The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of one of Britain's bravest wartime heroines

Product Information

Skarbek arrived in the midst of a large operation headed by British major Desmond Longe of supplying by parachute the local maquis with arms and supplies.

Christine Granville was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in London a few days after her death, leaving behind a great legacy. Posing as a powerful British official, she persuaded the captors that a British invasion was imminent and they would meet a horrible death if they executed Cammaerts and the others. According to Larecki, her true birthplace was the home of her Goldfeder grandparents at ulica Zielna 45 in Warsaw.

Somehow, the ruse worked – with the help of a 2 million franc bribe and Granville’s charm – and the agents walked free. The story of Skarbeks's bribe is fictionalised in the last episode of the television series Wish Me Luck. Skarbek managed to meet with Captain Albert Schenck, an Alsatian who acted as liaison officer between the local French prefecture and the Gestapo. It has been alleged that her father's branch of the Skarbek family had not obtained confirmation of the title of count in the 19th century from the Russian Imperial court.

She made contact with two prominent leaders of the French Resistance, Gilbert Galletti and Paul Hérault (soon to be killed by the Germans), and greeted the arrival of an "Operation Toplink" team which included her friends John Roper, Paddy O'Regan, and Harvard Gunn. After the physical hardship and mental strain she had suffered for six years in our service, she needed, probably more than any other agent we had employed, security for life. In Budapest, in January 1941, she showed her penchant for stratagem when she and Kowerski were arrested by the Hungarian police and imprisoned and questioned by the Gestapo. Amongst her many adventures she took the surrender of a German garrison persuading the polish conscripts there to join her; she tamed a man-hunting German soldier’s Alsatian dog which also switched sides under her spell and wouldn’t leave her side; perhaps most famously she marched into the Gestapo headquarters alone, despite the enormous bounty on her head and demanded the release of Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding who had been captured and were due to be executed that afternoon.She could not count on the support of her second husband, whom she had divorced in mid-1946, and her relationship with Kowerski was also on the rocks. This section was only set up in the wake of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, partly with staff from London (F Section) and partly with staff from Cairo (MO.