944.
Christine, fluent in French, had been dispatched to help co-ordinate the resistance effort in the south of France ahead of the allied invasion.
She had risen to be the second-in-command to Francis Cammaerts, a rising star in the SOE who was in charge of British liaison with resistance cells in the area.
Christine – a characteristically passionate woman who had many lovers – had also fallen for Cammaerts as they fought the Nazis together.
However, a confidential report filed by Christine, and hidden away for years, reveals how all their efforts could have come to nothing were it not for a brazen rescue attempt she made when her lover was almost executed.
Cammaerts was captured along with two colleagues when an uncharacteristically vigilant guard search their belongings at a checkpoint – and found that their banknotes had consecutive serial numbers, which blew apart the cover story that they didn’t know each other.
He and his companions were immediately arrested, and although they did not know what a valuable asset to the resistance they had come across, it made little difference as the official order at the time was that anybody suspected of being an enemy agent would be executed without trial.
When news was relayed to Christine, she begged local Resistance members to mount a rescue attempt to bust the men out of prison by force.
Recognising it as a suicide mission, Resistance leaders said that it was too risky and that the men would have to be abandoned.
But Christine had already resolved to save them and hatched her own, incredibly reckless plan.
Completely alone, she stormed into the office of the captain of the guards at the prison at which the men were being held, and revealed herself as British agent.
She claimed that the Allied invasion was imminent and that the nearby town of Digne was a prime target which would be bombed – a claim she later described as ‘a stab in the dark’. She told the man that the only way he could save himself from a horrible death at the hands of the liberated French was to hand over the prisoners and earn himself a pardon.
Christine was a highly-trained combatant who was deadly with her pistol (left) but preferred silent killing, with her ever-present knife (right) or even bare hands
By an incredible stroke of luck, both of Christine’s predictions turned out to be true, which utterly terrified the guard she had spoken to, who arranged for her to meet with his superior – a Gestapo officer. By this time Cammaerts was due to be executed that night.
The Gestapo officer – referred to by Christine as Waem – had his gun trained on her from the start, but was eventually won over by her mixture of charm and brazen lies.
Christine, who pretended Cammaerts was her husband, also claimed to be the niece of General Montgomery and a British aristocrat, and therefore somebody with tremendous political power.
She told Waem that he was in danger of a horrible death at the hands of a French mob when the Allies came, as they knew he was the head of the Gestapo in the area, and chief torturer.
In a three-hour conversation, Christine convinced him that the only way to save his own skin was to free the men – who she identified as vital parts of the British war effort – and so avert an all-out attack on the village by the Allies to free them.
Astonishingly, the gambit worked, and after he had been given several assurances, and a hefty bribe, the man arranged to release Cammaerts and his companions, who went on to be key players in the liberation of France.
It’s bravado such as this which fuels rumours that Christine may have been the blueprint for the original Bond girl in Ian Fleming’s iconic spy series.
Christine became world news when she died in a West London Hotel in 1952 – killed by a single thrust of the knife by a jealous, jilted lover. Her killer, George Muldowney, was hanged for his crimes, which helped elevate Christine into a legend.
Just one year later, Fleming published Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel. With it came the first Bond girl – a dark-haired and enigmatic European beauty named Vesper Lynd.
Though rumours abound that he and Christine were lovers, there is no evidence the two ever even met. But it is clear that Fleming knew of Christine’s exploits in the war, and held her in incredible esteem.
In a series of interviews in the U.S. ahead of Casino Royale’s publication, Fleming speaks at length about Christine – the only female agent he mentions – suggesting heavily that she was the prototype who would define the our ideas of the female special agent forever.
But, as those images of the smiling young woman, even in the midst of an invasion, show, there is a tender side to Christine, who still had fears and vulnerabilities despite her huge bravery.
Clare Mulley, who wrote a biography of Christine called The Spy Who Loved, says the images are a revealing window into her life.
After her sudden death, Christine was buried at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, London
She said: ‘Christine had a certain vulnerability to her. She could be incredibly tough and had this amazing, blunt courage, and would train with the men and ensure she was as tough as any man.
‘But she is fairly vulnerable and she does fall in love. My book’s called The Spy Who Loved because she loved freedom in its biggest sense – she loves adrenalin and adventures, she loved men – she had numerous lovers and two husbands.
‘But most of all she loved freedom, both for her country and for herself personally, and they’re very intertwined.
‘But she found rejection painful – she would get very exhausted and sit down and cry under trees and have to be shouted at to move on. It’s all too easy to see her as this very tough, man-devouring woman.
‘She was told she had a life expectancy of six weeks – you’re not going to want to waste time, you’re going to live your life to the full in that time – but it doesn’t mean she didn’t have a vulnerable side to her.’
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