During World War II, Sir Winston Churchill declared that Polish countess Maria Skarbek—although later, she became plain Christine Granville—was his favorite spy. She earned this accolade because of her extraordinary courage and achievements as a secret agent in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. The penalty for spying was, of course, execution, usually preceded by torture. Still, somehow, unlike so many Allied intelligence operatives, Skarbek managed to survive the war.
Skarbek’s story reads like the script for an espionage adventure yarn. Indeed, it’s been said that she was the model for Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale. Read on to learn about Skarbek’s extraordinary contribution to the Allied cause during WWII and find out why Churchill was such a fan.
Related: 10 Intriguing Facts about Britain’s Most Notorious WWII Double Agent
10 Wild Child
Table of Contents
Born in the Polish capital, Warsaw, in 1908, Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek’s father was Count Jerzy Skarbek, while her Jewish mother, Stefania, came from a wealthy banking family. Count Skarbek owned an extensive country estate, and Granville enjoyed a privileged childhood. Granville’s biographer Claire Mulley told the BBC that “She’d been brought up used to a lot of freedom and adoration, taught to ride a horse, shoot a shotgun, all that sort of thing.”
To say that Skarbek was a spirited youngster would be something of an understatement. At one point, she was expelled from an exclusive convent school for setting fire to a priest’s cassock during Mass. But Skarbek’s gilded childhood came to an end when her father’s finances collapsed, and he was forced to sell his estate before he died in 1930. She then had no choice but to find a job and began working as a clerk for an automobile business, a job she hated.[1]
9 Marriages and the Invasion of Poland
Not only was the job tedious, but it was even dangerous since the car fumes from the garage below her office badly affected Skarbek’s lungs, leaving scarring. Bizarrely, as we’ll see later, her injury would help to save her life. Told by medics that mountain air would help her condition, Skarbek now spent time at the southern Polish ski resort of Zakopane in the Carpathian Mountains. There, she became close to one Gustav Gettlich, whom she wed, although this marriage only lasted a couple of years.
The countess met her second husband, a diplomat called Jerzy Giżycki, on the pistes of Zakopane, and they married in 1938 despite him being almost 30 years her senior. The two were in Johannesburg, South Africa, when news reached them that the Nazis had brutally invaded the west of their homeland in September 1939, with the Soviets seizing the eastern part of the country. Both fierce patriots, they immediately headed back to Europe, sailing to England. Giżycki went to France to fight with the Allies, but Granville had other ideas about how she could best serve Poland.[2]
8 Becoming a Spy
Mulley described what Skarbek did once she reached London, “She storms off to what’s meant to be the secret headquarters of MI6 [British Military Intelligence]. She doesn’t so much volunteer as demand to be taken on.” This came as something of a shock to the MI6 bosses, who had never before recruited a female agent. But they soon warmed to the idea, impressed by Skarbek’s command of languages and apparent derring-do.
One MI6 officer noted, “She is a very smart-looking girl, simply dressed and aristocratic. She is a flaming Polish patriot, an expert skier, and a great adventuress. She is absolutely fearless herself and certainly makes that impression.” Anxious as they were to find out what was going on in Poland, she was just what the British were looking for. And the countess made no bones about it—she was more than happy to risk her life by infiltrating Poland to gather intelligence.[3]
7 Across the Carpathian Mountains
Skarbek wasted no time in starting her espionage work traveling to Hungary, still a neutral country although friendly with the Nazis at this point, in December 1939. In the Hungarian capital of Budapest, Skarbek linked up with an old friend, Andrzej Kowerski, who, despite fighting bravely with the Polish Army against the Germans, had only one leg. The two made their way from Hungary, across Slovakia, and over the formidable Carpathian peaks to Poland, where Kowerski worked to help British airmen who’d been shot down to make their way back to Britain while Skarbek collected intelligence.
Skarbek uncovered a key piece of intelligence in the shape of a piece of microfilm shot by Polish resistance fighters. The footage recorded the massing of troops and equipment on the border that divided German–occupied Poland from the Soviet sector, strong evidence that Hitler planned to invade Russia. The film found its way to Winston Churchill’s desk, and it was this key piece of intelligence that prompted him to call Skarbek his “favorite spy,” according to his daughter, the actress Sarah Oliver. Churchill was delighted because if Hitler attacked Russia, which he did, the Soviets would join the war on hard-pressed Britain’s side.[4]
6 Fake Tuberculosis
By January 1941, Hungary was allied with the Nazis and Germany, and Gestapo agents operating in the country had their eyes on Skarbek and Kowerski while they were in Budapest. In January, Hungarian police arrested the pair and handed them over to the Gestapo, highlighting the immense risks that the two were taking with their espionage work. But Skarbek hatched a cunning plan that would lead to their release. It involved those scarred lungs that had resulted from her job above a garage.
Showing incredible determination, Skarbek bit into her tongue until it bled. She then coughed and claimed the blood that appeared was a symptom of tuberculosis, a disease that terrified people in the 1940s. A chest X-ray showed the scars she’d had for years, seemingly confirming the diagnosis. Deciding that these prisoners were much more trouble than they were worth, the nervous Germans released both of them.[5]
5 Escape from Hungary
The British spymasters knew they had to get Skarbek and Kowerski out of Hungary as quickly as possible. They issued the pair with British passports, and that was when Krystyna Skarbek became Christine Granville, the name she’d use for the rest of her life. In typically cavalier fashion, she also took the opportunity to become seven years younger. Skarbek and Kowerski, now Andrew Kennedy, were spirited out of Hungary and eventually landed in Cairo in British-occupied Egypt.
They were not met with a universally warm welcome in Egypt. Some of the British suspected the two of being double agents working for the Germans. But by 1943, MI6 had discounted these groundless suspicions, and after intensive training, Skarbek was parachuted into German-occupied France in May 1944. There, she joined a large French Resistance formation led by Francis Cammaerts and based on the Vercors Plateau. Soon after Skarbek arrived, the Nazis mounted a well-organized attack on Vercors, from which Cammaerts and Skarbek only escaped by the skin of their teeth. [6]
4 High in the Alps
Now operating in the region of the French-Italian border, Skarbek pulled off one of her major coups against the Nazis. A fortified base high in the Alps at Col de Larche was manned by Polish conscripts commanded by just a handful of German officers. Learning about this base and its Polish contingent, Skarbek hatched another of her daring schemes. As so often, she seemed to have been entirely undeterred by the risks she would take.
After two days of arduous trekking through the mountains, GrSkarbekanville reached the remote Col de Larche. Approaching the fort, she made contact with the Polish soldiers and, able to speak to them in their own language, explained to them that the Allies had already landed in northern France with a second landing in the south of the country coming soon. It would not be long, Skarbek told the Poles, before Hitler’s Nazis were utterly routed.[7]
3 A Polish Mutiny
Using all of her charm and her formidable powers of persuasion, Skarbek convinced these reluctant Polish soldiers to mutiny against their Nazi masters. They deserted their posts, taking their weapons with them, and went over to the French resistance. With Skarbek encouraging them, the Poles actually blew up the road that led through the Col de Larche pass, denying its use by the Germans as a route to send reinforcements to counter Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing on southern France’s Mediterranean coast.
But a most unwelcome development came hot on the heels of this spectacular coup. The French resistance leader Cammaerts and two agents of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) were stopped at a German roadblock as they drove through rural France. The Germans searched them and, finding a large sum of money, correctly surmised that they were Resistance members and arrested them. The three were imprisoned at the Gestapo HQ in the city of Digne and sentenced to death.[8]
2 An Audacious Rescue
On hearing this devastating news, Skarbek cooked up another of her incredibly daring plans. She would spring Cammaerts and the SOE men from the Gestapo prison where they languished. At first, she tried to persuade other Resistance fighters to storm the jail, but they refused on the grounds that it would be a doomed mission. So Skarbek came up with another scheme. Unlikely as it sounded, she said she would simply persuade the Germans to release Cammaerts and the other two.
Making her way to Digne by bicycle, Skarbek contacted the Gestapo in the town. They could have simply arrested and shot her. However, by sheer force of personality and a certain amount of subterfuge, she got their attention. She was, she falsely claimed, Cammaerts’ wife, and what was more, she was the niece of the leading British Army commander, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. She admitted that the men held by the Nazis were senior British agents. But if any harm came to them, the Germans would pay with their lives when the invading British and Americans arrived. Astonishingly, all three men were released.[9]
1 After the War
With the end of WWII in Europe in May 1945, Skarbek chose not to return to Poland, which was now controlled by a Soviet-supported Communist regime. Shamefully, the British authorities, although awarding her the prestigious George Medal, largely left Skarbek to survive on her own. She was forced to take on a range of menial jobs, such as waitress, telephonist, and shop worker.
In 1950, she took a job as a stewardess on a cruise ship. It was during her first voyage that she met a man called Dennis Muldowney. Skarbek was by then divorced from George Giżycki. She struck up a relationship with Downey. But she soon tired of him and eventually told him bluntly to leave her alone.
In June 1952, Granville was living at the Shelbourne Hotel in London’s Kensington when Muldowney called on her despite her rejection of him. Skarbek met him in the lobby, and Muldowney stabbed her in the heart, killing her. She was just 44. It was a grim and ill-deserved end for this extravagantly heroic woman, Churchill’s favorite spy. Muldowney was convicted of murder and hung.[10]