History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Christine Granville: The Spy Who Skied In From The Cold

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You're about to listen to brand new History's Secret Heroes.

Episodes will be released on Mondays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now before anyone else.

First on BBC Sounds.

December 1939, St.

James's, London, the headquarters of the British Secret Service.

George Taylor was told that a member of the public had just stormed into the foyer.

She wanted to speak to a senior agent.

She is banging on the door and not so much volunteering as demanding to be taken on.

Reluctantly, Taylor agreed to see her.

He rounded up some colleagues.

The doors swung open to reveal a young woman of extraordinary charisma.

And you can just imagine the look on those men's faces.

In his notes, Taylor described a very smart-looking girl, simply dressed.

Her name was Countess Kristina Skarbeck.

She's a Polish national.

And the first thing you have to be to work for the British Secrets Intelligence Services is actually a British national.

So she's disqualified immediately.

Yet Taylor was intrigued.

They ask her a bit about herself.

She's got good English, but with a strong French accent.

Perfect French.

Speaks a bit of German.

She's got Jewish heritage.

Her mother had been born Jewish.

Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for three months.

Skarbeck knew how desperate the Allies were to find out what was happening inside Poland, the first country occupied by the Nazis.

They wanted troop numbers, locations, clues as to what Adolf Hitler might be planning next.

The British had some contacts inside Poland.

The problem is they had no way of being in touch with them.

They had no communications.

Skarbeck already had a plan to infiltrate Poland and gather intelligence.

What she was offering to do was to ski in in the first winter of the war, skiing over the high Carpathian mountains in minus 40 degrees.

Taylor's eyebrows rose.

A foreigner who had just minutes ago walked in off the street offering to ski over dangerous mountains.

Someone with Jewish heritage prepared to venture into Nazi-occupied Poland?

Above all, in Taylor's mind, a woman blithely taking on a man's job.

It was a suicide mission.

But Skarbeck demanded to be taken seriously.

She knows the right contacts.

She's an aristocrat.

She's got connections all over the country, people that will help her support her and trust her.

And she knows how to get in and out of Poland under the radar.

Before the war, she did a lot of skiing, leaving the menfolk far behind.

And when she got bored of that, she used to smuggle cigarettes across the border, across the mountains.

She was just doing it for the thrill, just for kicks.

To Taylor and his colleagues, this woman was a revelation.

The assistants could hardly jot down notes quickly enough.

They say she's a flaming Polish patriot, an expert skier and a great adventuress, as well as being absolutely fearless.

And one of those men had scribbled in the margin in pencil, she absolutely terrifies me.

By the end of the short meeting, Taylor knew he could not let this prize slip through his fingers.

Scarbeck was recruited as Britain's first female spy in World War II, assuming the English name Christine Granville.

She would inspire admiration, love, and obsession.

Her work would change the course of the war.

I'm Helena Boncarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage from World War II.

Christine Granville, the spy who skied in from the cold.

Three months earlier, Poland.

The summer of 1939 was a wonderfully hot summer.

Claire Malley is the author of The Spy Who Loved, a biography of Christine Granville.

The corn was ripening in the fields, there were blue flowers everywhere, and although there were clear tensions in Europe, war wasn't anticipated.

Twenty years earlier, Poland had won its independence from the Russian Empire.

Now it was enjoying peace.

But on the first day of September that year, Nazi forces invaded.

These are today's main events.

Germany has invaded Poland and has bombed many times.

General mobilization has been ordered in Britain and France.

Parliament was summoned for six o'clock this evening.

Orders completing the mobilization of the Navy, Army and Air Force were signed by the King at a meeting this afternoon of the Privy Council.

Details will be given later in this news.

They were using the Stucker dive bomber, they had their tanks, they were very highly mechanised and they they made very fast progress.

It was a great shock to the Polish nation.

Just 17 days after the Nazi-German invasion, the Soviets invaded the border on the east.

The Poles are facing war on two fronts simultaneously, and they knew at that point that they wouldn't be able to maintain their nation's independence.

5,000 miles away, a Land Rover sprayed up dust as it drove across dry, rolling plains.

Granville was in South Africa with her second husband, a diplomat.

As news of Hitler's invasion of Poland reached them, they turned the car around.

She was a very deep patriot.

Her response would be absolute horror that just 20 years after her country had fought for and won its freedom, it had been invaded again.

and also horror that she herself wasn't at home and wasn't able to contribute to the defense of her nation.

Granville and her husband boarded a ship sailing to Southampton.

It would be a perilous voyage, dodging German U-boats.

Within two days of arriving in England, Granville had identified the location of the Secret Service, barged in, and had herself recruited as a spy.

Christine Granville's addiction to danger had emerged early in life.

She has always had a slightly naughty streak.

This is Jan Ledokowski, whose father knew Granville.

At school, she went along and decided it would be fun to play with a box of matches and set light to the cassock of a priest whose sermons were rather boring.

Her father was a war veteran, an action man who had rather dissolved into drink.

She was used to a lot of freedom and a lot of adoration, but her father taught her to ride a horse.

One of his horses was called Satan because it had broken the legs of the grooms, it couldn't be trained.

And one day Satan wasn't there in his his stable.

And her father turned around, and there was Christine riding it bareback.

Granville had been brought up in an environment of great privilege.

Her mother had been born Jewish.

She was part of a well-known goldfedder family, a banking family.

And her father was Count Skarbeck.

And Christine became the absolute apple of her father's eye.

You know, he taught how to shoot a gun at an early age.

She was always trying to impress him.

But Granville's idyllic childhood faded into more difficult teenage years.

Her father's heavy drinking became worse.

When he died, it transpired he had squandered the family fortune.

Granville had to find work.

She got a job in a fiat car showroom.

They sold very fast fiat cars and wealthy young Poles would come in and one of them proposed to her and that was her first husband.

Gustav Gettlick made his money in soft furnishings.

He was looking for a wife who would be a good hostess.

And she was looking for freedom and adventure and that includes sexual freedom.

She was a very passionate woman.

After the wedding, Granville continued to party, enter beauty contests and amuse herself by smuggling cigarettes across the mountains.

Unsurprisingly, the marriage lasted less than two years.

As a divorcee, Granville faced some social social stigma, yet she seized her chance to play the field.

She had many lovers.

Men would follow her around.

She called them her lame dogs.

And one day she's out skiing.

The skis they use are these very heavy wooden skis.

There's no metal on it.

There's no neat edges, so they're incredibly hard to control, very heavy.

And she is caught in a blizzard.

and her skis start going off in the wrong direction and she's caught by another man, a very self-possessed man, nearly 50, and he likes what he sees.

She later called him her Svengali.

Diplomat Jerze Gisytski married Granville in November 1938.

The Gisyelskis were a glamorous couple.

They were together in South Africa when war broke out.

Keleti Station, Budapest, Hungary, December 1939.

Thick snow had brought the city to to a standstill.

A French journalist carried her suitcase along the platform.

She struggled through the drifts up the steep hill on the Buddha side of the Danube till finally she reached her apartment.

Carefully she locked the front door behind her before opening the case.

Inside was British propaganda to be taken into occupied Poland.

Weeks after her recruitment by British intelligence, Granville already had a new identity.

She's Madame Marchon, she's meant to be a French journalist, her French is perfect.

Hungary, as yet, is a neutral country.

Large numbers of journalists are convening in Budapest to report on the war.

She's very quickly in contact with members of the Polish resistance.

The Polish resistance was one of the largest national resistance movements in occupied Europe, ultimately involving hundreds of thousands of people.

It was unlikely that its well-organized members would automatically trust an an agent who reported to the British.

Granville's first target was a dashing Polish lieutenant, Anje Koverski.

In a crowded basement of a Budapest bar, this woman approached.

She had dark hair and flaming eyes and a kind of crackling vitality seemed to emanate from her.

They spent the night together.

And in the morning, you know, they were still getting to know each other.

He said, what were her plans?

And she said, oh, I'm going to ski into Nazi occupied territory.

and he's like absolutely not you know he's not going to let this fantastic woman he's just found undertake this perilous journey koverski set granville up with a fellow pole janek maruszas a former olympic skier who he hoped would help her cross the mountains safely marusz agreed to accompany granville on what would be the toughest journey of her life

It would take two weeks of trekking and skiing for them to cross the Tatra Mountains, rising to 2,000 meters above sea level on the border between Slovakia and Poland.

They would face armed enemy troops, deadly blizzards and wolves.

And that first winter was particularly harsh, minus 40 degrees in the mountains, and they said it was enough to freeze the birds on the branches of the trees, which sounds quite romantic.

When Christine went in on that first occasion, she actually skied past the bodies of two people, a man and a woman, who'd been skiing the other way, trying to get out of occupied territory.

and they hadn't been caught by a border patrol.

They hadn't been shot.

They had simply frozen to death.

When Granville had finally crossed the range and was skiing down towards Zakopane in occupied Poland, she felt elated.

A few days later, wearing new clothes and fresh lipstick, she boarded a train to Warsaw.

From her seat, Granville could hear the sounds of boots and voices.

A Gestapo officer entered the carriage and sat next to her.

He was searching bags, but Christine Granville got in ahead of him.

She asked him to carry her package to help her avoid trouble, explaining that it was just a small package of black market tea.

Had the Germans have caught her, you know, she is part Jewish and she is a British special agent.

She would have been shot.

The Gestapo officer took the the package, put it in his suitcase and carried it for her all the way to Warsaw.

I mean, she was incredibly quick-thinking.

She could talk her way in and out of situations.

You know, in the very sexist 1940s, women weren't expected to be doing this stuff, and Nazi Germany certainly early on never conceived that the women were, you know, carrying messages hidden inside their gloves or under potatoes in their bags, or that the women chatting to them in bars and cafes could have an ulterior motive.

Warsaw had been devastated by Nazi bombing three months earlier and was now occupied by the Nazis.

The city's Jewish population, including Granville's own mother, were in great danger.

In the streets of Warsaw, Granville saw Jews harassed, beaten and even shot.

Granville began two months of building a network, delivering propaganda, and working out the German military structures and troop numbers.

She'd have been talking to probably largely other women about how many loaves of bread are you delivering to the barracks?

Who's washing those uniforms and doing the mending?

The women who are entertaining them in the bars and the cafes.

All of these people would have provided that kind of intelligence information that she would have then brought back out.

Granville made three successful trips into Poland along these lines.

Then, in November 1940, she set out on a special mission.

She's being sent in to get a very specific microfilm.

The microfilm contained information on Nazi military installations in Poland, aerodromes and factories, as well as plans for new torpedoes and new boats.

Many Poles had risked their lives to collect this vital information.

By this point, the situation in Poland was desperate.

People were facing serious food shortages.

And she's traveling in with another courier for the Polish resistance, Count Vladimierz Ledohowski.

Ledokhowski became another of Christine's lovers.

My father's life overlapped with Christine's life for two months, but he was specially told that they have to keep their relationship secret because, well, she had a husband, remember, right?

And she was working for the British and he was working for the Polish.

And so they shouldn't have any sort of complications and they should keep the secret.

Jan Ledorkowski's father, like so many men before, fell hopelessly in love with Granville.

Before they set off across the mountains, Count Ledorkowski gave his lover a special gift.

He bought her some glass beads as a present and other bits of jewelry, which she was very appreciative of.

When they arrived in Warsaw, Granville collected the roll of microfilm from her contacts in the Polish resistance.

It was small enough that she could hide it inside her gloves.

Before Granville and Ledorkowski left for Hungary, Granville paid a final visit to her mother in Warsaw.

She tried to persuade her to leave Poland.

Despite all the risk though, and the fact that Jews in Warsaw were then being forced into a ghetto, her mother would not go.

Granville had no choice but to leave her behind.

A year later, at the beginning of 1942, her mother would be rounded up along with other civilians and taken to Paviak prison.

She would never be seen again.

Now though, Granville had to set off for the mountains with Ledokhovsky.

It's very hard territory to go through, torrential rain, and she develops a fever.

And she suggests they follow the branch line of a railway.

But she kept saying, oh, I've hurt my leg.

And their orders were not to use trains, not to go to railway stations, not to go anywhere where the Gestapo were.

And so in the event he gave way and they did take a train, and they got off at the last railway station.

The stationmaster's dog hears them, goes out barking.

He comes out, he's armed.

And unfortunately, his sympathies are with the Nazi Germans.

Well, the stationmaster went to summon the Gestapo.

He left Granville and Erdukhowski with armed guards.

These men, they're going through her bag, going going through her pockets.

So she thinks, right, these men, they're not just motivated by politics or ideology.

They're motivated by greed, and that gives me something.

She remembered the glass necklace under her shirt.

She suddenly sort of

goes hysterical and says, oh dear, oh dear, this is all terrible.

I just can't cope.

And started grabbing at her necklace.

And all the glass beads fell off.

And she said, oh, my diamonds, my diamonds.

So the guards are down on their knees, scrabbling to get these, what they think are diamonds.

Ledohovsky kicks the gun to one side, she gets rid of the torch and they peg it into the forest.

They manage to get to the safety of the trees before the bullets started shredding the leaves above their head.

When they reached Budapest, the Gestapo were everywhere.

Moreover, Granville had developed pneumonia.

Feverish and too weak to stand, She called on her old flame, Lieutenant Andrzej Koverski, but as they caught up.

On the second night, there is a banging on the door.

And within moments, the door has been forced open, and some German officers march in.

Koverski and Granville were taken to the police station, where they were interrogated and beaten in separate cells.

Though she was desperately weak, Granville thought fast.

She decides to make a virtue of her apparent weakness, which is her hacking cough and her temperature.

She bites her own tongue, and not not a little, but repeatedly and hard until her mouth fills with blood.

And then when she coughs during the interrogation, it looks as though she's coughing up blood.

The main symptom of tuberculosis, for which in 1941 there was no cure.

The disease was highly contagious and a death sentence.

And so the Germans throw her out.

And rightly believing that Andrew was her lover, they throw him out as well.

As they stumbled down the street, Granville and Koverski knew they were being followed.

When they reached their flat, they quickly realized the phone was tapped too.

Koversky had a car hidden in a nearby greenhouse and drove out of the country.

By now though, Granville's face was known to the Nazis.

It was too risky for her to travel in the open.

She was smuggled out in the boot of the British ambassador's car.

The microfilm was still safe inside her gloves.

When the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, received the information from this microphone, he was stunned.

What it showed was the massing of tanks and troops on what was then the German side of the German-Soviet wartime border.

The files suggested the Germans were planning an invasion of the Soviet Union.

Few at the time thought this feasible.

Along with other sources, Granville's intelligence led Churchill to make contact with Stalin, giving him advance notice of the major turning point of the war.

This is the BBC Home Forces and Overseas program.

Listeners at home and all over the world are now to hear the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr.

Churchill.

A few months later, in June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a move codenamed Operation Barbarossa.

At four o'clock this morning, Hitler attacked and invaded Russia.

All his usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique.

The Soviet Union joined the Allies to fight Germany.

After the war, there was going to be a film about Christine's life, and this actress, English actress called Sarah Oliver was going to play her.

And she is Winston Churchill's daughter.

And she was asked in an interview, why do you so want to play Christine?

And she said, because in 1941 my father said she was his favourite spy.

It was too dangerous for Granville to keep going back to Poland.

Instead, she was deployed by Special Operations Executive in Cairo, Egypt.

By July 1944, though, with the tide of the war turning, she was ready to serve in occupied France.

The Allied forces are already coming in in the north of the country.

She's parachuted into the south of the country to prepare for D-Day in the south, to push back the Germans into Germany and back towards Berlin.

Granville parachuted in with colleagues from the Special Operations Executive.

Her photograph was being circulated by the Gestapo with a reward offered for the arrest of this notorious spy.

Granville's mission was to disrupt German movements and communications, support sabotage operations, and prepare the ground for the arrival of troops.

But while she's out there, she also undertakes some self-appointed missions that she knows will be of huge value.

She hoped to make the first contact between the French resistance and the Italian partisans on the other side of the Alps.

So she's in the mountains.

She's actually dressed as a local with sandals and a skirt and a headscarf.

Granville walked past a German garrison.

And she realises that a number of the German soldiers at that garrison are either Polish working under duress serving under duress or have Polish heritage.

She spotted an opportunity and later she returned.

She climbs back and this time although she's dressed as a local she carries a megaphone clearly giving away that she's in the resistance and she carries the colours of Poland white and red in a silk scarf.

She climbs up towards the garrison and calls out in Polish.

She announced herself to the German garrison as a Pole working for the Allies.

This was risking death.

And luckily it's the Poles, the soldiers, rather than the German commanders that hear her.

And she has about two hours talking with them, urging with them, giving them the case to serve with the Allies.

She persuaded the Poles that they should sabotage German military installations, desert their posts and join the French resistance.

They agree that in a week's time, they will come down the mountain bringing all the weapons they can carry, the small arms.

They will disable the larger arms, take out the breeze blocks so that they can't be used, and they will join the Allied force.

Granville, single-handedly, secured the defection of an entire Nazi garrison.

Her handler at Special Operations Executive called her the Poles' Avenging Angel.

Granville risked her life again and again for Poland's freedom.

After the war, though, Poland was not free.

It remained under Soviet control.

The Soviets would not welcome a former spy, even one who worked for the Allied cause.

Instead, then, she went to London.

She was single again, alone, and hard up for money.

She takes various different jobs.

She's a hat.

Czech girl at Harrods.

She works as a waitress in various places.

And eventually she ends up becoming a bathroom stewardess, cleaning the toilets on a passenger ship.

One day, the captain of the ship asked if any of the crew who were veterans wanted to wear their medals on board.

A number of servicemen, of course, have got the war medal, but she has got this array of ribbons that any general would be proud of because she served in three theatres.

The war, she's got the army medal, she's got the OBE, the Quad de Guerr, and the George Medal.

And people don't believe her.

In 1956, Ian Fleming wrote what would be the first of his James Bond novels, Casino Royale.

It was thought by some that he had modelled Bond's beloved, dangerous Vesper Lind on Christine Granville.

By the time the book was published though, Granville was dead.

Her brilliant life was cut horribly short in 1952.

In the hallway of a London hotel, a man who'd been stalking her ambushed her and stabbed her to death.

He was apprehended and would later hang for her murder.

Decades later, Christine Granville would be celebrated as a war hero like no other.

In 2020, a blue plaque commemorating her was unveiled at 1 Lexham Gardens, London, her address for the last three years of her life.

She was so

quick-witted, so imaginative.

She was brilliantly skilled with a knife and a rope in her bare hands, but the tool that really distinguishes her was her intelligence.

Next time on history's secret heroes, a group of Native American soldiers use their language to devise a secret code for the allies

can the navajo code help win one of the fiercest battles of the war this is a common thread that i've heard comanches and navajos and other groups say over the years our language was our weapon the unbreakable navajo code

Hello, I'm David Yelland.

And I'm Simon Lewis.

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