How the sultry war spy who inspired James Bond’s Vesper Lynd fooled the Gestapo

Flying low over the mountain range that separated Czechoslovakia and wartime Poland, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot aimed his machine-gun fire at the beautiful young woman trekking alone through the treacherous terrain below.

There is no doubt that this was Christine Granville, Winston Churchill’s favorite spy, long suspected of smuggling money, explosives and anti-German propaganda to European resistance fighters.

And now she was finally “trapped like an ant on a tablecloth,” as the pilot who saw her put it.

But they had underestimated her courage—and the fact that she was immune to fear.

As bullets tossed up dirt all around her, Granville – then in her thirties – zigzagged back and forth, playing hide and seek by shielding herself behind rocks and dodging her pursuers for hours until she finally shook them off.

It was not the first – nor would it be the last – time that Granville confused the enemy.

She became the first and longest-serving female special agent to work for Britain during World War II, and was the inspiration behind the character of the sultry spy Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel, Casino Royale, which was published in 1953. published.

Now the extraordinary story of the real Lynd is being told in The Partisan, a new film in which she is played by Morgane Polanski, the 30-year-old daughter of controversial film director Roman Polanski.

Scheduled for release next year, it promises to be a captivating viewing experience, with director James Marquand describing Granville as “the bravest of the brave.”

Fleming himself wrote of Lynd that “Bond was struck by her beauty and intrigued by her composure”—and surely Granville had both in abundance.

Her admirers described how she used her “brilliant, brown, arresting eyes” and “crackling vitality” to hypnotic effect in disarming the enemy. But this highly trained cop was much more than an exceptionally pretty face.

She carried a seven-inch commando knife in a leather sheath strapped to her thigh, and she preferred hand grenades to rifles. “With a gun you can defend yourself against only one person,” she once explained. “With a hand grenade, against five, maybe ten.”

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Poland in 1908, she was driven by an almost pathological need for excitement, evident since childhood, according to her biographer Clare Mulley in her book, The Spy Who Loved.

The daughter of a poor Catholic aristocrat and his Jewish wife, she was expelled from convent school at the age of 14 for setting fire to a priest’s cassock during Mass.

At age 23, she won a beauty pageant at the fashionable winter resort of Zakopane, and by the time the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, she was married to Jerzy Gizycki, a wealthy diplomat 20 years her senior, who was a Polish consul in Eastern Europe. Africa.

The couple returned from Nairobi to London in 1939 and while Jerzy continued on to France, as part of the Polish government-in-exile, Granville came up with a dangerous proposal for the British Secret Intelligence Service’s sabotage arm known as Section D ( for ‘Destruction’).

It’s not entirely clear how she made the jump from beauty queen to international spy, but her plans may have hatched with Harold Perkins, a tough English businessman, who could bend a poker with his bare hands.

“Perks,” as Granville called him, had connections to British intelligence. When Section D’s introduction was made, the progenitors of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were convinced that Granville had to travel to neutral Hungary and ski from there to Poland for the missions that made her the target of that Luftwaffe pilot .

When Granville arrived in Poland in February 1940, it was the worst winter in living memory. Birds froze on tree branches and blood-stained snow marked the passage of starving packs of wolves.

But Granville was undeterred and not only reached Warsaw, but also found time for an affair with Count Wladimir Ledochowski, a member of the Polish resistance.

Their passion was fueled by the dangers they experienced together – she later recalled his fingers drumming coded messages on her naked body as he slept.

But she soon found herself in a more serious relationship in Hungary, with the handsome Andrzej Kowerski, a former Polish army lieutenant who smuggled intelligence material into a secret panel in his wooden leg, the result of a hunting accident.

Together they crossed the border and back again; and with a close shave, she charmingly freed herself from arrest, telling suspicious border guards that she was having a picnic and even persuading them to help her get her stalled car running.

Her fearlessness knew no bounds. In November 1940 she discovered that her mother Stefania, now divorced from her father, had been arrested in Warsaw for not registering as a Jew.

Granville found a Gestapo official who would spare her mother’s life at a price – the equivalent of £3,000 today, and a night in her bed. Only after they had slept together did he tell her that Stefania had died in Auschwitz.

The incident only reinforced her hatred of the Nazis.

In January 1941, she and Kowerski were arrested by the Hungarian police, acting on behalf of the Gestapo. During the interrogation, Granville bit her tongue so hard it bled; she then started coughing to give the impression that she was coughing up blood.

Terrified she might have TB, her inquisitors released both her and Kowerski, who was also deemed contagious. But it was clear that they could no longer continue to operate in Budapest. With the help of British diplomats, they adopted the latest in a long line of fake identities: ‘Andrew Kennedy’ and ‘Christine Granville’.

In July 1944, one month after the D-Day landings, Granville was parachuted into southeastern France. Wearing French-cut clothes and cutting her hair in the latest Parisian style, she took messages between the various resistance organizations active there.

As always, she was imperturbable under pressure.

On one occasion she was stopped by a Nazi border patrol while openly carrying a British map of France, printed on silk so that it would not rustle in her clothes when searched.

Unable to hide what was in her hands, she calmly shook out the card and used it to tie her hair back before greeting the soldiers and convincing them that she was a French housewife, running errands.

On another occasion, a border patrol saw her along with members of the French Resistance. She and the hunters threw themselves under some bushes, but were sniffed out by the patrol’s Alsatian. It had been trained to bite and snap necks, but Granville quietly put her arm around it and as she did so, it lay down beside her, ignoring its master’s whistles.

She exerted the same hypnotic influence on the opposite sex. Her marriage to Gizycki had ended in acrimony when he discovered she was associating with other men and after Kowerski started working for SOE in Italy, she became involved with Englishman Francis Cammaerts, 28, who had a wife and young children at home.

He was one of the best agents of the SOE and one night they became lovers during a German bombing raid. “We were all absolutely sure we were going to die,” he recalls. “It was all over, this was the end.”

Several months later, Granville learned that Cammaerts and two fellow officers had been arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death.

In a move that would almost certainly have had her executed had it failed, she strode into the prison, pretended to be his wife, and denounced the Vichy collaborator in charge of what his fate would be when the Allies arrived and found that he had allowed the executions to continue.

She later admitted it was “a shot in the dark.” But the officer began to shake so much that he spilled his coffee and, with only two hours left before their execution, released the three men.

While Cammaerts later confessed that he and Granville were deeply in love, they both knew he had a family to return to – and the relationship did not survive the end of the war.

Granville was not ready to return to everyday civilian life after her wartime adventures. Yearning for all the excitement she could find, she began working aboard a passenger liner from London to New Zealand and began an ill-fated relationship with fellow flight attendant Dennis Muldowney, a Brylcreemed lothario from Wigan.

She soon tired of him and ended the relationship. But when they returned to the country, he started stalking her, showing up unexpectedly at her West London hotel and refusing to leave her alone.

On June 15, 1952, Granville had returned to the hotel with friends after dinner when Muldowney followed her into the lobby and demanded she return his love letters.

When she told him she burned them, he plunged a knife deep into her heart. She was dead within seconds from shock and bleeding.

Muldowney made no attempt to escape.

He later confessed to the crime and was hanged in Pentonville Jail in September 1952 – a despicable and cowardly footnote in the story of a truly courageous woman.